No full-text available
To read the full-text of this research,
you can request a copy directly from the author.
Tyranny of the Minority: The Subconstituency Politics Theory of Representation
Abstract
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.
... Like many policy arenas, decision-making processes about carnivores can be undermined by tension and tradeoffs among four basic policy goals of efficiency, liberty, equity and security, or by tyranny of either the minority or the majority (Bishin, 2009;Cooke and Kothari, 2001;Serenari et al., 2018;Stone, 2002). Collaborative governance with inclusive stakeholder participation prioritizes equity over efficiency. ...
... Referenda and the potential resulting backlash (e.g., new counter-referenda, illegal take) can lead to swings in carnivore policies and continued contention between groups (Manfredo et al., 2017). When certain interests or stakeholders have privileged access to power and disproportionate influence over the ultimate decision-makers, a tyranny of the minority may occur (Bishin, 2009;López-Bao et al., 2017a, 2017b. When broader society or particular stakeholders perceive that a decision process was unfair, biased or simply do not approve of the results, they will often revisit the decision process through new avenues of litigation, ballot initiatives, or noncompliance with laws and regulations (Keane et al., 2008;Loker et al., 1998;Ludwig et al., 2001). ...
Decision-making about large carnivores is complex and controversial, and processes vary from deliberation and expert analysis to ballot boxes and courtrooms. Decision-makers range from neighboring landowners to the United Nations. Efficacy, longevity and legitimacy of policies may often depend as much on process as the policy itself. Overcoming controversy requires greater understanding of preferences for decision-makers and processes as well as deeper beliefs about human-carnivore interactions. Although academic debates are rich with recommendations for governance, practitioners' perceptions regarding decision-making processes have been rarely examined. Doing so can facilitate constructive discourses on managing and conserving carnivores across highly-variable social-ecological landscapes. To gain insight into different viewpoints on governance regarding large carnivore conservation, we asked a global community of conservation professionals (n = 505) about their preferences for governance alternatives for carnivore conservation through an online survey. Respondents agreed that government biologists should make decisions while legislators and commissions received low agreement and less consensus. Findings also indicated a general rejection of turning decision processes completely over to the general public, to courts, or to politicians who are perceived as lacking both technical knowledge and local insights. We found evidence for consensus on best management processes using a combination of science, local knowledge and participatory decision-making. According to our sample, sustainable coexistence strategies may require significant shifts in processes that remove mistrusted political influences vis-à-vis ballot boxes, courtrooms, commissions and legislative chambers. Our sample believed governance structures that combine technical expertise with local perspectives in a co-management framework may best withstand tests of time and controversy.
... How legislators define their constituents shapes both the input and the output side of politics (Rehfeld 2005;Bishin 2000Bishin , 2009. Their representational foci affect opportunities for political participation since they prescribe what kinds of demands gain access to politics and whom voters pay attention to (e. g. ...
... How legislators define their constituents shapes both the input and the output side of politics (Rehfeld 2005;Bishin 2000Bishin , 2009. Their representational foci affect opportunities for political participation since they prescribe what kinds of demands gain access to politics and whom voters pay attention to (e. g. ...
Political representation in European democracies is widely considered partisan and collectivist. This article, however, stresses that there is more to the representative process in European democracies than just its textbook version. It emphasizes the role of geographic representation as a complementary strategy in party‐dominated legislatures that is characterized by two distinct features. First, legislators employ distinct opportunities to participate in legislative contexts to signal attention to geographic constituents without disrupting party unity. Second, these activities are motivated by individual‐ and district‐level characteristics that supplement electoral‐system‐level sources of geographic representation. We empirically test and corroborate this argument for the German case on the basis of a content analysis of parliamentary questions in the 17th German Bundestag (2009–13). In this analysis, we show that higher levels of localness among legislators and higher levels of electoral volatility in districts result in increased geographic representation.
... Many studies show associations between legislators' personal characteristics and their votes. v Yet it is often unclear whether the association between an aspect of the MC's personal background reflects her own views or her ties to a subconstituency (Bishin 2009) whose preferences she gives extra weight in determining how to vote. ...
... MCs may also favor a "re-election constituency" (Fenno 1978) of voters they see as existing supporters, or a "prospective constituency" of potential backers (Bishin 2009). In practice, a Democratic MC and a Republican MC will cater to different constituencies when representing the same state or district. ...
... Second, the effects of age on policy can change as it becomes a strategic tool in elections (Bishin 2009;Fenno 1978;Miler 2010). From a demand-side perspective, we can argue that politicians use age strategically in political activities because they are responsive to their sub-constituents. ...
A politician’s age is an important individual attribute that can affect policymaking, although extant literature has paid little attention to the effects of representatives’ age on local government budgets. This study examined how the size and composition of local public expenditure are affected by mayors being less than 50 years of age by applying a regression discontinuity design to Korean local elections. We find that young politicians increase the size and proportion of budget spending on economic and cultural affairs, whereas they decrease the size and proportion of budget spending on social protection. A battery of robustness tests yielded similar results. These results indicate that politicians’ age has a significant impact on local public expenditure, which influences short- and long-term policy orientations. In particular, our findings suggest possible evidence that young politicians’ preferences and interests are generally aligned with those of young people, who demand greater attention on economic and cultural affairs. Based on these results, we discuss the possibility of a representative bureaucracy system for younger generations.
... Third, migrants also frequently meet directly with elite officials-including judges and legislators-to persuade them to act. In democracies, migrants and diasporas can often successfully pressure politicians to change policies, particularly when these policies are unlikely to be observed and opposed by a majority of voters (Bishin 2009). Migrants frequently testify in bureaucratic and legislative hearings as experts on economic, legal, and political conditions in the sending state (Shain 1994(Shain -1995. ...
Domestic courts sometimes prosecute foreign nationals for severe crimes—like crimes against humanity, genocide, torture, and war crimes—committed on foreign territory against foreign nationals. We argue that migrants can serve as agents of transnational justice. When migrants move across borders, as both economic migrants and refugees, they often pressure local governments to conduct criminal investigations and trials for crimes that occurred in their sending state. We also examine the effect of explanatory variables that have been identified by prior scholars, including the magnitude of atrocities in the sending state, the responsiveness of the receiving state to political pressure, and the various economic and political costs of prosecutions. We test our argument using the first multivariate statistical analysis of universal jurisdiction cases, focusing on multiple stages of prosecutions. We conclude that transnational justice is a justice remittance in which migrants provide accountability and remedies for crimes in their sending states.
... Measurements of closeness to country of origin are used in other social science studies such as Masuoka's (2008) study of how closeness to country of origin influences political participation. These studies generally find the strongest influence when a group's country of origin identity is activated, such as in the presence of external threats (Bishin 2009). Figure 3 presents respondents' closeness to their country of origin by race/ethnicity. ...
Bearing a distinctively ethnic name imposes a significant cost. Bearers of ethnic names experience discrimination when searching for housing, applying for jobs, contacting government officials, and even when running for political office. Why then do migrant parents give their children distinctively ethnic names? The literature proposes three non-mutually exclusive hypotheses: the price theory, the signal hypothesis, and the identity hypothesis. Using survey data from the 2020 Collaborative Multiracial Post-Election Survey, I find strong support for the signal and identity hypotheses. Analysis was pre-registered prior to the author gaining access to the dataset. Migrant parents appear to prefer giving their offspring ethnic names to facilitate non-market interactions with close community members (signal hypothesis) and as an expression of identity (identity hypothesis). These results not only advance our understanding of name giving, which is intrinsically important, but also help us better understand parents’ decisions to invest in the socioeconomic assimilation of their children.
... (Miller and Stokes 1963;Fenno 1978;Arnold 1990) To overcome these di culties, legislators appeal to subconstituencies within their district. (Bishin 2009;Mayhew 1974) Such appeals involve publicly taking positions and working on issues known to be important those subconstituencies' members. ...
This dissertation examines why Congress addresses some problems while ignoring others. Key to this process are congressional committees, which organize much of Congress's day-to-day activity but whose role has been downplayed in recent scholarship on congressional lawmaking. I examine how committees come to address particular problems with legislation, across three substantive papers. First, I find that while committee leaders may be more constrained in their agenda-setting powers than in the past, they can still direct their committee's attention to issue areas that they prioritize personally. In the second and third parts of the dissertation, I examine how interest group lobbying influences chairs' agenda-setting decisions with respect to individual bills. In the second paper, I develop the concept of interest diversity as the relative degree of observable variety of social identities, political causes, or industries represented by set of organizations. Using new data on interest groups' positions on over 5000 bills introduced during the 109th to 113th Congresses, I develop and validate a measure for interest diversity among groups lobbying on a bill. I show that the net interest diversity on a bill, the difference in supporters' and opponents' interest diversities, varies in ways that are both consistent with general predictions about interest group activity as well as with well-understood patterns of legislative and interest group behavior. In the third paper, I examine how bills' net interest diversity impacts the legislative agendas of congressional committees. I argue that committee chairs' incentives to promote viable legislation induce them to favor bills garnering the support of a diverse array of causes and industries, who are in turn able to mobilize the sustained support and attention of many legislators. I find that bills with higher net interest diversity are more likely to be considered in committee. I then show how these associations vary across bill sponsors and party alignments between Congress and the White House. Taken together, these results suggest that interest group influence, and what makes interest groups influential, is moderated by legislative institutions and may be more benign than is commonly assumed.
