Senators at Home: Local Attentiveness and Policy Representation in Congress

Abstract

Is local attention a substitute for policy representation? Fenno (1978) famously described how legislators develop personal ties with their constituents through periodic visits to their districts and carefully crafted communications. Existing work suggests that such interactions insulate incumbents electorally, creating less need to represent constituents’ policy preferences. Surprisingly, this important argument has never been tested systematically. In this paper, I use data on senator travel and staffing behavior along with survey data from the 2011–2018 Cooperative Congressional Election Study to investigate this claim. In addition to showing that areas with important campaign donors are significantly more likely to receive resources, I find that local visits may decrease approval among ideologically opposed constituents. Furthermore, I find inconsistent evidence regarding the effectiveness of local staff. These results suggest that local attention does not always cultivate goodwill in the district. Under polarized politics, home style does not effectively substitute for policy representation.

Making Issues Matter: Local Media and Policy-Based Evaluations of Politicians

“…In contrast to the possibility that deferential local media coverage may offer an avenue through which politicians could generate ideological leeway from their constituents, our evidence instead shows local media access increases the relevance of issue-based considerations for how incumbents are evaluated. This resembles what Kaslovsky (2022) observes when assessing another element sometimes seen as a source of ideological leeway, "home style", using politician travel patterns.…”

“…The media is often deferential to incumbent politicians (Bagdikian 1973, Cook 1989, Fridkin Kahn 1993, Schaffner 2006. For local news outlets this deference takes the form of routine discussion of a legislator's non-policy activities (Grimmer 2013, Kaslovsky 2022 and success in pork-barrel politics (Grimmer et al 2015), sometimes drawing directly from their press releases. At times local coverage emphasizes a politician's personal traits more than their their policy views (Druckman 2004).…”

“…For each year we create a scale of a respondent's agreement with the votes taken by their member of Congress. This approach has been used in previous work considering the correspondence between the public's views on issues and support for their representative (e.g., Kaslovsky andRogowski 2022, Ansolabehere andKuriwaki 2022).…”

Partisan Asymmetries in Earmark Representation

“…Although Engstrom and Vanberg (2010) argue that the Democratic majority from 2007 to 2009 punished conservative Republicans by giving them fewer earmarks, Fagan and Theriault (n.d.) find that at least during the FY2010 appropriations process, conservative Republicans requested fewer earmarks. Other factors such as gender of the legislator (Schultz 2013), campaign donations (Kaslovsky 2021;Rocca and Gordon 2013) may also impact earmarking. Because of the new rules adopted in the 117 th Congress to govern the return of earmarks significantly limit the discretionary power of party and committee leadership, many previous findings may not apply to earmarking today.…”

Competition in Congressional Elections: Money versus Votes

“…It provides the first analysis of the quality of competition through the lens of fundraising. The soaring cost of elections matters for who runs, who wins, and how legislators spend their time in office (i.e., Bonica 2020;Carnes 2018;Fouirnaies 2021;Hall 2019;Kaslovsky 2022;Kirkland 2021;Powell 2012). Grappling more directly with resource disparities is important because of the outsized role that fundraising plays in running for office and gaining attention on the campaign trail.…”