Candidates' Policy Positions and Voting in U. S. Congressional Elections

Previous research and common wisdom holds that issues are not significant in congressional elections. This paper uses the 1966 NBC survey of candidates for the House of Representatives and the SRC national election survey to examine the electoral impact of policy positions of candidates. The importance of candidates' policy positions is affirmed. Party defection is higher when voters are closer to the opposition candidate. The importance of incumbency decreases and the importance of issues increases in elections with larger ideological distances between candidates. The effects of relative issue proximity to the candidates, although less than the influence of partisanship and incumbency, are nevertheless sufficiently large that constituency issue preferences should be a major consideration for rational vote-seeking candidates for Congress.