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

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

Partisan Gerrymandering and the Political Process: Effects on Roll-Call Voting and State Policies

Recent scholarship has documented the advantages of a new measure of partisan gerrymandering: The difference in the parties' wasted votes, divided by the total number of votes cast. This measure, known as the efficiency gap (EG), can be calculated directly from aggregate vote totals, facilitating comparison of the severity of party gerrymandering across states and time. In this article, we conduct the first analysis of the EG's effects on legislative representation and policymaking in the states. We first show that the partisan outcome of legislative elections has important causal effects on the ideological representation of individual districts, the ideological composition of legislative chambers, and the conservatism of state policymaking. We then show that variation in the EG across state-years is associated with systematic differences in the ideological location of the median state legislator and in the conservatism of state policies. These results suggest that partisan gerrymandering has major consequences not only for who wins elections but for the political process as a whole. Keywords: redistricting, gerrymandering, state politics, representation, legislature

Replication Data for: On the Representativeness of Primary Electorates

Primary voters are frequently characterized as an ideologically extreme subset of their party, and thus partially responsible for increasing party polarization in government. We use a combination of administrative records on primary turnout and five recent surveys from 2008-2014 to show that primary voters are similar to rank and file voters in their party in terms of demographic attributes and policy attitudes. These similarities do not vary depending on the openness of the primary. Our results suggest that the composition of primary electorates does not exert a polarizing effect above what might arise from voters in the party as a whole

Geography, Uncertainty, and Polarization

Using new data on roll-call voting of U.S. state legislators and public opinion in their districts, we explain how ideological polarization of voters within districts can lead to legislative polarization. In so-called “moderate” districts that switch hands between parties, legislative behavior is shaped by the fact voters are often quite heterogeneous: the ideological distance between Democrats and Republicans within these districts is often greater than the distance between liberal cities and conservative rural areas. We root this intuition in a formal model that associates intra-district ideological hetero- geneity with uncertainty about the ideological location of the median voter. We then demonstrate that among districts with similar median voter ideologies, the difference in legislative behavior between Democratic and Republican state legislators is greater in more ideologically heterogeneous districts. Our findings suggest that accounting for the subtleties of political geography can help explain the coexistence of polarized legislators and a mass public that appears to contain many moderate

Geography, Uncertainty, and Polarization *

Abstract Using new data on roll-call votes of U.S. state legislators and measures of public opinion in their districts, we explain how ideological polarization of voters within districts can lead to legislative polarization. Many of the so-called "moderate" districts that switch hands between Democrats and Republicans are internally polarized. The ideological distance between Democrats and Republicans within these districts is often greater than the distance between liberal cities and conservative rural areas. We present a theoretical model in which intra-district ideological polarization causes candidates to be uncertain about the ideological location of the median voter, thereby reducing their incentives to moderate their policy positions. We then demonstrate that in districts with similar median voter ideologies, the difference in roll-call voting behavior between Democratic and Republican state legislators is greater when there is more within-district ideological heterogeneity. Our findings suggest that accounting for the subtleties of political geography can help explain the coexistence of a polarized legislature and a moderate mass public