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Descriptive and Substantive Representation in Congress: Evidence from 80,000 Congressional Inquiries: DESCRIPTIVE REPRESENTATION IN CONGRESS
Abstract
A vast literature debates the efficacy of descriptive representation in legislatures. Though studies argue it influences how communities are represented through constituency service, they are limited since legislators' service activities are unobserved. Using Freedom of Information Act (FOIA) requests, we collected 88,000 records of communication between members of the U.S. Congress and federal agencies during the 108th–113th Congresses. These legislative interventions allow us to examine members' “follow‐through” with policy implementation. We find that women, racial/ethnic minorities, and veterans are more likely to work on behalf of constituents with whom they share identities. Including veterans offers leverage in understanding the role of political cleavages and shared experiences. Our findings suggest that shared experiences operate as a critical mechanism for representation, that a lack of political consensus is not necessary for substantive representation, and that the causal relationships identified by experimental work have observable implications in the daily work of Congress.
... While descriptive representation does not always lead to influence in politics and policy, there is a consensus that, at a minimum, the election of political officials from marginalized groups is necessary for the full consideration of group perspectives (Dovi 2002;Mansbridge 1999;Williams˙2000). In practice, descriptive representation often leads to substantive representation of group interests (Cameron, Epstein, and O'Halloran 1996;Grose 2011;Hero and Tolbert 1995;Lowande, Ritchie, and Lauterbach 2019). ...
... Given the substantive policy benefits of descriptive representation (Cameron, Epstein, and O'Halloran 1996;Dovi 2002;Grose 2011;Hero and Tolbert 1995;Lowande, Ritchie, and Lauterbach 2019;Mansbridge 1999;Williams 2000), this empirical pattern is a troubling one, indicating that members of immigrant communities with limited access to resources and less of a public voice are among the least likely to receive descriptive representation (Schattschneider 1960;Schlozman, Verba, and Brady 2013). Furthermore, since processes of immigrant assimilation are non-linear, immigrant communities like Asian Americans may not consistently gain representation over time and generations if they do not gain access to civic resources. ...
Asian Americans are the fastest growing racial group in the US electorate, yet they are significantly under-represented in political office. How do predominantly immigrant groups like Asian Americans close this representation gap? We build on existing theories of minority representation and immigrant assimilation by highlighting the importance of a group’s political incorporation into American society. We argue that the representation of minority immigrant groups in political office requires social integration and the acquisition of civic resources, processes that can take considerable time. Using new data on Asian American state legislators spanning half a century, we find that immigration in prior decades is associated with greater political representation, while contemporaneous population size has either no independent impact or a negative one. Other indicators of immigrant social integration, including citizenship status, language ability, education, and income, also predict the likelihood of co-racial representation in political office. Our results suggest political representation gaps of immigrant groups narrow over time, though this may be a non-linear process. Our findings also imply that the least integrated members of immigrant groups are the most likely to be affected by representational deficits.
... T he extent to which descriptive representation-representation by members who share a common background or physical characteristics with the represented-leads to greater substantive representation -representation whereby members act in the interest of the represented-is the subject of decades of thoughtful scholarly literature on women's representation (Pitkin 1967;Mansbridge 1999;Phillips 1998;Campbell, Childs, and Lovenduski 2010;Celis and Childs 2012;Reingold 2008;Barnes 2016;Anzia and Berry 2011;Bratton and Ray 2002;Dovi 2007;Clayton et al. 2019;Wängnerud 2009;Kittilson 2008;Thomas 1991;Lowande, Ritchie, and Lauterbach 2019;Carroll 2003;Chattopadhyay and Duflo 2004;Beckwith 2014;Weeks 2022). Yet empirical findings on the link between descriptive and substantive representation are mixed, with some studies finding that the share of women in power leads to better outcomes for women constituents (Ferland 2020;Clayton et al. 2019), while others find that the share of women officeholders has little or no effect (Homola 2019;Dingler, Kroeber, and Fortin-Rittberger 2019;Reher 2018). ...
... When it comes to responsiveness to women's salience, women representatives appear to be more responsive in both countries. This finding is consistent with the idea that women representatives are more likely to act in the interests of the women they represent (Lowande, Ritchie, and Lauterbach 2019;Funk and Philips 2019). ...
A number of important studies have documented gender gaps in the effectiveness or performance of individual representatives. Yet whether these differences are observable when it comes to responsiveness to public opinion is unclear. In this article, I examine the degree to which representatives use social media to dynamically respond to shifts in issue salience among the electorate. After combining nearly 400 bi-weekly repeated public opinion surveys from YouGov asking voters about their issue priorities, I trained a large language model to classify the universe of elected U.S. and UK representatives’ social media messages on Twitter to the same issues. Findings reveal that women representatives demonstrate greater responsiveness than their male counterparts to shifts in issue salience according to both women and men constituents. Despite an overall bias toward male constituents, female representatives play a crucial role in narrowing the gender gap by consistently aligning their attention with the issues prioritized by female constituents. These findings not only contribute to our understanding of elite-voter responsiveness but also underscore the substantive benefits that women representatives provide for all constituents.
... These shared experiences are thought to enhance representatives' understanding of citizens' concerns and policy preferences. In line with this perspective, feminist scholars have advocated for institutional reforms such as quotas to improve the descriptive representation of women (e.g., Celis and Erzeel, 2013), assuming a link between women's descriptive and substantive representation (Lowande et al., 2019;Wängnerud, 2009). This perspective implies that female politicians are better equipped to understandand thereby representthe preferences of female citizens due to shared characteristics and experiences. ...
This study tests novel hypotheses on how gender affects candidates' policy congruence with parties and voters. We argue that structural barriers lead female candidates to align more closely with their parties, while gendered ideological differences shape their congruence with voters across policy domains. Additionally, we examine whether candidates' voter-or party-centric campaign focus mediates these gendered dynamics. Using data from the 2013 Austrian National Election Study (AUTNES) and blackbox scaling to estimate latent policy positions, we find no gender differences in candidate-party congruence. However, female candidates align more with female voters on the economic dimension but exhibit lower congruence with both female and male voters on socio-cultural issues. While voter-centric campaigns increase candidate-voter congruence on socio-cultural issues, campaign focus does not mediate gendered patterns of congruence. These findings shed new light on gender and policy congruence across dimensions, advancing our understanding of the dynamics between descriptive and substantive representation.
... When using continuous traits, researchers need to define reference groups. Nevertheless, this groupbased focus aligns closely with questions of descriptive representation, as the representativeness of an elected body affects the substantive representation of various population groups (Lowande et al., 2019). In electoral systems such as OLPR, where competition is largely between co-partisans, understanding the link between candidates' vote-earning attributes, list properties, and the composition of elected bodies is crucial and makes the counterfactual-based approach a valuable assessment tool. ...
This research note presents a counterfactual-based approach to assessing the impact of candidates' personal vote-earning attributes and list properties on the composition of bodies elected under open and semi-open list proportional representation systems. Previous research has focused heavily on individual electoral performance, overlooking the broader implications for descriptive representation. By identifying counterfactual electees and juxtaposing their numbers with those of factual electees, the proposed approach provides intuitive metrics of how specific factors alter the composition of elected bodies. Applied to the 2023 regional parliament election of Lucerne, Switzerland, the results suggest that the effect sizes identified in regression analyses of electoral performance do not always correspond to how strongly the respective variables subsequently influence the composition of elected bodies. The counterfactual-based approach thus provides valuable insights into the electoral consequences of candidate and list characteristics, and their role in shaping descriptive representation.
