Faction Brands

Members of the U.S. Congress have created new, sub-partisan institutions to capture some influence in an increasingly polarized and competitive two-party system. However, scholars have only recently begun to empirically evaluate the impact of groups like the Blue Dog Coalition or the House Freedom Caucus. In this article, I show that faction affiliation alone can shift the way that political donors, activists, and leaders perceive a candidate's ideological position. These experimental results contribute to our understanding of how factions can accumulate valuable political resources and, ultimately, loosen the bonds of two-party government.(1)