Party cues provide citizens with low‐cost information about their representatives’ policy positions. But what happens when elected officials deviate from the party line? Relying on the 2006 Cooperative Congressional Election Study (CCES), we examine citizens’ knowledge of their senators’ positions on seven high‐profile roll‐call votes. We find that although politically interested citizens are the group most likely to know their senator's position when she votes with the party, they are also the group most likely to incorrectly identify their senator's position when she votes against her party. The results indicate that when heuristics “go bad,” it is the norm for the most attentive segment of the public to become the most misinformed, revealing an important drawback to heuristic use.

P olitical debate is not constant. Some issues rise quickly on the political agenda to be debated fiercely by partisan elites for a brief period, only to disappear without a trace shortly thereafter. On other issues, political debate continues for years. The dynamic nature of political debate produces peaks and valleys in news media coverage of issues, which in turn leads citizens to think about specific issues to varying degrees over time (Baumgartner and Jones 1993;Iyengar and Kinder 1987). When partisan elites debate an issue and the news media cover it, partisan predispositions are activated in the minds of citizens and subsequently constrain their policy preferences (Zaller 1992). Moreover, those who view an issue as personally important and know where the parties stand on the matter update their partisan identities to reflect their issue preferences (Carsey and Layman 2006).Although public opinion scholars have studied relationships between partisanship and issue preferences for some time (Franklin and Jackson 1983;Green and Palmquist 1990), little is known about whether the dynamics of political debate influence these relationships. Does evolving political debate affect whether citizens connect their partisan identities and issue preferences, or do Logan Dancey is a Ph.D. candidate in Political Science, University of Minnesota, Minneapolis, MN 55455 (dance009@umn.edu). Paul Goren is Associate Professor of Political Science, University of Minnesota, Minneapolis, MN 55455 (pgoren@umn.edu).We thank Marc Hetherington, Gary Jacobson, the three anonymous reviewers, and Marianne Stewart for their comments and suggestions on how to improve earlier versions of the manuscript. The authors' names are listed alphabetically. They contributed equally to the article, including any remaining errors. citizens update irrespective of media coverage of elite debate? The answer to this question has important implications for understanding mass-elite linkages. Insofar as citizens remain oblivious to political debate, their connections to the institutions of representative government become increasingly tenuous. But if citizens respond sensibly to changes in the information environment, those connections grow stronger.This article examines whether changes in the volume of media coverage of political debate surrounding an issue moderate the relationship between individuallevel partisan identities and preferences on that issue. We argue that party identification and policy preferences dynamically constrain one another when partisan elites are visibly contesting the issue and the media cover this debate. Specifically, we posit that heightened partisan elite debate on a given issue is associated with increased media attention devoted to that issue. This increased media attention cues citizens that the issue divides the parties, prompting them to update their policy and party preferences accordingly. In the absence of media coverage of issue debate, individuals no longer receive cues that the issue is an important point of cleavage ...

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The authors analyze gender differences in members’ speech participation on the floor of the U.S. House of Representatives. Speeches increase members’ visibility and voice in the legislative process, providing opportunities for members to highlight their policy knowledge, constituents’ concerns, and partisan commitments. The authors hypothesize that women’s underrepresentation, coupled with the related challenges that female legislators face in a predominantly male institution, motivates congresswomen of both parties to speak at greater rates than congressmen. Analyzing over ten thousand floor speeches during the 103rd and 109th Congresses, the authors find strong support for their hypothesis, demonstrating that congresswomen’s participation in legislative debate increases their visibility and enhances women’s substantive representation.