... Especially in contexts of intergroup disparities, conflict, and historical exclusion from power, the presence and actions of marginalized-group officeholders can have significant impacts (Mansbridge 1999). Black legislators promote Black interests in several ways, including prioritizing these interests in proposed legislation (Tate 2003), sponsoring symbolic legislation acknowledging the contributions of Black Americans (Sinclair-Chapman 2002), and responding to contact from Black constitutions and non-constituents alike more frequently than otherwise-similar white legislators (Broockman 2013;Lowande, Ritchie, and Lauterbach 2019). Black voters' attitudes about descriptive representation reflect these impacts: Black voters perceive Black candidates as more likely to prioritize issues affecting racial minorities (English, Pearson, and Strolovitch 2019;McDermott 1998;Stout 2018) and as better equipped to address racial inequality (Weaver 2012). ...
Equitable representation of minority groups is a challenge for democratic government. One way to resolve this dilemma is for majority-group voters to support minority-group candidates, but this support is often elusive. To understand how such inter-group coalitions become possible, this paper investigates the case of white Democratic Americans’ growing support for Black political candidates. I show that as white Democrats’ racial attitudes have liberalized, an increasing number of majority-white districts have elected Black congressional representatives. White Democratic survey respondents have also come to prefer Black candidate profiles, as demonstrated in a meta-analysis of 42 experiments. White Democratic respondents in a series of original conjoint experiments were most likely to prefer Black profiles when they expressed awareness of racial discrimination, low racial resentment, and dislike towards Trump. Additional tests underscore the association between majority-group voters’ concern about racial injustice and their support for minority-group candidates.
... Descriptive representation is crucial for incorporating underrepresented groups into legislative bodies. Descriptive representatives add their groups' concerns to the agenda by sponsoring new legislation (Bratton and Haynie, 1999;Sweet-Cushman, 2020), intervening more into the bureaucracy on behalf of group members (Lowande, Ritchie, and Lauterbach, 2019;Minta, 2009), and stopping proposals with negative consequences for their group from being enacted into law (Carlson, 2022;Haider-Markel, 2010;Schroedel and Aslanian, 2017). Yet, it remains unclear to what extent descriptive representatives are successful in proactively advocating for, and ultimately enacting, their group's preferred policies into law. ...
Descriptive representatives often sponsor legislation that advances their groups’ policy interests, but it remains unclear how successful they are passing such legislation. Colleagues might defer and support group-relevant measures from descriptive representatives, perceiving them to have greater expertise and legitimate claims to address the issues than outgroup members. However, colleagues might also oppose those measures in an act of backlash against those groups (especially historically marginalized groups) making new claims on the political system. To answer the question of descriptive representative success, we review 3,401 pieces of legislation related to Native American issues introduced at the state level between 2010 and 2020. We find that measures related to Native affairs are no more likely to pass if sponsored by a Native lawmaker than if sponsored by a non-Native lawmaker. However, symbolic measures of Native concern are more likely to pass than substantive measures regardless of the identity of the sponsor. With more Native Americans running for office than ever before, our findings have important implications for considering the effects of increased descriptive representation in state legislatures.
... Descriptive representatives can be understood as 'epistemologically, experientially and affectively close to those they represent and, thus, more knowledgeable and best suited to advocate and judge on behalf of the represented' (Celis and Childs 2020:178;Khoban 2023). While it would be too simple to say that descriptive representation automatically improves substantive representation, recent studies have suggested that the correlation between a representative's characteristics and the way they substantively act for certain groups is particularly strong for hitherto marginalized groups (Lowande, Ritchie, and Lauterbach 2019). ...
How should democratic communities decide who should belong? Recent debates about issues such as voting rights for prisoners, denationalization policies or citizenship tests raise this fundamental democratic question. While many scholars argue that decisions about citizenship and voting rights should be more inclusive of subjected outsiders and more independent from electoral partisan politics, we still lack institutional proposals for inclusive and independent membership politics. This article contributes to the nascent institutional turn in the debate about democratic membership boundaries. My aim is to show that normative debates about membership politics can benefit from recent advances in democratic theory on sortition-based democratic innovations, constructive representation and systems thinking.
I argue that membership politics could be democratized by introducing a randomly selected political institution, which I call ‘boundary assembly’, that equally represents members and nonmembers and is charged with making binding decisions on a subset of a state’s membership questions. I argue that the strongest objections to empowered randomly selected assemblies (shortcut objection, alienation objection, capture objection, technocracy objection) lose most of their force in the ‘extraordinary’ political context of decisions on membership boundaries. Boundary assemblies cannot ‘solve’ the democratic boundary problem, but they could be a first step toward more democratic membership politics.
... Political scientists have demonstrated that male and female legislators' policy preferences and spending priorities are different in a meaningful way, especially regarding women's issues such as domestic violence, sexual violence, and children and family (Carroll, 2001;Poggione, 2004;Reingold and Smith, 2012). Minority legislators likely support the adoption and implementation of policies that address the needs and concerns of racial and ethnic minorities (Lowande et al., 2019). Nevertheless, several null findings have been reported, potentially driven by the predominant impact of political parties on the policy preferences of individual politicians (Poggione, 2004), the lack of reaching a critical mass (Kanter, 1977), and the endogeneity of women's candidacy to city characteristics (Ferreira and Gyoruko, 2014), among others. ...
This study explores the impact of representation in terms of types and loci on the intended outcomes of a child abuse protection policy implemented over 9 years (2011–2019), during which Erin’s Law was introduced in the U.S. states. Using state-level data, we find that gender and minority representation in the political and administrative arena have distinctive effects on policy outcomes and that policy adoption moderates the link between representation and implementation. Our analysis shows that bureaucratic representation significantly decreases child abuse reports per capita and increases investigation rates, with these effects being more pronounced when Erin’s Law is adopted. The marginal effects of bureaucratic representation on reports and investigation rates decrease and indicate non-linear relationships. This study finds that bureaucratic representation provides benefits beyond co-identity groups, but there is little evidence that political representation is moderated by policy adoption when different sources of representation are considered.
... In the legislative context, shared identity traits play an important role in candidate evaluations, often leading to more positive evaluations (Ansolabehere & Fraga, 2016;Bejarano et al., 2021;Jones, 2016;McDermott, 1998;Philpot & Walton Jr, 2007;Stout, 2018). This is in part due to the fact that co-ethnic representatives are more likely to provide substantive representation (Lublin, 1997;Tate, 2004;Whitby, 1997) and better constituent assistance (Butler & Broockman, 2011;Grose, 2011;Lowande et al., 2019;Minta, 2011). The same is true in the judicial context for evaluations of Supreme Court nominees. ...
We argue that characteristics of unelected officials directly influence individuals’ perceptions and evaluations of them. These evaluations then have indirect, downstream consequences on evaluations of the institution. To test this, we fielded a unique survey with an oversample of Black Americans after the nomination of Justice Ketanji Brown Jackson to the Supreme Court. Using a conjoint experimental design to randomize nominee race, we find that increased racial descriptive representation elicits more favorable views of the nominee and Court among Black respondents. Causal mediation analysis confirms our theoretical expectation that descriptive representation indirectly influences views of the Court through its effects on views of nominees. The effects we uncover are not confined to co-partisan nominees, indicating that descriptive representation may matter for more than policy reasons alone. Finally, our external validity test suggests these effects generalize beyond our experimental setting, with Black (but not white) respondents equally as supportive of an anonymous profile matching Justice Jackson’s characteristics as they are of Jackson herself.
... For example, Broockman (2013) demonstrates that Black state legislators are more likely to respond to written requests from Black constituents that offer limited political benefits than are white state legislators. Lowande, Ritchie, and Lauterbach (2019) found that women, racial/ethnic minorities, and veterans are more likely to advocate on behalf of constituents with similar identities to their own by contacting federal agencies. Further still, Grose (2011) provides evidence that descriptive representation enhances both constituency service and project delivery to constituents. ...
