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Presidential Coattails and Open Seats

Recent examinations of the coattail effect report conflicting evidence regarding the contemporary force of presidential coattails. This study contends that the failure to consider possible situational variance in coattail voting has contributed to this ambiguity. Interpreted from the perspective of cognitive theories of decision making, coattail voting can be seen as the behavioral consequence of citizens' reliance on a specific cognitive efficiency mechanism, heuristic processing of source cues. This interpretation suggests that coattail voting should be most prominent when House voters are relatively unfamiliar with the congressional nominees, or do not possess alternative voting cues. District-level aggregate data are examined for the 1976-1988 elections, and results support hypotheses suggested by the heuristic model. Specifically, the impact of presidential coattails on congressional margins is shown to vary substantially, with the coattail effect exhibiting the greatest prominence in open-seat congressional districts.