The Policy Legacy of Congressional Campaigns

Tracy SulkinAssistant Professor

Department of Political ScienceUniversity of Illinois, Urbana-Champaign

Why Congressional Campaigns Matter

They can affect voters

-choice of candidate

-turnout decisions

-knowledge and interest in politics

They can affect winners

-uptake of challengers’ issues

-promise-keeping

Why The Lack of Attention to the Campaigns-Policy Linkage?

Data constraints The “Two Congresses” division of labor in legislative studies research

-legislators’ careers in Washington vs.

-their careers in their districts or states

Do winning legislators respond to the critiques raised by their challengers?

Are campaign appeals just "cheap talk" or do elected officials keep their campaign promises?

Do candidates' decisions to picture certain types of people in their ads serve as a meaningful signal about their subsequent behavior?

Questions to be Addressed

Candidate Strategy

Highlight your own accomplishments and qualities and call the opponent’s into question

Signal to relevant constituencies that you are “one of them”

Discuss issues on which you enjoy the advantage

-issue ownership strategy

-riding the wave strategy

Types of Legislative ActivityVoting

-On roll calls

Agenda-Setting-Introduction of legislation (bills &

resolutions)-Cosponsorship

Deliberation-Floor statements-Participation in committees and

subcommittees

Defining Uptake

Conceptual Definition:The extent to which issues highlighted by challengers in their campaigns are pursued by winning legislators in their activity in office.

Measured As:The number of bills, resolutions, and amendments

introduced or cosponsored, and the number of floor statements made, by a legislator on his or her challenger's top three issue themes from the campaign (measured by news coverage of the campaign).

The Theory Summarized  

Challengers focus their campaigns on their opponents’ issue weaknesses.  This threat leads legislators to become attentive to their challengers’ issues and use their time in office to act to remedy their weaknesses. To accomplish this goal, they use the legislative activities at their disposal to gain a reputation for action on these issues. Engaging in this credit-claiming pays off for them in the next campaign.

Anecdotal Evidence of Uptake 

1988 Tim Johnson (D, SD) vs. David Volk

"Just as Volk was preparing to attack Johnson for what he deemed the incumbent's failure to protect Social Security recipients, Johnson immunized himself by announcing his cosponsorship of a bill designed to remove the Social Security trust fund from budget-deficit calculations" 1988 Jim Jontz (D, IN) vs. Pat Williams

"On a range of issues that Williams might want to use during the campaign, Jontz can head her off at the pass. He was given a seat on the Agriculture Committee when he got to Washington in 1987 and has used it to good advantage," focusing in particular on drought-relief legislation.

Sample:400 representatives and 51 senators elected in 1988-

1992 and followed across their next terms

Legislative Activities:17,166 Introductions151,931 Cosponsorships

31,144 Floor Statements

Campaign Themes:Content analysis of campaign coverage to identify top

three issue themes in each campaign

Data and Coding Procedures

Issue Attention in Campaignsand in Congress

# of Campaigns # of Bills and Resolutions Agriculture Budget Civil Rights and Civil Liberties Crime Defense Economy Education Environment Family Issues Foreign Policy Health Immigration Labor and Trade Regulation Social Security Taxes Welfare

64 185 137 166 148 163 98

154 26 31

117 4 86 97 32

185 38

1268 813 1061 2473 2995 2301 1613 4368 695 2843 4490 700 5007 5090 639 1325 1526

Uptake in Legislative Activity

Calculating Uptake:

# of activities on challenger’s themes/total number of activities

How Does Uptake Vary Across Legislators?

Range—0-73% of legislators’ agendas

Mean—14% for the House

19% for the Senate

Explaining Variation in Uptake Levels

What factors don’t matter?PartySeniorityCharacteristics of the constituency

What factors do matter?Ideological extremityElectoral vulnerability

The Effects of Uptake

On legislators’ electoral fortunes?Increases their vote shares in the next electionMakes it less likely that they will face an experienced challenger

 On public policy outputs?

