Jacobson Chapter 7

How members win and hold office powerfully affects the internal organization of the houses of Congress, the kind of legislation they produce, and the kind of representation Americans therefore receive.

So, here we are going to look at the consequences of elections—how electoral politics affects the workings of the House and Senate as institutions and the policy choices they make.

Voters can hold politicians accountable for their actions as long as members care about their own reelection or their party’s future.

What’s a MC’s number one goal? We can look at how effectively MC’s represent

their constituents by looking at the multidimensional aspect of representation.

The Dimensions:◦ Policy Congruence◦ Interests and Causes◦ Parties

One way to measure representation is the degree to which the policy views of people in a district or state are reflected in the policy stances (votes) of the people they elect to Congress.

However, this is extremely difficult because there is hardly any legitimate data on constituent attitudes.

Additionally, it would be hard to imagine that there would be any “constituency opinion” on many of the issues Congress faces.

Even if there is data available on a few districts or states, that still does not provide a sense of how well ALL members of Congress reflect their constituents’ preferences in their voting behavior.

Given these caveats, there are some conclusions that can be drawn from the studies that have tried to examine policy congruence.1. There is at least a moderate connection between

district preferences and voting behavior (the strength varies across issues and is never overwhelmingly large)

2. There is no great pressure to vote district preferences on every vote, especially because on many specific votes constituency preferences are unknown.

3. Members need only take care to cast “explainable votes.”

4. Anyone who consistently votes contrary to district preferences is likely to end up in trouble.

There is no way that the act of representing can be separated from the act of getting elected. If the congressman cannot

win and hold the votes of some people, he cannot represent any people. Further, he cannot represent any people unless he knows, or makes an effort to know, who they are, what they think, and what they want; and it is by

campaigning for electoral support among them that he finds out such things. During the expansionist stage of his

constituency career, particularly, he probably knows his various constituencies as well as it is possible to know

them. It is, indeed, by such campaigning, by going home a great deal, that a congressman develops a complex and

discriminating set of perceptions about his constituents.—Richard Fenno

In sum:◦ The knowledge and work it takes to win and hold

a district not only establish the basis for policy congruence but also let the member know when it is irrelevant or unnecessary.

Members can also become spokespeople for interests and causes not confined to their constituencies.◦ African-American Members◦ Female Members◦ Christian Conservatives

However, members need to be careful not to let their commitment to a group upset their core constituency.

Members will pay much more attention to particular groups (even those outside their constituencies) when those groups can mobilize people or money to help win campaigns.

For example, Jim Oberstar, an 18-term incumbent, recently filed his third quarter FEC report and received only one donation from a single resident in his district, between June 22 and September 30 ($500). All the rest of his donations came from PACs, donations from Native American tribes, and individual contributions from people in other districts and states.

This shows the delicate balance between representing the district vs. special interests.

Some polling in the district now shows that Oberstar may be in danger, even though he has won his past three elections with more than 65% of the vote.

This brings up a philosophical debate. Is it important to have members who try to

represent particular special interests in society, or should they focus on just the interests of their districts or states, whatever those may be?

In other words, is there value in having some mechanism for representing the enormous variety of economic and political interests that cannot be encompassed within the framework of single-member districts?

On a different dimension, aggregate election results are responsive to national economic and political conditions.

When citizens are unhappy with the government’s performance, the administration’s party suffers the consequences.

2012 Congressional Approval 2012 Voters' Trust 2012 Support for Repeal of Health Care Law 2012 Generic Congressional Ballot

In one particular way, Congress does not represent the American public very well at all.

Congress contains a much greater proportion of white, male, college-educated, professional, higher-income people than the population as a whole.

Some comparisons:◦ African-Americans

12% US Voting Age Population; 9% of the House◦ Latinos

7% US Voting Age Population; 6% of the House◦ Women

52% US Voting Age Population; 17% of the House

However, Congress appears very representative of the kinds of people who achieve positions of leadership in the great majority of American institutions.

It would be unlikely for an electoral system such as ours to produce a Congress that looks like a random sample of the voting age population.

What it does produce is a sample of local political/social elites from the many divisions in American society.

Electoral politics leads members to support policies that produce particularized benefits.

Members promote narrowly targeted programs, projects, and tax breaks for constituents and supporting groups without worrying about their impact on national spending and revenues.

This creates a collective action problem and answers the question as to why individual members of congress making “good” decisions for their districts can so easily make collectively “bad” decisions for the country as a whole.

Virtually any proposal will attract more support if the benefits it confers can be sliced up and allocated in identifiable packages to individual states and districts.

Policies are deliberately designed to distribute particularized benefits broadly even when that makes no objective sense.

As a consequence, resources are not concentrated where they are needed the most (or where they can be used most efficiently).

They are wasted and their impact diluted.

This also creates the incentive for members to logroll.

Individual members gain politically by supporting each other’s projects or tax breaks in return for support of their own.

However, when all follow this plan, they all may end up worse off politically when they get collectively blamed for the aggregate consequences.

Like, NOW, for example.

Another consequence of electoral politics is that Congress serves the vocal, organized, and active.

The system naturally favors any politically attentive group that is present in significant numbers in a large number of states or districts.

For example veterans or social security recipients.

But large numbers are not essential. Money and organization also count.

Remember something we talked about earlier in the semester.

What’s an incumbent’s most effective campaign strategy?

This helps interest groups gain some ground on politicians.

Sometimes they don’t have to “buy” members with their contributions to be effective.

They just have to threaten to support the opposition if the incumbent doesn’t stay in line.

The NRA is very effective at this.

This has created quite a problem for members, because it creates the incentive to stay below the radar, as not to offend any one particular, well organized group with their voting behavior.

However, this has become more difficult. This is one reason why we see the most

recent Congresses try to keep things behind closed doors even though they were apt to talk about the need for transparency.

Party leaders face the reality that members keep their jobs by pleasing the voters, not the congressional party.

Leaders can count on loyalty only to the degree that members believe the chances for reelection are higher for loyalty than defection.

To be effective party leaders need the authority to reward cooperation with the party and punish defection from the party.

Just how much power members are willing to delegate to party leaders depends on how worried members are that party leaders will use that power in ways that are harmful to members’ reelection chances.

In general, the more unified party members are ideologically, the more authority they are willing to delegate.

This is called conditional party government.

During the 1950s and 1960s the Democratic Party was split between the north and the south.

The job of party leaders was not to get members to toe the party line, but to actually find common ground that conservative southern Democrats and liberal northern Democrats could agree on.

Members voted their districts first when policies conflicted with their districts’ preferences.

Additionally, the party leadership was fine with this arrangement because they were chosen by the members to serve this exact purpose.

During the 1970s this division between the north and the south began to fade.◦ More liberal northern Democrats began to get

elected, overpowering the conservative southern Democrats

◦ Conservative southern white voters began to vote Republican

◦ African American began to vote Democrat These things combined to “cleanse” the

Democrat Party making it much more cohesive. They inadvertently did the same thing to the Republican Party.

Basically since Reagan’s election in 1980 there have been increasingly clear partisan divisions between the two major parties.

The parties became more unified. The parties became more ideologically polarized. Additionally, the constituencies became more

polarized. And this is reflected in members’ voting behavior. Party labels have become much more predictive in

members’ vote choices than in the past. This makes it much more clear for voters when

trying to determine how their vote choices will translate into congressional behavior.