Congruence, Responsiveness, and Representation in American State Legislatures PDF Download
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Author: Boris Shor
Publisher:
ISBN:
Category :
Languages : en
Pages : 0
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Book Description
Two problems hinder the ability of scholars to assess the quality of representation of state-level public opinion by elected representatives. First, the main tool measuring ideology in public opinion has historically been self-reported, but this is now well known to be severely plagued by measurement error. Second, and far more binding, we lack a common scale on which to place both constituents and representatives. While the literature has addressed a number of methods estimating a common space for politicians' ideal points across political institutions, little work exists that incorporates citizens into this space. The unified methodology in this paper solves both problems in order to assess representation of constituents by their individual state legislators, the parties in the state legislatures, and the state legislature as a whole. Bridging is accomplished using policy preference questions from a state and congressional candidate survey administered since the early 1990s. I ask those questions in my own 2008 survey of over 4,200 citizen respondents, representative at the state and national levels. Thus, citizens and state legislators can be located on the same ideological scale. I employ multilevel regression with poststratification to model state-level public ideology and obtain aggregate opinion estimates for all 50 states and 1942 upper chamber state legislative districts. State legislators and chamber and party medians are responsive to public opinion, but they are very often incongruent to it. Democrats and Republicans diverge from district and state opinion, but in an asymmetric fashion, with Republicans considerably more distant.
Author: Boris Shor
Publisher:
ISBN:
Category :
Languages : en
Pages : 0
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Book Description
Two problems hinder the ability of scholars to assess the quality of representation of state-level public opinion by elected representatives. First, the main tool measuring ideology in public opinion has historically been self-reported, but this is now well known to be severely plagued by measurement error. Second, and far more binding, we lack a common scale on which to place both constituents and representatives. While the literature has addressed a number of methods estimating a common space for politicians' ideal points across political institutions, little work exists that incorporates citizens into this space. The unified methodology in this paper solves both problems in order to assess representation of constituents by their individual state legislators, the parties in the state legislatures, and the state legislature as a whole. Bridging is accomplished using policy preference questions from a state and congressional candidate survey administered since the early 1990s. I ask those questions in my own 2008 survey of over 4,200 citizen respondents, representative at the state and national levels. Thus, citizens and state legislators can be located on the same ideological scale. I employ multilevel regression with poststratification to model state-level public ideology and obtain aggregate opinion estimates for all 50 states and 1942 upper chamber state legislative districts. State legislators and chamber and party medians are responsive to public opinion, but they are very often incongruent to it. Democrats and Republicans diverge from district and state opinion, but in an asymmetric fashion, with Republicans considerably more distant.
Author: Benjamin Bingle
Publisher:
ISBN: 9781369000207
Category : City councils
Languages : en
Pages : 216
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Book Description
Representation and legislative responsiveness are vital components of a functional democracy. In representative democracies legislators are elected to stand for, and act on behalf of, the citizenry. Although fundamental to the effectiveness of America's political system, both representation and responsiveness can be influenced by external factors such as legislature and constituency size. What follows is an exploration of representation and responsiveness in American states and cities through the lens of legislature and constituency size. All 50 states are included in the analyses as well as cities with populations of at least 100,000 people as of the 2010 decennial census. In sum, this dissertation suggests that racial minorities and women are underrepresented by state legislatures and city councils. Furthermore, larger legislatures are more descriptively representative than their smaller counterparts, especially among non-Whites and Latino/as. Plus, as constituencies grow, better education outcomes suffer and poverty rates increase, on average. The totality of the findings indicate that real implications emerge when political constituencies grow too large.
Author: Malcolm E. Jewell
Publisher: University Press of Kentucky
ISBN: 0813156165
Category : Political Science
Languages : en
Pages : 274
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Book Description
Every two years American voters turn out to elect several thousand representatives to state legislatures. Only now in Representation in State Legislatures do we have a detailed examination of how these officials perceive their jobs and how they attempt to do them. To provide answers to these questions, Malcolm E. Jewell conducted intensive interviews with 220 members of houses of representatives in nine selected states. He asked each legislator how he kept in touch with his constituents, how he resolved matters of policy, how he sought government resources for his district, and what services he provided for individual constituents. State legislatures differ greatly, and they are not institutionalized to the same degree as the national congress. It is difficult, therefore, to generalize on such effects as partisanship. Likewise it appears that past explanatory models do not adequately describe the complex relationships seen by most legislators in their work. The state legislature is changing. It is becoming more institutionalized. It is becoming more stable as fewer members retire and more are reelected. The trend is toward longer sessions, increased staff, and more activity. With this trend the legislator is becoming more visible; he can deal with lawmaking while having greater opportunities to provide services and to gain publicity for them. As the move, begun by the Reagan administration, to put more responsibility for programs on the states continues, the state legislatures will assume a place of greater importance in the governing of the United States. This pioneering study of representation will thereby gain significance both for the understanding it imparts and for the new questions it raises.