... Specific views are not allowed to be included in their representational credentials. The theory of freedom explains that in terms of being served, the representative considered it necessary to articulate his attitude and views on the problem faced without being firmly tied to the represented, gave him confidence as the representative (Bishin, 2009). The official judgment and behavior are then dictated by the delegate consideration, who pays attention to all things relevant to the issue at hand. ...
This paper explores the partnership management model on local parliament (DPRD) formulation between factions and political parties. The study used a qualitative descriptive, which allows identifying the proof for the right interpretation. The research was conducted in Sinjai Regency, Indonesia, for three months in 2019. The study position includes both factions with informant determination through purposeful sampling of Sinjai Parliament. The informants involved in this study are membership and leadership of legislative seated political parties; chairman/deputy and DPRD members; chairman and party members; and secretary and staff of the DPRD. The sources of the data gathered in this study comprise both primary and secondary data. The result showed that the policy-making model adopted in Sinjai DPRD is less effective and cooperation between political parties and voters is weak. In contrast, there is an unclear paradigm of the relationship between political parties and factions. The policy development process needs to be refined by developing a new model governed in a precise regulation and converted into Parliament order. The partnership structure between factions and political parties in policy formulation needs to be established and strengthened. However, voters and political parties participation in the policy formulation is not a core actor but an aspiration to have feedback, recommendations, demands, or support from the community in the political management system, especially in the Sinjai Parliament. The study results contribute to improve the political management system of local parliament in Indonesia.
... According to this account, district interests and issue priorities motivate congressional campaigns, legislative efforts, and bill introductions (Hall, 1998;Hayes et al., 2010;Sulkin, 2009). Appeals to constituency interests are themselves based not in targeting a potential median voter, but rather in alliances with distinct subconstituencies (Bishin, 2009). This, in turn, is reflected in legislators' granting access to, and prioritizing, organized interests with particular district relevance (Hansen, 1991). ...
The COVID-19 pandemic has induced a system-wide economic downturn disrupting virtually every conceivable economic interest. Which interests do legislators publicly champion during such crises? Here, we examine mentions of particular industries across thousands of press releases issued by members of Congress during the onset of the COVID-19 pandemic (January to June 2020). We show that members consistently emphasized interests significant to their constituency and party network, but less so their direct campaign contributors or ideological allies. This suggests that members believe they must be seen as good district representatives and party stewards even when national crises could justifiably induce them to favor any number of interests.
... It is a platform for the articulation and expression of the shared will of the people and a vital link between citizens and government (Okoosi, 2010). Bishin (2009), assert that political representation embodied in the legislature is fundamental in a democratic state. This suggest that good governance, requires legislative effectiveness in performing the vital role of citizens representation for a sustaining democracy in complex and diverse societies. ...
The level of information and communication technology (ICT) implementation in a country may have a significant effect on the successful realisation of e-parliament for a more accessible, transparent, effective, efficient and representative legislature. Despite several perceived benefits of e-parliament, some African nations including Nigeria are still at the initial phase of adopting this technology. This study examines barriers to the effective e-parliament adoption and implementation in Africa with a distinct focus on the Nigerian National Assembly context. Descriptive survey research design together with multistage and stratified random sampling techniques were employed for this research; questionnaires was also used for this study. Three hypotheses were formulated and tested with Analysis of Variance (ANOVA) statistical model. The results revealed that, inter alia, limited ICT infrastructure, low level of ICT literacy and absence of necessary ICT regulatory framework are major barriers towards the successful adoption and usage of e-parliament in Nigeria.
... Looking at effects on United States government policy, Gilens and Page (2014) find "mass-based interest groups and average citizens have little or no independent influence" (565). More pluralistic accounts of democratic politics find mass-based factions or interest groups can effectively represent their constituencies (Bishin 2009;Dahl 1961;Gillion 2012Gillion , 2013Lee 2002;Luders 2010;Truman 1951). Lee (2002), for example, challenges the model of a "one-way, top-down flow of political communication from elites on center stage to spectators in the audience" and finds that, at times, "oppositional counterpublics" of non-elite actors can shape mass opinion (18-9). ...
How do stigmatized minorities advance agendas when confronted with hostile majorities? Elite theories of influence posit marginal groups exert little power. I propose the concept of agenda seeding to describe how activists use methods like disruption to capture the attention of media and overcome political asymmetries. Further, I hypothesize protest tactics influence how news organizations frame demands. Evaluating black-led protests between 1960 and 1972, I find nonviolent activism, particularly when met with state or vigilante repression, drove media coverage, framing, congressional speech, and public opinion on civil rights. Counties proximate to nonviolent protests saw presidential Democratic vote share increase 1.6–2.5%. Protester-initiated violence, by contrast, helped move news agendas, frames, elite discourse, and public concern toward “social control.” In 1968, using rainfall as an instrument, I find violent protests likely caused a 1.5–7.9% shift among whites toward Republicans and tipped the election. Elites may dominate political communication but hold no monopoly.
... Our central argument is that attempts to make policy restricting gay rights, and to oppose policies supporting gay rights, are driven by organized interests rather than an organic response by the mass public to challenges to the status quo. These interests are run and represented by elites opposing gay rights who hold policy goals and instrumental goals (see Bishin 2009 for a general discussion). Their primary policy goal is to prevent gays and lesbians from achieving full inclusion and legitimacy in the polity. ...
Media and scholastic accounts describe a strong backlash against attempts to advance gay rights. Academic research, however, increasingly raises questions about the sharply negative and enduring opinion change that characterizes backlash among the mass public. How can we reconcile the widespread backlash described by the media with the growing body of academic research that finds no evidence of the opinion change thought to be its hallmark trait? We argue that rather than widespread opinion change, what appears to be backlash against gay rights is more consistent with elite‐led mobilization—a reaction by elites seeking to prevent gays and lesbians from achieving full incorporation in the polity. We present evidence from what is widely considered to be a classic case of anti‐gay backlash, the 2010 Iowa Judicial Retention Election. Analysis of campaign contribution data in Iowa versus other states between 2010 and 2014, and voter roll‐off data exploiting a unique feature of the 2010 retention election supports this argument. The results simultaneously explain how reports of backlash might occur despite increased support for gay rights, and an academic literature that finds no evidence of backlash.
... As "single-minded seekers of reelection" (Mayhew 1974), members of Congress strategically appeal to their constituents so as to maximize their likelihood of winning reelection. More particularly, members of Congress respond to their reelection constituency or those within their district whose support they deem as central to their ability to win reelection (Bishin 2009;Fenno 1978). The second way constituents influence legislative behavior is by electing like-minded representatives. ...
Despite the growing body of scholarship urging congressional scholars to consider the racialization of Congress, little attention has been given to understanding how racial resentment impacts legislative behavior. To fill this gap, we ask if and how racial resentment within a member’s home district influences the positions she takes on racially tinged issues in her press releases. Due to constituent influence, we expect legislators from districts with high levels of racial resentment to issue racially tinged press releases. Through an automated content analysis of more than fifty four thousand press releases from almost four hundred U.S. House members in the 114th Congress (2015–2017), we show that Republicans from districts with high levels of racial resentment are more likely to issue press releases that attack President Barack Obama. In contrast, we find no evidence of racial resentment being positively associated with another prominent Democratic white elected official, Hillary Clinton. Our results suggest that one reason Congress may remain racially conservative even as representatives’ cycle out of office may be attributed to the electoral process.
... It also helps scholars to realize that race itself is a salient and important factor in the formation of foreign policy (Plummer, 2002). Investigating the role of social identity through the prism of race groups allow me to forgo the adventure of constructing an ad hoc social group simply to evaluate my theory (Bishin, 2009). Examining race groups also allow me to rely confidently on groups that have been well-identified in previous social science research. ...
... Still, what happens when states lack a clear opinion on the presidential candidate, à la swing states? Bishin (2008) argues that rather than focusing on the median voter, legislators should focus on the most active subconstituency as it relates to partisanship. For example, if the base is lukewarm to Trump but there is an active and vocal subconstituency that opposes Trump, the senator should choose to oppose Trump. ...
Presidential candidates provide a boost to their congressional candidate counterparts, in which congressional candidates should ride the proverbial coattails into office (Campbell and Sumners 1990; Stewart 1989). The 2016 election, however, provides an instance in which the presidential coattails were less than desirable. In this article, we argue that state politics determines the optimal strategy for how candidates should position themselves vis‐à‐vis a controversial presidential candidate. Based on our findings, voters rewarded candidates at varying levels for distancing themselves from then candidate Trump. Specifically, the disloyal strategy, in which candidates completely disavowed Trump, worked best in swing states and among Democrats, liberals, and Clinton voters. The ambiguous strategy, in which candidates took an unclear position on Trump, was less effective, but still received gains in appeal among independents and liberals.
... Decentralized actions to influence politicians' activities are more impactful when the organizers are geographically concentrated (Rickard 2012). Politicians, moreover, have incentives to target spatially concentrated groups because they share interests and have lower barriers to collective action (Bishin 2009). Intuitively, both the likelihood that economic ties are interconnected and that vested actors are able to coordinate to influence government in their interest should be positively related to geographic proximity. ...
