Uncontested Primaries: Causes and Consequences
Bibliographic record
Abstract
Direct primary elections were introduced in the United States to limit the power of parties, to favor entry of new candidates, and to foster competition. However, a majority of incumbents faces no competition in their primary. We propose a formal model of primaries to rationalise this fact and analyse its welfare consequences. The party of the incumbent can influence the challenger’s entry cost in the primaries. Primary challengers choose strategically to enter only when the incumbent is of low competence. Voters, who are poorly informed about the competence of candidates, use the competitiveness of the primary to update beliefs. We identify three sources of uncontested primaries: a lower bound on the challenger cost of entry; an absence of commitment to set this entry cost by the party of the incumbent; and an imperfect observability of the entry cost by voters. Regulation favoring challenger entry can benefit voters and even the party of the incumbent.
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How this classification was reachedexpand
Full frame machine prediction
Teacher imitationNot calibrated prevalence, not ground truth. Human validation pending. The Gemma side is a direct model label for every work in the frame, read from the title-only record. The Codex side is a classifier learned from the 10,348 direct Codex labels and calibrated to design-weighted sample rates; fields without enough sample support carry no Codex call. Candidate is the union of the two sides; consensus is their intersection. These outputs are machine_predicted_unvalidated and are not human labels.
Distilled classifier scores by category (both heads)
| Category | Codex | Gemma |
|---|---|---|
| Metaresearch | 0.005 | 0.031 |
| Meta-epidemiology (narrow) | 0.001 | 0.001 |
| Meta-epidemiology (broad) | 0.001 | 0.001 |
| Bibliometrics | 0.002 | 0.002 |
| Science and technology studies | 0.003 | 0.009 |
| Scholarly communication | 0.005 | 0.003 |
| Open science | 0.002 | 0.006 |
| Research integrity | 0.002 | 0.004 |
| Insufficient payload (model declined to judge) | 0.015 | 0.001 |
Machine scores (provisional)
The two teacher heads of the student model, read on this work. A score orders the frame for review; it never asserts a category, and the validation status ships verbatim with every row.
Baseline scores from an immature model (maturity gate not passed, 7 training rounds). Scores rank; they never assert a category.
score_only:v0-immature-baseline · verbatim from the scoring run: score_only means the number may rank works, and no category label ships from itClassification
machine, unvalidatedMachine predicted; a candidate call from one source (direct Gemma or distilled Codex), not a consensus.
How this classification was reached, model by model and score by score, is at the end of the page under "How this classification was reached".