Representational Style in Congress
Representational Style in Congress

Author: Justin Grimmer

Publisher: Cambridge University Press

Published: 2013-12-23

Total Pages: 215

ISBN-13: 110747051X

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This book demonstrates the consequences of legislators' strategic communication for representation in American politics. Representational Style in Congress shows how legislators present their work to cultivate constituent support. Using a massive new data set of texts from legislators and new statistical techniques to analyze the texts, this book provides comprehensive measures of what legislators say to constituents and explains why legislators adopt these styles. Using the new measures, Justin Grimmer shows how legislators affect how constituents evaluate their representatives and the consequences of strategic statements for political discourse. The introduction of new statistical techniques for political texts allows a more comprehensive and systematic analysis of what legislators say and why it matters than was previously possible. Using these new techniques, the book makes the compelling case that to understand political representation, we must understand what legislators say to constituents.

Representational Style in Congress
Representational Style in Congress

Author: Justin Grimmer

Publisher: Cambridge University Press

Published: 2013-12-23

Total Pages: 215

ISBN-13: 1107026474

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This book examines the consequences of legislators' strategic communication for representation, demonstrating how legislators present their work to cultivate constituent support. Using new statistical techniques to analyze massive data sets, Justin Grimmer makes the compelling case that to understand political representation, we must understand what legislators say to constituents.

Dilemmas of Representation
Dilemmas of Representation

Author: Sally Friedman

Publisher: SUNY Press

Published: 2007-05-03

Total Pages: 292

ISBN-13: 9780791470756

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In-depth analysis of the representational styles of several members of Congress from New York State.

Congress at the Grassroots
Congress at the Grassroots

Author: Richard F. Fenno Jr.

Publisher: Univ of North Carolina Press

Published: 2003-06-19

Total Pages: 187

ISBN-13: 0807860638

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However much politicians are demeaned and denounced in modern American society, our democracy could not work without them. For this reason, says Richard Fenno, their activities warrant our attention. In his pioneering book, Home Style, Fenno demonstrated that a close look at politicians at work in their districts can tell us a great deal about the process of representation. Here, Fenno employs a similarly revealing grassroots approach to explore how patterns of representation have changed in recent decades. Fenno focuses on two members of the U.S. House of Representatives who represented the same west-central Georgia district at different times: Jack Flynt, who served from the 1950s to the 1970s, and Mac Collins, who has held the seat in the 1990s. His on-the-scene observation of their differing representational styles--Flynt focuses on people, Collins on policy--reveals the ways in which social and demographic changes inspire shifts in representational strategies. More than a study of representational change in one district, Congress at the Grassroots also helps illuminate the larger subject of political change in the South and in the nation as a whole.

Representational Style
Representational Style

Author: Justin Ryan Grimmer

Publisher:

Published: 2010

Total Pages: 448

ISBN-13:

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Quantitative studies define representation through roll call votes, but roll call votes alone are insufficient to describe a legislator's representational style : how legislators respond, anticipate, and shape their constituents' preferences. Representational style is composed of three elements: how legislators invest their time and resources in Washington, their Washington styles ; the way they connect to their constituents in their district, their home styles ; and how they vote on legislation, their voting . In this book, I use new comprehensive, systematic, and verifiable measures of home style to demonstrate its central role in representational style. Home styles are important on their own as the primary way legislators define the representation provided to constituents. Legislators define diverse, stable, and nonpartisan home styles that reflect senators' multiple motivations in the institution. Home styles are also important because they are much more than cheap talk. I demonstrate that home styles are systematically related to what legislators do in Washington and how senators vote on controversial legislation, therefore providing a credible indicator of legislators' representational styles. Legislators also value opportunities to maintain their home styles, which bureaucrats exploit to cultivate support for their agencies. Because analyzing home styles across all legislators using standard methods and data is infeasible, I introduce a new Bayesian statistical model for political texts (estimated using a variational approximation, a deterministic alternative to MCMC) and an original collection of over 64,000 Senate press releases to measure home style.

The Challenge of Congressional Representation
The Challenge of Congressional Representation

Author: Richard F. Fenno

Publisher: Harvard University Press

Published: 2013-04-01

Total Pages: 270

ISBN-13: 0674074289

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At a moment when Congress is viewed by a skeptical public as hyper-partisan and dysfunctional, Richard Fenno provides a variegated picture of American representational politics. The Challenge of Congressional Representation offers an up-close-and-personal look at the complex relationship between members of Congress and their constituents back home.

