Assessing Preferences for Political Representation in the US

Abstract

A BSTRACT While much of the extant research on political representation focuses on congruence issues and elite perceptions of their representational roles, little has been done to examine how members of the general public think about representational relationship. Often, constituents are assumed to be passive actors in the representational process. This paper advances the argument that individuals have preferences over how tightly bound elected representatives should be to constituent policy preferences and that these preferences are contextual, varying by the degree to which constituents perceive that their representative shares characteristics similar to those of the individual. Two data sources are used to verify this argument: (1) the 1978 ANES and (2) data collected for Congress ' Obey Commission, 1976-1977. These data provide evidence that public representational preferences have a systematic component. Most significantly, the study finds that members of minority groups have contextually derived preferences for political representation.

Styles of Political Representation: What Do Voters Expect?

“…The results by Carman (2006Carman ( , 2007, however, indicate that women as well as younger age groups are more inclined to prefer a close relation with their political representatives than men and the older members of the population. As far as age is concerned, the results are not very surprising.…”

“…Yet another hypothesis related to socio-demographic characteristics concerns the minority-majority aspect that has been found to influence attitudes towards representation roles in Spain (Mendez-Lago & Martínez 2002) and the U.S. (Carman 2007). The effect of minority status appears however to display contextual variation concerning institutional features.…”

“…Education in particular has been considered to have a potential effect on views on representational styles. The understanding of the complex world of politics is assumed to rise in accordance with educational level thus working in favour of a trustee-like preference of representation (Carman 2007). In addition, social class has been presented as a possible factor having an influence in the same direction as education (Carman 2006, 110).…”

“…A few possible reasons for this deficit have been offered. Firstly, public opinion has been considered to be homogeneously in favour of a mandate type of relationship (see Carman 2007, 1, referring to Manin et al 1999 thus making research on the preferences of voters redundant. Despite the fact that the sparse research in the field has indicated different directions concerning the type of representative relationship voters prefer, it seems fair to conclude that the presumption about homogeneity does not hold (Carman 2006;McMurray & Parsons 1965;Mendez-Lago & Martínez 2002).…”

Institutions and Representational Roles in American State Legislatures

“…Recently, scholars of Congress (Lipinski 2003), public opinion (Carman 2003), state legislatures (Rosenthal 1998;Smith 2003), and comparative politics (Searing 1991(Searing , 1994Studlar and McAllister 1996;Taylor 1992) have used the concept of representational roles to gain a better understanding of how legislators and their constituents relate to one another. Our study of representational roles in the state legislature addressed three questions: 1) Are self-reported representational roles related to behavior, 2) where do legislators place themselves on a scale of representational roles, and 3) how do institutions affect the type of representational roles legislators?…”