Approaches to Studying Policy Representation

Abstract

Some studies of policy representation test hypotheses about the relationship between citizens' views and elites' positions on multiple issues by proceeding one issue at a time. Others summarize citizens' and elites' preferences with “ideology scores” and test hypotheses with these. I show that approach is flawed. It misinterprets citizens' ideology scores as summaries of policy preferences, but these scores actually measure ideological consistency across areas: how often citizens' ideal policies are liberal or conservative. Examples show how attending to this distinction overturns conventional wisdom: legislators appear similarly moderate as citizens, not more extreme; however, politically engaged citizens appear especially moderate.

Centrist by Comparison: Extremism and the Expansion of the Political Spectrum

“…An important step in this direction is to allow survey respondents to express policy preferences on a wider range than it is currently done (see Broockman 2016). In general, further research using either quantitative or qualitative approaches would be sorely needed for a better understanding of the ways in which extremism shapes public opinion in contemporary US.…”

“…We chose these highly salient issues to avoid obtaining large effect sizes simply because respondents are unfamiliar with policy debates: in this sense using these issues make our test conservative. The specific policy options were modeled on a recent paper by Broockman (2016) who collected and classified the positions of all senators from the 113th Congress on these issues. Table 2 reports each of the policies we used in the six experiments.…”

“…As a consequence, while the literature in comparative politics has produced numerous studies seeking to explain political extremism (e.g. Ezrow et al, 2013, research on American politics has neglected the study of non-mainstream policy views, and the effect of platforms that are on the fringes of the political spectrum (though, see Bailey et al 2012;Broockman 2016).…”

Growing numbers, growing influence? A comparative study of policy congruence between parliaments and citizens of immigrant origin

“…Studies focusing on Latino representation in the United States apply such a simplified approach using only left-right placements (see, e.g., Welch & Hibbing 1984;Wallace 2014). For a critical discussion, see Thomassen (2012);Broockman (2016). 12.…”

On the Meaning of Survey Reports of Roll‐Call “Votes”

“…In response to criticism about existing survey measures of preferences being subject to sampling and measurement error (e.g., Achen 1977Achen , 1978Clinton 2006;Wright, Erikson, and McIver 1985), scholars have subsequently embraced the idea of asking ordinary citizens how they would vote on specific roll-call votes, what we call "survey roll-call measures." The promise of such measures is transparent: Because survey respondents are now making the same binary choice as legislators, their responses are presumably informative of their preferences over outcomes in the same way as legislators' votes (Broockman 2016;Lax and Phillips 2009). To assess the nature of representation, scholars can then compare member votes on specific roll-calls to survey respondent preferences elicited about those same roll-calls or use a set of roll-call votes in joint scaling procedures to provide more precise measures of citizen and legislator preferences in a common space (e.g., Bafumi and Herron 2010;Clinton 2006;Gerber and Lewis 2004;Tausanovitch and Warshaw 2013).…”