Amateurs: How Americans Learned to Stop Caring and Embrace Inexperience

• In Event: Rethinking the Roles of Individual Candidates and Their Attributes

Abstract

Recent research documents a rising supply of political amateurs for federal office; voters more frequently have the opportunity to elect candidates without previous political experience to the highest levels of U.S. government. In this paper, I consider examine three questions regarding the rise of amateurism in U.S. elections; what is the prevalence of amateurs across all levels of government, why do voters elect amateurs when given the opportunity, and what are the consequences for representation and democracy? I compile comprehensive, longitudinal data on amateurs in state executive, state legislative, and local government, showing the rise of amateurs is in part conditional on office. In two survey experiments, I document how voters conceive of political qualification and weigh perceptions of qualifications against policy preferences. Finally, I show the distinctiveness of governance by amateurs using data on political rhetoric in official press releases and on social media. The results suggest political polarization undermines political representation and commitment to democracy through the tolerance of political outsiders lacking commitments to institutional norms.

Author

• Derek Holliday, Stanford University