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.     

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.     

Exchanging Favours: The Predominance of Casework in Legislators' Behaviour in Jordan and Lebanon

Responsiveness to constituents' demands and needs is considered an essential element of representation. Responsiveness takes several forms – service, allocation (casework), policies, and symbolic responses – and legislators usually respond to constituents using a combination of these means. However, this article discusses a category of Jordanian and Lebanese legislators, called ‘Favours legislators’, who respond to their constituents only through casework. These legislators use all tools available to them (party/parliamentary bloc, bureaucracy, and fellow legislators) to improve their access to services important to successful casework. Favours legislators assume that by providing a successful favour, constituents who received the favour will reciprocate in kind and vote and/or encourage others to vote for them.     

Representation,Competing Principals,and Waffling on Bills in US Legislatures

Legislators are often placed in the position of representing the interests of their constituents against the preferences of their own party leaders. We develop a theoretical framework indicating that these cross‐pressured legislators are more likely to initially support legislation and subsequently change their minds than are legislators whose constituents and leaders share similar preferences. Moreover, we expect this pattern to be most pronounced among members of majority parties than minority‐party members. We test our expectations using data on bill cosponsorship and final passage votes from 46 lower state legislative chambers and the US House, finding considerable support for our theory.     

Doubling Down: Inequality in Responsiveness and the Policy Preferences of Elected Officials

Is bias in responsiveness to constituents conditional on the policy preferences of elected officials? The scholarly conventional wisdom is that constituency groups who do not receive policy representation still obtain some level of responsiveness by legislators outside of the policy realm. In contrast, we present a theory of preference‐induced responsiveness bias where constituency responsiveness by legislators is associated with legislator policy preferences. Elected officials who favor laws that could disproportionately impact minority groups are also less likely to engage in nonpolicy responsiveness to minority groups. We conducted a field experiment in 28 US legislative chambers. Legislators were randomly assigned to receive messages from Latino and white constituents. If legislators supported voter identification laws, Latino constituents were less likely to receive constituency communications from their legislators. There are significant implications regarding fairness in the democratic process when elected officials fail to represent disadvantaged constituency groups in both policy and nonpolicy realms.     

When Voters Pull the Trigger: Can Direct Democracy Restrain Legislative Excesses?

Direct democracy is sometimes described as a “gun behind the door,” but how do legislators react when voters pull the trigger? Leveraging the high‐profile referendum defeat of a controversial law passed by the Ohio legislature, I examine how legislators respond to voter disaffection. Using interest groups to “bridge” votes before and after the election, I show that the measure's defeat induced moderation on the part of the Republican legislative majority, while leaving the behavior of opposition Democrats largely unchanged. The results suggest that direct democracy has the potential to restrain legislative excesses and alleviate polarization in state legislatures.     

“It Takes a Coalition”: Coalition Potential and Legislative Decision Making

This article empirically illustrates the value of coalition formation in legislative bargaining. I argue that legislators’ potential to form powerful coalitions, their coalition potential, is essential to their ability to obtain preferred policy outcomes. Using data on the European Union's legislative process, I show that coalition potential significantly increases legislators’ success. Moreover, the value of coalition potential depends on the voting rules used to pass legislation. For example, under the unanimity voting rule, the importance of coalition potential is insignificant because of the veto power held by each legislator.     

The Color of Their Skin or the Content of Their Behavior? Race and Perceptions of African American Legislators

Abstract: Previous studies have shown that, because of their race, African American candidates for public office are often evaluated less favorably than their colleagues by voters. Does this dynamic continue when black candidates become elected officials? Using data on the North Carolina General Assembly, I address this question by examining the effects of race on perceptions of legislative effectiveness. When the dependent variable is the average effectiveness rating given by three groups—lobbyists, journalists, and other legislators—there is evidence that African American representatives are evaluated negatively because of their race. When the dependent variable is disaggregated into the separate effectiveness ratings given by each of the respondent groups individually, these negative perceptions of blacks on account of race remain on the part of lobbyists and other legislators, but not for journalists. Moreover, the negative perceptions of black representatives are not mitigated by these representatives possessing certain characteristics (e.g., seniority and leadership positions) that previous studies have found to be correlated with positive effectiveness evaluations. The presence of an African American Speaker in one legislative session did, however, seem to attenuate the negative perceptions.     

The Effects of Term Limits on State Legislatures: A New Survey of the 50 States

Term limits on legislators were adopted in 21 states during the early 1990s. Beginning in 1996, the limits legally barred incumbents from reelection in 11 states, and they will do so in four more by 2010. In 2002, we conducted the only survey of legislators in all 50 states aimed at assessing the impact of term limits on state legislative representation. We found that term limits have virtually no effect on the types of people elected to office—whether measured by a range of demographic characteristics or by ideological predisposition—but they do have measurable impact on certain behaviors and priorities reported by legislators in the survey, and on the balance of power among various institutional actors in the arena of state politics. We characterize the biggest impact on behavior and priorities as a “Burkean shift,” whereby term‐limited legislators become less beholden to the constituents in their geographical districts and more attentive to other concerns. The reform also increases the power of the executive branch (governors and the bureaucracy) over legislative outcomes and weakens the influence of majority party leaders and committee chairs, albeit for different reasons.     

