Congressional Response to Mandate Elections

Abstract

Elections from time to time are widely believed to carry a mandate, to express a message about changed policy preferences of the electorate. Whatever the accuracy of such beliefs-a matter about which we are skeptical-perceptions of a mandate should affect the behavior of actors in government. Politicians lack the scholarly luxury of waiting for careful analyses. They must act in the months following elections. We postulate that many will act as if the mandate perceptions were true, veering away from their normal voting patterns. This is driven by election results and interpretations that undermine old calculations about what voters want. As the flow of information gradually changes these perceptions, and the election becomes more distant, members of Congress return to their normal position. We first ask, how would members observe an emerging consensus of mandate? And then we model the duration of the change in behavior in an event-history framework. That permits a depiction of important movements of the median member and, from this, inferences about policy impact.

Dynamic Representation(s): Federal Criminal Justice Policy and an Alternative Dimension of Public Mood

“…At this level of abstraction, where demand is for more or less government rather than for specific policies, we know that the system of dynamic representation works exceedingly well (Stimson et al 1995). Furthermore, research shows that individual members of Congress will attend to these signals from their constituents (Peterson et al 2003), and will pay some attention to the size of specific programs and policy areas (Wlezien 1996(Wlezien , 2004. In short, the government listens to what citizens want and responds directly to these desires.…”

In defense of the lowly scorecard: What legislator ratings can tell us about interest groups

“…For example, Stimson (1999a) found via an analysis of the political tenor of major laws passed by Congress that full 17 years passed between the years Congress was its most liberal (1964) and its most conservative (1981). Moreover, when significant short-term ideological shifts occur, these 'mandate' periods tend to be infrequent and rather short-lived (Peterson et al, 2003), as individual members of Congress return to voting in a way that reconciles with broader constituent and national interests (Stimson et al, 1995;Wood and Andersson, 1998;Peterson et al, 2003, p. 413).…”

Mandate and paternalism: A theory of large elections

“…Somer-Topcu (2009) finds that political parties respond to declining vote shares by changing the policies they support using a sample of 23 Democracies between 1945 and 1988 from the Comparative Manifesto Project. Peterson et al (2003) proxy "mandate" to the winning party by analyzing newspaper coverage in US Presidential and off-year election and provide empirical evidence that Members of Congress deviate from their historical voting pattern in the direction of the mandate following a "mandate" election.…”