Local News Coverage and the Incumbency Advantage in the U.S. House

Much of the incumbency advantage in the U.S. House of Representatives is attributed to incumbents' efforts to address constituents' needs. Yet House members do not win reelection simply by performing well in office, but also by informing constituents of how well they are doing their jobs. I examined the value of local news coverage for legislators seeking to publicize their legislative work on behalf of constituents. I found that incumbents who win more newspaper coverage are viewed as being more in touch with the district and are more likely to win support from constituents during bids for reelection.     

Strategic Retirements: The Influence of Public Preferences On Voluntary Departures from Congress

Are members of Congress responsive to public preferences in their decisions to seek reelection or retire, or do members simply rely on the advantages of incumbency to secure reelection? I argue that members of Congress consider their electoral vulnerability when deciding whether or not to seek reelection, informing their reelection odds with the same short‐term electoral forces that influence election outcomes: partisan preferences, economic evaluations, and congressional approval. Considering aggregate rates of voluntary departures from the House and Senate from 1954 to 2004, I show that rates of retirement reflect, not only institutional environments within Congress, but also the mood of the electorate.     

Evangelizing Congress: The Emergence of Evangelical Republicans and Party Polarization in Congress

The realignment of evangelical voters is well‐documented, but religion's impact within Congress is less clear. New data on home churches of members of Congress shows that the realignment of congressional evangelicals, combined with their growth and distinctly conservative legislative behavior, has significantly contributed to party polarization in Congress. Controlling for other factors, evangelicals are significantly more conservative than members of other religious traditions. This conservatism also has second‐order effects on the polarization of the House, where their more partisan proposals comprise a larger share of the roll‐call agenda when Republicans are in the majority. Moreover, evangelical Republicans in Congress differ significantly from evangelical Democrats in terms their geography, denominations, and experiences prior to Congress.     

The Effect of the Size of Voting Blocs on Incumbents' Roll‐Call Voting and the Asymmetric Polarization of Congress

Candidates face a trade‐off in the general election between taking a more‐moderate position that appeals to swing voters and a more‐extreme position that appeals to voters in the party's base. The threat of abstention by voters in the party's base if their candidate takes a position too moderate for them moves candidates to take more‐extreme positions. I discuss hypotheses regarding how this trade‐off affects candidate positioning and describe my tests of those hypotheses using data on House members in the 107th Congress and Senate members for the period 1982–2004. I then present data on how the distribution of voters in the electorate has changed over the past three decades and discuss how, in light of my empirical findings, these changes might explain the observed pattern of asymmetric polarization in Congress in recent decades.     

It Takes a Coalition: The Community Impacts of Collaboration

Members of Congress frequently collaborate on policy initiatives, reaching out to colleagues in both parties to find common ground on solutions for the problems faced by their constituents. Using a novel dataset of over 30,000 “Dear Colleague” letters sent by members of the 111th Congress, I use the collaborative relationships that exist in the earliest stages of the policy process to measure the social influence of legislators. I demonstrate that districts represented by members of Congress who are better connected to their colleagues receive a greater share of federal grant money. I argue that this is because collaborative legislators are well‐positioned to be influential allies to strategic bureaucrats who want to maintain a broad base of support for their programs in Congress. Thus, devoting resources to building relationships with their colleagues is one way members of Congress can more effectively support the communities they represent.     

How to Make Congress Popular

Abstract: Conventional wisdom holds that Congress is unpopular because it does not measure up to the people's populist expectations. Instead of being the “citizen's legislature” that the people desire, it is an institutionalized legislature with well‐paid, longtime members and an elaborate infrastructure of committees, caucuses, parties, and perquisites. The people, it is alleged, desire more of a voice in the decisions made by Congress, they want congressional procedures to be more open so ordinary people know what is going on in the halls of power, and they want more accountability and more representation of the interests of real people. In this paper, I argue that the enactment of this populist reform agenda would actually make Congress substantially less popular with the people. In other words, I contend that the more Congress gives people voice, accountability, representation, and open, visible procedures, the more the people will be dissatisfied with Congress. The real cause of congressional unpopularity is not that people would rather make decisions themselves but that people do not trust members of Congress to make decisions in a non‐self‐interested fashion.     

The View from the Hill: Legislative Perceptions Of the District

This article addresses legislative perceptions of constituents' interests and develops a theory of perception that highlights the role of information accessibility in the formation of legislative offices' views of their districts. I used original data regarding health policy in the U.S. House to analyze perceptions of constituents' interests. I found that legislators do not see all constituents in their district, nor do they see the largest constituencies. Rather, legislators are more likely to see active and resource‐rich constituents. These findings provide unique evidence of the influence of money in Congress and suggest that legislative misperception is both common and systematically biased.     