We examine the distribution of economic productivity across subnational regions as a factor explaining the level and allocation of central government expenditure. As regional productivity becomes more dispersed, the preferences influencing national decision making should diverge, thus impeding agreement to expand the central state. However, if regional productivity becomes more right-skewed, an increasing number of less productive regions may be able to press for greater central outlays. Dispersion and skew of interregional inequality also shape the allocation of centralized spending. With growing economic dispersion across regions, decision makers are more likely to fund policy categories that aid citizens in all regions over those that are locally targeted. By contrast, with the distribution of regional productivity skewing farther to the right, central expenditure is likely to become more locally targeted. We find strong evidence for these propositions in error correction models using new measures of interregional inequality and government policy priorities for 24 OECD countries. © 2019 by the Southern Political Science Association. All rights reserved.
... 4. Throughout our research, we refer to shared constituencies intending to imply the general constituency a senator represents. Of course, the field of legislative studies has long known that senators and legislators more generally may think about constituencies in other ways, like a primary election constituency or a personal constituency (Bishin 2009, Fenno 1978. These independent subconstituencies are what drive some scholars to expect independence in senatorial elections. ...
The coordinated behavior of members of a state delegation to the U.S. Senate can provide constituents in a state greater representation in Congress. Despite this potentially improved level of representation through coordination, popular and scholarly accounts of the U.S. Senate often feature senators from the same state at odds with one another on a variety of policy issues. In this research, we investigate competing expectations regarding the frequency (across topics) of collaborations between members of a state delegation to the Senate. We then test our expectations using patterns in bill cosponsorship in the 103rd–110th U.S. Senates. We find that senators from the same state work together often on the development of legislation, and that this coordinated activity is consistent across a variety of bill topics across many sessions of congressional activity. Notably, same-state status is an even stronger predictor of support via cosponsorship than is same-party status, raising possible avenues of breaking through partisan gridlock.
... While issue problem status and attention are related, we assume that because they can vary independently among different subpopulations within a state, the two can also shape policy adoption independently of the other. In other words, subpopulations are often far more interested in certain policy areas than the general population and are thus able to exert a disproportionate effect on policy, given their numbers (Bishin 2009). This interest can be seen as a difference in the recognition of problem status and in issue attention. ...
How does the salience of environmental issues influence climate policy adoption in the American states? This article considers how two aspects of public salience, issue problem status and issue attention, work with environmental interest group membership to influence climate policy adoption in the American states. We contribute to the theoretical development of issue salience and offer alternative measures that capture differences in salience across subnational units. We find evidence that states where climate change is perceived to be a problem, and where attention to environmental issues is high, are more likely to adopt relevant policies. Furthermore, states with Republican majorities in either legislative chamber are less likely to adopt climate policies. Our findings have implications for the impact of salience on the policy process.
... However, there is also a long line of literature detailing policy responsiveness to public opinion (e.g., Bartels, 1991;Bishin, 2009;Hayes & Bishin, 2012;Hutchings, 1998;Page & Shapiro, 1983;Pratchett & Wilson, 1996). Evidence suggests that policymakers do respond to mass opinion rather than just elite opinion (Enns, 2015;Leighley & Oser, 2018;Mishler & Sheehan, 1993;Stimson, MacKuen, & Erikson, 1995;Wlezien, 1995) and that the mass public is able to develop opinions independent of elite influence (Bullock, 2011;Friedman, 2012). ...
Recently, governments, commercial firms, and individuals have increased their use of unmanned aerial vehicles (i.e., “drones”). As with many new technologies, drone use has outpaced government oversight. Attempts to regulate the technology have been met with intense public backlash. Therefore, governments need to understand the public’s preferences for a regulatory regime. Analyzing national survey data, we address two questions: (a) What policies do Americans prefer for the regulation of drones? and (b) Does the public believe the federal, state, or local government or nongovernmental actors should be responsible for regulating drone use? Public preferences are one of several important inputs affecting policymaking; therefore, our results provide an important overview of current public opinion toward drone policy, as well as a theoretical blueprint for understanding how such opinions might fluctuate overtime.
... output (Peress 2013). Indeed, studies have evaluated the degree to which legislators pay attention to subconstituencies (Bishin 2009) as well as how and when legislators engage with their constituents in a strategic manner (Grimmer 2013a(Grimmer , 2013bGrose, Malhotra and Van Houweling 2015). ...
... output (Peress 2013). Indeed, studies have evaluated the degree to which legislators pay attention to subconstituencies (Bishin 2009) as well as how and when legislators engage with their constituents in a strategic manner (Grimmer 2013a(Grimmer , 2013bGrose, Malhotra and Van Houweling 2015). ...
Legislators are elected to be the voice of their constituents in government. Implicit in this electoral connection is the responsiveness of legislators to the preferences of constituents. Many past approaches only examine successful legislative behavior blessed by the majority party, not all legislative behavior, thereby limiting inference generalizability. I seek to overcome this limitation by considering bill sponsorship as an outlet in which all members are free to engage. Testing expectations on bill sponsorship in the 109th and 110th Congresses, I find that legislators are responsive, though only on “safely-owned” issues. I compare these findings to roll call voting on the same issues in the same Congresses and find a different pattern, suggesting legislators leverage bill sponsorship differently than roll call voting as they signal legislative priorities.
... Decentralized actions to influence politicians' activities are more impactful when the organizers are geographically concentrated (Rickard 2012). Politicians, moreover, have incentives to target spatially concentrated groups because they share interests and have lower barriers to collective action (Bishin 2009). Intuitively, both the likelihood that economic ties are interconnected and that vested actors are able to coordinate to influence government in their interest should be positively related to geographic proximity. ...
We examine the distribution of economic productivity across sub-national regions as a fac- tor explaining the level and allocation of central government expenditure. As regional productivity becomes more dispersed, the preferences influencing national decision-making should diverge, thus impeding agreement to expand the central state. However, if regional productivity becomes more right-skewed, an increasing number of less productive regions may be able to press for greater cen- tral outlays. Dispersion and skew of inter-regional inequality also shape the allocation of centralized spending. With growing economic dispersion across regions, decision-makers are more likely to agree to fund policy categories that aid qualified citizens in all regions over those that are locally-targeted. By contrast, with the distribution of regional productivity skewing farther to the right, central expendi- ture is likely to become more locally-targeted. We find strong evidence for these propositions in error correction models using new measures of inter-regional inequality and government policy priorities for a sample of 24 OECD countries.
... Em relevante trabalho, Bishin (2009) ...
Pesquisas de opinião sobre candidatos a cargos públicos são muito utilizadas em época de eleição. Os dados servem para mostrar qual é a fotografia do momento, quem está na frente e apontar tendências de queda ou crescimento para os pesquisados. E aí reside um problema. Mesmo com tanta importância, são escassos os estudos que medem o grau de confiabilidade das pesquisas eleitorais no Brasil. É disto que este artigo trata. Após fazer uma breve revisão da literatura sobre as pesquisas eleitorais e a opinião pública, o trabalho apresenta um balanço feito com 77 pesquisas de 23 institutos diferentes nos 27 estados brasileiros antes da realização do primeiro e do segundo turno das eleições de 2014 no Brasil. Ao todo, foram analisados 302 candidatos. Os resultados indicaram que 32% dos candidatos pesquisados tiveram previsões que não se realizaram, sendo que a maioria dos erros se deu no primeiro turno. Quase 15% das pesquisas apresentaram candidatos trocando de posições entre a previsão e o resultado nas urnas. Entre as razões para tantos equívocos estão a utilização da margem de erro, a coleta de dados feita em um período distante do pleito e a quantidade de eleitores indecisos até a proximidade da votação.
... On these issues, lawmakers may rely on their impressions of the economic and social needs of their district. As well, much of what representatives know about their district's preferences originates from constituents who are disproportionately members of "issue publics" or those who have intense preferences on an issue (Bishin 2009). It may be that an issue public within a district communicates a preference that is more closely associated with the conditions in the district than it is associated with the majority opinion of the district. ...
When constituent opinion and district conditions point in two different directions, which factor is most influential for representatives who face important legislative roll calls? To address this question, we combine four types of data for the period from 2000 to 2012: key congressional roll call votes, district-level survey data, objective measures of district conditions, and other district demographics. We show (1) that material conditions in a district have an effect on legislative behavior independent of constituents’ opinions; (2) that opinions are not always a better predictor of lawmaker decisions, compared to conditions; and (3) that whether lawmakers tend to reflect constituent opinions or district conditions is a function of the demographic makeup of their districts.
... Second, even if they perceive constituents' views accurately, legislators' background may lead them to give greater weight to the perceived views of a "subconstituency" (Fenno 1978, Bishin 2009. A politician may expect to win greater support from co-ethnics, co-religionists, neighbors or others with whom he shares traits or be more vulnerable to social pressure from his community. ...
