Senators at Home: Local Attentiveness and Policy Representation in Congress

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.

Under the Microscope: Gender and Accountability in the US Congress

We study how officeholder gender affects issue accountability and examine whether constituents evaluate women and men legislators differently on the basis of their policy records. Data from 2008 through 2018 show that constituents’ approval ratings and vote choices in US House elections are more responsive to the policy records of women legislators than of men legislators. These patterns are concentrated among politically aware constituents, but we find no evidence that the results are driven disproportionately by either women or men constituents or by issues that are gendered in stereotypical ways. Additional analyses suggest that while constituents penalize women and men legislators at similar rates for policy incongruence, women legislators are rewarded more than men as they are increasingly aligned with their constituents. Our results show that accountability standards are applied differently across legislator gender and suggest a link between the quality of policy representation and the gender composition of American legislatures.

MCDM Application of the Third Vote

When choosing among alternatives, group members may have various preferences regarding the properties of a solution being sought. Since the properties partially do and partially do not meet their collective wishes, the alternatives are in fact better or worse representatives of the collective will. This idea is implemented in the so-called Third Vote election method aimed at enhancing policy representation, and we show how to use it for collective multi-criteria decision making. To be specific, we consider an example of a committee charged with naming a campus library when neither plurality vote nor Condorcet method nor Borda count gives a unique solution. The committee members have differing opinions, such as whether the library should reflect the national affiliation, be named after a great man, relate to sciences, and so forth. Balancing opinion on these issues, the proposed library names are evaluated and the optimal compromise is found.

Gendered Polarization and Abortion Policymaking in the States

Widening, asymmetric polarization is evident in both the U.S. Congress and state legislatures. Recent work unveils a new dimension to this polarization story: newly elected Republican women are driving this polarization. Women are more likely to legislate on women’s issues than men, yet women’s shared interest in representing women doesn’t preclude their identity as partisans. In this article, we explore the effect of today’s political climate on state legislators’ policy representation of women’s issues. We ask what effect does gendered polarization have on women’s issues? To test this, we evaluate bill sponsorship in the states on the quintessential “women’s issue” of abortion. Our research design focuses on bill introductions and uses on an original dataset of pro- and anti-abortion rights bill introductions, which we analyze using an event count model. We find that overall polarization leads to the introduction of fewer restrictive abortion bills, but as polarization between women lawmakers grows, legislators are more likely to introduce anti-abortion rights legislation. Gender polarization has consequences on the types of bills legislators introduce and for how scholars should study polarization.

Disability Policy Representation in African Higher Education Research

This paper sets out to critically explore the way disability policies are framed in African higher education. Presented in this paper is a review of published studies that detail the dominant framing perspectives that have influenced disability policies in African Higher Education (HE). Review of literature was done using the Yair Levy and Timothy J. Ellis (2006) systems approach to conducting an effective literature review. The paper has three sections and these include (a) an introduction (b) dominant policy framing perspectives (c) and a discussion on exploring possibilities for an expansive disability policy framing for Higher Education in Africa.This paper argues for nuanced ways to expand our understanding of the current and emerging issues pertaining to the study of policies on disability in the field of HE in Africa.

Representation and the European Union

This chapter considers the nature and quality of representation in the European Union by examining the dual paths of representation available to European citizens: the direct path of electing representatives to the European Parliament and the indirect path of electing national parliamentarians, and in turn governments, who represent national interests in the Council. Both paths matter if we want to understand representation in the European Union. The chapter examines the extent to which each of these channels facilitates substantive policy representation in the EU. It explores the quality of the selection and sanctioning processes in European Parliament and national elections, and examines citizens’ attitudes towards democracy at both levels of government. It concludes that, while representation in the EU is imperfect, it reflects the hybrid nature of the EU’s political system and is still undergoing significant change as the EU evolves and its policymaking is becoming more politicized domestically.

Do People Want Members of Congress to Compromise?

What do people want from their elected representatives? Our traditional expectation is that people want their legislators to cast votes aligned with the ideological preferences of the district. But if people demand ideological policy representation above all else, it allows legislators little leeway to consider compromise outcomes in Congress. This chapter argues that people expect more from their representatives than congruent votes, and value legislators who are willing to strike compromises. Experimental evidence demonstrates that people offer higher evaluations of legislators who are willing to strike compromises than those who pledge to stick to their convictions. People do not punish in-party representatives for pledging to compromise, while they reward out-party legislators who are willing to seek compromises.