Although commentators often point to the political value of legislators’ geographic ties, less is known about the influence of such connections once in office. Given recent scholarship underscoring the importance of geography as a dimension of identity, we argue that local legislators should behave as descriptive representatives. We collect the hometowns of all members of Congress with known birth locations from 1789 to 2020 to analyze how being born near one’s district impacts legislator behavior. We connect these data to information on a series of behaviors, finding that local legislators emphasize constituency work over policymaking and party-building. Moreover, while local legislators do not demonstrate substantively less partisan unity in roll-call voting, they attract a higher percentage of out-party cosponsors to their bills. Together, our results point to important representational implications regarding the geographic roots of legislators and the role of local connections in the contemporary Congress.
... Feminist political scientists are interested in the way that descriptive representation of women translates into the substantive representation of women, including questions about whether women's legislative presence influences policy agendas (Celis and Childs 2012;Curtin 2008;Forman-Rabinovici and Sommer 2019;Lowande et al. 2019;Phillips 1995;Sawer et al. 2006;Sawer 2012;Wängnerud 2009). 8 What is apparent is that women legislators have distinct policy priorities and are typically more assertive than men in advocating for social welfare and women's rights issues in legislative committees and debates, and in the sponsorship of bills (Swers 2016; see also Childs and Krook 2009;Grey 2006). ...
... Globally, the percentage of women legislators has been dramatically increased over the last decades reaching over 25% as of June 2021 (Inter-Parliamentary Union, 2022). Scholars have examined the impact of gender composition of legislative branches on social and political phenomena such as women's substantive representation (Celis & Childs, 2008;Cowell-Meyers & Langbein, 2009;Lowande et al., 2019;Reingold, 2008) and policy outcomes (Taflaga & Kerby, 2020;Whitford et al., 2007;Woo, 2021). Among various topics, the relationship between female political representation and conflict behavior of states is one of the most hotly debated issues (Caprioli, 2005;Hessami & da Fonseca, 2020;Hudson et al., 2009Hudson et al., , 2012Koch & Fulton, 2011;Krause et al., 2018;Melander, 2005). ...
Do improved women’s descriptive representation in legislative branches and women’s participation in civil society decrease the intensity of civil conflicts? Is the impact of women’s presence in legislative branches on the conflict intensity magnified by women’s participation in civil society, and vice versa? In this study, we aim to expand the constructivist argument that equal gender roles in politics and civil society can bring about less intensive internal armed conflicts. Relying on time-series cross-national data on 151 countries from 1960 to 2016, we demonstrate that the increases in women’s descriptive representation in parliaments and women’s participation in civil society tend to decrease the predicted civil conflict intensity. In addition, we demonstrate that the deterrent effect of women’s descriptive representation is magnified by women’s participation in civil society and vice versa. These findings remain consistent in alternative model specifications with additional women-related control variables.
... For Black and Latinx people, descriptive representation translates to substantive representation along various measures. Compared to white legislators, Black and Latinx legislators spend significantly more time advocating for policies favorable to Black and Latinx individuals (Minta 2009;Lowande, Ritchie, and Lauterbach 2019) and are also more likely to co-sponsor bills of high salience to these communities (Wallace 2014). Outside of the legislature, Black and Latinx bureaucrats also substantively represent Black and Latinx clients, respectively, in the context of social services such as family and child welfare agencies (Watkins-Hayes 2009), education (Nicholson-Crotty, Grissom, and Nicholson-Crotty 2011;Grissom, Kern, and Rodriguez 2015;Lindsay and Hart 2017), policing (Lasley et al. 2011;Headley and Wright 2020), and prisons (Wade-Olson 2019; Johnston and Holt 2021). ...
As demographic groups’ heterogeneity increases, questions emerge about how elected and unelected political representatives respond to such diversity. Representative bureaucracy scholarship suggests that representatives will rely on shared values and interests with clients of their demographic group to make decisions or implement policies that improve the group’s status. However, differences in immigration histories, demographic characteristics, language, and discrimination experiences within racial and ethnic groups are points of diversion that could affect representation. We explore the relationship between race and ethnicity to understand how within-group differences may disrupt the traditional assumptions of representation. Centering on the experiences of Afro-Latinx students, we ask, What effect do within-group differences have on bureaucrat-client representation?” Afro-Latinx students share a racial identity with Black education bureaucrats and an ethnic identity with Latinx education bureaucrats but may also differ from both groups in their language acquisition, culture, norms, and interests. We find that Black representatives offer Afro-Latinx students substantive representation, while Latinx representatives do not when we consider their racial identity. The research holds implications for understanding the boundaries of representation and may offer insight into the importance of disaggregating groups in representation studies.
... Collective descriptive representation is the quality of political institutions to represent their citizens on the basis of shared political and sociodemographic characteristics (Atkeson and Carrillo 2007;Bratton and Ray 2002). Increases in descriptive representation of minoritized groups have been connected to policy outcomes that benefit their substantive interests, thus decreasing structural inequalities (Bratton and Ray 2002;Hessami and da Fonseca 2020;Lowande et al. 2019;Wängnerud 2009;Mendelberg et al. 2014). The inclusion of women in governing bodies also has a symbolic quality (Stokes-Brown and Dolan 2010). ...
Search engines like Google have become major information gatekeepers that use artificial intelligence (AI) to determine who and what voters find when searching for political information. This article proposes and tests a framework of algorithmic representation of minoritized groups in a series of four studies. First, two algorithm audits of political image searches delineate how search engines reflect and uphold structural inequalities by under- and misrepresenting women and non-white politicians. Second, two online experiments show that these biases in algorithmic representation in turn distort perceptions of the political reality and actively reinforce a white and masculinized view of politics. Together, the results have substantive implications for the scientific understanding of how AI technology amplifies biases in political perceptions and decision-making. The article contributes to ongoing public debates and cross-disciplinary research on algorithmic fairness and injustice.
... Perhaps, then, the results suggest that active government venues prompt interest groups to bring that activity to the attention of the other venue. Indeed, executive branch agencies are responsive to legislators (Lowande and Potter 2021;Lowande et al. 2019;Ritchie and You 2019), and interest groups can subsidize legislators' bureaucratic engagement (Hall and Miler 2008). Accordingly, groups' best response to an active bureaucracy may be to subsidize congressional oversight, while the best response to preliminary lawmaking might be to bring the executive's attention to an issue. ...
Prior work examines how organization resources and types shape venue selection strategies. Both Congress and executive branch agencies can change policy, so interest groups must consider which of these venues to lobby on a given issue. We argue that factors in the political environment—venues’ issue priorities and the power of groups’ allies in a venue—influence how groups with different resource constraints select lobbying venues. Examining over one million issue-level lobbying disclosures filed between 2008 and 2016, we find that low-resource groups strategically lobby the venue(s) controlled by partisan allies and respond to the government’s and public’s issue priorities. Meanwhile, high-resource groups more often lobby all venues relevant to their issues regardless of the political environment, especially on issues gaining significant attention within government but not in the public. Our findings suggest that separation of powers provides high-resource groups more venues to lobby for favored policies. Conversely, low-resource groups strategically only lobby venues they have the potential to influence.
... To be truly meaningful, descriptive representation must lead to improvements in EMs' substantive representation (Mansbridge, 1999). Empirical research has shown this relationship to hold in most cases (e.g., Saalfeld and Bischof, 2013;Lowande et al., 2019). The assumed link between substantive and descriptive representation also remains one of the main motivations for descriptive representation research. ...
In recent decades, representation of ethnic minorities increased significantly across Europe, while concurrently many political parties moved to the right on multiculturalism and immigration, a seeming paradox. We explain it by arguing that often it is the same parties that move to the right and simultaneously increase representation. They use this dual strategy in an attempt to positionally converge to the median voter, where the increased minority representation acts as a reputational shield to prevent allegations of intolerance. Looking at parliaments of eight European countries between 1990 and 2015, we find that parties that shifted to the right in response to a public mood swing to the right are indeed significantly more likely to bring more ethnic minority politicians into parliament. This has important implications for the literature on descriptive representation and party platform change.
