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Who is Punished? Conditions Affecting Voter Evaluations of Legislators Who Do Not Compromise

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Abstract

In American politics, legislative compromise is often seen as a necessary and desirable aspect of policymaking, yet people also value politicians who stick to their positions. In this article, we consider these conflicting expectations of legislators and ask two intertwined questions: what conditions lead people to punish legislators for not compromising (when legislative action is at stake) and, conversely, what conditions leave people more willing to overlook a legislator’s unwillingness to engage in compromise? Relying on previous research, we suggest that legislator gender, legislator partisanship, and issue area may all affect which legislators are punished for not compromising. Relying on two national experiments, we demonstrate that the extent to which lawmakers are punished for not compromising is conditional on the intersection of the three factors in this study. In general, our results suggest that people may be most willing to overlook unwillingness to engage in compromise when party, gender and issue ownership align than when party, gender, and issue ownership are at odds.

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Notes

  1. The general electorate may favor legislators who support bipartisan compromises (Carson et al. 2010), even if primary electorates do not (Burden 2004).

  2. We conducted a content analysis of news stories from across the country about women in politics over the last three years. In our sample of 54 relevant news stories, we find that 13 % of the articles discussed female lawmakers and compromising. This is a considerable number of stories given that news coverage is generally more likely to focus on more conflictual topics and less likely to focus on issues such as compromise (Groeling 2010). As Kahn (1996) finds, for example, female candidates for Senate are more likely to get “trait” coverage than issue coverage – which increases the likelihood of stories painting women as compromising. See Web Appendix 1 for more details on the coding of this content analysis.

  3. Of course, female politicians are not always punished for breaking with stereotypes (see, for example Brooks 2013; Dolan 2014; Krupnikov and Bauer 2014) so it remains an open question as to whether women are punished for not compromising.

  4. This premise holds so long as issue area under consideration is important to how people evaluate legislators (Krosnick 1988).

  5. Both parties pursue these legislative issues, and both issues have received bipartisan support in recent years. Recent reforms like the Energy Savings and Industrial Competitiveness Act of 2013 have garnered bipartisan support in Congress (e.g., the bill had 9 Republican and 8 Democratic cosponsors and was reported from committee on a bipartisan voice vote). Likewise, both parties have championed initiatives on early childhood education in recent years and reforms often garner bipartisan support. For instance, the 2007 reauthorization of the Head Start program passed with 227 Democrats and 154 Republicans voting yea.

  6. Recruited via Amazon’s Mechanical Turk (Berinsky et al. 2012) between October 25 and November 3, 2013. Given that this pre-test uses a different sample than our main study, we also replicated these results using an SSI sample in a study run from April 19 to April 23, 2016. This second test demonstrates similar patterns in issue ownership.

  7. We conducted the pre-test of candidate photos with a separate sample of participants on Amazon’s Mechanical Turk in September 2012, N = 129. We found no significant differences in the average ratings of the female or male legislator in terms of age, education, or attractiveness. See Web Appendix 3 for more details.

  8. Following Gaines, Kuklinski, and Quirk (2007), a control condition is not necessary since we are interested in testing whether evaluations of legislators are affected by their willingness to compromise, and are not interested in whether the compromise or non-compromise condition is driving the effect. Moreover, in the absence of additional information in a control condition, individuals may infer from recent news coverage that legislators would not compromise.

  9. This approach requires dropping participants who did not identify with any party. Initially, 28.6 % of participants in Study 1 and 26.9 % of participants in Study 2 reported they were “pure” Independents (meaning they did not lean toward a party). On the next screen, pure Independents were asked to select the partisan category that is most like them. Among these independents, all but 4 of the participants in Study 1 and all participants in Study 2 selected a partisan category.

  10. All outcome variables and gender treatments were pre-tested. See Web Appendix 3 for details.

  11. A randomization check shows that demographics do not jointly predict group assignment in either study (Study 1: χ2[28] = 17.83, p = 0.9303; Study 2: χ2[28] = 25.63, p = 0.5936).

  12. Mean evaluations for each condition and each dependent variable are included in Web Appendix 5. We opt for the difference-in-differences approach rather than ANOVA because we predict specific group differences and conditional dynamics.

  13. Averaging across conditions (to retain power) for each legislator gender and partisanship, we find the cost of not compromising is smaller among self-identified Republicans than Democrats [consistent with patterns from surveys (Pew 2012)], but not different across participant gender.

  14. At the end of the survey, we asked participants “if members do not compromise on [energy/early childhood education] legislation, which of the following is most likely to happen?” Response options were “Democrats pass own version of the legislation”, “Republicans pass own version of the legislation,” and “Gridlock over the legislation and nothing passes”. 64 % of participants in Study 1, and 62 % of participants in Study 2 thought that gridlock would result. The type of issue may matter as well. Support for compromise, even in the face of gridlock, may be lower on non-consensus issues (Flynn and Harbridge 2016).

  15. Reported difference is p < 0.01. We similarly observe that the female legislator pays a significantly higher cost for not compromising than the male legislator when we consider the leadership outcome measures. Full results are presented in Web Appendix 6.

  16. The results on our remaining two outcome measures mirror these patterns, although we do observe a small but statistically significant gender difference for candidates of the opposing party on the representative measure. Still, the pattern is much more consistent across all three measures for the representative of the same party, and inconsistent for the opposing party representative. This is shown in Web Appendix 6.

  17. As we demonstrate in Web Appendix 6, we observe the same patterns across all three outcome measures. In none of the three outcome measures is the effect of not compromising larger for women in the other party than for women of one’s own party.

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Authors and Affiliations

  1. Department of Political Science, University of Alabama, Tuscaloosa, USA

    Nichole M. Bauer

  2. Department of Political Science, Institute for Policy Research, Northwestern University, Evanston, USA

    Laurel Harbridge Yong

  3. Department of Political Science, Stony Brook University, Stony Brook, USA

    Yanna Krupnikov

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  1. Nichole M. Bauer
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  2. Laurel Harbridge Yong
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Correspondence to Laurel Harbridge Yong.

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All procedures performed in studies involving human participants were in accordance with the ethical standards of the institutional and/or national research committee and with the 1964 Helsinki declaration and its later amendments or comparable ethical standards.

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Informed consent was obtained from all individual participants included in the study.

Additional information

Replication files are available on the Political Behavior Dataverse website, study doi:10.7910/DVN/UYUZYA. The authors thank the Dirksen Congressional Center for funding part of this study. We also thank Kim Fridkin, Georgia Kernell, Neil Malhotra, Spencer Piston, John Barry Ryan, Monica Schneider, Sergio Wals, Sara Yeganeh, and participants at the Yale CSAP Workshop on Quantitative Research Methods, Wisconsin American Politics Workshop, and Chicago Area Political and Social Behavior Conference for helpful feedback. We also thank the editor and two anonymous reviewers for their comments and suggestions.

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Bauer, N.M., Yong, L.H. & Krupnikov, Y. Who is Punished? Conditions Affecting Voter Evaluations of Legislators Who Do Not Compromise. Polit Behav 39, 279–300 (2017). https://doi.org/10.1007/s11109-016-9356-6

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