We argue that the effect of legislators' personal background on their policy stands may vary over time. We discuss several means by which this may occur. We then illustrate this process with the case of abortion politics in California from the 1960s through the 1990s. Using newly collected evidence on Assemblymembers' and constituents' religion and voting patterns, we show that divisions in the State Assembly on abortion were chiefly religious at first, but later became highly partisan. This shift was distinct from overall polarization, and not a result of district-level factors or "sorting" of legislators by religion into party caucuses. Instead, growing ties between new movements and parties, feminists for Democrats, and the Christian Right for the Republicans, made party affiliation supplant religion as the leading cue for legislators on abortion, impelling many incumbents to revise their positions. Examining how personal characteristics become outweighed by partisan considerations as issues evolve advances understanding of party position change and polarization and contributes to the literature on representation. 1 In this paper, we explore the shifting importance of legislators' personal background characteristics for their position taking. When issues are new on the agenda,
... Kelompok ketiga ialah kajian representasi politik yang mencoba menekankan pada sikap kritis terhadap representasi politik dalam tataran praktik. Bishin (2009) mengkritik studi-studi representasi politik selama ini yang hanya fokus pada mayoritas semata, sementara minoritas tidak mendapat perhatian dengan menggunakan studi kasus di Amerika Serikat. Begitu pula dengan Grill (2007), yang menggunakan istilah krisis representasi melihat persoalan-persoalan yang terjadi di Congress Amerika Serikat di tahun 1990, 1994, 1998, 2000, dan 2006 sebagai bagian dari hilangnya publik dalam hubungan representasi politik antara parlemen dan publik Amerika Serikat. ...
The killing of George Floyd at the hands of police in the spring of 2020 not only refocused attention on racial inequality in America but also seemed to spark an increase in awareness among white Americans and support for Black Lives Matter (BLM). It is not clear, however, whether members of Congress would alter their own messaging and actions to meet the moment and how their messaging would impact them electorally. This chapter explains the impact messaging, or lack of messaging, on BLM had on the electoral outcomes of members of Congress who ran for reelection. An analysis of e-newsletters distributed by House members in 2020 reveals that few (13%) members voiced support publicly for BLM. White Democrats from safe districts were the most likely to voice support for BLM. Members who publicly voiced support for BLM won a higher share of the vote than members who stayed quiet or voiced opposition even after taking other variables into account.KeywordsBlack Lives MatterCongressional electionsPublic supportRoll call voting
Les Droits de l’Homme sont aujourd’hui partout sans que nous sachions réellement de quels « droits » ou de quel « homme » nous parlons. Pourtant, la poursuite de cet idéal philosophico-politico-juridique façonne notre quotidien et notre environnement, au point de devenir par lui-même un concept ayant élaboré notre cosmos. Or, dans celui-ci, les minorités sont devenues non seulement un pilier et un étalon de mesure pour apprécier l’assimilation de ces Droits mais apparaissent dorénavant comme le fer de lance nécessaire à l’instauration et au développement du concept à vocation universelle que sont justement ces Droits de l’homme. Tel un miroir européen, les pays issus de l’ex-Yougoslavie permettent alors d’illustrer cette dynamique en action, puisque au sein même de la culture européenne, truisme du creuset des minorités et objets de l’implantation des Droits de l’homme depuis trois décennies.Mais, souffrant à leur tour d’un certain désenchantement, ces Droits de l’homme pourront-ils demeurer encore longtemps ce concept révolutionnaire se voulant affranchi de toute hétéronomie ?
Do interpersonal relationships among and between representatives and senators affect legislative collaboration in the contemporary Congress? The extant literature on Congress suggests interpersonal dimensions of life on Capitol Hill should play a minimal role in the legislative process. However, research in other fields, including psychology, finds that relationships are crucially important to within organizations. In addition, many contemporary accounts of congressional deal‐making highlight the role of personal relationships. Drawing on interviews with high‐level congressional staff, and data on CODEL trips taken by members of Congress, we show that interpersonal relationships help promote collaboration across the aisle. These findings have implications for how we understand the contours of conflict and cooperation on Capitol Hill.
Many important traits of state legislatures vary across chambers within a state. Yet according to existing typologies in the comparative study of bicameralism, the 49 bicameral American state legislatures would be deemed quite homogeneous. To resolve this disjuncture, I identify a novel dimension of bicameralism that distinguishes among state legislatures by capturing the extent to which the two chambers serve as meaningfully different venues for influence. Based on this framework, I develop an index of bicameral “distinctiveness” rooted in three traits that speak to policy influence across chambers: the ratio of seats, bipartisan representation, and constituency dissimilarity. This measure reveals sizable variation across states and a conspicuous geographic pattern, with considerably greater bicameral distinctiveness in the Eastern United States. In turn, I assess the construct validity of this measure, showing how patterns of second chamber bill amendment vary systematically with the level of bicameral distinctiveness.
Understanding differential policy costs across constituencies, and how they link to legislators' policy preferences, can facilitate policy changes that solve pressing problems. We examine the role of policy costs on constituents by studying legislator support for taxing gasoline. Analysis of survey responses from US state legislators, as well as of their voting records, shows that legislators whose constituents would be most affected by an increased gas tax—those whose constituents have longer commutes—are more likely to oppose higher gas taxes. Separately estimating the impact of time spent driving to work versus using public transit shows that the effect of commute times comes from those who have long drives, not from those who ride public transit, highlighting how the policy costs to constituents is a major driver in legislators' considerations. We finish the article by discussing the implications of our findings for combating climate change and for understanding policy feedbacks.
How do citizens change their voting decisions after their communities experience catastrophic violent events? The literature on the behavioral effects of violence, on the one hand, and on political behavior, on the other, suggest different answers to this question. Using a difference-in-differences approach, we investigate the influence of indiscriminate, rampage-style school shootings on both voter turnout levels and the relative electoral support for the Democratic and Republican Parties at the county level in US presidential elections (1980–2016). We find that although voter turnout does not change, the vote share of the Democratic Party increases by an average of nearly 5 percentage points in counties that experienced shootings—a remarkable shift in an age of partisan polarization and close presidential elections. These results show that school shootings do have important electoral consequences and bring to the fore the need to further examine the effects of different forms of violence on political behavior.
This chapter is an analysis of the politics of defection in the Nigerian National Assembly from 1999 to 2019. Relying heavily on documentary sources of data and anchoring analysis on the framework of political opportunism, the chapter critically interrogates the prevalent culture of defection among Nigerian legislators vis-à-vis the operation of representative democracy in the country. Representative democracy is better practiced and the interests of the constituents are better served when parliamentarians are doggedly committed to their political parties. However, where legislators gyrate, on quarterly basis, around two or more political parties, representative democracy becomes a shadow of itself. The analysis in the chapter shows that the culture of opportunistically inclined party defection is prevalent among Nigerian federal legislators, in spite of the constitutional provision intended to reduce the instances of non-ideologically inclined defection. The persistent cases of defection among the Nigerian legislators thus hold critical implications for the National Assembly as the symbol of representation, policy articulation and evaluation, strengthening of party politics and effective functioning of representative democracy in Nigeria. To redress this situation, Section 68 (1g) of the 1999 Constitution (as amended) needs to be amended in such a way that the nature of ‘division’ and the level of occurrence within a party are explicitly defined.
In this paper, we test the optimal position taking strategy for senators running for reelection vis-à-vis their party’s president. Using data from a survey experiment conducted using a national sample, we examine the responses towards three hypothetical Democrats: (i) ‘embracing’ or supportive of Barack Obama (ii.) ambiguous about their attitude towards Obama (iii.) ‘eschewing’ or opposed to Obama. Comparing participants exposed to the ambiguous and the embracing Democrat, we find some evidence of a difference in candidate preference, but little evidence to suggest that the strategy gains votes. Comparing participants exposed to the eschewing Democrat to the embracing Democrat, we find that the strategy does yield some gains but these are offset by losses amongst the base. Overall, these findings suggest that the optimal reelection strategy for Democratic candidates is to remain supportive, unless they are running in areas with a high concentration of Republicans—then the eschew strategy can yield some gains.
Providing representation entails making choices about prioritizing the needs of diverse groups within one’s constituency. While citizens cannot reasonably expect that representatives will cater to their particular interests or priorities all the time, we know little about citizens’ expectations in this regard. In this paper, we present the results of two survey experiments that probe the relationship between citizens’ group identifications, their perceptions of their constituencies, and their demands regarding representation. We find that citizens are generally egocentric, in that they expect a representative to cater to personally relevant interests even when such interests are not an important part of the representative’s constituency. Moreover, we find that this egocentrism is not mitigated through the provision of information about the district’s diversity or composition, indicating that voter ignorance about the nature of constituencies is not the primary cause of these expectations. Regardless of sophistication, we observe expectations that are unrealistically self-centered.
The U.S. Supreme Court’s recent application of employment protections to gays and lesbians in Bostock v. Clayton County highlights the striking absence of policy produced by the U.S. Congress despite two decades of increased public support for gay rights. With the notable exceptions of allowing gays and lesbians to serve in the military, and passing hate crimes legislation, every other federal policy advancing gay rights over the last three decades has been the product of a Supreme Court ruling or Executive Order. To better understand the reasons for this inaction, we examine the changing preferences of members of Congress on LGBTQ (lesbian, gay, bisexual, transgender, and queer) issues. Examining scores from the Human Rights Campaign from 1989 to 2019, we find a striking polarization by the parties on LGBTQ issues, as Democrats have become much more supportive and Republicans even more opposed to gay rights. This change has been driven not by gerrymandering, mass opinion polarization, or elite backlash, but among Republicans by a mix of both conversion and replacement, and among Democrats primarily of replacement of more moderate members. The result is a striking lack of collective representation that leaves members of the LGBTQ community at risk to the whims of presidents and jurists.