... Given that politicians' backgrounds often affect whose viewpoints they know, understand, heed, and ultimately advocate (Butler 2014;Phillips 1995), it is likely that the lack of female politicians leads to unequal responsiveness. This is supported by many studies documenting a link between women's descriptive and substantive representation (Chattopadhyay and Duflo 2004;Lawless 2015;Lowande, Ritchie, and Lauterbach 2019;Volden, Wiseman, and Wittmer 2018). ...
Are the preferences of women and men unequally represented in public policies? This simple yet fundamental question has remained largely unexplored in the fast-growing fields of women’s representation and inequality in the opinion-policy link. Our study analyzes gender biases in policy representation using an original dataset covering 43 countries and four decades, with citizens’ preferences regarding more than 4,000 country-year policies linked to information about actual policy change. Our analysis reveals clear and robust evidence that women’s policy preferences are underrepresented compared to those of men. While this skew is fairly modest in terms of congruence, women’s representation is driven mostly by the high correlation of preferences with men. When there is disagreement, policy is more likely to align with men’s preferences. Our analyses further suggest that women’s substantive underrepresentation is mitigated in contexts with high levels of female descriptive representation and labor market participation. In sum, our study shows that gender inequality extends to the important realm of policy representation, but there is also meaningful variation in unequal representation across contexts.
... Women representatives, elected both with and without quotas, are more likely to promote women's rights (Franceschet and Piscopo 2008) and childcare and family welfare (Schwindt-Bayer 2006). They also are more likely to help female constituents (Lowande, Ritche, and Lauterbach 2019;Parthasarathy, Rao, and Palaniswamy 2019). Symbolically, women politicians encourage higher levels of voting and political activity among women, as women begin to see politics less as a realm reserved for men (Beckwith 2007). ...
Despite Congress' Article I powers, challenges within and outside of Congress prevent lawmakers from influencing policy outcomes. Legislators confront obstacles when trying to pass bills, and legislation is often not implemented as intended. What strategies do lawmakers have for controlling policy outcomes? We argue that legislators use formal and informal means to influence policy, but that they choose an instrument that exploits their comparative advantage in Congress. Authority over legislative functions and access to stages of the legislative process influence lawmakers' strategy. We merge two datasets to measure the statutory tools drafted into legislation and House members' informal interactions with agencies between 2005 and 2012, drawing on nearly 14,000 bills and 65,000 contacts. Our findings contribute to theories of delegation and oversight—by focusing on the allocation of authority among individual legislators rather than transitory interbranch political explanations—and advance our understanding of the distribution of power in Congress.
It Takes More Than a Candidate remains the only systematic account of the gender gap in political ambition. Based on national surveys of more than 10,000 potential candidates in 2001, 2011, and 2021, the book shows that women, even in the highest tiers of professional accomplishment, are substantially less likely than men to demonstrate ambition to seek elective office. The gender gap in persists across generations and over time, despite society's changing attitudes toward women in politics. Women remain less likely to be recruited to run for office, less likely to think they are qualified to run, and less likely to express a willingness to run for office in the future. In the twenty years since It Takes a Candidate was first published, the book remains timely and eye-opening, highlighting the challenges women face navigating the candidate emergence process and providing insight into the persistent gender gap in political ambition.
We provide evidence that there are substantial racial and gender gaps among lobbyists. These gender and racial differences are also greater among conservative leaning groups. However, we show, these gaps are decreasing over time. Does demand for minority and female lobbyists play a role in these trends? Although previous work has highlighted the relative scarcity of women and minorities in positions leading to the lobbyist profession (supply), we know less about whether interest groups are interested in hiring qualified women and minorities for such positions (demand). Using a conjoint experiment embedded in a survey of individuals involved in hiring lobbyists, we find greater demand for female and minority lobbyists than for their male and White counterparts, especially among ideological liberals. Our work shows that the lobbying industry does not appear to discount the candidacies of potential female and minority lobbyists.
Peace agreements often establish political institutions designed to accommodate conflict parties. However, this approach can lead to the continuing marginalization of other groups, including women. This does not have to be the case. Peace agreements are opportunities to establish inclusive institutions. This article examines the adoption of gender quotas in independent commissions. Commissions are institutions that are not directly elected or directly managed by elected officials, but carry out a specific public policy role. They are frequently provided for in peace accords and gender quotas are sometimes included in the provisions establishing them. This article provides an in-depth analysis of the case of the Truth, Coexistence and Non-Recurrence Commission in Colombia as an initial assessment of whether women’s political empowerment, external mediation, and United Nations Security Council Resolution 1325, factors found to contribute to other gender provisions in peace processes, contribute to the adoption of quotas.
While formal rules of group representation in China and most other countries address underrepresented groups concerning gender, race, and ethnicity, China’s practice extends to encompassing occupation and profession. The speciality highlights an unstudied question in terms of the widespread profession-oriented group representation (POGR) concept among the general public. We apply a mixed approach based on our own dataset containing the text from 45 professional internet forums and reveal that the public’s POGR concept arises from two mechanisms. The first, known as the disadvantaged groups with shared demand, leads individuals to perceive their own profession as a disadvantaged group with shared interests, prompting the call for professional representation in the legislature to champion these interests. The second mechanism, referred to as misperceptions about representation, involves the public’s misperceptions regarding the electoral system, the model of representation, and the deputies’ professional qualifications required to hold such a position. The findings contribute to a deeper understanding of group representation concept and practice in China.
This study builds on the existing literature by considering the extent to which minority legislators offer different forms of constituency outreach during times of emergency. This case study of state legislator constituent outreach during the COVID-19 pandemic uses an analysis of Facebook posts in 2020 to track how state legislators provided outreach and communicated resources to their constituents during a public health crisis. We ask, in times of emergency, do women and minority legislators offer unique attention toward the needs of those constituencies that they descriptively represent, or do urgent issues push these legislators to focus more broadly on general concerns expressed by their entire district? We argue that legislators’ social media activity during the COVID-19 pandemic offers an important measure of their practice of constituency outreach due to the nation’s reliance on virtual communication during this period. This study finds there to be important variation by partisanship, but within party, we find important differences depending on both the race and gender of the legislator. Democratic women of all races were those legislators most actively providing information and outreach related to COVID-19 to their constituents in 2020.
Congress is more polarized than ever. At the same time, there are fewer military veterans serving in Congress than ever before. Candidates with military experience, along with their supporters, argue that electing more veterans could help reduce dysfunction and gridlock. They claim that military values, such as duty and teamwork, translate into differences in legislative behavior. But are veteran lawmakers more effective than those without military experience? Are they more bipartisan? Using House data from the 104th to 116th Congresses (1995–2021), I examine the extent to which military experience influences a lawmaker’s ability to legislate and engage in bipartisan behavior. I find that veteran lawmakers are more effective at advancing consequential legislation. Additionally, veterans appear more willing to collaborate with members of the opposite party, especially in recent Congresses. These effects are particularly evident among those who served on active duty. I conclude by considering the implications of these findings for maintaining healthy civil-military relations in America.
Though there is strong evidence that nonwhite lawmakers introduce more racially salient legislation than white lawmakers, it is less clear whether race is a significant predictor of other legislative behavior. Given mixed findings in existing research, lawmakers’ actions in committee offer a new test of how race shapes legislative behavior. I develop new, original measures identifying race references in more than 1.4 million congressional committee hearing statements. I find that nonwhite lawmakers discuss race more frequently than white lawmakers in hearings, though white lawmakers are more likely to mention race in racially diverse hearings due to contact effects. Using a novel measure of race-issue bills, I demonstrate that lawmakers’ race statements in hearings are linked to policy representation. These findings explain how racial diversity in legislatures affects legislative speech and policy representation.