Author: Gerhard Loewenberg
Publisher: Routledge
ISBN: 1317255143
Category : Political Science
Languages : en
Pages : 121
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Book Description
On Legislatures looks at why people support their individual representatives but continue to criticise the legislative system at every opportunity. Although legislatures exist in every political system and are meant to represent the people, they are generally disparaged because they appear both unrepresentative and indecisive. Gerhard Loewenberg explains this puzzling contradiction by examining what representation means and what it takes for a large number of equally representative members to reach decisions. It also describes the methods for studying legislatures that have been developed in the social sciences in the last half century and shows their importance in democratic societies throughout the world. On Legislatures gets to the heart of the current disconnect between legislatures and the public they are supposed to represent.
Author:
Publisher:
ISBN:
Category :
Languages : en
Pages :
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Author: Jeffrey J. Harden
Publisher: Cambridge University Press
ISBN: 1107130964
Category : Biography & Autobiography
Languages : en
Pages : 203
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Book Description
This book examines four unique dimensions of American political representation from the supply (legislator) and demand (constituent) perspectives.
Author: John M. Carey
Publisher: Cambridge University Press
ISBN: 1139476793
Category : Political Science
Languages : en
Pages : 217
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Book Description
Legislatures are the core representative institutions in modern democracies. Citizens want legislatures to be decisive, and they want accountability, but they are frequently disillusioned with the representation legislators deliver. Political parties can provide decisiveness in legislatures, and they may provide collective accountability, but citizens and political reformers frequently demand another type of accountability from legislators – at the individual level. Can legislatures provide both kinds of accountability? This book considers what collective and individual accountability require and provides the most extensive cross-national analysis of legislative voting undertaken to date. It illustrates the balance between individualistic and collective representation in democracies, and how party unity in legislative voting shapes that balance. In addition to quantitative analysis of voting patterns, the book draws on extensive field and archival research to provide an extensive assessment of legislative transparency throughout the Americas.
Author: Erik S. Herron
Publisher: Oxford University Press
ISBN: 0190258675
Category : Political Science
Languages : en
Pages : 752
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Book Description
No subject is more central to the study of politics than elections. All across the globe, elections are a focal point for citizens, the media, and politicians long before--and sometimes long after--they occur. Electoral systems, the rules about how voters' preferences are translated into election results, profoundly shape the results not only of individual elections but also of many other important political outcomes, including party systems, candidate selection, and policy choices. Electoral systems have been a hot topic in established democracies from the UK and Italy to New Zealand and Japan. Even in the United States, events like the 2016 presidential election and court decisions such as Citizens United have sparked advocates to promote change in the Electoral College, redistricting, and campaign-finance rules. Elections and electoral systems have also intensified as a field of academic study, with groundbreaking work over the past decade sharpening our understanding of how electoral systems fundamentally shape the connections among citizens, government, and policy. This volume provides an in-depth exploration of the origins and effects of electoral systems.
Author: Brian F. Crisp
Publisher: Cambridge University Press
ISBN: 1108478018
Category : Political Science
Languages : en
Pages : 279
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Book Description
A comparative analysis of why democratic institutions often produce dissonance between citizens' preferences and public policy in separation-of-powers regimes.
