It’s getting tougher to find moderates among elected officials. Harris research sheds light on why they decline to run.

For several months in 2023, Harris School of Public Policy Professors Anthony Fowler and William Howell engaged in a friendly argument about the filibuster, the U.S. Senate rule that allows for infinite debate unless three-fifths of senators vote to end that debate. The filibuster, as political observers know, is used often to derail a vote.

Fowler, whose research focuses on elections and political representation, argued that the filibuster forces consensus. Howell, Director of the Center for Effective Government who has written extensively on American political institutions and the separation of powers, contended that scrapping the filibuster would reduce extremists and clear the way for impactful legislation.

They decided to settle the debate in a way that makes sense for people in their line of work. They researched the issue, seeking to discern if a link existed between our dysfunctional political system and dysfunctional government.

Joined by University of Chicago Political Science Professor Andrew Eggers and Assistant Professor of Political Science at UChicago Molly Offer-Westort, the researchers identified 3,000 registered voters of various political ideologies and party affiliations who followed government and public affairs. Then they asked the respondents about running for a full-time city council seat under various scenarios.

And the researchers may have found the link they sought: the difficulty recruiting and electing moderate, highly qualified candidates for public office.

It turns out that the separation of powers, multiple veto points, federalism and similar tenets of democracy that our founding fathers imposed to limit the damage done by any one leader could have been misguided. Their logic might have been incomplete.

“Reductions in authority, capacity, and opportunities to pass policy certainly mitigate the harm that a more extreme or less competent politician can cause,” the researchers wrote in a 39-page paper on the analysis released earlier this year. “But these same reductions also dissuade moderates and highly qualified candidates from seeking elected office; in so doing, they exacerbate the very problems of polarization and mediocrity that are the cause of so much concern in our politics.”

Why do these cornerstones of our democracy discourage moderate, highly qualified candidates from stepping forward?

“Some of the more moderate and more competent potential candidates who currently are standing on the political sidelines may choose to run if they can reasonably expect to exercise meaningful influence upon winning elected office,” the paper concludes.

In other words, the researchers found that moderates are willing to run if they believe that they could have impact. They see constraints on their powers, which the founders designed as healthy checks and balances, as restrictions on their capacity to get things done. So, they don’t run for elected office.

That authority or ability to make an impact was much less influential for extreme respondents than for moderates, the analysis shows. The reasons for the difference, Fowler said, are unclear. But he has a few theories.

“I think an explanation is likely that extremists care about lots of other things, too,” Fowler said in an interview. Those include praise from their inner social circle, and fulfillment that comes with engaging in shouting matches with your opponents, he said.

“Moderates would much rather not do that,” Fowler added. “They don’t enjoy doing that. The thing that makes a difference for them is the hope that they can actually get something done.”

Howell said ideological differences could be a reason that extremists seem to care less about the authority of the office than moderates do.

“There’s a kind of person who says, ‘I’m willing to run for office because I want to make a difference; I want to try and make things better,’” Howell said. “And people with that disposition, I’ll postulate, are more inclined to sit at the center of the political distribution. They’re not going to get wrapped around a set of ideological trappings. They’re going to say, ‘Look, there are big, complex things in the world. What can we do to make it better? I just want to get something done.’”

Government dysfunction may cause extremism

Characteristics such as flexible work hours, more fulfilling involvement in policy, quality of office culture or the opportunity for career advancement also may stimulate interest among a wider cross section of potential candidates to seek elected office, the analysis shows, although not nearly as much as the authority in the elected office does.

“By focusing squarely on features of the job for which candidates are running,” the researchers state, “we may yet uncover a whole host of institutional reforms that convince more women, members of the working class, underrepresented minorities, younger people and any number of other constituents to run for public office.”

In addition, researchers teased out a slightly more nuanced conclusion: polarization, gridlock and dysfunction may not just be the result of extreme and incompetent politicians. The features of our current government dysfunction also may be a cause of electing those politicians to office.

“Seeing few opportunities to make a real difference in politics, more moderate and more competent individuals may choose to take their talents elsewhere,” the researchers write. “In so doing, they leave behind a pool of candidates that is less representative of an American public that is decidedly moderate in orientation. Thus ensues a vicious cycle in which polarization, gridlock, and dysfunction propagate, and the effectiveness of government degenerates.”

Relaxing impediments to lawmaking also could increase the chances that extreme or objectively bad policies will be implemented, Howell said.

“But you’re not free and clear from concerns about demagoguery or polarization by building a political system that makes it impossible to accomplish anything,” he added. “In fact, the most provocative way of stating our findings is, all you’ll be left with, in terms of people who are willing to serve, are the very people who you should worry about the most.” 

High qualifications drive interest in running

Beyond looking into how the function of an elected office influences a person to run, the researchers also asked respondents about factors unrelated to those core functions.

All else equal, respondents said they were more likely to run if their chances of winning are stronger, the position’s salary is higher, their fundraising expectations are lower and less media coverage is devoted to their campaigns, the analysis reveals.

“Moderates generally express lower levels of baseline interest in running for public office than do extremists,” the report states. And as prospective candidates’ levels of competence increase, so does their interest in running.

Extremists are more averse to media coverage than moderates, researchers found. In addition, the most competent respondents are more interested in running for office if they would have a larger staff.

On gender and race, the analysis shows that women care less about salary than men and that white citizens care more about the authority intrinsic to the job and their chances of winning than respondents of color did.

In the end, the researchers write that who runs for office “crucially depends upon what they are running for.”

The authors conclude their paper by encouraging more research on how other changes to offices might encourage more candidates to run and on whether this research holds true for other offices and other samples of citizens.

The analysis, the researchers said, is a step toward untangling a somewhat intractable problem in our politics and government.

“Through this research,” they state, “we anticipate, we may collectively recover a better understanding of how the design of political institutions affects the contours of electoral competition.”

It also settles a friendly debate—for now.