Congressional Representation: Accountability from the Constituent’s Perspective
Abstract: The premise that constituents hold representatives accountable for their legislative decisions undergirds political theories of democracy and legal theories of statutory interpretation. But studies of this at the individual level are rare, examine only a handful of issues, and arrive at mixed results. We provide an extensive assessment of issue accountability at the individual level. We trace the congressional roll-call votes on 44 bills across seven Congresses (2006–18), and link them to constituent’s perceptions of their representative’s votes and their evaluation of their representative. Correlational, instrumental variables, and experimental approaches all show that constituents hold representatives accountable. A onestandard deviation increase in a constituent’s perceived issue agreement with their representative can improve net approval
by 35 percentage points. Congressional districts, however, are heterogeneous. Consequently, the effect of issue agreement on vote is much smaller at the district level, resolving an apparent discrepancy between micro and macro studies.
Control-F: "In what follows, we uncover a picture of the electorate that, although not hyperinformed and hyperrational, is one in which constituents are sufficiently
attentive that the majority can and does hold their representatives accountable for the decisions that they make
on important pieces of legislation."
Verification Materials: The materials required to verify the computational reproducibility of the results, procedures
and analyses in this article are available on the American Journal of Political Science Dataverse within the Harvard
Dataverse Network, at: https://doi.org/10.7910/DVN/QOVWMM
Abstract: The premise that constituents hold representatives accountable for their legislative decisions undergirds political theories of democracy and legal theories of statutory interpretation. But studies of this at the individual level are rare, examine only a handful of issues, and arrive at mixed results. We provide an extensive assessment of issue accountability at the individual level. We trace the congressional roll-call votes on 44 bills across seven Congresses (2006–18), and link them to constituent’s perceptions of their representative’s votes and their evaluation of their representative. Correlational, instrumental variables, and experimental approaches all show that constituents hold representatives accountable. A onestandard deviation increase in a constituent’s perceived issue agreement with their representative can improve net approval by 35 percentage points. Congressional districts, however, are heterogeneous. Consequently, the effect of issue agreement on vote is much smaller at the district level, resolving an apparent discrepancy between micro and macro studies.
Control-F: "In what follows, we uncover a picture of the electorate that, although not hyperinformed and hyperrational, is one in which constituents are sufficiently attentive that the majority can and does hold their representatives accountable for the decisions that they make on important pieces of legislation."
https://cces.gov.harvard.edu/files/cces/files/AnsolabehereKu...
Verification Materials: The materials required to verify the computational reproducibility of the results, procedures and analyses in this article are available on the American Journal of Political Science Dataverse within the Harvard Dataverse Network, at: https://doi.org/10.7910/DVN/QOVWMM