Abstract
Most foundational theories of congressional representation were developed during an era of less polarized and less partisan politics. These theories viewed the incumbency advantage as buttressed by the fact that some constituents were willing to support legislators from the opposite party because of their “home styles.” But in an era of policy immoderation in Congress, this perspective leads to an assumption that citizens evaluate their members of Congress based on what those legislators do for them individually, rather than what they do for their districts more broadly. In this paper, we ask whether citizens take the interests of their fellow constituents into account when evaluating their members of Congress. Using both survey data and an experiment, we uncover support for the notion that citizens take a more communal view of representation as at least part of their evaluations of their representatives. This suggests individuals may have a more nuanced understanding of representation than purely self-interested approaches tend to assume.
This is a preview of subscription content, log in via an institution to check access.
Similar content being viewed by others
Notes
However, see Mansbridge (2003) for an illustration of models that do not necessarily rely on accountability as a mechanism.
For the purposes of this paper, we focus largely on the policy-based representational relationship between constituents and legislators. This is not to say that other activities, such as securing pork and responding to constituent requests, are unimportant for a holistic understanding of representation. However, accounting for these other activities does not change our substantive conclusions regarding communal representation (see the Supplementary Information).
See the Supplementary Information for evidence supporting the latter claim.
The CCES Panel Survey was conducted by YouGov, America using a matched internet panel approach (Ansolabehere and Schaffner 2014).
Respondents were also asked to rate their approval of their Senators on the same page of the CCES survey.
4% of respondents indicated that they had not heard of their representative. We exclude these individuals from our analysis.
In the Supplementary Information, we include a model with additional co-variates, but the effects for the key indicators described here are consistent in that model.
The question about incumbents was asked with a seven-point ideological scale while the question about the district was asked with a five-point scale. Based on our analysis of self-reported ideology (which is asked on both a five-point and seven-point scale at different points during the survey), we determined that the best way to translate the seven-point scale to a five-point scale was to combine “somewhat liberal” and “somewhat conservative” categories with “middle of the road.”
The exact text of this question is “How would you describe the Congressional District you live in?” Respondents could choose “most people are Democratic,” “most people are Republican,” or “my district is a mix with no single dominant party.”
In an alternative specification presented in the online supplementary information, we also included those who responded “not sure” to the question about district representation. However, taking this approach did not significantly alter our substantive results, so we present the more parsimonious model results here.
See the supplementary information for estimates from a model with additional demographic and attitudinal controls. The addition of these controls to the model does not alter the statistical or substantive effects presented in Table 1.
Nonetheless, we also estimate a cross-sectional model for the 2014 wave of the panel and the patterns we report below for the panel model are largely duplicated with the simpler, cross-sectional approach.
Recall that approval is measured on a four point scale ranging from “strongly disapprove” to “strongly approve.”
While it is possible to implement a panel ordered logit model, such a model cannot accommodate individual fixed effects. For this reason, we use a linear regression model for this estimation.
While this measure is not perfectly parallel to our measures of personal representation, Table 1 shows that MC/district party match and ideological distance do not alone predict whether respondents think the MC represents the district well. Our measure of communal representation therefore more effectively and uniquely captures the concept.
Several studies have demonstrated that MTurk respondent pools are favorably comparable in response quality to other convenience samples. In particular, MTurk samples generally respond similarly to experimental treatments as subjects recruited through other approaches (Amir et al. 2012; Crump et al. 2013; Berinsky et al. 2012; Buhrmester et al. 2011).
Our question asked respondents “Do you support or oppose the following issues?” The issues listed were “Federal funding of stem cell research,” “the Affordable Care Act (Obamacare),” and “The Keystone XL Oil pipeline.” These issues were selected from a larger set of issues asked in the CCES panel study that we analyze earlier in this paper. The roll calls were selected so that there would be one highly salient partisan issue and two somewhat less salient issues where support did not break down strictly along party lines in Congress. Since many Democrats supported the Keystone pipeline and many Republicans supported funding for stem cell research, any combination of positions taken by the representative would have been plausible.
A legislator may not necessarily claim he would vote against public opinion while campaigning; however, there are instances of politicians claiming they will and have taken actions that may not please all individuals in pursuit of following his convictions. For example, in his remarks on March 15, 2016, viewable in The Los Angeles Times, Marco Rubio claimed not to have done “the easiest thing” and prey upon constituent anxiety, but prided himself instead of choosing “a different route” that he was “proud of.” Similarly, the New York Times reported on Donald Trump’s statement that “everyone won’t like everything [he does], but [he’s] not running to be everyone’s favorite president.”
Including those who failed this attention check does not significantly alter our results.
1019 individuals passed the manipulation check, but we remove additional respondents who responded “not sure” to the questions we analyze.
References
Amir, O., Rand, D. G., et al. (2012). Economic games on the internet: The effect of $1 stakes. PLoS ONE, 7(2), e31461.
Ansolabehere, S., & Jones, P. E. (2010). Constituents’ responses to congressional roll-call voting. American Journal of Political Science, 54(3), 583–597.
Ansolabehere, S., & Schaffner, B. F. (2014). Does survey mode still matter? Findings from a 2010 multi-mode comparison. Political Analysis, 22(3), 285–303.
Barker, D. C., & Carman, C. J. (2012). Representing red and blue: How the culture wars change the way citizens speak and politicians listen. Oxford: Oxford University Press.
Bartels, L. M. (1991). Constituency opinion and congressional policy making: The reagan defense buildup. American Political Science Review, 85(02), 457–474.
Berinsky, A. J., Huber, G. A., & Lenz, G. S. (2012). Evaluating online labor markets for experimental research: Amazon. com’s mechanical turk. Political Analysis, 20(3), 351–368.
