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Congressional Cohorts: The House Republican Class of 2010

  • C. Lawrence Evans

    C. Lawrence Evans is Newton Family Professor of Government at the College of William and Mary. A former chair of the Legislative Studies Section of APSA, he has written extensively about the US Congress.

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Published/Copyright: October 31, 2014
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Abstract

As a result of its size and close ties to the Tea Party movement, the freshman cohort of House Republicans elected in 2010 had a significant impact on the chamber. Compared to other Republicans, the districts the freshmen represented did not tilt more toward the GOP or the Tea Party, nor was their roll call ideology during 2011–2012 statistically distinguishable from that of their more senior colleagues. For votes that were Tea Party priorities, however, the effects of freshman status were often large. And the most consequential impact of the class was over party strategy and agenda. The role played by the 2010 House freshmen has implications for how we should think about party influence in Congress.


Corresponding author: C. Lawrence Evans, Department of Government, College of William and Mary, Williamsburg, VA, USA, e-mail:

About the author

C. Lawrence Evans

C. Lawrence Evans is Newton Family Professor of Government at the College of William and Mary. A former chair of the Legislative Studies Section of APSA, he has written extensively about the US Congress.

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Article note

My thanks to Mike Bailey and his coauthors for providing portions of the data used in this article. For details, see their excellent study (Bailey, Mummolo, and Noel 2012).


Published Online: 2014-10-31
Published in Print: 2014-10-1

©2014 by De Gruyter

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