The theory of the “personal vote” assumes that constituent service, or the process by which members of Congress help their constituents navigate the federal bureaucracy, is a component of representation that transcends partisanship. However, recent research suggests that affective polarization and negative partisanship may discourage constituents from reaching out to ask for help from cross-partisan legislators. Using a conjoint experiment, I show that shared partisanship has a strong effect on constituents’ decisions about which of their legislators to contact for assistance. However, positive in-party affect is unrelated to these preferences, suggesting that negative partisanship is responsible for this result. Gender and seniority also matter for constituents’ preferences even when accounting for shared partisanship. The results suggest that legislators’ ability to build a “personal vote” by performing constituent service may be weakened in an era of strong partisanship.
This review examines the scientific research on constituency service from 1975 to 2024, leveraging a dataset of 161 documents from the Scopus database. Statistical analysis using tools such as Bibliometrix RStudio and VOSviewer reveals a dynamic trajectory, with a historical start in 1975 through the article by Clarke et al. and a significant spike in publications after 2000. The annual growth rate is 0.0%, indicating a stable number of documents added yearly. The dataset contains documents with an average age of 12.2 years, denoting an extensive historical presence. Notable contributors include Lindsay J. Benstead (Portland State University) and Mihail Chiru (University of Oxford), who contributed three articles, and Cox & McCubbins's (1986) article, which received the highest number of citations at 619, demonstrating their noteworthy influence on constituency service discourse. The Journal of Legislative Studies emerged as the primary source with eleven articles, followed by the "Representation" and "Parliamentary Affairs" journals with nine and eight articles, respectively. Leading universities, such as the University of California, Harvard University, and Stanford University, lead research efforts in the constituency service field, confirming the United States' position as a paramount contributor with 118 articles. This bibliometric review provides a global overview of research trends in constituency service, political representation, personal vote, clientelism, and parliamentary questions. It highlights recent advances, dominating issues, key topics, and thematic evolution. The findings offer valuable insights for scientific inquiry and encourage future research and development initiatives.
Public trust and perceptions of institutional legitimacy are vital to the functioning of the federal court system, and recent work challenges the long-standing belief that these attitudes are relatively stable in the populace. We posit that one threat to perceptions of trust and legitimacy is the lack of representation for women in the federal judiciary. Using a series of experiments, we show that, while women desire descriptive representation, this is an insufficient condition for preserving support for the institution. Substantive representation on issues critical to women leads to significantly increased trust and legitimacy and lowered perceptions of institutional bias among women. While female judges may bring their own social identities to bear in their decision-making, our work suggests that efforts to diversify the federal judiciary, while important, are unlikely to bolster public support for the courts if the new judges and justices fail to substantively represent the communities of interest.
Men's numerical over‐representation in politics leads to complacency regarding their substantive representation. Yet the men in politics are not descriptively representative of most men and are drawn disproportionately from the most socially privileged groups. Building on theories of representation, intersectionality and masculinities, I argue that men have gendered representational needs that are not adequately met. Power structures among men leave many men marginalized and/or subordinated, and disincentivize the privileged men in power from defending disadvantaged men's interests. Masculinist cultures within politics inhibit discussion of male vulnerability and further undermine the substantive representation of men. I make the case for why we should study men's substantive representation and then show how we could do so. I propose a groundbreaking research agenda for identifying and measuring men's diverse representational needs, recognizing how these are shaped by gender and its intersection with other identities. Combining insights from objectivist, constructivist and intersectional approaches, I develop a framework for measuring the substantive representation of men that explores who represents men, which ideology informs their claims, which men are included and excluded and whether the goals of representation are to transform or uphold the status quo. I offer several illuminations of policies where different men have distinct gendered needs, and offer an extended example using educational outcomes in the United Kingdom to illustrate how privileged men are not effective representatives of disadvantaged men. This article builds the normative case and offers the theoretical tools for addressing an important gap in the study of representation.
Members of the US Congress held over 25,000 town hall meetings over the last eight years, and yet we know very little about the role that these events play in American politics. In this article, we present new data on congressional town hall meetings held in the 114th to 117th Congresses (2015–2022) to explore why politicians hold such meetings. In short, we do not find consistent evidence that electoral vulnerability drives legislators to their districts. Nor do we find support for claims of a zero‐sum tradeoff between lawmaking and district representation. However, members of the president's opposition party clearly and consistently host more town hall meetings, suggesting that party messaging may be at the heart of this often‐overlooked congressional behavior.
We develop State Legislative Effectiveness Scores (SLES) for state legislators across 97 legislative chambers over recent decades, based on the number of bills that they sponsor, how far those bills move through the lawmaking process, and their substantive importance. We assess the scores through criterion and construct validation and reveal new insights into effective lawmaking across legislators. We then offer two illustrations of the immense opportunities that these scores provide for new scholarship on legislative behavior. First, we demonstrate greater majority-party influence over lawmaking in states featuring ideological polarization and majority-party cohesion, and where there is greater electoral competition for chamber control. Second, we show how institutional design choices—from legislative rules to the scope of professionalization—affect the distributions of policymaking power from state to state.
During the COVID-19 pandemic, school board members played a prominent role in deciding reopening plans. Using an original large-scale survey of board members, our goal is to understand how the polarized, political context of pandemic responses shaped the decision-making processes of members as they experienced dramatic increases in workload. We find school board members are much more likely to identify at the extremes of partisan identity, as strong Democrats or strong Republicans. How they identified mattered in who they trusted to tell them information, how much control they felt the board should have in the process of reopening plans, and who should interpret data about COVID. If the other party was in power at the state level, members from opposing parties had less trust in state sources. Most school board elections are nonpartisan, but that does not mean that the members themselves do not strongly identify with a party.
While theories of local democracy mark political representation as highly important in determining the quality and perception of public services, little has been done to explore the empirical connection. This represents a lacuna in our understanding of how representation affects citizen wellbeing and how citizens determine their satisfaction with public services. We focus on descriptive and symbolic dimensions of representation to elucidate how representation influences citizens’, and minority citizens’ in particular, experience with public services. Utilizing a survey of residents of Haifa, Israel, our findings imply that beyond the descriptive makeup of municipal elected bodies, symbolic dimensions of representation might be even more important for understanding citizen satisfaction. Symbolic representation may impact satisfaction directly and through its contribution to other feelings about government. These findings expand understandings of the importance of diversity in political representation, determinants of satisfaction and how dynamics of good governance contribute to citizens’ experiences.
Do elections increase responsiveness of legislators to their constituents? Previous studies that examine the effect of electoral proximity have been unable to hold the roll-call agenda constant and control for differences in unobserved covariates between legislators. This paper utilizes a natural experiment in four state legislatures—Arkansas, Illinois, Florida, and Texas—where term length was randomly assigned. This design compares the responsiveness to constituency opinion of those randomly assigned to a two-year term to those assigned a four-year term on different issue areas, like the economy, environment, and crime. I find no evidence for an electoral proximity effect on responsiveness. In addition, in the Illinois State Senate, the causal effect of electoral proximity on responsiveness is measured on several individual roll-call votes, including the legalization of medical marijuana and gay marriage.
Do female legislators have different policy preferences than male legislators? Despite a large body of literature from liberal democracies and recent studies of electoral authoritarian regimes, this topic has received little attention in the context of single-party regimes. Based on quasi-experimental methods and regression models, we analyze original data from 38,383 proposals introduced during China’s 12th National People’s Congress and test the effect of gender on policies concerning conventionally selected feminine issues and “political stance,” issues that are unique to single-party regimes. The analysis confirms the effect of gender on policy preference across several feminine issues. However, the effect of gender is null on issues concerning political stance. Our findings suggest that while single-party regimes allow gender differences to emerge among legislators on issues that are not politically important, they tend to discourage such differences on politically prominent issues. This study advances the literature on both gender politics and authoritarian politics.
