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.
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.
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.
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.
Constituents often fail to hold their representatives accountable for federal spending decisions—even though those very choices have a pervasive influence on American life. Why does this happen? Breaking new ground in the study of representation, The Impression of Influence demonstrates how legislators skillfully inform constituents with strategic communication and how this facilitates or undermines accountability. Using a massive collection of Congressional texts and innovative experiments and methods, the book shows how legislators create an impression of influence through credit claiming messages. Anticipating constituents' reactions, legislators claim credit for programs that elicit a positive response, making constituents believe their legislator is effectively representing their district. This spurs legislators to create and defend projects popular with their constituents. Yet legislators claim credit for much more—they announce projects long before they begin, deceptively imply they deserve credit for expenditures they had little role in securing, and boast about minuscule projects. Unfortunately, legislators get away with seeking credit broadly because constituents evaluate the actions that are reported, rather than the size of the expenditures. The Impression of Influence raises critical questions about how citizens hold their political representatives accountable and when deception is allowable in a democracy.
Thirty years ago there were nine African Americans in the U.S. House of Representatives. Today there are four times that number. In Going Home, the dean of congressional studies, Richard F. Fenno, explores what representation has meant—and means today—to black voters and to the politicians they have elected to office. Fenno follows the careers of four black representatives—Louis Stokes, Barbara Jordan, Chaka Fattah, and Stephanie Tubbs Jones—from their home districts to the halls of the Capitol. He finds that while these politicians had different visions of how they should represent their districts (in part based on their individual preferences, and in part based on the history of black politics in America), they shared crucial organizational and symbolic connections to their constituents. These connections, which draw on a sense of "linked fates," are ones that only black representatives can provide to black constituents. His detailed portraits and incisive analyses will be important for anyone interested in the workings of Congress or in black politics.
This is a book about the politics of representative democracy, written from the perspective of the politicians who make it work. Typically, political scientists study campaigns from the perspective of the voter and for the purpose of explaining election outcomes. But campaigns also need to be studied from the perspective of the candidate, for the purpose of understanding representation. Richard F. Fenno, Jr., traveled with ten U.S. senators as they campaigned in their home states-using what he calls the "drop in/drop out, tag along/hang around" method of research-to present a developmental picture of their activities. His focus here is on three such activities—pursuing a career, campaigning for office, and building constituency connections. Taken together, the three constitute the political underpinnings of representative democracy. Fenno describes the achievement, the testing, and the maintenance of representational relationships. He examines challengers and incumbents, winners and losers, and motivations, strategies, and behaviors; and he reports on differences, similarities, and patterns among them. In studying the candidates' varied careers, campaigns, and connections in stages and sequences and in depth—and in allowing us to hear them reflect on these experiences—Fenno has been able to offer rare insights into campaigns and elections, insights very different from conventional ones that concentrate on the behavior of voters. In its focus on the process of representative democracy, Senators on the Campaign Trail offers a rich, rounded, developmental view of some high-level individuals who work at the business of representation. For scholars, the book suggests some qualitative confirmation and added stimulation in forging generalizations about politicians. For citizens, the book argues for replacing the conventional blanket condemnation of our politicians, so prevalent today, with more discriminating judgments about what they do, and why and to what purpose they do it.
Being concerned with representation, this book is about an idea, a concept, a word. It is primarily a conceptual analysis, not a historical study of the way in which representative government has evolved, nor yet an empirical investigation of the behavior of contemporary representatives or the expectations voters have about them. Yet, although the book is about a word, it is not about mere words, not merely about words. For the social philosopher, for the social scientist, words are not "mere"; they are the tools of his trade and a vital part of his subject matter. Since human beings are not merely political animals but also language-using animals, their behavior is shaped by their ideas. What they do and how they do it depends upon how they see themselves and their world, and this in turn depends upon the concepts through which they see. Learning what "representation" means and learning how to represent are intimately connected. But even beyond this, the social theorist sees the world through a network of concepts. Our words define and delimit our world in important ways, and this is particularly true of the world of human and social things. For a zoologist may capture a rare specimen and simply observe it; but who can capture an instance of representation (or of power, or of interest)? Such things, too, can be observed, but the observation always presupposes at least a rudimentary conception of what representation (or power, or interest) is, what counts as representation, where it leaves off and some other phenomenon begins. Questions about what representation is, or is like, are not fully separable from the question of what "representation" means. This book approaches the former questions by way of the latter. This title is part of UC Press's Voices Revived program, which commemorates University of California Press's mission to seek out and cultivate the brightest minds and give them voice, reach, and impact. Drawing on a backlist dating to 1893, Voices Revived makes high-quality, peer-reviewed scholarship accessible once again using print-on-demand technology. This title was originally published in 1972. Being concerned with representation, this book is about an idea, a concept, a word. It is primarily a conceptual analysis, not a historical study of the way in which representative government has evolved, nor yet an empirical investigation of the behavior
The Handbook of Political Representation in Liberal Democracies offers a state-of-the-art assessment of the functioning of political representation in liberal democracies. In 34 chapters the world's leading scholars on the various aspects of political representation address eight broad themes: The concept and theories of political representation, its history and the main requisites for its development; elite orientations and behavior; descriptive representation; party government and representation; non-electoral forms of political participation and how they relate to political representation; the challenges to representative democracy originating from the growing importance of non-majoritarian institutions and social media; the rise of populism and its consequences for the functioning of representative democracy; the challenge caused by economic and political globlization: what does it mean for the functioning of political representation at the national leval and is it possible to develop institutions of representative democracy at a level above the state that meet the normative criteria of representative democracy and are supported by the people? The various chapters offer a comprehensive review of the literature on the various aspects of political representation. The main organizing principle of the Handbook is the chain of political representation, the chain connecting the interests and policy preferences of the people to public policy via political parties, parliament, and government. Most of the chapters assessing the functioning of the chain of political representation and its various links are based on original comparative political research. Comparative research on political representation and its various subfields has developed dramatically over the last decades so that even ten years ago a Handbook like this would have looked totally different.
In virtually every democratic nation in the world, political representation is defined by where citizens live. In the United States, for example, Congressional Districts are drawn every 10 years as lines on a map. Why do democratic governments define political representation this way? Are territorial electoral constituencies commensurate with basic principles of democratic legitimacy? And why might our commitments to these principles lead us to endorse a radical alternative: randomly assigning citizens to permanent, single-member electoral constituencies that each looks like the nation they collectively represent? Using the case of the founding period of the United States as an illustration, and drawing from classic sources in Western political theory, this book describes the conceptual, historical, and normative features of the electoral constituency. As an institution conceptually separate from the casting of votes, the electoral constituency is little studied. Its historical origins are often incorrectly described. And as a normative matter, the constituency is almost completely ignored. Raising these conceptual, historical and normative issues, the argument culminates with a novel thought experiment of imagining how politics might change under randomized, permanent, national electoral constituencies. By focusing on how citizens are formally defined for the purpose of political representation, The Concept of Constituency thus offers a novel approach to the central problems of political representation, democratic legitimacy, and institutional design.
