| In order to secure the greatest number of votes, conventional wisdom stipulates that rational office seeking candidates converge to the ideological center of a unimodal electoral distribution throughout an election season to increase their likelihood of electoral success. However, candidates have increasingly become more ideologically partisan in their stances and the policies they champion. One explanation for this seemingly paradoxical phenomenon is rooted in the level of divisiveness that exists within the election cycle.;This research reveals that under certain circumstances the level of divisiveness does affect the ideological positions of those candidates seeking the party nomination, particularly in 2008, when three of the four independent variables of divisiveness showed significance. However, the results were more modest when grouping together both Democratic and Republican candidates, since only national poll support margins was found to be significant. When examining the candidates based on party, slight differences did emerge. For example, Democratic candidates took more extreme ideological positions in response to narrowing national poll support margins and when the state ideological composition was more or less evenly split between liberals and conservatives. Conversely, increasing levels of divisiveness did not significantly affect the ideological positions among Republican candidates.;In the end, this research provides a comprehensive analysis of how the level of divisiveness affects a candidate's ideological position during the presidential primary election season; and, supplies credibility to a distinctive methodology to perform content analysis.;This study contributes to the understanding of candidate behavior during political elections in several ways. First, this research develops a comprehensive model which acknowledges that candidates do change their ideological positions throughout an election. Second, this model investigates, for the first time, how the level of divisiveness affects candidate behavior during presidential primary elections. Lastly, this model utilizes a newer content analysis methodology, Wordscore, that treats words as data to track ideological changes of candidates themselves. Since candidates are continuously engaged in many political debates during the primary season, relative to the general election, this analysis provides a unique and dynamic explanation of candidate ideological behavior in response to divisiveness. |
