| Sustained high incumbent re-election rates in US Congress in the past half century indicate that unseating an incumbent is extremely difficult. Very few challengers could succeed defeating an incumbent. Scholars usually attribute this development to the advantage that incumbents enjoy when they are in office. The quality of challenger, as an important factor in influencing election outcome, however, is often overlooked. Furthermore, when challenger quality has been discussed, it has often been measured with rather crude measurements, leaving out crucial information on challengers. Challengers in Senate have received even less scholarly attention.This thesis is an effort to fill the gap in existing literature by interpreting Senate election outcome from the perspective of challenger quality. First of all, this thesis proposes a new measurement of challenger quality that includes three indicators, Political Experience, Campaign Finance, and Name recognition. This measurement, as proved by this thesis, works better than those used by previous literature.Second, by collecting and sorting data on challengers from 2000 to 2012, this thesis has managed to shed some light on Senate elections. This thesis finds that nearly half of Senate challengers have never held elected office of any kind. Of those with elected experience, they most commonly come from the House.Third, this thesis has studied the relationship between challenger quality and election outcome. It finds that Campaign Finance, Political Experience and Name Recognition have significant positive impact on challenger election outcome. An extra 1000,000 dollars in campaign finance (holding the incumbent's campaign finance constant) brings about an increase of 0.73 percent in two-party vote share.By studying challenger quality and election outcome, this thesis tries to make sense of Senate elections, and in a broader sense, of American politics from a new perspective and with new depth. |
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