campaign-fundraising

Political officeholders have long been seen as having a wide range of advantages over challengers: Name recognition is no problem, as they’re always in the public eye. Even if voters don’t agree with every position a long-time incumbent might take, they like the prestige and power that can come with seniority. And most importantly, officeholders make policy, so donors know to whom they should be signing the checks.

Scholars have hypothesized that state capitals such as Trenton, N.J., Albany, N.Y., or Springfield, Ill., may be more susceptible to political corruption because they are geographically remote from their state’s major metropolitan centers — and therefore remain out of the full glare of the public spotlight. But prior research has not definitively established a precise connection or pinpointed the mechanisms that might explain such a pattern.

From the Scholars Strategy Network, written by Daniel Kreiss, University of North Carolina, Chapel Hill

In studying the mechanisms that determine how candidates prevail in presidential primaries, political scientists have often focused on momentum and how a candidate can pull away from the field. But they have also studied the “winnowing” process, analyzing the factors that cause candidates to drop out and, by attrition, ultimately leave one candidate as the nominee.