As the holders of the only office elected by the entire nation, presidents have long claimed to be sole stewards of the interests of all Americans. Scholars have largely agreed, positing the president as an important counterbalance to the parochial impulses of members of Congress. This supposed fact is often invoked in arguments for concentrating greater power in the executive branch. Douglas L. Kriner and Andrew Reeves challenge this notion and, through an examination of a diverse range of policies from disaster declarations, to base closings, to the allocation of federal spending, show that presidents, like members of Congress, are particularistic. Presidents routinely pursue policies that allocate federal resources in a way that disproportionately benefits their more narrow partisan and electoral constituencies. Though presidents publicly don the mantle of a national representative, in reality they are particularistic politicians who prioritize the needs of certain constituents over others.
This study applies insights from principal-agent models to examine whether and how the language assistance provisions of the Voting Rights Act, Sections 203 and 4(f)(4), affect Latino representation. Using panel data from 1984–2012, we estimate two-stage models that consider the likelihood and extent of Latino board representation for a sample of 1,661 school districts. In addition, we examine how policy design as well as federal oversight and enforcement shape implementation and compliance with the language assistance provisions. Our findings not only provide the first systemic evidence that the language assistance provisions have a direct effect on Latino representation, but also link the efficacy of the language assistance provisions to the duration and consistency of coverage and the presence of federal elections observers. Overall, our study underscores the continued need for federal government involvement in protecting the voting rights of underrepresented groups, in this case, language minority citizens.
A critical element of decision making is the timing of choices political actors make; often when a decision is made is as critical as the decision itself. We posit a dynamic model of strategic position announcement based on signaling theories of legislative politics. We suggest that members who receive clear signals from constituents, interest groups, and policy leaders will announce their positions earlier. Those with conflicting signals will seek more information, delaying their announcement. We test several expectations by examining data on when members of the House of Representatives announced their positions on the North American Free Trade Agreement. We also contrast the timing model with a vote model, and find that there are meaningful differences between the factors influencing the timing of position announcements and vote choice. Our research allows analysts to interpret the process leading up to the House action and the end state of that process.
Scholarship on bureaucratic responsiveness to Congress typically focuses on delegation and formal oversight hearings. Overlooked are daily requests to executive agencies made by legislators that propose policies, communicate concerns, and request information or services. Analyzing over 24,000 of these requests made to 13 executive agencies between 2007 and 2014, I find agencies systematically prioritize the policy-related requests of majority party legislators—but that this effect can be counteracted when presidents politicize agencies through appointments. An increase in politicization produces a favorable agency bias toward presidential copartisans. This same politicization, however, has a net negative impact on agency responsiveness—agencies are less responsive to members of Congress, but even less responsive to legislators who are not presidential copartisans. Critically, this negative impact extends beyond policy-related requests to cases of constituency service. The results suggest that presidential appointees play an important, daily mediating role between Congress and the bureaucracy. © 2018 by the Southern Political Science Association. All rights reserved.
Public policy is produced by elected and unelected officials and through the interactions of branches of government. We consider how such interactions affect policy implementation and representation. We argue that legislators try to influence bureaucratic decisions through direct communication with federal agencies, and that such contact is effective and has consequences for policy outcomes. We provide empirical evidence of this argument using original data about direct communication between members of Congress and the U.S. Department of Labor (DOL) along with decisions made by the DOL regarding trade and redistributive policies. We find that direct contacts influence DOL decisions, and the agency is more likely to reverse previous decisions when requested to do so by legislators. Our results challenge key assumptions and findings in the previous literature and have important implications for interbranch relations and informal means of control over the implementation of national policy.
Scholarship on oversight of the bureaucracy typically conceives of legislatures as unitary actors. But most oversight is conducted by individual legislators who contact agencies directly. I acquire the correspondence logs of 16 bureaucratic agencies and re-evaluate the conventional proposition that ideological disagreement drives oversight. I identify the effect of this disagreement by exploiting the transition from George Bush to Barack Obama, which shifted the ideological orientation of agencies through turnover in agency personnel. Contrary to existing research, I find ideological conflict has a negligible effect on oversight, whereas committee roles and narrow district interests are primary drivers. The findings may indicate that absent incentives induced by public auditing, legislator behavior is driven by policy valence concerns rather than ideology. The results further suggest collective action in Congress may pose greater obstacles to bureaucratic oversight than previously thought.
Modern presidents are CEOs with broad powers over the federal government.
The United States Constitution lays out three hypothetically equal branches of governmentthe executive, the legislative, and the judicialbut over the years, the president, as head of the executive branch, has emerged as the usually dominant political and administrative force at the federal level. In fact, Daniel Gitterman tells us, the president is, effectively, the CEO of an enormous federal bureaucracy.
Using the unique legal authority delegated by thousands of laws, the ability to issue executive orders, and the capacity to shape how federal agencies write and enforce rules, the president calls the shots as to how the government is run on a daily basis. Modern presidents have, for example, used the power of the purchaser to require federal contractors to pay a minimum wage and to prohibit contracting with companies and contractors that knowingly employ unauthorized alien workers.
Presidents and their staffs use specific tools, including executive orders and memoranda to agency heads, as instruments of control and influence over the government and the private sector. For more than a century, they have used these tools without violating the separation of powers. Calling the Shots demonstrates how each of these executive powers is a powerful weapon of coercion and redistribution in the president's political and policymaking arsenal.
An underappreciated way members of Congress represent interests is by pursuing policy goals through their communication with the bureaucracy. I argue that the bureaucracy provides an alternative, covert way for cross-pressured legislators, who face diverging pressures from party leaders, interest groups, and subconstituencies, to satisfy conflicting interests. Using original data of senators’ communication with the US Department of Labor from 2005 to 2012 (109th through 112th Congresses), I show that, when faced with cross-pressures from party and constituency, senators strategically choose less visible, back-channel means for pursuing policy goals. These findings provide a new perspective on representation by demonstrating that legislators pursue policy goals outside of the legislative process in an effort to evade accountability.
While evidence from international security and civil-military relations shows that elites with military experience have distinct policy preferences from elites who have not served in the armed forces, the effects of military service are not apparent in congressional voting records on foreign and defense policy. If elites with military experience have distinct policy preferences, why has this gap failed to manifest itself in congressional policy positions? I argue that the effects of military service are most pronounced on issues where this experience is highly salient: on the oversight of war operations. Using a pooled cross-sectional time-series analysis of an index of roll call votes in the House of Representatives during the wars in Afghanistan and Iraq, I find that congresspersons with military experience are significantly more likely to vote to increase congressional oversight over war operations, including increased access to information and limiting the deployment of troops in theater. Further tests confirm these findings are not simply due to partisan effects. I discuss how my results carry serious implications for war termination and the declining number of veterans in Congress during the post-9/11 era, as well as the impact of military service on foreign policy and international security.
Although understanding the role of race, ethnicity, and identity is central to political science, methodological debates persist about whether it is possible to estimate the effect of something immutable. At the heart of the debate is an older theoretical question: Is race best understood under an essentialist or constructivist framework? In contrast to the "immutable characteristics" or essentialist approach, we argue that race should be operationalized as a "bundle of sticks" that can be disaggregated into elements. With elements of race, causal claims may be possible using two designs: (a) studies that measure the effect of exposure to a racial cue and (b) studies that exploit within-group variation to measure the effect of some manipulable element. These designs can reconcile scholarship on race and causation and offer a clear framework for future research.
Political inequality is a major issue in American politics, with racial minorities and low-income voters receiving less favorable representation. Scholars argue that this political inequality stems largely from differences in political participation and that if all citizens participated equally we would achieve political equality. Daniel M. Butler shows that this common view is incorrect. He uses innovative field and survey experiments involving public officials to show that a significant amount of bias in representation traces its roots to the information, opinions, and attitudes that politicians bring to office and suggests that even if all voters participated equally, there would still be significant levels of bias in American politics because of differences in elite participation. Butler's work provides a new theoretical basis for understanding inequality in American politics and insights into what institutional changes can be used to fix the problem.