For most congressional legislation, committee consideration is the first and most drastic winnowing point. Organized interest groups try to influence this winnowing. Many have suggested such influence arises from organizational resources. I offer an alternative view based on the need of policy-motivated committee agenda setters to assess the viability of bills before granting them consideration. Such needs incentivize agenda setters to favor legislation supported by organizations representing diverse industries, causes, and other interests. Analyzing new data on organizations’ positions on over 4,700 bills introduced between 2005 and 2014, I show that committee consideration favors such “interest diverse” coalitions, not coalitions that are large but homogeneous or that give high levels of campaign contributions. These associations are stronger when viability information is more valuable, for majority-party bills and bills introduced during divided government. This suggests that lobbying helps agenda setters identify, and promote, legislation likely to garner widespread and diverse support.
Much of the research on minority representation in the U.S. House has focused on how group preferences are reflected in recorded votes, yet most opportunities for position-taking exist outside the roll call arena. This research explores the conditions under which descriptive representation enhances substantive representation by examining an area where members have a great deal of freedom to register their preferences - speeches on the House floor. Using a novel database of immigration-related one-minute speeches from the 109th-113th Congress, this research explores both the decision to deliver and the position taken in speech on the floor. It finds that not only do Latino members devote a greater share of attention to the issue of immigration than their colleagues, but they take distinct positions that are more reflective of Latino interests, and they are less vulnerable to district pressures than their non-Latino colleagues. These results suggest a clear value in descriptive representation and more diverse legislatures.
Political groups are often seen as polarized communities. Research suggests social capital predicts intergroup attitudes; those who perceive higher social capital tend to have more positive attitudes about racial outgroups. Do the positive associations between social capital and racial attitudes extend to attitudes about political outgroups? If so, could social capital help reduce political animosities? Lessons are found in the fields of community development and psychology. We conducted a survey (n = 338) of college students regarding their perceptions of social capital in their university community, as well as their political ideology and attitudes about liberals and conservatives. After controlling for personality and pre-political predispositions, regression analyses indicate asymmetrical effects. Among liberals, social capital positively predicts attitudes about the liberal ingroup and the conservative outgroup. Among conservatives, social capital has no significant effects on attitudes about either political group. Thus, liberals and conservatives respond differently to their beliefs about their communities, potentially impacting the effectiveness of interventions.
Scholars have identified partisan differences in policy representation—with Republicans more often found to represent the rich, while Democrats align with the preferences of less affluent voters. This paper explores these partisan differences, questioning this simple conclusion on both theoretical and methodological grounds. Instead, we develop and test a theory in which elected officials of both parties represent their co-partisans, who agree with one another on many policy issues. Yet, on a subset of issues, upper class and lower class co-partisans have diverging policy preferences: rich and poor Democrats disagree on social issues while rich and poor Republicans disagree on economic issues. We analyze roll call voting in the U.S. Senate and find that, in these cases, senators of both parties better represent the preferences held by affluent members of their party. Our findings underscore the value in examining the content of policy debates and theorizing about different forms of representation.
This article examines the extent to which legislators use legislative debates to engage in localism activities to cater to the interests of their selectorate in nonpreferential electoral systems. We define localism activities as the delivery of tangible and intangible benefits to a geographically confined constituency that is instrumental to legislators’ re-selection. Our primary argument is that legislators whose selectorate operates at the local level make more speeches with parochial references. Results show strong support for this assertion. Furthermore, we find that high district magnitude leads to higher levels of localism. We use a mixed-methods research design, combining an original data set of 60,000 debates in Portugal with qualitative evidence from elite interviews. We make a methodological innovation in the field of representation and legislative studies by using a Named Entity Recognition tool to analyze the debates.
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.
A large body scholarship demonstrates that the population size of an electoral district affects elections in important ways, yet little is known about the implications of population size for campaigning and fundraising. I posit that the challenges of running a campaign in a populous electorate require candidates to focus their fundraising efforts on the wealthy. I analyze campaign finance records published by the Federal Election Commission during the 2006–2014 Senate elections and find that Senate candidates running in large states receive fewer donations per capita from in-state donors, but they tend to receive larger donations on average and more money from contributions of $1,500 and above. In sum, candidates running in populous states appear to rely upon comparably smaller pools of wealthy constituents writing larger checks to finance their campaigns. In the context of rising campaign costs, these findings suggest that constituency population growth may exacerbate representational inequalities between citizens and contribute to the growing influence of the wealthy in U.S. politics.
In this article, we use legislative correspondence to determine who gains access to key staffers in a congressional office. To evaluate our theory of the office power hierarchy, we test hypotheses using an original dataset of more than 3,000 correspondence records from the office of former member of Congress James R. Jones. Our empirical analysis is supplemented by an e-mail interview with Representative Jones. We find that key senior staffers are more likely to pay attention to powerful individuals and nonroutine matters. Letters from women and families and those dealing with routine legislation are more likely to be answered by lower-ranked staffers. These results are important because they reveal that even something as simple as constituent correspondence enters a type of power hierarchy within the legislative branch where some individuals are advantaged over others.
Presidents face incentives to move toward the median voter as elections approach. We explore the racial consequences of these electoral incentives. As presidents move toward the center, they move away from ideologically noncentrist groups like the Congressional Black Caucus (CBC). Comparing the president’s annual budget proposal to the CBC’s alternative budget from 1980 to 2012, we test whether Democrats’ (Republicans’) budgets are less (more) congruent with the CBC’s alternative budgets in election years. Typically, Democrats’ budgets are much more congruent than Republicans’ with the CBC’s budgets. However, in election years, Democrats’ budget proposals tend to move away from the CBC’s ideal such that Democrats’ budgets are no better aligned with the CBC than are Republicans’ budgets.
This article tests whether theories of congressional behavior that link legislative responsiveness to the preferences of sub-constituencies at the expense of party preferences apply to the state level. Using ten years of state-level data and roll-call data from nearly 4,000 individual votes on E-Verify legislation, I examine the competing influences of party and constituency preferences on legislative behavior. The results confirm that state legislatures/legislators are responsive to sub-constituencies, but find that responsiveness plays out in different ways depending on the level of analysis and the political party and constituents in question. These results have important implications for our understanding of legislative representation: because responsiveness to sub-constituencies can yield policy results that are antithetical to stated party goals, what appears to be collective irresponsibility from a party may actually be individual legislators striving to be responsive to those constituents that they anticipate will hold them accountable.
On the night of November 8, 2016, once election results showed an almost certain presidential victory for Donald Trump, private prison stock values increased. Trump’s harsh anti-immigrant campaign rhetoric, followed by his attempted crackdown on sanctuary cities (and immigrants more generally), had the potential to expand the carceral market to greater shares of undocumented immigrants. We develop a theory of carceral market expansion, arguing that private actors seek to expand carceral markets—for profit—just as in any other market. This paper examines whether private companies, like Core Civic and GEO, that contract with Immigration Customs and Enforcement (ICE) to operate detention facilities exert influence over federal immigration legislation in the 113th and 114th Congresses. Specifically, we examine (1) whether campaign donations made by private prison companies and other contractors to legislators (carceral lobbying hypothesis), and (2) having a privately owned or managed ICE detention facility in a legislator’s district (carceral representation hypothesis) increases the probability that legislators will co-sponsor more harsh immigration legislation in the U.S. states. We find strong support for the carceral representation hypothesis but limited to no support for the carceral lobbying hypothesis. Implications are discussed.
Bill sponsorship is a valuable form of legislative activity in which all legislators are free to signal priorities, stake out positions, and influence legislative agendas. However, decisions to hone in on specific issues have been mostly overlooked, resulting in drivers of issue-specific sponsorship remaining unclear. A reasonable place to look for drivers is constituent preferences, given the representational responsibilities underlying most legislative behavior. To address this question, I leverage advances in opinion estimation to generate a new fine-grained measure of constituent issue preferences at the district level. By keeping the focus on issues, this approach is preferable to other measures of constituent preferences, in that it assumes nothing about constituents’ ideology. Through numerous tests across several issues spanning the 109th to 113th Congresses, I find a largely indirect effect of preferences on sponsorship through employment proxies, yet no consistent direct impact from constituents, opposite expectations of the delegate model of representation.
Political scientists have demonstrated the importance of lawmakers’ identities, showing that race, gender, socioeconomic status, and sexual orientation affect legislative and representational behavior. Is the same true for age? We argue it is, but the effect is conditioned by the salience of different “senior issues.” Analyzing the bill introductions by members of Congress during the 109th and 110th Congresses, we show that older lawmakers are more likely to introduce legislation addressing lower salience senior issues than their younger colleagues. In contrast, sizeable senior constituencies in a district influence lawmaker attention to higher salience senior issues, regardless of a lawmaker’s age. These findings have implications for our understanding of senior power and personal roots of representation in the United States.
In order to further our understanding of the empirical value of the constituency control model of representation, we seek to determine whether differences in voter information and recall affect the capacity of elections to serve as instruments of accountability. We address this question by focusing on the degree to which voters held their senators accountable for their votes on the Clarence Thomas nomination in the 1992 senate elections. We find that policy-specific accountability requires voters to correctly recall their incumbent's roll-call behavior. Reliance on more general cues such as party identification and ideology leads some voters to mistakenly hold their representatives accountable for something they did not do. Since these cues are not so helpful on cross-cutting issues like the Thomas nomination, citizens who invest in detailed information will minimize errors in judgment made in the frequent instances when legislators' actions cross partisan and ideological lines. The high school civics texts may be right about the importance of an informed citizenry to democratic practice after all.