Bills and resolutions that “begin” as uptake are just as likely to pass as any other billIn the 101st-105th Congresses, 66 uptake measures introduced by the sample became law

Conclusions about Uptake

Challengers’ campaigns shape the content of winning legislators' activity in office.

Legislators’ uptake levels serve as an indicator of their responsiveness to salient issues.

Individual uptake decisions have downstream consequences for public policy outputs.

Promise-KeepingDefinition:

The extent to which campaign appeals provide strong signals about legislators’ behavior in office.

Questions:Are those legislators who raise an issue in their campaigns more active on it in Congress?

Are those who show pictures of particular demographic and occupational groups in their advertising more likely to pursue policies to help those groups?

Does the language that candidates use when talking about issues serve as a signal about their subsequent probability of being active on those issues?

Two Campaign Appeals about Education

John Sweeney (R-NY)

“Schools—first, last, and always about children.”

Ernie Fletcher (R-KY)

"Fletcher wants parents and teachers, not Washington bureaucrats, to control education. He voted to make class sizes smaller so children get the attention they deserve, and for increased funding for disadvantaged children so no child is left behind."

Data SourcesSample:

130 winning House candidates in the 2000 election

Legislative Activities:Bills and resolutions introduced and cosponsored by the winners in the 107th Congress, from the Congressional Bills Project’s datasets

Campaign Appeals:Content analysis of candidates’ televised ads, from

storyboards made available by CMAG and the Wisconsin Ads Project

Coding Scheme

For issues:What issues were discussed?Were they discussed in reference to the candidate or the opponent?How specific was the claim?

For images:Were women, seniors, kids, African-Americans, Latinos, farmers, police, teachers, veterans/military personnel, workers, or businesspeople pictured?

Question #1—Do the images that candidates use serve as signals about their policy activity in Congress?

For the majority of the demographic and occupational groups, those who picture them engage in more activity on issues of interest to them than those who do not picture them

Imagery seems to serve as a better predictor of Democrats’ behavior than Republicans’

Question #2-Are those who talk about an issue in their campaigns more active on it in the following Congress than those who do not?

Effect of talking about yourself?-On 10 of the 16 issues, those who had made at least one claim about the issue were more active than those who had made no claim

Effect of talking about your opponent-Matters for only 4 issues, and for 3 of those, the effect is negative!

Question #3--Does specificity matter? Do candidates who make more detailed appeals follow through more than those who are vague?

Specificity “matters” for 5 of the 16 issues

For the other issues, mentioning the issue seems to be the important distinction—not how it was discussed

Conclusions about Promise-KeepingDiscussing an issue or picturing a group does seem to indicate legislators’ policy commitments

Systematic linkages exist between how candidates make appeals and whether they follow through on them

So, campaigns are more than just "cheap talk"

Campaigns, Legislative Behavior, and Public Policy

Campaigns have a legacy in individual legislative activity and in collective public policy outputs, so they clearly “matter”

Work that bridges the gap between the “Two Congresses” has the potential to raise new questions and provide fresh insight into old ones

Sources of Data on Legislative Activity

Policy Agendas Project-- http://www.policyagendas.org

Congressional Bills Project—http://www.congressionalbills.org

THOMAS—http://thomas.loc.gov

Sources of Data on Campaign AdsNational Journal--http://nationaljournal.com/members/adspotlight/2006

Wisconsin Advertising Project/CMAG--http://www.polisci.wisc.edu/tvadvertising

Class Project IdeasDevelop a simple coding scheme for negativity in ads. Assign each student one candidate’s storyboards and have them use the scheme to code them. Calculate average levels of negativity across groups of interest (e.g., incumbents vs. challengers, Democrats vs. Republicans.)

Use the Policy Agendas Project data tool to graph attention to a particular issue across time. Does it rise and fall as one might expect given outside events?

Use THOMAS to identify all of the activities undertaken by your legislator. Which policy areas seem most important to this person?