Out of Office, Out of Step? Re-election Concners and Ideological Shirking in Lame Duck Sessions of the U.S. House of Representatives

Do elections constrain incumbent politicians’ policy choices? To answer this longstanding question, this paper proposes a novel identification strategy to separate electoral incentives from selection effects. Taking advantage of the unique setup of lame-duck sessions in the U.S. Congress, where lame-duck incumbents who lost re-election vote on the same issues as their re-elected colleagues, I use a close election regression discontinuity design to exploit quasirandom assignment of re-election seeking representatives to lame-duck status, which is orthogonal to voter preferences and incumbents’ type. Comparing within-incumbent changes in roll call voting of barely unseated lame ducks to narrowly re-elected co-partisans serving the same congressional term, I find that lame ducks revert to more extreme positions with lame-duck Democrats (Republicans) voting more liberally (conservatively). Consistent with lame ducks’ loss of re-election incentives driving the result, the effect of lame-duck status on roll call extremism is more pronounced among ex-ante more vulnerable legislators. I also consider, but ultimately dismiss, several other mechanisms including emotional backlash, logrolling motives, party control, and selective abstention.