This article provides a critical review of empirical research on attitudes toward abortion among mass publics in the United States, with a view toward suggesting promising avenues for future research. We identify three such themes: Accounting for pro-life movement among mass attitudes in recent years, when the composition of the U.S. population would seem to trend in a pro-choice direction; explaining the sources of party polarization of the abortion issue; and anticipating changes in abortion attitudes which might result from public debate over human cloning.
We estimate a model of House members' roll call voting decisions embodying some hypotheses about representation, including estimates of the influence of district opinion on broad collective issues relative to personal economic interests, of the effect of electoral security on constituency responsiveness, and of the difference in constituency and party voting among Republicans and Democrats. This model is estimated with votes taken during deliberations on the 1978 Tax Reform Act, important because it was a significant change from the tax reforms passed in the late 1960s and 1970s, marked the first appearance of the Kemp-Roth proposed tax cut, and represented a concerted effort by Republicans to make tax policy a broad national issue. Findings indicate that constituent preferences for redistribution are important influences on representatives' decisions and that Republicans exhibited a greater degree of party voting than the Democrats while the Democrats better represented their constituent's preferences. © 1989, American Political Science Association. All rights reserved.
The perception of threat and the experience of anxiety are distinct but related public reactions to terrorism. Anxiety increases risk aversion, potentially undercutting support for dangerous military action, consistent with terrorists' typical aims. Conversely, perceived threat increases a desire for retaliation and promotes animosity toward a threatening enemy, in line with the usual goals of affected governments. Findings from a national telephone survey confirm the differing political effects of anxiety and perceived threat. The minority of Americans who experienced high levels of anxiety in response to the September 11 attacks were less supportive of aggressive military action against terrorists, less approving of President Bush, and favored increased American isolationism. In contrast, the majority of Americans who perceived a high threat of future terrorism in the United States (but were not overly anxious) supported the Bush administration's antiterrorism policies domestically and internationally.
Three hypotheses suggesting why senators might adopt or change positions on such an issue as the ABM are compared. The empirical analysis clearly substantiates the contention that position reflects ideology, not party commitment or potential state economic benefits. Furthermore, the influence of ideology is seen to have grown more apparent each year the issue was contested in the Senate. Virtually all the senators who changed position between 1968 and 1970 had initial positions that did not accord with their ideology, and they moved so as to bring them in accord. Virtually all those senators whose initial position was in accord with their ideology maintained that position.
In recent years, positive theories of congressional parties have been elaborated to encompass a variety of institutional features. The seasoning of the field is reflected in its contrasting theoretical accounts of the existence of parties and their effects, and the return to empirical evidence in a set of insightful studies of modern congressional decision making. This paper provides a critical review of this recent literature and suggests some unfinished tasks in the development of this field.
A core tenet of many approaches to American trade politics is that diffuse interests exert little or no influence on the process. This paper argues, however, that there are theoretical and empirical reasons to believe that diffuse interests can and do influence congressional trade politics. Members of Congress respond to these interests in order to preempt their mobilization by political rivals, interest groups, the president, and the media. This mechanism does not preclude interest group influence but rather points our attention to an additional influence on congressional trade voting. Evidence for this view comes from statistical analyses often years of House and Senate trade voting in the eighties and nineties. The results indicate that skilled labor - an interest that receives diffuse benefits from trade but lacks direct organization - has been a statistically significant, consistent, and substantial influence on congressional trade voting.
There are many good reasons to expect that the diversity of a constituency should impact electoral competitiveness. However, in the face of these strong expectations, the empirical record that has sought to quantify this relationship is at best mixed. The work by Bond (1983) is an excellent example. Using a measure of diversity (the Sullivan Index) common to other researchers, Bond's investigation of House races in the 1970s revealed no relationship between district diversity and competitiveness. The principle finding of this study is that much of the confusion in the literature is caused by the measure of diversity used: the Sullivan Index measures the absolute, not political, diversity of a constituency. Thus, I develop and examine a measure of diversity that assumes constituency characteristics have differential partisan impact. Use of this measure clearly demonstrates that for House elections held between 1962 and 1996, diverse House districts experienced significantly more electoral competition than did relatively less diverse House districts.
The assumptions imposed in spatial models of election competition generally are restrictive in that they require either unidimensional issue spaces or symmetrically distributed electorate preferences. We attribute such assumptions to the reliance of these models on a single concept of a solution to the election game—pure strategy equilibria—and to the fact that such equilibria do not exist in general under less severe restrictions. This essay considers, then, the possibility that candidates adopt mixed minimax strategies. We show, for a general class of symmetric zero-sum two-person games, that the domain of these minimax strategies is restricted to a subset of the strategy space and that for spatial games this set not only exists, but if preferences are characterized by continuous densities, it is typically small. Thus, the hypothesis that candidates abide by mixed minimax strategies can limit considerably our expectation as to the policies candidates eventually advocate. Additionally, we examine the frequently blurred distinction between spatial conceptualizations of two-candidate elections and of committees, and we conclude that if pure strategy equilibria do not exist, this distinction is especially important since committees and elections can produce entirely different outcomes.
The delegate theory of representation posits that legislators ought to reflect purposively the preferences of their constituents. We show that this form of representation does take place on salient issues when the theory's two fundamental conditions are fulfilled simultaneously. First, legislators must think of themselves as delegates. Second, constituencies must provide consistent cues regarding district preferences to their representatives. The absence of either or both conditions seriously disrupts delegated representation.
This study assesses the ability of legislators to predict constituency opinion by comparing the predictions made by members of Florida's lower house with actual constituency opinion as reflected in subsequent referendum results. On the whole, predictions prove reasonably accurate. An attempt is also made to identify what influences legislators' predictions. On some issues, previous constituency voting behavior seems to guide the legislators' estimates of constituency opinion. Legislators' self-described role orientations are not consistently related to prediction prowess.
Recent research on representational linkages between legislators and their constituents challenges the long-standing assumption that constituency preferences are exogenous to the linkage process, but does not clearly suggest the conditions under which a specific pattern of linkage should exist. Drawing on a diverse collection of prior research, we argue that issues that function as main lines of cleavage between competing political parties should be characterized by reciprocal linkages between mass and elite preferences, while highly complex issues on which party distinctions are unclear should be characterized by no linkages between mass and elite. For salient issues on which the public fails to distinguish party positions, we expect the traditional one-way linkage from mass to elite. We test our theoretical expectations with a unique version of the data from the 1958 American Representation Study - and with explicit predictions for which policy issues addressed in that study should demonstrate which particular pattern of mass-elite linkage. The empirical results, derived from LISREL analyses for three policy areas, are entirely in accord with our predictions.
The abstract for this document is available on CSA Illumina.To view the Abstract, click the Abstract button above the document title.
We argue that most previous empirical reports of the influence of personal economic situations upon political preferences ("self-interest effects") in the mass public have been due to either of two item-order artifacts: political preferences may have been personalized by assessing immediately after the respondent's own economic situation has been made salient, or perceptions of personal economic situations may have been politicized by assessing them immediately after major political preferences have been made salient. Three sources of data were used to test the effects of these item orders on the consistency between personal economic situations and political attitudes: an experiment conducted within the 1979 National Election Studies (NES) pilot survey, and secondary analyses of NES and media surveys during the 1976 and 1980 presidential campaigns, as well as the full series of pre-1980 NES surveys. Self-interest effects prove to have occurred primarily in surveys with either personalizing or politicizing designs, and only rarely in uncontaminated surveys. We speculate that such survey-induced increases in consistency reflect temporary facework rather than a genuinely increased grounding of political preferences in self-interest. Political campaigns may also find it difficult to induce a genuine link between self-interest and political preferences; NES data reveal little success for the Reagan campaign's effort to do so in 1980.
This article tests the hypothesis that low-education voters are more likely to evaluate a candidate using personalistic or non-policy campaign messages than are more educated voters. The Latino electorate in the U.S. presents an ideal case study, given that both Presidential candidates in the 2000 election directed personalistic campaign messages toward them. Latinos with low-levels of education should be the most likely to evaluate a candidate using personalistic campaign cues since processing and understanding these messages require little in stored political information. Analysis of self-reported responses from the Latino Voter Survey of 2000 indicates that low-education Latinos are more likely than are high-education Latinos to use non-policy cues when evaluating a candidate. This finding implies that vote choice is structured differently for Latinos with varying levels of education. To test this implication and to confirm the finding from the self-reported responses, I estimate a model of Latino vote choice for the 2000 Presidential election. Probit analysis shows that high-education Latinos are indeed more likely to use factors that are informationally demanding, such as candidates’ issue positions and ideology than are low-education Latinos.
