How Policy and Procedure Shape Citizens' Evaluations of Senators

Abstract

I report findings from survey experiments that improve our understanding of how people want individual Senators to approach their role as representatives. The findings show that people are committed to the idea that Senators should prioritize their states' preferences over those of the national public. This preference persists in situations where a Senator's advocacy for her state plays a key role in defeating nationally supported legislation. This finding contradicts popular claims that voters are hungry for Senators who prioritize national preferences over those of their constituents. I also find that people who support a piece of legislation-but not those who oppose it-evaluate a Senator who helps to defeat the legislation by filibustering substantially less favorably than one who accomplishes the same ends through majoritarian means. This suggests that how people respond to some procedural characteristics of politicians' behavior depends on how they feel about the outcomes it yields.Research on citizen evaluations of a representative's legislative behavior typically focuses on their agreement with the substantive policy positions the legislator adopts. However, people may also care about how legislators decide which policies to support, the procedures they use in advocating for those positions, and how their actions relate to the broader democratic process. Some scholars even argue that people "are more affected by the processes of government than by the policies government enacts" (Hibbing and Theiss-Morse 2002, 34). Although substantial work has assessed how characteristics of political processes affect how people evaluate political institutions and the political system in general, little work has examined how procedural characteristics of individual legislators' behavior affect how they are evaluated as individuals. This is an important lacuna because disliked characteristics of how Congress operates as an institution are unlikely to change unless voters punish legislators for their individual contributions to these aggregate outcomes.In this article, I report findings from experiments that examine how two characteristics of a Senator's legislative behavior affect how she is evaluated. First, the experiment varies whether the Senator's

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