Connecting the Candidates: Consultant Networks and the Diffusion of Campaign Strategy in American Congressional Elections

Abstract

Modern American political campaigns are typically conceptualized as “candidate-centered ” and treated as conditionally independent in quantitative analyses. In reality, however, these campaigns are linked by professional consulting firms, who are important agents of campaign strategy diffusion within the extended party networks of the contemporary era. To test our hypothesis that consultants disseminate campaign strategies among their clients, we analyze new data on U.S. House elections derived from Federal Election Commission records. Using spatial autoregressive models, we find that candidates who share consultants are more likely to use similar campaign strategies than we would otherwise expect conditional on numerous explanatory variables. These results, which largely withstand an extensive series of robustness and falsification tests, suggest that consultants play a key role in diffusing strategies among Congressional cam-paigns. Authors are listed in reverse alphabetic order. We thank Tessa Baizer, Jeremy Kreisberg, Callie Lambert, Boris Litvin, and JoyWilke for exceptional research assistance; Michael Heaney for providing support for their work;

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