This book explores the complex relationship between women's presence and impact in two strikingly different, consecutive congresses. Drawing on hundreds of elite interviews and archival information, the case studies of three highly visible policy areas (reproductive rights, women's health, and health care policy) move beyond the question of 'Do women make a difference?' to confront the oft-ignored, contested issues surrounding gender difference and impact: its probabilistic nature, contested legitimacy, and disputed meaning. The analysis enhances understanding of how gendered forces at the individual, institutional, and societal levels combine to reinforce and redefine gendered relationships to power in the public sphere, and suggests strategies to strengthen substantive representation of women.
Oversightanswers the question of whether black and Latino legislators better represent minority interests in Congress than white legislators, and it is the first book on the subject to focus on congressional oversight rather than roll-call voting. In this important book, Michael Minta demonstrates that minority lawmakers provide qualitatively better representation of black and Latino interests than their white counterparts. They are more likely to intervene in decision making by federal agencies by testifying in support of minority interests at congressional oversight hearings. Minority legislators write more letters urging agency officials to enforce civil rights policies, and spend significant time and effort advocating for solutions to problems that affect all racial and ethnic groups, such as poverty, inadequate health care, fair housing, and community development. InOversight, Minta argues that minority members of Congress act on behalf of broad minority interests--inside and outside their districts--because of a shared bond of experience and a sense of linked fate. He shows how the presence of black and Latino legislators in the committee room increases the chances that minority perspectives and concerns will be addressed in committee deliberations, and also how minority lawmakers are effective at countering negative stereotypes about minorities in policy debates on issues like affirmative action and affordable housing.
The symbolic importance of Barack Obama’s election is without question. But beyond symbolism, does the election of African-American politicians matter? Grose argues that it does and presents a unified theory of representation. Electing African-American legislators yields more federal dollars and congressional attention directed toward African-American voters. However, race and affirmative action gerrymandering have no impact on public policy passed in Congress. Grose is the first to examine a natural experiment and exceptional moment in history in which black legislators - especially in the U.S. South - represented districts with a majority of white constituents. This is the first systematic examination of the effect of a legislator’s race above and beyond the effect of constituency racial characteristics. Grose offers policy prescriptions, including the suggestion that voting rights advocates, the courts, and redistricters draw ‘black decisive districts’, electorally competitive districts that are likely to elect African Americans.
The 2009 financial stimulus bill ran to more than 1,100 pages, yet it wasn’t even given to Congress in its final form until thirteen hours before debate was set to begin, and it was passed twenty-eight hours later. How are representatives expected to digest so much information in such a short time.
The answer? They aren’t. With Legislating in the Dark, James M. Curry reveals that the availability of information about legislation is a key tool through which Congressional leadership exercises power. Through a deft mix of legislative analysis, interviews, and participant observation, Curry shows how congresspersons—lacking the time and resources to study bills deeply themselves—are forced to rely on information and cues from their leadership. By controlling their rank-and-file’s access to information, Congressional leaders are able to emphasize or bury particular items, exploiting their information advantage to push the legislative agenda in directions that they and their party prefer.
Offering an unexpected new way of thinking about party power and influence, Legislating in the Dark will spark substantial debate in political science.
Many hypothesize that the election of more women to the U.S. Congress is more than simply an issue of equity, but will make a substantive policy difference. I test this hypothesis by analyzing the voting records of all representatives in the 103d Congress on a set of women's issues. It is my premise that women will not necessarily exhibit a more liberal ideology than their male counterparts on all issues; however, the more directly an issue affects women, the more likely it is that women will vote together across party lines. The results of regression analysis on the composite score of women's issue votes indicate that gender exerts a significant and independent effect on voting for women's issues in the face of controls for other major influences on congressional voting These influences include constituency factors, party, personal characteristics, and ideology. Interaction terms for gender by party indicate that much of the impact of gender is due to the influence of Republican women. Logit analysis of the individual votes demonstrates that the gender of the representative was most significant on votes that dealt with abortion and women's health. The influence of gender was overwhelmed by other factors such as party, ideology, and constituency concerns on votes that were less directly related to women, such as education.
Why are politicians more likely to advance the interests of those of their race? I present a field experiment demonstrating that black politicians are more intrinsically motivated to advance blacks’ interests than are their counterparts. Guided by elite interviews, I emailed 6,928 U.S. state legislators from a putatively black alias asking for help signing up for state unemployment benefits. Crucially, I varied the legislators’ political incentive to respond by randomizing whether the sender purported to live within or far from each legislator's district. While nonblack legislators were markedly less likely to respond when their political incentives to do so were diminished, black legislators typically continued to respond even when doing so promised little political reward. Black legislators thus appear substantially more intrinsically motivated to advance blacks’ interests. As political decision making is often difficult for voters to observe, intrinsically motivated descriptive representatives play a crucial role in advancing minorities’ political interests.
Little is known about the American public’s policy preferences at the level of Congressional districts, state legislative districts, and local municipalities. In this article, we overcome the limited sample sizes that have hindered previous research by jointly scaling the policy preferences of 275,000 Americans based on their responses to policy questions. We combine this large dataset of Americans’ policy preferences with recent advances in opinion estimation to estimate the preferences of every state, congressional district, state legislative district, and large city. We show that our estimates outperform previous measures of citizens’ policy preferences. These new estimates enable scholars to examine representation at a variety of geographic levels. We demonstrate the utility of these estimates through applications of our measures to examine representation in state legislatures and city governments.
This article explores the consequences for representation after a redistricting by reexamining the finding that members of Congress will alter their voting behavior to fit their new district. Specifically, it applies partisan theories of congressional organization to test if members are changing their behavior on all or just some votes. The results indicate that representatives adjust their roll call behavior to fit their new districts on votes that are visible to their constituents. However, when it comes to votes that are important to the party for controlling the agenda (i.e., procedural votes), members do not respond to changes in the district.
Scholars have often remarked that Congress neglects its oversight responsibility. We argue that Congress does no such thing: what appears to be a neglect of oversight really is the rational preference for one form of oversight--which we call fire-alarm oversight--over another form--police-patrol oversight. Our analysis supports a somewhat neglected way of looking at the strategies by which legislators seek to achieve their goals.
In this article we examine the patterns of gendered representation and related legislative advocacy within Latino delegations to four state legislatures in the Southwest. Most agree that one of the most significant changes in American politics in the post-civil rights era is the increasing election of women and people of color, but there is less agreement about the magnitude, consistency, and impact of this representation. Moreover, little is known about how these patterns vary by state. First, we examine the patterns of gendered and ethnic election in the states of Arizona, California, New Mexico, and Texas from 1990–2004. We find considerable variation across these states, relative to both women and Latinos, but the presence of Latinas within the Latino/a delegation has noticeably increased across all the states and at a rate that outpaces the increase in women in the legislatures overall. Second, using original survey data supplemented with elite interviews, we explore perceived differences in the representational priorities and related behaviors, issue agendas, and policy successes between Latinas and Latino men. We find a number of similarities but also find distinct differences that reveal Latinas place greater emphasis on representing the interests of multiple minority groups, promoting conflict resolution, and building consensus in both the legislature as a whole and within the Latino caucus. Latinas also are more likely than Latino men to introduce and successfully pass legislation that addresses the issue agenda held by both Latina and Latino legislators.
In this article we measure the impact of gender on women's legislative behavior by utilizing a unique research design. We compare whether women and men of the same political party represent the same congressional district differently with respect to women's issues. Using bill sponsorship and floor remarks during the 104th to 107th sessions of the U.S. House of Representatives as measures of legislative behavior, we find that female legislators who replace men in the same district introduce more women's issues bills in Congress. Although our conclusion that women legislators represent women's issues more frequently in the House supports existing research, our results do so in a new and more effective way by controlling for the competing explanations of party identification and district opinion as factors determining a legislator's behavior.