Box-Steffensmeier, J. M., Kimball, D. C., Meinke, S. R., & Tate, K. (2003). The effects of political representation on the electoral advantages of house incumbents. Political Research Quarterly, 56(3), 259–270.
Buhrmester, M., Kwang, T., & Gosling, S. D. (2011). Amazon’s mechanical turk a new source of inexpensive, yet high-quality, data? Perspectives on Psychological Science, 6(1), 3–5.
Cain, B., Ferejohn, J., & Fiorina, M. (1987). The personal vote: Constituency service and electoral independence. Harvard: Harvard University Press.
Cameron, C., Epstein, D., & O’Halloran, S. (1996). Do majority-minority districts maximize substantive black representation in congress? American Political Science Review, 90(04), 794–812.
Campbell, A. (1980). The American voter. Chicago: University of Chicago Press.
Clinton, J. D. (2006). Representation in congress: Constituents and roll calls in the 106th house. Journal of Politics, 68(2), 397–409.
Crump, M. J., McDonnell, J. V., & Gureckis, T. M. (2013). Evaluating amazon’s mechanical turk as a tool for experimental behavioral research. PLoS ONE, 8(3), e57410.
Doherty, D. (2015a). How policy and procedure shape citizens’ evaluations of senators. Legislative Studies Quarterly, 40(2), 241–272.
Doherty, D. (2015b). The public’s concept of representation (Unpublished manuscript). http://orion.luc.edu/~ddoherty/documents/Concept_of_Representation.pdf.
Dovi, S. (2011). Political representation. The Stanford encyclopedia of philosophy (Spring 2014 Edition) (E. N. Zalta, Ed.). http://plato.stanford.edu/entries/political-representation/.
Downs, A. (1957). An economic theory of democracy. New York: Harper & Bros.
Eulau, H., & Karps, P. D. (1977). The puzzle of representation: Specifying components of responsiveness. Legislative Studies Quarterly, 2, 233–254.
Fenno, R. F. (1973). Congressmen in committees. Boston: Little, Brown, and Company.
Fenno, R. F. (1978). Home style: House members in their districts. Boston: Little, Brown and Company.
Fiorina, M. P. (1996). Retrospective voting in American national elections. New Haven: Yale University Press.
Grant, J. T., & Rudolph, T. J. (2004). The job of representation in congress: Public expectations and representative approval. Legislative Studies Quarterly, 29(3), 431–445.
Herrera, C. L., Herrera, R., & Smith, E. R. (1992). Public opinion and congressional representation. Public Opinion Quarterly, 56(2), 185–205.
Jacobson, G. C. (2015). It’s nothing personal: The decline of the incumbency advantage in us house elections. The Journal of Politics, 77(3), 861–873.
Jones, D. R., & McDermott, M. L. (2002). Ideological distance from the majority party and public approval of congress. Legislative Studies Quarterly, 27(2), 245–264.
Key, V. O., & Cummings, M. C. (1966). The responsible electorate. Cambridge: Belknap Press of Harvard University Press.
Kinder, D. R., & Kiewiet, D. R. (1981). Sociotropic politics: The American case. British Journal of Political Science, 11(02), 129–161.
Long, J. S. (1997). Regression models for categorical and limited dependent variables. Advanced quantitative techniques in the social sciences (Vol. 7). Thousand Oaks, CA: Sage.
MacKuen, M. B., Erikson, R. S., & Stimson, J. A. (1992). Peasants or bankers? The american electorate and the us economy. American Political Science Review, 86(03), 597–611.
Manin, B., Przeworski, A., & Stokes, S. (1999). Elections and representation. In A. Przeworski, B. Manin, & S. Stokes (Eds.), Democracy, accountability, and representation (pp. 29–54). Cambridge: Cambridge University Press.
Mansbridge, J. (1999). Should blacks represent blacks and women represent women? A contingent “yes”. The Journal of politics, 61(03), 628–657.
Mansbridge, J. (2003). Rethinking representation. American Political Science Review, 97(04), 515–528.
Mayhew, D. R. (1974). Congress: The electoral connection. London: Yale University Press.
Miller, W. E., & Stokes, D. E. (1963). Constituency influence in congress. American Political Science Review, 57(01), 45–56.
Pitkin, H. F. (1967). The concept of representation. Berkeley: University of California Press.
Schwindt-Bayer, L. A., & Mishler, W. (2005). An integrated model of women’s representation. Journal of Politics, 67(2), 407–428.
Tausanovitch, C., & Warshaw, C. (2013). Measuring constituent policy preferences in congress, state legislatures, and cities. The Journal of Politics, 75(02), 330–342.
Weissberg, R. (1978). Collective vs. dyadic representation in congress. The American Political Science Review, 72, 535–547.
Weissberg, R. (1979). Assessing legislator-constituency policy agreement. Legislative Studies Quarterly, 4, 605–622.
Acknowledgements
We would like to thank Cameron Roche for his significant contributions to this project when it was in its early stages. We are also grateful to the American Politics Research Group at UMass, Thomas Wood, and the anonymous reviewers for helpful feedback on the paper. This work was supported by the National Science Foundation (Awards 1154420 and 1430473)
Author information
Authors and Affiliations
Corresponding author
Additional information
All necessary files to replicate the results in this article and in the Supplementary Information are available at 10.7910/DVN/H6EIX0.
Electronic supplementary material
Below is the link to the electronic supplementary material.
Rights and permissions
About this article
Cite this article
Costa, M., Johnson, K.T. & Schaffner, B.F. Rethinking Representation from a Communal Perspective. Polit Behav 40, 301–320 (2018). https://doi.org/10.1007/s11109-017-9393-9
Published:
Issue Date:
DOI: https://doi.org/10.1007/s11109-017-9393-9