Measuring Constituent Policy Preferences in Congress, State Legislatures, and Cities

Little is known about the American public’s policy preferences at the level of Congressional districts, state legislative districts, and local municipalities. In this article, we overcome the limited sample sizes that have hindered previous research by jointly scaling the policy preferences of 275,000 Americans based on their responses to policy questions. We combine this large dataset of Americans’ policy preferences with recent advances in opinion estimation to estimate the preferences of every state, congressional district, state legislative district, and large city. We show that our estimates outperform previous measures of citizens’ policy preferences. These new estimates enable scholars to examine representation at a variety of geographic levels. We demonstrate the utility of these estimates through applications of our measures to examine representation in state legislatures and city governments

Representation in Municipal Government

Municipal governments play a vital role in American democracy, as well as in governments around the world. Despite this, little is known about the degree to which cities are responsive to the views of their citizens. In the past, the unavailability of data on the policy preferences of citizens at the municipal level has limited scholars' ability to study the responsiveness of municipal government. We overcome this problem by using recent advances in opinion estimation to measure the mean policy conservatism in every U.S. city and town with a population above 20,000 people. Despite the supposition in the literature that municipal politics are non-ideological, we find that the policies enacted by cities across a range of policy areas correspond with the liberal-conservative positions of their citizens on national policy issues. In addition, we consider the influence of institutions, such as the presence of an elected mayor, the popular initiative, partisan elections, term limits, and at-large elections. Our results show that these institutions have little consistent impact on policy responsiveness in municipal government. These results demonstrate a robust role for citizen policy preferences in determining municipal policy outcomes, but cast doubt on the hypothesis that simple institutional reforms enhance responsiveness in municipal governments

By ‘bridging’ political surveys, we can measure levels of representation in American politics

Democracy only functions if elected officials represent the wishes of their constituents. But in a country with hundreds of millions of voters, and thousands of legislators, how can we measure how the policy preferences of constituents affect the actions of their representatives? Chris Tausanovitch argues that by aggregating and ‘bridging’ differing surveys, we can estimate liberal-conservative scores for voters, and legislative responsiveness for states, congressional districts, state legislative districts, and even cities

Income, Ideology, and Representation

Do legislators represent the rich better than they represent the poor? Recent work provides mixed support for this proposition. I test the hypothesis of differential representation using a data set on the political preferences of 318,537 individuals. Evidence of differential representation in the House of Representatives is weak. Support for differential representation is stronger in the Senate. In recent years, representation has occurred primarily through the selection of a legislator from the appropriate party. Although the preferences of higher-income constituents account for more of the variation in legislator voting behavior, higher-income constituents also account for much more of the variation in district preferences. In light of the low level of overall responsiveness, differential responsiveness appears small

Replication Data for: Representation in Municipal Government

This is the replication data for: Tausanovitch, Chris and Christopher Warshaw. "Representation in Municipal Government." American Political Science Review. August, 2014. 108(3)

Replication Data for: Why are Subnational Governments Responsive?

Code to replicate the figures from the paper

Replication Data for: A Disconnect in Representation? Comparison of Trends in Congressional and Public Polarization

The files here reproduce the results and analysis presented in Hill, Seth J. and Chris Tausanovitch. 2015. "A Disconnect in Representation? Comparison of Trends in Congressional and Public Polarization." Journal of Politics

Replication Data for: Estimating Candidates' Political Orientation in a Polarized Congress

Over the past decade, a number of new measures have been developed that attempt to capture the political orientation of both incumbent and non-incumbent candidates for Congress, as well as other offices, on the same scale. These measures pose the tantalizing possibility of being able to answer a host of fundamental questions about political accountability and representation. In this paper, we examine the properties of six recent measures of candidates' political orientations in different domains. While these measures are commonly viewed as proxies for ideology, each involves very different choices, incentives, and contexts. Indeed, we show that there is only a weak relationship between these measures within party. This suggests that these measures are capturing domain-specific factors rather than just candidates' ideology. Moreover, these measures do poorly at distinguishing between moderate and extreme roll call voting records within each party. As a result, they fall short when it comes to facilitating empirical analysis of theories of accountability and representation in Congress. Overall, our findings suggest that future research should leverage the conceptual and empirical variation across these measures rather than assuming they are all synonymous with candidates' ideology