Representation in Congress
Representation in Congress

Author: Kim Quaile Hill

Publisher: Cambridge University Press

Published: 2015-07-02

Total Pages: 237

ISBN-13: 1316301028

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Representation in Congress provides a theory of dyadic policy representation intended to account for when belief sharing, delegate, responsible party, trustee, and 'party elite led' models of representational linkage arise on specific policy issues. The book also presents empirical tests of most of the fundamental predictions for when such alternative models appear, and it presents tests of novel implications of the theory about other aspects of legislative behavior. Some of the latter tests resolve contradictory findings in the relevant, existing literature - such as whether and how electoral marginality affects representation, whether roll call vote extremism affects the re-election of incumbents, and what in fact is the representational behavior of switched seat legislators. All of the empirical tests provide evidence for the theory. Indeed, the full set of empirical tests provides evidence for the causal effects anticipated by the theory and much of the causal process behind those effects.

Legislative Style
Legislative Style

Author: William Bernhard

Publisher: University of Chicago Press

Published: 2018-02-01

Total Pages: 271

ISBN-13: 022651031X

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Once elected, members of Congress face difficult decisions about how to allocate their time and effort. On which issues should they focus? What is the right balance between working in one’s district and on Capitol Hill? How much should they engage with the media to cultivate a national reputation? William Bernhard and Tracy Sulkin argue that these decisions and others define a “legislative style” that aligns with a legislator’s ambitions, experiences, and personal inclinations, as well as any significant electoral and institutional constraints. Bernhard and Sulkin have developed a systematic approach for looking at legislative style through a variety of criteria, including the number of the bills passed, number of speeches given, amount of money raised, and the percentage of time a legislator voted in line with his or her party. Applying this to ten congresses, representing twenty years of congressional data, from 1989 to 2009, they reveal that legislators’ activity falls within five predictable styles. These styles remain relatively consistent throughout legislators’ time in office, though a legislator’s style can change as career goals evolve, as well as with changes to individual or larger political interests, as in redistricting or a majority shift. Offering insight into a number of enduring questions in legislative politics, Legislative Style is a rich and nuanced account of legislators’ activity on Capitol Hill.

Constituency Representation in Congress
Constituency Representation in Congress

Author: Kristina C. Miler

Publisher: Cambridge University Press

Published: 2010-09-27

Total Pages:

ISBN-13: 1139493159

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Congressional representation requires that legislators be aware of the interests of constituents in their districts and behave in ways that reflect the wishes of their constituents. But of the many constituents in their districts, who do legislators in Washington actually see, and who goes unseen? Moreover, how do these perceptions of constituents shape legislative behavior? This book answers these fundamental questions by developing a theory of legislative perception that leverages insights from cognitive psychology. Legislators are shown to see only a few constituents in their district on a given policy, namely those who donate to their campaigns and contact the legislative office, and fail to see many other relevant constituents. Legislators are also subsequently more likely to act on behalf of the constituents they see, while important constituents not seen by legislators are rarely represented in the policymaking process.

Congressional Communication in the Digital Age
Congressional Communication in the Digital Age

Author: Jocelyn Evans

Publisher: Routledge

Published: 2017-07-06

Total Pages: 190

ISBN-13: 1351754343

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Communication defines political representation. At the core of the representational relationship lies the interaction between principal and agent; the quality of this relationship is predicated upon the accessibility of effective channels of communication between the constituent and representative. Over the past decade, congressional websites have become the primary way constituents communicate with their members and a prominent place for members to communicate with constituents. Yet, as we move toward the third decade of the 21st century, little work has systematically analyzed this forum as a distinct representational space. In this book, Jocelyn Evans and Jessica Hayden offer a fresh, timely, and mixed-methods approach for understanding how the emergence of virtual offices has changed the representational relationship between constituents and members of Congress. Utilizing strong theoretical foundations, a broad historical perspective, elite interviews, and rich original datasets, Evans and Hayden present evidence that virtual offices operate as a distinct representational space, and they demonstrate that their use has resulted in unprecedented and ill-understood changes in representational behavior. Congressional Communication in the Digital Age contributes to the scholarship on representation theory and its application to the contemporary Congress. It is valuable reading for students and researchers interested in American politics, political communication, and legislative politics.