Theory: Voters, as Downs (1957) argues, cast instrumental rather than expressive votes. Voters choose between candidates based on the policy outcomes they expect from the candidates rather than on the policy platforms of the candidates. Voters' expectations about the policy outputs of candidates depend on the partisan control of the separate branches of government in a separation of powers system. Hypotheses: Voters perceive differences between a presidential candidate's policy platform and the expected policy outcome of a government with the candidate in office. The perceived differences in policy outcomes and policy platforms are influenced by voters' expectations about partisan control of the legislature. Voters' choice of candidates depends more on the distance between voter ideal points and expected policy outcomes under each candidate than on the distance between voter ideal points and candidate platforms. Methods: Analysis of data from a 1996 Texas poll in which voters were asked to place the ideological positions of Bob Dole and Bill Clinton along with the ideological position of the government with Bob Dole or Bill Clinton as president. Results: Voters' support for presidential candidates is more strongly related to their proximity to the policy outcomes they expect from each candidate's election than to their proximity to the candidate's policy position.
In a two-party system, electoral capture refers to the political dilemma faced by a group that regularly votes overwhelmingly for one party while the other major party has no interest in competing for the group's votes (Frymer, 1999). In 2004, 11 states approved amendments to their state constitutions that banned same-sex marriages. The initiatives passed by wide margins that, except in Utah, exceeded the margin of victory for the winning presidential candidate in each state. The broad support for the anti-gay initiatives suggests the electoral capture of Gay and Lesbian Americans.
The implementation of particular public policies may infringe upon important civil rights of citizens. This article explores the relationship between the racially disproportionate effects of the death penalty and a subsequent attempt in the U.S. Senate to provide racial justice protection. While the most important explanatory factors of a senator's behavior are their political philosophy and the state homicide rate the findings also indicate that racially disproportionate outcomes under capital punishment in the senator's state are negatively associated with the probability that the senator will support racial justice protection. We discuss the importance of these findings.
This article considers the impact of public opinion on public policy, asking: (1) how much impact it has; (2) how much the impact increases as the salience of issues increases; (3) to what extent the impact of public opinion may be negated by interest groups, social movement organizations, political parties, and elites; (4) whether responsiveness of governments to public opinion has changed over time; and (5) the extent to which our conclusions can be generalized. The source of data is publications published in major journals and included in major literature reviews, systematically coded to record the impact of public opinion on policy. The major findings include: the impact of public opinion is substantial; salience enhances the impact of public opinion; the impact of opinion remains strong even when the activities of political organizations and elites are taken into account; responsiveness appears not to have changed significantly over time; and the extent to which the conclusions can be generalized is limited. Gaps in our knowledge made apparent by the review are addressed in proposals for an agenda for future research.
Roll-call votes of African American representatives are explored to dis cern more explicitly the ideological cohesiveness of the Congressional Black Caucus (CBC) and factors that affect vote choice. We use adjusted Americans for Democratic Action (ADA) scores. The adjustment corrects for changes in the ADA's scale from year to year. The analysis is carried out focusing on CBC coherence with respect to ideological voting and potential influences on Caucus unity We pool the CBC data from the period under investigation (1971-1996) to address the impact of vari ables identified as affecting roll call voting. The findings suggest that while there is considerably more diversity within the CBC than we some times imagine, African American representatives are more cohesive with the Black Caucus on roll call behavior than they are with either their regional or state party delegations. In addition, analyses suggest that sen iority, correspondence between the president's party and the CBC, presi dential policy preferences, percent black voters in the district, and elec toral margin of victory in the district may help explain variation in Caucus unity Finally, we conclude high vote cohesion is meaningful for the CBC and the representation of black interests in Congress.
This study argues that, due to selective political coverage by the entertainment-oriented, soft news media, many otherwise politically inattentive individuals are exposed to information about high-profile political issues, most prominently foreign policy crises, as an incidental by-product of seeking entertainment. I conduct a series of statistical investigations examining the relationship between individual media consumption and attentiveness to several recent high-profile foreign policy crisis issues. For purposes of comparison, I also investigate several non-foreign crisis issues, some of which possess characteristics appealing to soft news programs and others of which lack such characteristics. I find that information about foreign crises, and other issues possessing similar characteristics, presented in a soft news context, has indeed attracted the attention of politically uninvolved Americans. The net effect is a reduced disparity in attentiveness to select high-profile political issues across different segments of the public.
In a recent article, Stanley Lieberson presents convenient and interpretable measures of population diversity. In the following report we are concerned with applying one of these measures to the states and examining some possible consequents of variation in diversity, or heterogeneity. The particular measure is Lieberson's Aw—diversity within a population—as applied to polytomous variables. It is nicely interpretable in probability terms, since it represents the proportion of characteristics upon which a randomly-selected pair of individuals will differ, assuming sampling with replacement. That is, if an infinite number of pairs were selected randomly from a finite population, the average proportion of unshared characteristics of these pairs would be Aw.
Along with the traditional “promissory” form of representation, empirical political scientists have recently analyzed several new forms, called here “anticipatory,” “gyroscopic,” and “surrogate” representation. None of these more recently recognized forms meets the criteria for democratic accountability developed for promissory representation, yet each generates a set of normative criteria by which it can be judged. These criteria are systemic, in contrast to the dyadic criteria appropriate for promissory representation. They are deliberative rather than aggregative. They are plural rather than singular.
Discontent with the functioning of representative bodies is hardly new. Most of them were born and developed in the face of opposition denying their legitimacy and their feasibility. Most have lived amid persistent unfriendly attitudes, ranging from the total hostility of anti-democrats to the pessimistic assessments of such diverse commentators as Lord Bryce, Walter Lippmann, and Charles de Gaulle. Of particular interest today is the discontent with representative bodies expressed by the friends of democracy, the supporters of representative government, many of whom see in recent history a secular ‘decline of parliament’ and in prospect the imminent demise of representative bodies.
Wilder W. Crane, JR., recently received his Ph.D. from the University of Wisconsin and is now an Instructor in Political Science at Vanderbilt University. Dr. Crane served as Assemblyman from Chippewa County in the 1957 Wisconsin Legislature.
In contrast to statistical methods, a number of case study
methods—collectively referred to as Mill's methods, used by
generations of social science researchers—only consider
deterministic relationships. They do so to their detriment because
heeding the basic lessons of statistical inference can prevent serious
inferential errors. Of particular importance is the use of conditional
probabilities to compare relevant counterfactuals. A prominent example
of work using Mill's methods is Theda Skocpol's States
and
Social
Revolutions. Barbara Geddes's widely assigned
critique of Skocpol's claim of a causal relationship between
foreign threat and social revolution is valid if this relationship is
considered to be deterministic. If, however, we interpret
Skocpol's hypothesized causal relationship to be probabilistic,
Geddes's data support Skocpol's hypothesis. But Skocpol,
unlike Geddes, failed to provide the data necessary to compare
conditional probabilities. Also problematic for Skocpol is the fact
that when one makes causal inferences, conditional probabilities are of
interest only insofar as they provide information about relevant
counterfactuals. a
Central to representation are the questions of the content of the representational decision and the manner in which it is achieved. Recent empirical work has been grounded in Hanna Fenichel Pitkin's definition of representation: “Representation here means acting in the interest of the represented, in a manner responsive to them.” Responsiveness, the manner in which activity must take place to be characterized as representation, seems the more important component of Pitkin's definition. Representative democracy presumes that the governed generally know their own interests, or if they do not in a particular instance, that the representative is able to convince the represented that their wishes do not correspond to their interests.
The origin of this pair of notes is a study that was not party centered but rather noted that a null hypothesis of no majority party effect could not be refuted. By changing the dependent and/or independent variables of the original study, however, Binder, Lawrence, and Maltzman (1999) find evidence of such an effect. This comment accepts their findings as evidence of majority party influence but questions the durability and robustness of the so-called party effect. Durability is questioned because there is little evidence of an outcome-consequential nature. Robustness is questioned because the findings are sensitive to measures and to model specification. Finally, the conclusion highlights the need for an explicit, formal, outcome-consequential theory of majority party strength.
The relationship between black constituency size and congressional support for black interests has two important attributes: magnitude and stability. Although previous research has examined the first characteristic, scant attention has been directed at the second. This article examines the relationship between district racial composition and congressional voting patterns with a particular emphasis on the stability of support across different types of votes and different types of districts. We hypothesize that, among white Democrats, the influence of black constituency size will be less stable in the South, owing in part to this region's more racially divided constituencies. Examining LCCR scores from the 101st through 103rd Congress, we find that this expectation is largely confirmed. We also find that, among Republicans, the impact of black constituency size is most stable—albeit negligible in size—in the South. We conclude by discussing the implications of these findings for the relative merits of “influence districts” and “majority minority” districts.
We offer a theory of the direction and nature of representational linkages between constituents and their elected representatives based on two attributes of issues: their complexity and their relationship to the lines of partisan cleavage. We show that the theory is compatible with the existing evidence on representation and then offer results of tests of new predictions from the theory for both simple and complex party-defining issues. For additional evidence of the dyadic basis of these findings, we also show that the strength of the observed linkages varies in accordance with theoretical expectations about the seniority of members of Congress and, for senators, recency of election. We also explain how the theory can account for a number of seemingly contradictory empirical findings in the large literature on policy representation and how it allows scholars to make precise predictions about the characteristics of representational linkages.
This article extends the Calvert-Wittman, candidate-location model by allowing one candidate to have a valence advantage over the other, due to, say, superior character, charisma, name recognition, or intelligence. Under some fairly weak assumptions, I show that when one candidate has a small advantage over the other, this alters equilibrium policy positions in two ways. First, it causes the disadvantaged candidate to move away from the center. Second, and perhaps more surprising, it causes the advantaged candidate to move toward the center. I also show that, under some fairly weak assumptions, for all levels of the valence advantage, the advantaged candidate chooses a more moderate position than the disadvantaged candidate. Empirical studies of congressional elections by Fiorina (1973) and Ansolabehere, Snyder, and Stewart (2001) support this result.
