Constituency Influence on Congressional Decision-Making

Constituency Influence on Congressional Decision-Making
Author: Joseph R. Foster
Publisher:
Total Pages: 79
Release: 2001-01-01
Genre: Political science
ISBN: 9781423531951

Like many areas of study within Political Science, the influence of constituency on congressional voting is often assumed, but not often demonstrated empirically. Some studies claim constituency has a strong impact; others claim is it nonexistent. In an attempt to find an overall pattern in the literature, I examine numerous studies of congressional decision-making. Specifically I conduct a meta-analysis of 31 studies of constituency influence on congressional voting. I introduce theoretical arguments concerning the impact of constituency, ideology, and party identification on the voting decisions made by members of Congress. I introduce the concept of meta-analysis and describe the specific steps taken in conducting this analysis of congressional voting. The results indicate that constituency influence is a significant predictor of congressional voting, but that ideology and party identification demonstrate a stronger effect than constituency.

Congressional Decision-making: Testing Constituent Interest Versus the National Interest

Congressional Decision-making: Testing Constituent Interest Versus the National Interest
Author: Tevin Devon Wilson
Publisher:
Total Pages: 94
Release: 2016
Genre:
ISBN:

Congressional decision-making involves making representatives subject to different factors that can influence their decisions. Constituents can be an important influencer because members of Congress are sent to Washington to represent them, but the national interest can play a role on some issues. The approach of this paper takes a look at what factors influence members of Congress when they are deciding how to vote. Trade and the relationship between the United States and China are used because of the complexity of the issue and the overlap between constituency interest and the national interest. This paper theorizes that members of Congress depending on the importance of trade, with China, to their district or what committee members sit on impact their decision-making. The end result of this study shows little to no support for theories laid out in the paper, but the overall concept of the papers warranted consideration.

Congressmen's Voting Decisions

Congressmen's Voting Decisions
Author: John W. Kingdon
Publisher: University of Michigan Press
Total Pages: 372
Release: 1989
Genre: Political Science
ISBN: 9780472064014

A study of the process by which members of Congress arrive at roll call voting decisions

Tyranny of the Minority

Tyranny of the Minority
Author: Benjamin Bishin
Publisher: Temple University Press
Total Pages: 216
Release: 2009-04-28
Genre: Political Science
ISBN: 1592136605

Why do special interests defeat the people's will in American politics?

All Politics is Local - Congressional Decision-making in Foreign Policy

All Politics is Local - Congressional Decision-making in Foreign Policy
Author: Karl Lemberg
Publisher: GRIN Verlag
Total Pages: 78
Release: 2007-10
Genre: Political Science
ISBN: 3638658287

Seminar paper from the year 2003 in the subject Politics - International Politics - Region: USA, grade: 1,0, University of Potsdam, course: Public policy and institutions, 13 entries in the bibliography, language: English, abstract: The dominant player in international politics is unmistakably the United States of America. U.S. economic, military and cultural superiority is shaping world politics and setting the stage for the next generation. U.S. foreign policy features the image of the United States President and to a lesser extent that of the Secretary of State and Defense. They are the predominant figures that drive U.S. foreign policy on the international stage. The system of checks and balances neatly involves two branches of government - executive and legislative - in a construct of interdependence. Congress is the government branch of 'the people'. The two-year term cycles for House Representatives and the large number of districts make Congress the most 'representative' institution in the U.S. government. In contemporary political science the state of being represented is described by 'Principle-Agent-Relationship', in which the representative - the agent - closely represents his constituency - the principle. "It doesn′t pay off for my constituency" said Rep. Grace Napolitano (D-CA) when asked, why she wanted to get off of the House International Relations Committee (HIRC). This incident was my first impression of foreign policy in the U.S. Congress. Having heard that, I went to a HIRC oversight hearing to see how they conduct their business. What struck me most was the fact that the members devoted approx. half of their speaking time of total five minutes to the actual issue at stake and the other half to an issue that was absolutely irrelevant to the pending business. As I found out later, the irrelevant issues were important for the individual member to have been mentioned to the panel and C-SPAN. The subsequent past months I spent on 'the Hill', obser

Participation in Congress

Participation in Congress
Author: Richard L. Hall
Publisher: Yale University Press
Total Pages: 324
Release: 1998-09-10
Genre: Political Science
ISBN: 9780300076516