Author: Erik Hanson
Publisher:
ISBN:
Category :
Languages : en
Pages : 263
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Book Description
How does institutional differences across state legislatures representation and the political pathways of women, people of color, and working class state legislators? While some studies have focused on institutional elements of state legislatures, few have focused on how representational pathways are affected for individual legislators. Furthermore, studies that have focused on legislator pathways have generally analyzed one particular state legislature. This project will contribute to the literature on state legislatures by taking a mixed methods, interstate, and institutional approach to studying representation. The theoretical framework for analyzing the constraint among legislators is an 'Hourglass of Representation, ' in which legislators (and particularly people of color legislators) are pinched between 'bottom up' pressures from their district along with social movements and interest groups, and 'top down' forces, including the leadership structure and culture of the legislature and state-level political and institutional forces. I argue that people of color, women, and working class legislators are particularly constrained by this situation both because the bottom up forces facing them are more intense and the roadblocks facing them for obtaining power and advancing agendas are more severe. There are three key contributions this dissertation makes to the Political Science literature on representation in state legislatures. The first study contains an analysis of legislator interaction with constituents, including constituent work, in-district legislator events, and other forms of legislative styles that emerge among legislators. This work is related to Richard Fenno's Homestyle and related work on credit claiming and the personal vote for a representative. It is in conversation with, and expands on the work found in Homestyle by using a variety of methods to analyze legislator activities. Furthermore, it is one of relatively few studies which studies both legislative lawmaking and constituent services in the same project. Additionally, it combines legislative activity with their subsequent progressive advancement to Congress and other legislative bodies or elected offices. In the course of this research, I argue that many people of color legislators place a greater effort on Homestyle Politics than would be predicted simply from electoral incentives. This is in part that many people of color legislators face unique pressures from their district; frequently their districts are among the most left-leaning in the state legislature, they are likely to be indebted to ideological groups who helped them run for office and originally recruited them, and also these districts operate in a context of hostility from the state government at large. To address this question, I assembled a unique data set of legislator communication via public twitter accounts in 2016 and 2017. The second study contains an analysis of visible and less visible legislative actions to secure substantive representation for people of color groups. There will be a discussion of how focusing on latter stages in the legislative process may obscure the unique legislative styles of people of color legislators. It also contains a cross-state analysis of the varying role of legislative institutions and their effects on the opportunities and trade offs legislators are faced with. Discussion of how some forms of constraint on legislators are relatively identity neutral, while others more strongly inhibit the choices of women, people of color, or particularly women of color. To address this question, I assembled a unique data set of bill and resolution sponsorship, including its eventual passage in the legislature, among all state legislatures in 2016 and 2017 via legiscan.com. The third study continues the legislative institutional argument by looking at the role of state party and legislative institutions on equality of access to legislative office and progressive advancement to Congress. This is followed by a discussion of how these sources of constraint occur at many stages in the career of a legislator. Many of these forms of constraint most negatively affect legislators wanting to advance radical redistributive politics across class and racial lines, along with advocating for those in which there is a consensus across both political parties of marginality (non-citizens, criminals, prisoners, people expressing anti-American or irreligious viewpoints, etc.) To address this question, I assembled a unique data set of the occupational backgrounds and electoral history of all state legislators and members of Congress for the year 2020 from existing public data. Three key findings were found from the aforementioned studies, and they are as follows: State legislators from non-white backgrounds, particularly Black legislators devote more effort to constituency service and particularly constituent service events. Furthermore, these legislatures showed much higher levels of tailoring events and information to diverse groups of constituents rather than relying on generic information, another sign of legislative effort. This may come from group consciousness held by the legislator in some cases, although it also may be informed by the constraint faced by these legislators in other avenues. Legislators constrained from taking action in the legislative arena (e.g. committee work) may devote more attention to activities where they have more autonomy. Legislators from legislatures with higher variation in legislative activity are less likely to ascend to higher office, including moving from the state house to the state senate. The variation in legislative activity is theorized to be reflective of inequality within the legislature in power and open avenues for lawmaking. Although in theory a legislature with no variation in legislative activity could also be a sign of legislative constraint, this was not found to be the case within any legislature. Future work will explore other measures of legislative success besides election to higher office and reelection. Members of Congress with past legislative experience were far more likely to come from legislatures with more professionalized state legislatures. Professionalized state legislatures were also more likely to show lower levels of legislative inequality and constraint. However, it is important to note that even in the "best" state legislatures on these measures, the legislatures were still quite unequal in legislative power and the constraint facing their members. Furthermore, they all showed evidence of bias in recruitment networks that made it less likely for legislators of nontraditional backgrounds to run for higher office and win. This dissertation contributes to the growing understanding of the role of formal and informal political institutions on the representation of marginalized groups and the political pathways of legislators in unequal legislative environments. Furthermore, it makes a contribution to the literature on credit claiming, electoral threat, and homestyle politics literature in Political Science