Strategic Challenger Entry in a Federal System: The Role of Economic and Political Conditions in State Legislative Competition

Over a third of state legislators do not face challengers when seeking reelection. Existing analyses of state legislative contestation almost exclusively focus on the stable institutional features surrounding elections and ignore conditions that change between elections. I remedy this oversight by investigating how political contexts influence challenger entry. State legislators—particularly members of the governor's party—more often face opposition during weak state economies, but the president's copartisans are even more likely to receive a challenger when the president is unpopular. My findings suggest that both national‐ and state‐level political conditions have an important impact on challengers' entry strategies.     

Disentangling the Relationship between Legislative Professionalism and Government Spending

Recent movements to deprofessionalize American state legislatures have been driven partly by the notion that professional legislators spend more than their citizen counterparts. This article explores the relationship between legislative professionalism and government spending, a connection complicated by the possibility that legislators in high‐spending states may choose professional institutions to handle their responsibilities more effectively. I employed propensity score matching, an increasingly used technique of causal inference, to disentangle the relationship. Contrary to previous academic work and popular notions, I found that professional legislatures do not spend significantly more than part‐time bodies do, if one accounts for the fact that legislatures in high‐spending states have a greater need to be professionalized and therefore select those structural frameworks. These findings have important implications for the study of the effects of legislative institutions on public policies more generally and attest to the utility of recently developed techniques of causal inference to disentangle these relationships.     

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.     

Changes in Legislative Support for the Governor's Program Over Time

Abstract This study examines changes in legislative support for the governor's legislative agenda in Georgia during the governor's first term in office (1991–94). I analyze the factors that led legislators to support the governor's agenda, as well as how the level of support changed between election years and off‐years. I use multivariate OLS models of gubernatorial support to determine how support varied (1) between the parties, (2) between factions within parties, and (3) over time. I find that there was wide variation in support among factions in the majority party and that support varied widely between election years and off‐years.     

Political Parties and the Representativeness Of Legislative Committees

What role do parties play in determining which interests committees represent? In this article, I compare committee organization and representativeness in Nebraska's nonpartisan legislature with those in the partisan senates of Kansas and Iowa. I demonstrate that when parties do not organize legislative conflict, committees are less representative of the full chamber. I argue, however, that committee representativeness does not necessarily result from parties actively working to create representative committees. Rather, when legislative conflict has a definitive partisan structure and the committees are always controlled by the majority party, representative committees will result as a simple by‐product of the partisan structure and organization.     

The Job of Representation in Congress: Public Expectations and Representative Approval

Few concepts are more central to democratic theory than that of representation. Theories of representation are commonly premised on the belief that citizens' expectations of their representative are politically consequential, yet we know little about the nature of these expectations and precisely how they matter. Using individual‐level data from a recent national survey, we investigate the influence of constituents' job expectations on their approval of their representative in Congress. We find that citizens' job expectations condition the effects of members' legislative activities on their job approval.     

Government Growth and Professionalism in U.S. State Legislatures

This article analyzes the professionalization of American state legislatures since the 1960s and expands on previous studies by considering the strategic incentives of members. Fiorina and Noll's (1978a, 1978b) theory that reelection‐minded legislators serve as “ombudsmen to the bureaucracy” on behalf of their constituents suggests that legislatures have professionalized in response to growth in public spending in order to strengthen members' abilities to handle increased facilitation duties. I used longitudinal analysis and instrumental variables regression to test this hypothesis and disentangle causal directionality, since professional legislators may have the means and incentive to spend more than their citizen counterparts. Both methods revealed empirical support for the Fiorina and Noll hypothesis that spending increases caused legislators to become more professional.     

From House to Home: Strategic Bill Drafting in Multilevel Systems with Non-static Ambition

How do legislators behave in systems where pursuit of re-election is not the rule, and ambition is channelled through multiple levels of government? Is their legislative behaviour biased towards their immediate career goals? In this paper, the Argentine case is analysed in order to explore the link between political ambition and legislative performance in a multilevel setting where politicians have subnational executive positions as priorities, rather than stable legislative careerism. The piece demonstrates that legislators seeking mayoral positions tend to submit more district-level legislation than their peers. This finding contributes to the knowledge of strategic behaviour in multilevel settings, and provides non-US-based evidence regarding the use of non-roll call position-taking devices.     

The Perks of Being a Lawmaker: Returns to Office as a Legislative Goal

Extant literature demonstrates that holding public office is financially lucrative. Yet little is known about which sitting legislators profit from office. Relying on original data of members of the Florida legislature, I estimate predictors of income growth among sitting legislators. I find that legislators whose vote share increases by 10 percentage points between elections report income growth of nearly $20,000. This finding is robust to estimation technique and model specification, indicating that electoral safety is tied to income growth. Lawmakers appointed to legislative posts with agenda‐setting power do not obtain additional income. These data demonstrate the market values of electorally dominant legislators.