Prominent theories of American political parties imply that higher levels of competition cause lawmakers to be more responsive to the center of public opinion, but there is little empirical evidence to support this assertion. Furthermore, many studies have found that competition causes lawmakers to be less responsive to public opinion as a whole and more responsive to their own partisans. Parties and candidates pursue a “mobilization” rather than “moderation” strategy supposedly because competitive constituencies are inherently heterogeneous, which then creates a context for more ideological campaigns and a more partisan policymaking environment. An analysis of U.S. Senate roll call votes between 1989 and 2000 reveals that legislators from more marginal states are less responsive to the ideological center than legislators from safe states. Furthermore, there is no evidence of a relationship between constituency diversity and electoral competition or that greater partisanship is the result of greater diversity.
This research note uses a median legislator model to assess the claim that racial redistricting leads to conservative policy outcomes. I examine policy preferences of southern representatives to the U.S. House in the late 1980s and early 1990s. Surprisingly, the fraction of southern representatives who were liberal, that is, to the left of the House median, increased after racial redistricting. To explain this empirical pattern, I develop a simple formal model of redistricting's electoral effects. In the model, racial redistricting in a conservative state increases the number of members of that state's delegation to the left of the U.S. House median, thereby moving national policy outcomes to the left.
Bill cosponsorship has become an important part of the legislative and electoral process in the modern House of Representatives. Using interviews with congressional members and staff, I explain the role of cosponsorship as a signal to agenda setters and a form of position taking for constituents. Regression analysis confirms that cosponsoring varies with a member's electoral circumstances, institutional position, and state size, but generally members have adapted slowly to the introduction of cosponsorship to the rules and practice of the House.
Several recent studies suggest that voters may prefer candidates who propose policies that are similar to, but more extreme than, the voters’ sincere policy preferences. This may arise either because voters vote directionally based on the direction and intensity of candidates’ proposals or, alternatively, because voters recognize that elected officials face obstacles to implementing their policy agenda and therefore discount the candidates’ policy promises. Using data from the Pooled Senate Election Study, we evaluate the discounting/directional hypothesis versus the alternative proximity hypothesis, by conducting individual-level and aggregate-level analyses of voting in 95 Senate races held in 1988–90–92. Our results support the discounting/directional hypothesis, that voters reward candidates when they present distinctly noncentrist positions on the side of the issue (liberal or conservative) favored by their constituency. These findings have important implications for understanding voting behavior, policy representation, and candidate strategies in Senate elections.
Why do some legislators take fewer positions on roll-call votes than others? Do these omissions occur by chance, or is it possible that certain legislators avoid taking positions intentionally? This study analyzes whether differential electoral considerations affect the level of position taking among legislators. In particular, it examines whether electoral considerations may actually lead some legislators to avoid taking positions on roll-call votes in an effort to conceal their issue preferences from constituents. Based on U.S. Senate data from the years 1979 to 1996, the results suggest that unwillingness to take positions on roll-call votes is not random. Instead, it is significantly related to factors such as diversity of constituents’ opinions, pursuit of higher office, electoral marginality, retirement decisions, and visibility within the institution.
UsingPetrocik's (1996)theory of issue ownership as a point of departure, I develop and test a theory of “trait ownership” that provides an explanation for the origins of candidate trait perceptions and illustrates an important way that candidates affect voters. Specifically, I argue for a direct connection between the issues owned by a political party and evaluations of the personal attributes of its candidates. As a result, the American public views Republicans as stronger leaders and more moral, while Democrats hold advantages on compassion and empathy. I also draw on “expectations gap” arguments from psychology and political science to demonstrate how a candidate may gain an electoral advantage by successfully “trespassing” on his opponent's trait territory. National Election Studies data from the 1980–2004 presidential elections are used to demonstrate the existence, durability, and effects of trait ownership in contemporary American political campaigns.
This paper examines the extent to which constituency and subconstituency preferences are reflected in roll-call voting in the 106th House. Aggregating 100,814 randomly selected respondents to measure subconstituency preferences provides an unprecedented ability to measure subconstituency preferences in the House. Looking at the relationship over all votes, “key votes,” and on individual votes confirms that representatives are not completely responsive to the district mean voter, that only majority party Republicans are especially responsive to the preferences of same-party constituents, and that same-party constituency preferences cannot entirely account for systematic differences in Republican and Democratic voting behavior.
Social identity is a concept that has been invented and reinvented across the social and behavioral science disciplines to provide a critical link between the psychology of the individual and the structure and function of social groups. This paper reviews the various definitions of social identity as it is used in different theoretical frameworks, drawing distinctions among person-based identities, relational (role-based) identities, group-based identities, and collective identities. The implications of these different conceptualizations of social identity for political psychology are discussed, with a call for integrative theory that draws on all four definitions interactively.
If the Supreme Court were to overturn its basic decision making abortion legal, abortions would not suddenly become illegal. This issue would revert to the states. State legislatures would have to pass new laws if they wanted to ban abortions. Using the Senate vote on the proposed Hatch/Eagleton Amendment, which would have reversed the Supreme Court's decision to legalize abortion, a model was developed to identify the various constituencies that may be significant in determining whether a state would continue to allow legal abortions. Empirical analysis finds women in white-collar occupations and nonwhites are demanders of legal abortions, while evangelical Christians have a negative impact on the continuation of legal abortions. The empirical results also suggest that there exists a direct relationship between the liberal ideology of a state concerning the role of women in society and its political support of legal abortions. An implication of this study is that, if the legal status of abortion were to revert to the states, nineteen states would almost certainly continue to allow legal abortions while five other states are highly probable. But eighteen states would almost certainly abolish legal abortions and eight other states are unlikely to continue to allow legal abortions.
U.S. senators frequently vote against the preference of their constituency, assuming that such a preference exists. Both of a state's senators represent the same constituency. Whenever they split their votes, one or the other is necessarily going against the constituency preference. For the sample of defense-related votes analyzed above, “misrepresentation” — either observable vote splitting or unobservable vote matches that go against the constituency preference — occurred at least 37 percent of the time, at least 46 percent on one vote. Although party differences accounted for more than two-thirds of the vote splitting, a substantial number of splits remained. Besides, a party difference for a state's senatorial pair is itself problematical.
The method employed here can be applied easily to any data whatever on senatorial voting. Its application will show that, quite often, many senators depart from constituency preference. This finding refutes the hypothesis, popular in certain circles, that ours is a more or less “perfect political market” with little or no scope for ideologically driven voting by legislators.
This paper develops and tests a theory of voting and abstaining on Congressional roll calls. The theoretical model assumes that the voting behavior of legislators is oriented toward reelection, and that constituents vote retrospectively. Among the predictions of the theory are that supporters of a program are more likely to abstain than opponents, that conflicted legislators are more likely to vote on the losing side (but will abstain when the vote is very close), and that indifferent legislators will abstain when votes are not close but trade their votes when the outcome is uncertain. The empirical test is based on a series of votes on appropriations for the Clinch River Breeder Reactor from 1975 to 1982. We estimate a nested logit model of, first, the probability of voting for Clinch River, and second, the probability of abstaining from the vote, conditional on preferences regarding the program. All of the empirical results are consistent with the theoretical predictions, and most are statistically significant by conventional standards. The implication is that the abstention decision, as well as yes or no votes, can be purposive, and that the pattern of abstentions is not random among supporters and opponents.
Using congressional districts as primary sampling units, the 1978 National Election Survey provides improved (though still
imperfect) measures of district opinion. Together with Census data on district demography, roll call voting scales, and information
on congressmen's party and personal characteristics, they permit a new examination of representation in Congress. Using these
data we found a high degree of representation of district opinion on social welfare and (surprisingly) on women's issues,
nearly as much on racial issues, and much less on law and order or on abortion. District demography and congressmen's party
add substantially to the explanation of roll call votes. There is not, however, much “responsible party” representation in
Congress. Future representation studies must face questions about the complex interplay among these factors, including reciprocal
influences.
This study examines the contextual and ideological dimensions of attitudes toward discretionary abortion using two national surveys. The abortion attitudes are dichotomized in terms of consistent opposition versus consistent support. Discriminant analysis, partial correlations, and stepwise regression procedures are used in the analysis. Findings indicate that education and attendance at religious services are the two most significant contextual dimensions and sexual permissiveness and fertility ideology are the two most significant ideological dimensions for explaining attitudes toward discretionary abortion. Implications of these findings are discussed.
We review recent empirical evidence that shows political campaigns are more potent than widely believed, focusing on the conceptual and methodological advances that have produced these findings. Conceptually, a broader definition of effects--that includes learning and agenda-control, as well as vote choice--characterizes contemporary research. This research also features two kinds of interactive models that are more complex than the traditional hypodermic (message-based) approach. The resonance model considers the relationship between message content and receivers' predispositions, while the strategic model highlights the interactions between competing messages. Finally, we attribute the emergence of stronger evidence in favor of campaign effects to the use of new methodologies including experimentation and content analysis, as well as the more sophisticated use of sample surveys.