Citizens' Orientations Toward Legislatures: Congress and the State Legislature

Abstract

wo decades ago, Wahlke argued forcefully that research on legislative representation should focus more effort on investi--JL gating patterns of public orientations toward representative institutions, mapping &dquo;the incidence and variations of support in specific systems,&dquo; and formulating &dquo;hypotheses about its conditions and correlates&dquo; (Wahlke 1978: 83). He advocated inquiry about &dquo;the role of the represented.&dquo;Citizens' orientations toward legislatures have, in fact, been investigated to some extent. Davidson and Parker (1972) opened up research on support for Congress more than twenty years ago (also see Davidson, Kovenock, and O'Leary 1966: 38-66); and the state of such research was synthesized ten years ago by Dennis (1981). Similar research was conducted with the state legislatures in mind during the 1970s (e.g., Patterson, Hedlund, and Boynton 1975). Most commonly, the thrust of research has gone to the extent of constituents' supportive or unsupportive evaluations of the legislature and its work. Do citizens generally approve or disapprove of the job the legislature does? Such inquiry about legislative performance is an effective, widely understood, and &dquo;probably the simplest and most direct&dquo; indicator of public support for the legislature (see Dennis 1981: 324;Ripley 1988). Why should support, or lack of support, for the legislature be investigated? Public support for Congress oscillates over time without

Constituents' Evaluations of U.S. House Members

“…Finally, we demonstrate that constituents' evaluations of the congressional institution are firmly related to their appraisals of their own congressman (see Patterson, Ripley, and Quinlan 1992). Incumbent congressmen have not, as some scholars have argued, &dquo;become virtual masters of their own fate, insulated from generally adverse public perceptions of Congress's internal procedures, policy-making, and ethical standards&dquo; (Born 1990(Born , 1224).…”

Public Approval ofU.S. State Legislatures

“…Major surveys of American political attitudes, such as the American National Election Studies, are focused on the national level and generally do not include questions measuring attitudes and opinions about state government. Most of the studies that have been conducted rely on opinion data from a single state or just a few states (Cotter 1986; Jewell 1982; Patterson, Hedlund, and Boynton 1975; Patterson, Ripley, and Quinlan 1992; Squire 1993; though Kelleher and Wolak 2007 is an important exception).…”

“…Among the central findings of the existing studies are that socioeconomic and political attributes such as education, occupation, income, partisan identification, political ideology, and political efficacy are associated with evaluations of the legislature (Patterson, Hedlund, and Boynton 1975; Patterson, Ripley, and Quinlan 1992; Squire 1993). In terms of state political institutions and other contextual factors, Squire (1993) found that legislative professionalism was negatively related to an individual's level of approval.…”

“…Professionalized legislatures have been associated with increased legislative efficiency (Squire 1998), more time for legislators to focus on developing legislation, deliberating on policy, and interacting with other branches (Rosenthal 1998; Squire 1988), greater policy innovation (Kousser 2005), more casework for constituents (Freeman and Richardson 1996), and greater congruence between public opinion and policy (Maestas 2000). Although scholars have generally viewed these effects positively, past studies have found a negative association between legislative professionalism and public approval of and confidence in state legislatures (Jewell 1982; Kelleher and Wolak 2007; Patterson, Ripley, and Quinlan 1992; Squire 1993). The negative relationship may be due to other outcomes associated with legislative professionalism, including that it provides incumbents with greater electoral safety (Berry, Berkman, and Schneiderman 2000), attracts more ambitious legislators (Maestas 2003), and advantages Democrats (Fiorina 1989, 1994).…”

“…Studies have shown high levels of citizen cynicism about democracies around the globe (Norris 1999) and in American state and national politics (Hibbing and Theiss‐Morse 1995; Rosenthal 2009). Citizen approval of U.S. state legislatures, however, has received only modest scholarly attention (Jewell 1982; Squire 1993; Kelleher and Wolak 2007; Patterson, Hedlund, and Boynton 1975; Patterson, Ripley, and Quinlan 1992) and has been limited by both theoretical and empirical shortcomings.…”