Long‐Term Change and Stability in House Voting Decisions: The Case of the Minimum Wage

Although members of Congress exhibit considerable stability in their voting decisions on similar, recurring issues, members' long‐term voting histories reveal evidence of systematic instability as well. I argue that members reverse positions in predictable ways when the vote history loses value as a decision cue, and I present empirical evidence for this behavior in the context of the highly salient and regularly repeated House decisions on increasing the federal minimum wage. The empirical findings suggest that reversals of member positions are related to institutional, electoral, and constituency factors. I conclude by discussing the importance of these findings to understanding congressional decision making and representation.     

What Happens When House Members “Run with Congress”? The Electoral Consequences of Institutional Loyalty

This article characterizes the electoral consequences of messages of institutional loyalty and disloyalty sent by incumbent House members to their constituents. We show that, for the contemporary House, there is variation in these messages—not all incumbents in the contemporary House “run for Congress by running against Congress.” Moreover, we show that these messages can, under the right conditions, have significant electoral consequences, even after controlling for party affiliation and district political factors. In addition to demonstrating the electoral relevance of legislators' presentations, our results show an incumbent‐level link between constituents' trust in government and their voting behavior—a link created by interaction between constituents' perceptions, legislators' party affiliations, and the messages that legislators send to their constituents.     

Decentralizing Pork: Congressional Roll‐Call Voting,Decentralized Administration,and Distributive Politics

Congress packages pork‐barrel spending in complicated proposals that belie theories of distributive politics. We theorize that roll‐call voting on such bills depends on grant programs' administrative centralization, party ties with presidents or home‐state governors, and differences in geographic representation between chambers. Analyzing votes between 1973 and 2010 using a within‐legislator strategy reveals that House members are less likely to support decentralized spending when they are copartisans with presidents, while senators support decentralization regardless of such party ties. When House members or senators share affiliation with only governors or with neither chief executive, the likelihood of support rises with decentralization.     

Tarnishing Opponents,Polarizing Congress: The House Minority Party and the Construction of the Roll‐Call Record

Existing research on congressional parties tends to focus almost exclusively on the majority party. I argue that the inattention to the House minority party hampers our understanding of the construction of the roll‐call record and, consequently, our understanding of the sources of polarization in congressional voting. Employing an original data set of House members' requests for recorded votes between 1995 and 2010, I demonstrate that votes demanded by the minority party are disproportionately divisive and partisan and make Congress appear considerably more polarized based on commonly used measures. Moreover, minority‐requested votes make vulnerable members of the majority appear more partisan and ideologically extreme.     

News media influences on public views of sentencing

Opinion polls in Canada, the United States, Great Britain, Australia, and elsewhere suggest that most members of the public would like their criminal courts to be harsher. Does media coverage of criminal sentencing contribute to a preference for harsher sentencing? Most people derive their information about sentencing from the news media and content analyses of news stories in Canada and the United States demonstrate that crimes of violence and sentences of imprisonment are overrepresented. Moreover, the news media provide little systematic information about the sentencing process or its underlying principles. This article reports the results of three studies examining the effects of media coverage on public opinion about sentencing. Subjects who read actual newspaper stories about sentencing that appeared in Canadian newspapers rated most reported sentences as too lenient. However, the specific account they read influenced their leniency judgments. Furthermore, in one experiment, participants assigned to read a newspaper account of a sentencing decision supported harsher sentences than participants who read a summary of actual court documents from the sentencing hearing.     

House Party Switchers and Committee Assignments: Who Gets “What,When, How?”

What are the political consequences for members of Congress who switch parties? Roll‐call and electoral consequences of congressional party switching have been studied, but other implications of party defections have yet to be systematically explored. In this article, I examine the committee assignments of House party switchers and argue that party leaders seek to reward members of the opposing party who join their ranks. Using committee assignment data from the 94th House (1975–76) through the 107th House (2001–02), I show that party switchers are more likely than nonswitchers to be the beneficiaries of violations of the seniority norm. The findings from this article are of interest to students of political parties and legislative institutions, and fill a gap in the literature on party switching. When you joined the Republican Conference on August 6, 1995, the elected leadership …determined that your accumulated seniority in the Congress would be credited when you joined the Republican Conference…. Therefore, the Republican Steering Committee's Seniority List ranks you nineteenth in overall conference seniority and designates May 22, 1980, as the beginning of your tenure in the House for purposes of Republican seniority. Letter from Speaker Dennis Hastert to party switcher Billy Tauzin, April 4, 2000.¹     

Media effects: The influence of local newspaper coverage on municipal police size

This paper explores the influence that local newspaper coverage exerts on the relative size of municipal police agencies. It is hypothesized that the volume of law enforcement news stories affects sworn personnel allocations. Regression results based on 63 large U.S. cities show that media coverage does affect police employment levels. A content analysis of selected newspapers suggests that crime-related stories are prominently featured and tend to portray the police as effective in responding to criminal incidents. Implications for future research concerning media influence and criminal justice policy-making are offered. An earlier version of this paper was presented at the annual meeting of the American Society of Criminology, Washington, D.C., November 1998. I would like to thank Ruth Peterson, David Jacobs, Randy Hodson, Christopher Browning, Maria Velez, the editor of AJCJ, and three anonymous reviewers for most helpful comments on previous drafts of this paper.     

