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Editorial
Released on March 14, 2015 at 15:30  EDT

This research work initially published on The Journal of Politics, 73 (2), 443-462. Brief overview and excerpts from the article as follows.

Gaining and Losing Interest in Running for Public Office: The Concept of Dynamic Political Ambition

Considering a candidacy for public office involves pondering the courageous step of going before an electorate and facing potential examination, scrutiny, and rejection. Anyone who contemplates running for office, therefore, must answer a series of questions. Is the time right to inject my family into the political arena? Where am I in terms of my professional goals? Do I know enough about the issues and the political system to run for office? Am I in sync with my potential constituents on the issues that matter most? Have electoral gatekeepers indicated support for my foray into politics? Do I really want to take part in a political process that is so often associated with self-interest, corruption, and cynicism? In short, a variety of personal, professional, and political circumstances—circumstances that often change over time undoubtedly affect the extent to which someone considers entering the electoral arena.

Despite the intuitive appeal of thinking about political ambition as a trait that fluctuates, more than 60 years of research pertaining to the candidate emergence process treats political ambition as relatively static. Most political scientists work from a rational choice paradigm that conceptualizes political ambition as primarily a strategic response to a political opportunity. Fluctuations in political ambition tend to be divorced from changes in circumstances at the individual level; rather, changes in the political opportunity structure account for shifts in candidate emergence. Even those scholars who focus on the manner in which individual characteristics do affect the decision to run for office tend to concentrate on fairly static demographic factors and personal traits. Moreover, they rely on cross-sectional data at one snapshot in time. Existing research on candidate emergence, therefore, does not focus on, operationalize, or provide a systematic understanding of, the process by which an individual gains or loses political ambition over the course of a lifetime. Yet studying changes in individuals’ political ambition is of central importance for several reasons. Foremost, examining individual-level change in political ambition is important because it offers an opportunity to assess the extent to which the political climate affects civic engagement at the most profound levels. It is well-established in the literature on political participation and attitude formation that presidential scandals, tumultuous social, economic, and political times, and reactions to political leaders directly influence citizens’ trust in and cynicism toward government. In turn, levels of political trust and efficacy affect individuals’ willingness to engage in political and community activities. Even though running for office is, in many ways, the ultimate act of political participation, the concepts of political trust, cynicism, and efficacy are absent from the scholarship that addresses candidate emergence. Identifying and analyzing individual-level shifts in political ambition, therefore, allow for a critical exploration of whether political trends, events, and conditions affect potential candidates’ attitudes and either inspire them to run for office or lead them to recoil at the notion. Studying the degree to which political ambition ebbs and flows at the individual-level also provides insight into policymaking and representation at all levels of government. In most cases, the initial decision to run for office occurs at the local level; politicians often then opt to run for higher office.

The study of political ambition, which has been a mainstay in political science research for decades, tends to coalesce around the central premise that political ambition, itself, is a fixed attribute or ‘‘inherent characteristic’’. From the time when researchers released Ambition and Politics, scholars have

employed a rational choice paradigm to understand the decision to run for office. Research in this vein argues that potential candidates are more likely to seek office when they face favorable political and structural circumstances. The number of open seats, term limits, levels of legislative professionalization, partisan composition of the constituency, and party congruence with constituents are among the factors individuals consider when seeking any elective position or deciding whether to run for higher office. In other words, open seats and a balancing of the political risks and rewards associated with pursuing a particular office comprise an individual’s decision-making calculus. The political opportunity structure framework for understanding political ambition provides substantial leverage in predicting whether an individual will choose to enter a specific political contest, seek higher offer, or retire from politics altogether. But scholars have begun to demonstrate that a more complete understanding of candidate emergence demands expanding this paradigm in fundamental ways.

First, many political scientists—even some who work within the rational choice tradition—posit that the decision to run for office relies on a comprehensive set of considerations beyond a strict political opportunity structure. Researchers  path-breaking work on progressive ambition, for example, was among the first to acknowledge that elected officials assess the risks and value the rewards involved in seeking higher office differently, even when they face the same political context. More recently,  

few reseachers provide convincing empirical evidence that when state legislators consider running for the U.S. House of Representatives, they employ a calculus that includes not only evaluating the political opportunity structure, but also a series of personal and institutional factors.

Second, the political opportunity structure approach to studying ambition tends to overlook the early stages of the candidate emergence process. Building on  one of the researcher notion of a ‘‘political type,’’ we argue in earlier work that, in order to understand fully the decision dynamics involved in moving from ‘‘potential candidate’’ to ‘‘actual office holder,’’ it is necessary to assess nascent ambition—or general interest in considering a candidacy. This distinct phase of the development of political ambition occurs before the actual decision to enter a specific race ever transpires. After all, if the idea of running for office never really occurs to an individual, then he/she will never be in a position to assess a specific political opportunity structure or identify the level of office in which he/she is most interested. Notably, we find that nascent ambition is influenced by factors such as a politicized upbringing, race, and sex, each of which falls outside of the political opportunity structure on which most political ambition theory relies.

In continuing to develop and strengthen our understanding of candidate emergence, we argue that it is vital also to consider and incorporate explicitly the concept of dynamic ambition—the process by which an individual gains or loses political ambition over time. Certainly, aspects of the political opportunity structure can change, so implicitly, the rational choice paradigm allows for the possibility that someone might choose not to run for office at a particular time, but then opt to enter the electoral arena at another. Here, though, the individual’s ambition does not change; rather, the political opportunity structure changes. Yet, regardless of the political opportunity structure a potential candidate might face, not everyone who considers running for office maintains that level of political ambition over a lifetime. Alternatively, individuals lacking the sociodemographic profile of a typical candidate can often be motivated to consider running for office by a change in circumstances. The existing empirical work that examines individuals’ traits and characteristics as predictors of political ambition, however, does not track systematic change in interest in pursuing a candidacy. The early literature, for example, focuses on individuals who already hold elected office, so these analyses are confined to politicians at a time in their lives following the formation and crystallization of political ambition. Women and men who may have held some level of interest in running for office, but who then lost it or never exercised it, fall out of the analyses. Later studies—even those that focus on potential candidates—rely universally on data that gauge political ambition only at a single point in time.

As on of the researchers suggests, however, personal and political attitudes and events can constrain or promote political ambition through the life cycle. Thus, accounting for individual-level gains and losses in interest in running for office is a necessary condition for determining the circumstances under which potential candidates will ultimately emerge, but one that is absent from the political ambition scholarship. Drawing on theory and empirical evidence from the literatures on political ambition and political participation at the mass level, we derive five expectations about the dynamic nature of the candidate emergence process. Our central and most important expectation—which deals with potential candidates’ external and internal political efficacy—represents an improvement over the traditional, rationalist models of ambition and provides an opportunity to test the manner in which changes in attitudinal indicators associated with mass-level participation influence the evolution of political ambition. Our remaining four expectations involve more well-established predictors of candidate emergence. But even here, we build substantially on the scholarship by testing hypotheses about the relationship between changes in these indicators and changes in interest in running for office. The evolution of political ambition at the individual level is an intricate phenomenon and many of the expectations we identify are linked to one another. We do anticipate, though, that changes in each will exert an independent effect on a citizen’s likelihood of gaining or losing interest in entering the electoral arena.

Related Document

Gaining and Losing Interest in Running for Public Office: The Concept of Dynamic Political Ambition

Reference Fox, R.L., Lawless, J.L. (2011).Gaining and Losing Interest in Running for Public Office: The Concept of Dynamic Political Ambition. The Journal of Politics, 73 (2), 443-462.