Congressional incumbency advantage and electoral success factors

Congress is the most important representative institution in a government. Each member's primary responsibility is to his or her constituency, and not to the congressional leadership, a party, or even Congress itself.

Purpose and Power of Congress

The purpose of the congress is agreed by most, is to legislate for the public interest, the public interest however is not agreed on. The Congress was established by the founders of this country, to be the first and most powerful branch of government. One of the first powers given to the congress was to lay and collect taxes. The agreement was to give such a power to the more common branch of government. The second power was to certify national elections. Third, determine who will replace President or Vice President if both are incapacitated. The last is the power to enforce other amendments through legislation.

Incumbency advantage, Factors and Quality challengers and Donors

The first, and most central, fact we should know about congressional elections is the incumbency advantage. Simply put, what we mean by this is that incumbent members of Congress are at a great advantage when running for reelection.

The first generation of scholarship on congressional elections took two views of why incumbents possessed such an advantage. The first of these views focused on voter behavior. In this research, incumbents were said to win reelection so frequently because congressional voters were inordinately swayed by name recognition when casting their congressional votes. The second view for why incumbents are more likely to be reelected comes from incumbent behavior. Incumbents take advantage of the perquisites of office to enhance their electoral position over their challengers.

Linked to incumbency is the strategic politician's theory that the reason incumbents win so often is because they so often face weak challengers. Because incumbents can do things like advertising, casework and skillful position-taking, and because voters tend to vote based on name recognition, where incumbents dominate, strong challengers tend to avoid running.

The strategic politician's theory incorporates money as well. If there is one thing we know about money in congressional elections, it is that money matters most to the challengers. Incumbents already have gotten their name before the voters; things like casework and franking allow them to do so while in office. But challengers tend to be less known. Successful challengers must spend money. But strategic donors avoid giving money to those they perceive as weak. Money accounts for even more of the incumbency advantage; most congressional challengers are perceived as so weak that they can't even get their hands on enough cash to run a campaign. Strategic donors also help make congressional elections self-fulfilling prophecies.

Finally, the strategic politician's theory accounts for national results in addition to local ones. They have already seen how the quality of a challenger influences individual elections. But on the national scale, challenger quality is how national factors get linked to individual districts.

Goals of members of Congress

Members of Congress tend to be quite purposeful. That is, most of what