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 rollcall votes on 44 bills across seven Congresses (2006)(2007)(2008)(2009)(2010)(2011)(2012)(2013)(2014)(2015)(2016)(2017)(2018), 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 one-standard 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.

The politics of accountability in Supreme Court nominations: voter recall and assessment of senator votes on nominees

“…In the modern era, hundreds of polls have asked about Americans' opinions on Supreme Court nominees. But the Ansolabehere and Kuriwaki (2021) framework requires not just this information, but also how citizens perceive their senators to have voted on a given nominee, as well as voters' assessments of their senators. Polls that ask both types of questions are rare, but they exist for three nominees: Clarence Thomas (1991), Sonia Sotomayor (2009), andElena Kagan (2010).…”

“…Our work both complements and extends this existing research. Most importantly, we use the framework developed in Ansolabehere and Kuriwaki (2021) to tie the concepts studied more closely to accountability theory. 6 In particular, this framework allows us to account for the possibility that a citizen's evaluation of a senator's vote may be endogenous to the citizen's overall assessment of the senator.…”

Protest as One Political Act in Individuals’ Participation Repertoires: Latent Class Analysis and Political Participant Types

“…Examples of recent cross-national research on this topic include Htun and Weldon's (2012) findings that women's mobilization in autonomous social movements has affected policies to combat violence against women in 70 countries over four decades; and Rasmussen and Reher's (2019) empirical results showing that civil society engagement has strengthened the relationship between public opinion and public policy across 20 policy issues in 30 European countries. These studies represent a growing body of literature that illustrates how scholars are increasingly tracing the linkages between a variety of political acts and representational outcomes (Ansolabahere & Kuriwaki, 2021;Dassonneville et al, 2020;Esaiasson & Wlezien, 2017;Hooghe et al, 2019;Wasow, 2020;Wouters & Walgrave, 2017).…”

Under the Microscope: Gender and Accountability in the US Congress

“…An important body of scholarship finds evidence to support this theoretical perspective. For example, legislators incur electoral penalties for compiling ideologically extreme voting records (Canes-Wrone, Brady, and Cogan 2002) and constituents who agree with their legislator's votes on individual policies report more favorable evaluations of their representative (Ansolabehere and Jones 2010;Ansolabehere and Kuriwaki 2021). These patterns provide evidence of a link between constituent evaluations and the policy representation provided by elected officials.…”

“…Specifically, we investigate whether constituents respond similarly to the policy records of women and men representatives. Although constituents tend to evaluate legislators based on how well they provide issue representation (Ansolabehere and Kuriwaki 2021;Canes-Wrone, Brady, and Cogan 2002), it is less clear whether this standard applies similarly to men and women legislators. Research in other contexts indicates that women politicians are held to different (and, usually, higher) performance and qualification standards than men (Bauer 2020b;Costa 2020;O'Brien 2015;Reyes-Housholder 2020), suggesting that policy performance may operate differently as a criterion for evaluating women and men legislators.…”