The Dynasty Advantage: Family Ties in Congressional Elections

Political dynasties, families in which multiple members have held elected office, commonly feature in the U.S. Congress. I explored the electoral origins of this phenomenon and determined that members of political dynasties have a significant advantage over first‐generation politicians in open‐seat House elections. Using an original dataset containing candidate‐ and district‐level covariates for all candidates in open‐seat House contests between 1994 and 2006, I found that dynastic politicians enjoy “brand name advantages,” giving them a significant edge over comparable nondynastic opponents. In contrast, hypotheses concerning potential advantages stemming from past political experience and fundraising ability yield null results.     

Lawmaking and News Making: Different Worlds after all? A Study on News Coverage of Legislative Processes in the Netherlands

Over the last decades the importance of the media for understanding the functioning of democracy in the contemporary world has become evident. Yet despite the developing body of knowledge on political communication and newsworthiness there is little research about why and how the media cover legislative processes in a European context. Therefore this study analyses media coverage of lawmaking in the Netherlands and investigates which characteristics of legislation influence the amount of news coverage. It shows that only one out of five laws is covered at all and that no more than one out of 10 laws receives substantial media attention. This leads to the question why some laws get extensive news attention, whereas most laws are completely ignored. Press coverage for the legislative process turns out to be both selective and predictable. Traditional news values such as political conflict and significance are good predictors of media coverage for lawmaking. In addition, laws are largely ignored when they are part of the budgetary cycle.     

Dynamics of Polarizing Rhetoric in Congressional Tweets

Affective polarization is pervasive in modern US politics, and can be intensified by strategic messaging from members of Congress. But there are gaps in our knowledge of the dynamics of polarizing appeals from elected representatives on social media. We explore the usage of polarizing rhetoric by members of Congress on Twitter using the 4.9 million tweets sent by members of Congress from 2009 to 2020, coded for the presence of polarizing rhetoric via a novel and highly accurate application of supervised machine learning methods. Fitting with our expectations, we find that more ideologically extreme members, those from safer districts, and those who are not in the president’s party are more likely to send polarizing tweets, and that polarizing tweets garner more engagement, increasing campaign funding for more polarizing members.     

Giving credit when credit is due: credit giving to the president in the United States Congress

How do members of the US Congress give credit when credit is due for political achievements? Focusing on an important credit giving scenario – credit giving to the president of the United States – this research suggests that credit giving is a form of non-roll call position taking and members give credit in a way that is reflective of individual, institutional, and constituency factors. Using an original data set composed of the official congressional statements concerning the death of Osama bin Laden, findings suggest the proximate decision to issue a statement is related to individual and institutional factors. Within the issued statements, however, credit giving is primarily driven by presidential popularity in the constituency. In addition to being less predictable in their credit giving behaviour, members of the Senate are less likely to give credit than their colleagues in the House of Representatives. Finally, Republican women in the House of Representatives are less likely to give the president credit than other members.     

Media framing and political advertising in the Patients' Bill of Rights debate

The purpose of this article is to assess the influence of interest groups over news content. In particular, I explore the possibility that political advertising campaigns affect the tenor and framing of newspaper coverage in health policy debates. To do so, I compare newspaper coverage of the Patients' Bill of Rights debate in 1999 in five states that were subject to extensive advertising campaigns with coverage in five comparison states that were not directly exposed to the advocacy campaigns. I find significant differences in coverage depending on the presence or absence of paid advertising campaigns, and conclude that readers were exposed to different perspectives and arguments about managed care regulation if the newspapers they read were published in states targeted by political advertisements. Specifically, newspaper coverage was 17 percent less likely to be supportive of managed care reform in states subject to advertising campaigns designed to foment opposition to the Patients' Bill of Rights. Understanding the ability of organized interests and political actors to successfully promote their preferred issue frames in a dynamic political environment is particularly important in light of the proliferation of interest groups, the prevalence of multimillion-dollar political advertising campaigns, and the health care reform debate under President Barack Obama.     

Public Expectations of State Legislators

When members of Congress neglect the needs of their districts or vote contrary to the wishes of their constituents, their public approval suffers. Does the same hold true for representatives at the state level? Using experiments, I explore whether people dole out similar rewards and penalties to state legislators and members of Congress for their successes and shortfalls in representing constituents. I find that a similar model of political accountability travels from national politics to state politics. People value policy representation, casework, and attention to the district as much from state legislators as they do from members of Congress.