Primary Election Reform and Congressional Elections

Primary elections in the United States have undergone enormous change in recent decades and reformers have continued to push for further changes. In this dissertation I seek to investigate how the differences among these primary elections affect both candidates and voters, with a particular focus on the top-two primary, which has been largely excluded from the previous literature. I evaluate the effect of primary elections systems on candidate ideology, electoral competition, and voter participation to determine what differences, if any, exist among these primary election systems. I find that significant differences in candidate ideology, electoral competition, and voter participation do exist among these primary election systems.