Nonelectoral Motivations to Represent Marginalized Groups in a Democracy: Evidence from an Unelected Legislature

McAndrews, John H.; Goldberg, Jonah; Loewen, Peter John; Rubenson, Daniel; Stevens, Benjamin

doi:10.1111/lsq.12310

Cited by 4 publications

(1 citation statement)

References 40 publications

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“…What are examples (or potential examples) of value-added and transparent experiments? One example is McAndrews et al (2020). In this article, we were interested in whether politicians who are unelected – in this case, Canadian senators – are motivated to represent constituents who share their ascriptive characteristics.…”

Section: Value-added and Transparent Experimentsmentioning

confidence: 99%

Value-added and Transparent Experiments

Loewen

Rubenson

2021

Political Studies Review

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Experimental research by political scientists on elites has grown dramatically in recent years. Experimenting on and with elites raises important questions, both practical and ethical. Elites are busy people, doing important work under public scrutiny. Therefore, any experiments that use up political elites’ time, risk impairing their ability to do their jobs as well as possible, or put at risk the larger research community’s access to elites should be avoided. Nevertheless, despite these risks and challenges, we argue experimenting with elites has enough benefits both to the research community and to elites themselves, that it should still be done. The relevant question then becomes how should we think about doing experiments with political elites? We propose a framework of value-added and transparent experiments. Our framework is guided by the following two simple rules: Elite subjects should individually benefit from the process of doing the experiment. It should add value to their role as representatives. Second, the identity of the researchers and purposes of the experiment should be transparent. As we argue, these two combined features can still accommodate a large range of experiments, can creatively spark researchers to think up new designs and can protect access to elites for future research. We review two such examples at the end of this essay.

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Section: Value-added and Transparent Experimentsmentioning

confidence: 99%

Value-added and Transparent Experiments

Loewen

Rubenson

2021

Political Studies Review

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Nonelectoral Motivations to Represent Marginalized Groups in a Democracy: Evidence from an Unelected Legislature

McAndrews

Goldberg

Loewen

et al. 2020

Legislative Studies Qtrly

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Do legislators from marginalized groups have non‐electoral motivations to represent ‘their’ group? Previous observational and experimental research on this question focuses on elected politicians and is thus unable to isolate representation absent a desire to win re‐election. We address this limitation by observing the decision‐making of appointed legislators who, by institutional design, have no personal re‐election motive. We administered to Canadian senators and their staff a novel survey instrument that captured how they prioritized learning about the policy opinions of various groups of citizens. We show that senators’ group identities—specifically, those associated with racial and regional minorities—influenced which group’s views they chose to learn about. The findings refine the central conclusion of the literature and have implications for the study not only of unelected legislators but also of elected officials in settings where public monitoring is weak.

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Government Responsiveness in Developing Countries

Grossman

Slough

2022

Annu. Rev. Polit. Sci.

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When and how do governments deliver public goods and services in response to citizen preferences? We review the current literature on government responsiveness, with a focus on public goods and service delivery in developing countries. We identify three types of actors that are commonly present in these accounts: politicians, bureaucrats, and citizens. Much of this literature examines interactions between dyads of these actors. The study of electoral accountability and constituency services emphasizes relationships between citizens (or voters) and politicians. Studies of bureaucratic incentives and political oversight of bureaucrats emphasize interactions between politicians and bureaucrats. Finally, studies of bureaucratic embeddedness and citizen oversight of bureaucrats elaborate the interactions between bureaucrats and citizens. We argue that an emerging literature that considers interactions between all three types of actors provides rich theoretical and empirical terrain for developing our understanding of responsiveness and accountability in low- and middle-income countries and beyond. Expected final online publication date for the Annual Review of Political Science, Volume 25 is May 2022. Please see http://www.annualreviews.org/page/journal/pubdates for revised estimates.

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Nonelectoral Motivations to Represent Marginalized Groups in a Democracy: Evidence from an Unelected Legislature

Cited by 4 publications

References 40 publications

Value-added and Transparent Experiments

Value-added and Transparent Experiments

Nonelectoral Motivations to Represent Marginalized Groups in a Democracy: Evidence from an Unelected Legislature

Government Responsiveness in Developing Countries

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