A rich theoretical literature has illuminated the institutional mechanisms through which legislators influence agency policy. We focus on the behavioral ones, examining the decisions of individual legislators to intervene in agency rulemaking. We argue that interest groups play an important but incompletely understood role in the oversight process. They may sound alarms when agencies threaten harm, but they also subsidize the interventions of sympathetic overseers postalarm. We test the theory's hypotheses with data from face-to-face surveys of lobbyists involved in an EPA rulemaking to revise air quality standards. We find that public and private interest groups successfully employ this strategy but that the latter have the advantage, an advantage that does not flow from their substantial contributions to congressional campaigns.
Disadvantaged groups gain advantages from descriptive representation in at least four contexts. In contexts of group mistrust and uncrystallized interests, the better communication and experiential knowledge of descriptive representatives enhances their substantive representation of the group's interests by improving the quality of deliberation. In contexts of historical political subordination and low de facto legitimacy, descriptive representation helps create a social meaning of "ability to rule" and increases the attachment to the polity of members of the group. When the implementation of descriptive representation involves some costs in other values, paying those costs makes most sense in these specific historical contexts.
How minority legislators influence policy development in Congress remains a relevant question for those interested in race and political representation. This article addresses this question using evidence from participation in committee work—a vantage point that has received minimal attention in scholarship on black political representation. I interpret racial differences in participation in House committees across a range of policy areas, demonstrating that black members participate at higher rates within committees than whites on both black interest and nonracial bills. The results suggest that race has a substantive effect on members' policy priorities and their legislative activity within committees.
Do (1) Democratic legislators; (2) African-American legislators; and/or (3) legislators from African-American-majority districts hire a higher proportion of district staff that are African-American? Legal experts and policymakers are engaged in discussions over the efficacy of districts with significant African-American populations in the wake of the extension of portions of the Voting Rights Act. With the Act's extension, critics have planned to file suit against districts likely to elect African-American legislators, alleging that these districts may harm African-American constituents. In contrast, we argue that these districts may be useful in enhancing African-American political empowerment and that the presence of African-American staff in legislative district offices is an indicator of this empowerment. Based on interviews with staff in 41 congressional district offices, we find that African-American-majority districts and the presence of African-American and Democratic legislators lead to a higher proportion of African-American district staff. The results suggest that contrary to the conventional wisdom of some voting rights scholars, in the aggregate the election of African-American legislators (and thus the drawing of African-American-majority or influence districts) enhances the empowerment of African-American constituents when based on an examination of African-American district staff and constituency service.
Do politicians advance the interests of those of their race even when they expect few political rewards for doing so? I use a field experiment to examine how politicians change their behavior towards a black individual when their political incentives are attenuated. Guided by elite interviews, I emailed 6,928 state legislators from a putatively black alias asking for help signing up for unemployment benefits. Crucially, I varied legislators’ political incentives to respond by randomizing whether the sender purported to live within or far from each legislator’s district. While non-black legislators were markedly less responsive once their political incentives were diminished, most black legislators continued to respond even when they had little political reason to do so. Black legislators thus appear substantially more intrinsically motivated to advance black interests, while non-black legislators seem even less responsive to black interests when their political incentives are weak than existing evidence appreciates.
Are constituents less likely to communicate to representatives of a different race? Mixed findings and methodological barriers characterize existing research. I present a field experiment that exploited electoral rules in Maryland, where several multi-member districts have both black and white representatives. I offered 8,829 residents of such districts the opportunity to communicate to one of their actual representatives, whose race I randomized. Three findings emerge. First, both black and white subjects were markedly more willing to communicate to their representative of their race. This implies that politicians receive racially biased portraits of their constituencies, hearing disproportionately infrequently from those unlike them. Second, blacks and whites were similarly likely to communicate to their descriptive representatives, suggesting that blacks’ lack of descriptive representation can explain their lower overall rates of political communication in the US. Finally, subjects in segregated areas were most reluctant to communicate cross-racially, suggesting where these inequalities are greatest.
When determining whether or not legislators are representing their constituents' interests, scholars using voting studies may overstate the role of strategic factors, such as reelection goals and constituent influence, while understating the effect of descriptive characteristics. I argue that race and ethnicity matter in congressional oversight of bureaucratic policymaking. My examination of hearing transcripts from the 107th Congress indicates that minority legislators are more likely than white legislators to participate in racial-oversight hearings but not more likely than whites to participate in social welfare hearings. The results show that descriptive representation contributes to substantive representation, even if the costs of participating outweigh the electoral benefits.
This paper characterizes the behavioral and policy implications of the decline in the number of military veterans in the U.S. Congress, from more than 70% of legislators in the early 1970s to less than 30% in the contemporary House and Senate. Many scholars argue that military service shapes information and beliefs, and that this decline has had negative effects on defense policy. The analysis tests these arguments using voting data from the House and Senate in the 1990s and the House in the 1970s, showing that the impact of veteran status on votes is generally small and has a relatively minor effect on legislative outcomes.
We use a field experiment to investigate whether race affects how responsive state legislators are to requests for help with registering to vote. In an email sent to each legislator, we randomized whether a putatively black or white alias was used and whether the email signaled the sender's partisan preference. Overall, we find that putatively black requests receive fewer replies. We explore two potential explanations for this discrimination: strategic partisan behavior and the legislators’ own race. We find that the putatively black alias continues to be differentially treated even when the emails signal partisanship, indicating that strategic considerations cannot completely explain the observed differential treatment. Further analysis reveals that white legislators of both parties exhibit similar levels of discrimination against the black alias. Minority legislators do the opposite, responding more frequently to the black alias. Implications for the study of race and politics in the United States are discussed.
Since the early 1970s, the major American parties have moved from general consensus on women's rights issues to sharp polarization. While previous efforts to explain this realignment have identified pieces of the puzzle, these explanations have been generally incomplete and atheoretical. I argue that party positions are determined by the perceived value of specific issue positions for maintaining and expanding the party's coalition of electoral support. Thus, changes in both the composition of the party's coalition and the way the issue is defined and understood can bring about changes in the issue positions adopted by parties. Using the Convention Delegate Studies (1972–1992), this research suggests that both replacement (coalition change) and in the case of Democrats, conversion (caused by issue change) have been important mechanisms for bringing about party realignment on women's rights. This explanation both encompasses causal factors highlighted by previous scholars and points to other important contributing causes.
Theory: This article poses and examines theories concerning substantive representation of Latinos in the U.S. House of Representatives. Hypothesis: With increasing numbers of Latinos in the United States and in the U.S. House during the 1980s, an increase in direct (dyadic) substantive representation of Latinos might be anticipated. Method: Regression analysis is used to analyze scores of congressional voting patterns from Southwest Voter Research Institute (SWVRI) relative to (a) the ethnic background of representatives, and (b) the percent of Latino constituents in House districts. Results: As with previous studies of Representatives' voting patterns in the 1970s, this study finds little direct, substantive representation of Latinos. Representatives who are of Latino origin have somewhat distinct voting patterns, and Latino constituencies have little impact on how representatives vote. But during the period studied, legislation deemed salient to Latinos was enacted, indicating that collective or partisan substantive representation does occur. The empirical and normative implications of these findings are considered.
Why do politicians frequently heed the preferences of small groups of citizens over those of the majority? Breaking new theoretical ground, Benjamin Bishin explains how the desires of small groups, which he calls "subconstituencies, " often trump the preferences of much larger groups. Demonstrating the wide applicability of his "unified theory of representation, " Bishin traces politicians' behavior in connection with a wide range of issues, including the Cuban trade embargo, the extension of hate-crimes legislation to protect gay men and lesbians, the renewal of the assault-weapons ban, and abortion politics. In the process, he offers a unique explanation of when, why, and how special interests dominate American national politics.