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

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.     

The economic organization of legislatures and how it affects congressional voting

Congress confronts two major organizational problems that affect the behavior of legislators, party leaders, and groups doing business with congressional committees: The costly nature of monitoring and the absence of explicit mechanisms for upholding agreements. The problem of monitoring implies that party leaders will have a difficult time influencing decisions made in decision-making arenas where the actions of legislators are less visible, as in congressional committees. While legislators can evade leadership monitoring of their actions within committees, once an issue leaves a committee, the costs of monitoring decline, and leadership influence increases. The absence of mechanisms for assuring that legislators keep their bargains means that groups will place an emphasis on dealing with reliable legislators — those who can be counted upon to uphold their end of a bargain. Thus, party leaders are more effective in influencing floor voting because of their better ability to monitor legislator behavior; however, obligations to important interest groups will be more immune to leadership influence because of the incentives for committee members to adhere to their bargains.     

The Unscientific Determinants of Voting on a Controversial Scientific Issue: An Evaluation of Biofuels Policy in the U.S. Congress

Whether allegiance to party or the preferences of constituents are most important in an elected representative's voting decision has been a long‐running question in political science. This study contributes to this debate through an evaluation of biofuels policy in the U.S. Congress. Results indicate that in this policy area the House and Senate balance these influences differently, with partisanship playing a significant role in the House but not in the Senate. Analysis of voting on this issue indicates that there are important distinctions between how a legislator views the overall partisan preferences of constituents in their district or state versus how they view the interests of particular groups of constituents; when the concentration of agricultural interests in a legislator's district or state is great enough, it can override the effects of party for this issue, which suggests that legislators are especially concerned with specific constituency groups in their district or state that would stand to gain or lose from a policy. The proposition that a legislator is most likely to do that which benefits him or her most regardless of the available science relevant to a policy is a useful starting point for understanding what has been found in this research project.     

Ideology and interest groups

This paper analyzes the interaction between ideological shirking by legislators and interest group activities in a two stage game between a legislator, a challenger, and an interest group. Some comparative statics results are derived. In some circumstances, campaign contributions decrease as the legislator shirks more; they increase with committee power and seniority, other things equal. An empirical test provides some support for this model. The interpretation of those results is made difficult by the methodological problems of ideological shirking measures. It is problematic to interpret the standard residual as ideological shirking because it ignores the effect of campaign contributions on legislative voting.     

House or home? Constituent preferences over legislator effort allocation

In many political systems legislators face a fundamental trade‐off between allocating effort to constituency service and to national policy‐making activities, respectively. How do voters want their elected representatives to solve this trade‐off? This article provides new insights into this question by developing a conjoint analysis approach to estimating voters’ preferences over their legislator's effort allocation. This approach is applied in Britain, where it is found that effort allocation has a significant effect on voter evaluations of legislators, even in a political system where other legislator attributes – in particular, party affiliation – might be expected to predominate. This effect is nonlinear, with voters generally preferring a moderate balance of constituency and national policy work. Preferences over legislator effort allocation are not well‐explained by self‐interest or more broadly by instrumental considerations. They are, however, associated with voters’ local‐cosmopolitan orientation, suggesting that heuristic reasoning based on underlying social dispositions may be more important in determining preferences over representative activities.     

Barriers to competition and the effect on political shirking: 1953–1992

Economists and political scientists have offered a variety of explanations for why legislators might rationally choose to ignore the preferences of their constituents, political parties, and presidents. The broad conclusion of this literature is that there is an element of “shirking” in congressional voting. The objective of this paper is to suggest that the effects of shirking in congressional voting may have increased over time, largely in response to the raising of barriers to competition in congressional elections, thereby enabling legislators to vote their own preferences without fear of losing reelection. We use a quasi-experimental design that controls for the effects of party, region, electoral safety, presidential control of the White House, and constituency factors, in isolating the causal effects of barriers to entry on a continuous series of roll-calls regarding the raising of the debt limit between 1953 and 1992. We find that “shirking” in legislative voting on debt limit legislation is a post-1970s phenomenon.     

On the Meaning of Survey Reports of Roll‐Call “Votes”

Contemporary efforts to evaluate representation often compare survey measures of how citizens say they would vote on legislation to what elected officials do in office. These comparisons generally suggest poor representation. We argue here that this common design is unlikely to effectively evaluate representation because responses to survey questions differ in important aspects from voting in legislatures. Measurement error and construct validity undermine the comparison. Three survey experiments show that providing partisan and nonpartisan information readily available to legislators materially changes respondents' expressed preferences on roll‐call votes. With information, expressed policy positions are both less centrist and more closely matched to legislator behavior in their preferred party. Respondents also appear aware of their own lack of knowledge in evaluating roll‐call policy votes. The treatment effect of information decreases in confidence judging policy in that area. We show similar patterns for respondent opinions on Supreme Court decisions.     