For every issue that arises on the legislative agenda, each member of Congress must make two decisions: What position to take and how active to be. The first has been thoroughly studied. But little is understood about the second. In this landmark book, a leading scholar of congressional studies draws on extensive interviews and congressional documents to uncover when and how members of congress participate at the subcommittee, committee, and floor stages of legislative decision making. Richard L. Hall develops an original theory to account for varying levels of participation across members and issues, within House and Senate, and across pre- and postreform periods of the modern Congress. By closely analyzing behavior on sixty bills in the areas of agriculture, human resources, and commerce, Hall finds that participation at each stage of the legislative process is rarely universal and never equal. On any given issue, most members who are eligible to participate forego the opportunity to do so, leaving a self-selected few to deliberate on the policy. These active members often do not reflect the values and interests evident in their parent chamber. A deeper understanding of congressional participation, the author contends, informs related inquiries into how well members of congress represent constituents' interests, what factors influence legislative priorities, how members gain legislative leverage on specific issues, and how well collective choice in Congress meets democratic standards of representative deliberation.

Multiple Representation

Multiple Representation
Author: Ruoxi Li
Publisher:
Total Pages: 175
Release: 2015
Genre:
ISBN:

This dissertation project explores how elected legislators appease different segments of society when confronted with conflicts of interests. I demonstrate that legislators tailor their actions based on different levels of constituency issue attention, respond to multiple interests by behaving strategically across different stages of the legislative process, thus position themselves in the most favorable light. Findings from this project have implications for legislative representation, interest group politics, and political engagement. Specifically, the dissertation takes the format of three papers and tackles the research topic from three distinct and relevant angles. The first paper focuses on the effect of constituency issue attention on legislative behavior, including bill sponsorship, floor debate, and roll call votes. I argue that, when constituencies pay more attention to a particular policy issue, legislators are likely to be more diligent by participating more in the legislative process, and more responsive by better reflecting district preference in their roll call votes. Using the 2006 Cooperative Congressional Election Study (CCES) data which directly measure congressional district-level constituency attention, I find that, as expected, legislators increase their levels of legislative activities when constituencies show higher level of attentiveness to a particular issue; yet contrary to expectation, legislators do not become more responsive in their roll call votes when constituency pay more attention. In the second paper, I take a nuanced look at congressional representation by examining how constituencies, sub-constituencies, and interest groups influence bill co-sponsorship, floor debate, and final votes. With a formal model explaining the mechanism through which voters and interest groups influence legislators' behavior, I propose a multiple representation theory that argues 1) the general geographic constituency is represented through legislative voting decisions, 2) the engaged sub-constituencies and organized groups are represented through non-voting activities such as co-sponsorship and floor debate. Focusing on the House of Representatives, I include in the data direct measures of public opinion (CCES, 2006-2008), interest group contributions, and legislative activities including an original dataset for floor debate participation. I find that the geographic constituency has a strong effect on voting decisions yet very limited effect on co-sponsorship or floor debate. It is interest group membership and PAC donations that affect co-sponsorship and debate. This multiple representation pattern is found on almost all of the domestic issues. On international issues such as trade policies, representatives' partisan affiliation and ideology are the most influential factors; constituencies, sub-constituencies, and interest groups are of secondary importance. The third paper studies representation in the Senate. I begin by applying the multiple representation theory in the context of senatorial politics and examining the same ten policy issues. The results suggest that while there are important similarities between representation in the Senate and that in the House, there are also significant differences. The most important difference is that there is not a multiple representation pattern in the Senate. Senators appear to be unresponsive to the geographic constituencies. To understand the senators' seeming unrepresentativeness, I take into consideration the senate's electoral and institutional features and hypothesize that state size, heterogeneity, and senate election cycles play a mediating role. The results suggest that senators' longer term is partially responsible for the unresponsiveness. Senators facing immediate re-election are in fact highly responsive to the geographic constituency, but the rest of the senators are not. This contrast between the House and the Senate on responsiveness clarifies the mechanism of legislative accountability: responsiveness is closely related to the electoral pressure from imminent re-elections, as observed in the behavior among House representatives and senators who were in the last two years of their terms; when the electoral pressure was not an immediate concern, other considerations such as partisanship and ideology take priority, as observed in the behavior among senators who were in the earlier years of their terms.