What Gets Rewarded? Legislative Activity and Constituency Approval

Abstract

Members of Congress (MCs) are concerned about reelection and act in office with this goal in mind. Whether citizens notice this behavior and how they respond remains an open question. We examine the relationships between legislators' characteristics and activity and their constituents' evaluations of their performance in office. We argue that MCs' behavior does filter down to citizens, but that their responses are conditioned by their partisanship and interest in politics. Our analyses combine 2006 and 2008 Cooperative Congressional Election Study survey data on citizens with information on legislators' activity in office in the 109th and 110th Congresses. The results reveal that there are widespread linkages between MC behavior and constituency approval, but that legislators' copartisan, outpartisan, and independent constituents respond in different, yet predictable, ways. Moreover, these effects are strongest among the most interested constituents. Our findings have important implications for our assessments of legislators' strategies and constituency representation.

Inferences Made Easy

“…These findings suggest that at least some constituents are able to pick up on the degree to which their representative or senator is a loyal partisan (see also Fortunato & Stevenson, 2014;Sulkin et al, 2015). Our findings complement these works by showing that this awareness does not seem to translate into people being able to identify the positions their less loyal senators take on high-profile votes.…”

“…We omit respondents who reported that they were "not sure" about whether they approved or disapproved of a senator. Our coding is consistent with Sulkin, Testa, and Usry (2015), although Ansolabehere and Jones (2010) treat approval as an ordinal measure and treat not sure responses as the midpoint in a 5-point approval scale. When we code approval using this approach, our results are substantively the same.…”

Voters’ Knowledge of Their Representatives: The Direct and Conditioned Effects of Parliamentary Work

“…Building on the idea of a personal vote (Cain, Fiorina, and Ferejohn 1990), a growing body of research shows that hard-working MPs receive extra votes in subsequent elections and are consequently more likely to be re-elected (Bouteca et al 2019;Papp and Russo 2018). This literature specifically investigates the type of activities and mechanisms that make a difference (Sulkin et al 2015), such as general retrospective judgements on the incumbents' competence (Kulisheck and Mondak 1996), constituency-oriented activities (Chiru 2018), the initiation of legislation (Bowler 2010;D€ aubler et al 2016), or particular styles of representation (Martin 2010). It also seeks to unveil the conditional effects of distinct institutional features (in particular the electoral rules) on the relationship between incumbents' parliamentary records and re-election prospects (Papp 2018).…”

Does constituency focus improve attitudes to MPs? A test for the UK

“…I also control for respondents' political attention: several studies support a link between attention (or similar variables) and positive evaluations of MPs (Box-Steffensmeier et al, 2003;Frederick, 2008;Parker & Goodman, 2009;Schaffner, 2006; although see Sulkin, Testa, & Usry, 2015). The final individual-level factor is recalled contacting of the MP, which, where included, consistently predicts positive evaluations (Cain et al, 1979;Wagner, 2007).…”