Voter reaction to legislator dissent across political systems

Research shows that legislators who dissent from the political line of their party are rewarded among constituents. This raises concerns about future party cohesiveness and, in turn, parties’ ability to govern and voters' ability to hold parties accountable. However, nearly all studies are conducted in single-member district systems, such as the United States and United Kingdom, which are generally considered most-likely settings for observing such effects. In this note, we conduct a country comparative study of voter reaction to legislator dissent across single-member and multi-member district systems (US, UK and Denmark). Building off existing theories, we argue that voters in multi-member districts also reward legislator dissent but that the reward is significantly weaker. We support this argument with observational and experimental data. Our results suggest that concerns regarding party governance and accountability associated with legislator party dissent extend to—but are less pertinent in—the more widespread multi-member district systems.     

Exclusive Committee Assignments and Party Pressure in the U.S. House of Representatives

Most studies of committee agency in theU.S. House of Representatives consider theideological location of the committee’smedian with respect to some agent. Littlestudied, however, is the effect committeeagency may have on legislators seekingcommittee assignments. I show that whencommittees are agents to the party,legislators feel pressure to selectideological positions more proximate to theparty. They respond to this pressure byexhibiting voting behavior more similar tothe preferences of the party median. Committee assignments, then, are a means bywhich parties can influence the votingbehavior of their members.     

Information flow and party influence: Theory,measurement, and policy consequences

In this paper I present a theory of party influence, based on Bayesian decision theory, as a process in which the voting decisions of individual legislators are influenced by information concerning the votes or intended votes of their rank-and-file colleagues. Procedures derived from the theory are then used to estimate the magnitude of party influence relative to the influence of the president and of party leaders, committee cue givers, and constituents on roll call voting in three policy domains in the U.S. House of Representatives. The results imply that party influence has important short-run and long-run consequences for public policy.     

Legislative systems with absolute party discipline: Implications for the agency theory approach to the constituent-legislator link

This paper examines how the presence of absolute party discipline forces one to re-examine some of the issues surrounding the constituent-legislator link. With absolute party discipline, slack at the individual district level is determined by the policy choices of a political party, rather than by the choices of the individual legislator. This party discipline not only has implications for the representational effectiveness of individual legislators, but also results in the terms “slack” and “shirking” no longer necessarily being synonymous. The empirical work shows that Canadian political parties engaged in wide scale shirking on the 1988 U.S.–Canada Free Trade Agreement.     

Representation,neighboring districts,and party loyalty in the U.S. Congress

Legislative scholars often assume that legislators are motivated by concerns over re-election. This assumption implies that legislators are forward-looking and are motivated by a concern over what their re-election constituency will look like during their next electoral cycle. In this research, we show how the forward-looking nature of legislators motivates members of the U.S. House of Representatives to represent both their home district and their neighboring districts in their choices regarding when to support their own party. Using survey responses to the 2006, 2008, and 2010 Cooperative Congressional Elections Study to construct measures of Congressional District ideology, empirical analysis is strongly supportive of our claims. Legislators’ choices are strongly influenced both by the ideology of their home district and that of the districts that neighbor their home district. Thus, the electoral connection between citizens and representatives extends beyond a legislator’s own constituents to include the constituents in neighboring districts.     

Thinking locally,acting supranationally: Niche party behaviour in the European Parliament

Recent research on the European Parliament (EP) has neglected the idiosyncrasies of niche parties. Similarly, analyses of niche parties have not fully engaged the literature on the EP. This article builds on both literatures by analysing niche party behaviour in the EP as a distinct phenomenon. It is argued that niche parties will respond differently to institutional stimuli than parties more generally. To test this argument, Hix, Noury and Roland's work on EP party voting behaviour is replicated concentrating on niche parties only. It is found that participation in national government and institutional changes affect niche party legislators' voting behaviour, whereas they do not for legislators in the EP overall. These results have important implications for understanding both party behaviour in the EP and niche party behaviour more generally.     

Centralized vote-trading

This paper presents a model of centralized vote-trading in a legislature. In this model, legislators trade only with party leaders, who set prices at which they will buy needed vote-changes and sell promises to pass or defeat particular bills. Each legislator trades away votes on bills of little concern to him and of high concern to leaders, and purchases promises from the leaders to pass (or defeat) particular bills of high concern to the legislator, relative to the price the leguslator must pay. This model is intended as a formal representation of an ‘efficient’ and possibly desirable legislature; modifications are needed to make it useful in describing actual legislatures. However, some evidence is cited to show that this model better accords with reality than previous vote-trading models.     

