Tea Party Candidates in Republican Primaries: Explaining Electoral Outcomes Open Access

Abstract

While there have been numerous studies concerning the emergence and sources of support for the Tea Party movement, the results of Tea Party candidates in Republican primaries have not been analyzed. This study seeks to analyze and explain the success of Tea Party candidates in the 2010 Republican congressional primaries, using ordinary least squares (OLS) and logistic regressions. This study utilizes two data sets, one's unit of analysis is each individual Tea Party candidate, while the other's unit of analysis is each primary. The results indicate that the candidate specific characteristics are more significant than the state-level factors. The importance of candidate specific characteristics implies that, even in an election cycle deemed a "wave" election, as the 2010 congressional election was, the success of Tea Party candidates was largely dependent on characteristics specific to each individual candidate and their ability to compete.

Table of Contents

Table of Contents
Introduction...1
Literature Review...2

Political Opportunity Model...2
Rational Politician and Strategic Politician Models...9

Hypotheses...17
Research Design...21
Analysis...30

Variables' Summary Statistics...30
OLS Regression: Tea Party Candidate Data Set...33
Logistic Regression: State-level Data Set...37

Discussion and Conclusion...38
Figures...43

Figure 1...43

Tables...44

Table 1...44
Table 2...44
Table 3...45
Table 4...45

Bibliography...46

About this Honors Thesis

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School	Emory College
Department	Political Science
Degree	BA
Submission	Honors Thesis
Language	English
Research Field	Political Science, General
Keyword	Republican primary Primary Tea Party
Committee Chair / Thesis Advisor	Abramowitz, Alan, Emory University
Committee Members	Black, Merle, Emory University Abramowitz, Ann, Emory University

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