Race-Based Redistricting, Core Constituencies, and Legislative Responsiveness to Constituency Change * (original) (raw)
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Annual Meeting of the American Political Science Association, San Francisco, CA, 2001
The extent to which representatives “represent” the preferences of their district in roll call voting is fundamental to the endeavor of understanding the nature of electoral institutions. Although a great deal of work is devoted to this problem, previous work suffers from both an inability to measure sub-constituencies of the type identified by Fenno (1978) and problems resulting from the usage of ideal point estimates. Using survey data from a random probability sample of 39,000 respondents and a hierarchical Markov Chain Monte ...
Constituency, Party, and Representation in Congress
Public Opinion Quarterly, 1984
, J. S. Mill, and others have expressed varying views on how a legislator ought to represent his constituency. Theorists have also offered different ideas about how legislators actually behave. Some, including Downsian theorists working with an "economic theory of democracy," expect representatives to act exactly in accord with the policy preferences of their constituents (first section of Downs, 1957). Others argue that legislators are largely free of popular control and are influenced instead by interest groups' wishes, party loyalties, peer pressures, or their own judgments. The pioneering Miller and Stokes study of 1958 made possible for the first time a systematic empirical examination of linkages between sampled public opinion and roll call voting in Congress (Miller and Stokes, Abstract 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. Benjamin I.
Representation in U.S. Legislatures: The Acquisition and Analysis of State Roll-Call Data
Roll-call data have become a staple of contemporary scholarship on legislative behavior. Recent methodological innovations in the analysis of roll-call data have produced a number of important theoretical insights, such as understanding the structure of congressional decisionmaking and the role of parties and ideology in Congress. Many of the methodological innovations and theoretical questions sparked by congressional scholarship have been difficult to test at the state level because of the lack of comprehensive data on various forms of state legislative behavior, including roll-call voting. The Representation in America's Legislatures project rectifies that problem through collection of comprehensive state legislative roll-call votes across all 99 state legislative chambers for the 1999-2000 and 2003-04 legislative sessions. In this article, we describe the data available through this project as well as our data acquisition procedures, including Stata and Perl programming and OCR of paper documents, with suggestions about how to use these methods to collect a wide range of state-level data.
David R. Mayhew - Congress The Electoral Connection (2004)
Preface xvii ber may need to cater to a crosscountry finance con stituency in order to keep scoring with a home-district voter constituency. Southern Democrats running for the Senate, for example, seem to need to raise money in Holl yw ood. lt is a dual-constituency pattern. Also on the campaign finance front, an incumbent may stock up enough campaign money to scare off strong challengers. That is a perfect instance of acting so as to influence relevant political actors, even if home district voters know nothing about it. Fifth, let me admit that if I were writing The Ekctoral Connection today I would back off from claiming that "no theoretical treatment of the United States Con gress that posits parties as analytic units will go very far" (p. 27). From the perspective of 2004 it is easy to see that the congressional parties bottomed out in importance around 1970 and that they have grown considerably more important in various ways since that time. That much is clear. Still, I have not seen any evidence that today's congressional party leaders "whip" or "pressure" their members more frequently or effectively than did their predecessors thirty years ago. Instead, today's pattern of high roll-call loyalty seems to owe a debt to a post-1960s increase in each party's "natural" ideological homogeneity across its universe of home constituencies. Somehow, the cau sation lurks down there in the states and districts. 5 5. See Jon R. Bond and Richard Fleisher, "The Disappear ance of Moderate and Cross-Pressured Members of Congress: Conversion, Replacement and Electoral Change," paper pre-xviii Prefar.e Also, even in an era of stronger party leadership and high party loyalty, there are limits. A key finding of recent research is that members of a House majority party can profit individually in the next election through what might be called "centrist defecting"that is, by voting with the minority party on roll calls where their own party's stance is risky back home. Perhaps we ali knew this, but I had not seen the effect measured in sophisticated fashion until recently. The phenomenon has been observed on roll calls on showdown budgetary questions in general during the 1980s and 1990s, on three major White House or Democratic measures during 1993-94-Clinton's budget package of 1993, the North American Free Trade Agreement (NAFTA), and the party's omnibus crime measure of 1994-and on the Republicans' Contract with America in 1995. 6 sented at the annual meeting of the American Political Science Association, San Francisco, 2001. For a stat�f-the-art treatment of the relationship between constituencies and roll-call voting,
The impact of party and ideology on roll-call voting in state legislatures
2010
To assess the relative impact of party and ideology on legislative behavior, I utilize survey-based measures of legislator ideology to examine voting in five state legislatures. The results suggest that, although party and ideology both influence voting, the impact of party is greater. The magnitude of this impact varies, however, from chamber to chamber. The activity of parties in the electoral arena explains part of this variance, with more active parties having more influence.
Constituency characteristics and legislative preferences
Public Choice, 1993
An important concern for testing any theory of legislative politics is how to measure legislative preferences. No existing measures are immune to criticism, so sound advice should be based on a balanced assessment of various types of measures. This study focuses on the ability of constituency characteristics to predict Senate roll call votes. Even in the best possible case, constituency-characteristic measures are shown to be deficient both absolutely and relative to supposedly crude, vote-based measures which as ADA ratings. The implication is that constituencycharacteristic measures are inappropriate as direct measures of legislative preferences. However, the possibility remains that for some applications they are useful indirect measures, e.g., as right hand side variables that covary with legislative behavior of interest.
Policy Responsiveness to Shifting Majorities: US House Members Respond to Hard Times
APSA 2010 Annual Meeting Paper, 2010
Abstract: In theory, students of democracy hold that voting is the hallmark of a responsive government. One measure of responsive government is the fit between citizens' policy expectations and those of their agents, the elected officials. We examine fluctuations in federal awards and assistance to House districts over three election cycles (2002 through 2006) for their responsiveness to observable changes in members' reelection constituencies. We anticipate that changes in the makeup of voters will alter the number ...
Legislative Studies Quarterly, 2008
We examined the effects of subjective and objective descriptive representation and district demography on African Americans' attitudes toward their member of Congress and the U.S. Congress as an institution. We investigated whether or not African Americans in more-racially homogeneous districts differ in their attitudes from counterparts in districts with fewer African Americans. We also studied the effects of descriptive representation and district demography to determine if these effects are contingent on voters' perceptions of descriptive representation. We found that living in a district with a higher proportion of blacks enhances African American voters' feelings toward their representative and marginally elevates these voters' evaluations of Congress. This effect is mediated, however, by the election of a black representative to Congress.