Declining electoral competitiveness in the House of Representatives: The differential impact of improved transportation technology

Douglas Hart and Michael Munger

Public Choice, 1989, vol. 61, issue 3, 217-228

Abstract: This paper advances the hypothesis that improvements in the national transportation and communication infrastructure are responsible for the ‘vanishing marginals’ or the increased electoral security of U.S. Representatives. We assume that margin and security are directly affected by the amount of time a legislator, or a member of her staff, devotes to direct contact with constituents in the home district. Formally, we demonstrate that a decline in the time opportunity cost associated with travel to the district improves victory margins, where we proxy improvement in transportation technology by using a distance variable across three different historical samples: 1890, 1928, and 1970. This proposition offers a potentially more fundamental explanation of declining electoral competition than existing explanations focusing on professionalism, careerism, redistricting and bureaucratic casework. In fact, the technology/communication hypothesis may well encompass such explanations. The model specified here offers at best a crude test of the hypothesis that technology and communication are the cause of the vanishing marginals. A superior test would include the actual time required to travel to each district in each sample year, because a closer, but more inaccessible, location would be less electorally favorable, according to the logic underlying our model. While distance is therefore an imperfect proxy, we are encouraged by the results of the preliminary test. The next step for future research is to identify which technological innovations have had the greatest impact. In order to accomplish this, a more complete model of the link between legislators and constituents must be established. Copyright Kluwer Academic Publishers 1989

Date: 1989
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DOI: 10.1007/BF00123885

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