The Structure of Utility in Spatial Models of Voting

Empirical models of spatial voting allow legislators' locations in a policy or ideological space to be inferred from their roll‐call votes. These are typically random utility models where the features of the utility functions other than the ideal points are assumed rather than estimated. In this article, we first consider a model in which legislators' utility functions are allowed to be a mixture of the two most commonly assumed utility functions: the quadratic function and the Gaussian function assumed by NOMINATE. Across many roll‐call data sets, we find that legislators' utility functions are estimated to be very nearly Gaussian. We then relax the usual assumption that each legislator is equally sensitive to policy change and find that extreme legislators are generally more sensitive to policy change than their more centrally located counterparts. This result suggests that extremists are more ideologically rigid while moderates are more likely to consider influences that arise outside liberal‐conservative conflict.     

Constraining Executive Action: The Role of Legislator Professionalization in Latin America

What explains the failure of legislatures with strong constitutionally endowed powers to exert themselves over the executive in practice? We examine the role of legislator professionalization in strengthening the legislature's ability to constrain executive action, conceptualizing legislator professionalization as prior legislative experience and prior professional work experience. We argue that more professionalized legislators, through the skill and knowledge they bring to the policymaking process from prior experience, will be better equipped to challenge executive authority. In a sample of four Latin American countries from 1990 through 2010, we find that legislatures are more likely to curb executive decree issuance when individual legislators are strongly professionalized, controlling for constitutional powers and several other partisan and political factors. Our findings suggest that legislatures composed of more professionalized legislators can constrain executive action, especially in the context of a unified political opposition in the legislature.     

What would delegates do? When and how the delegate paradox affects estimates of ideological congruence

The consensus that American politicians are more ideologically extreme than voters has been challenged by the observation that issue delegates – who adopt voters’ majority position on each issue – can be more extreme than the median voter. We show that this difference is conditional. Issue delegates are much more extreme than the median voter in left- and right-leaning constituencies, but not in evenly divided or ideologically pure constituencies. This means that these preference aggregation assumptions have a large effect on ideological comparisons between legislators and their party constituents, but little effect on comparisons between legislators and their general election constituents. We demonstrate this finding’s implications by replicating and extending two prominent studies. Although issue delegates representing full states are not much more extreme than the median voter, party issue delegates have moved to the extremes at nearly twice the rate of party median voters and are just as extreme as legislators.     

When Are Agenda Setters Valuable?

Why do industries donate money to legislative campaigns when roll‐call votes suggest that donors gain nothing in return? I argue that corporate donors may shape policy outcomes by influencing powerful agenda setters in the early stages of lawmaking. On the basis of a new data set of more than 45,000 individual state legislator sessions (1988–2012), I document how agenda control is deemed valuable to legislators and groups seeking influence on policy. Employing a difference‐in‐differences design, I assess the revealed price, as measured by campaign contributions, that firms are willing to pay for access to committee and party leaders and document how this price varies across industries and institutions. The results indicate that industries systematically funnel money to the legislative agenda setters by whom they are regulated, and to those endowed with important procedural powers. I document that the value of agenda‐setter positions has increased dramatically in recent years. Finally, exploiting changes in state laws, I show that relaxing contribution limits significantly benefits committee chairs and party leaders more so than it does other legislators, suggesting that agenda setters have strong incentives to obstruct restrictive campaign finance reforms.     

An Analysis of Welfare Effects of Legislative Term Limits

This paper analyzes the welfare effects of term limits forstate legislators. Legislators tend to pursue their ownobjectives and deviate from the interests of voters as theystay longer in office. However, such long-term incumbentsbecome more productive in transferring wealth to theirconstituents due to seniority they gain, and voters re-electthe incumbent. Term limits reduce the maximum seniority of adistrict's legislator and of other districts' legislators aswell, affecting the relative seniority of the legislator.Thus, the legislator gains relative seniority sometimes andloses other times under term limits. As a consequence, votersof a district may or may not benefit from term limits. Thewelfare effects of term limits depend crucially on the shapeof the voters' utility function.     

Assessing the rise of issue voting in British elections since 1964

Measuring the extent to which issues determine electoral choice requires a suitable causal model that takes into account the tact that party identification may colour issue perceptions as well as being partially determined by them. In this paper several possible models are evaluated before settling on one considered to be plausible. This one shows issue-based voting choice to have increased in recent British elections, more or less in step with the decline of class voting documented in previous research. The possibility that this rise in issue voting might be a spurious concomitant of increasing milieu influences is considered and rejected. It is tentatively concluded that the rise of issue voting was due to a decline in the class structuring of British electoral choice.