Do Constituents Influence Issue-Specific Bill Sponsorship?

Abstract

Bill sponsorship is a valuable form of legislative activity in which all legislators are free to signal priorities, stake out positions, and influence legislative agendas. However, decisions to hone in on specific issues have been mostly overlooked, resulting in drivers of issue-specific sponsorship remaining unclear. A reasonable place to look for drivers is constituent preferences, given the representational responsibilities underlying most legislative behavior. To address this question, I leverage advances in opinion estimation to generate a new fine-grained measure of constituent issue preferences at the district level. By keeping the focus on issues, this approach is preferable to other measures of constituent preferences, in that it assumes nothing about constituents’ ideology. Through numerous tests across several issues spanning the 109th to 113th Congresses, I find a largely indirect effect of preferences on sponsorship through employment proxies, yet no consistent direct impact from constituents, opposite expectations of the delegate model of representation.

Parliamentary Questions as an Instrument for Geographic Representation: The Hard Case of Portugal

“…Another consistent finding in our analysis is the influence of committee membership on an MP’s decision to take up an issue, which suggests the importance of the division of labour and policy specialization within Portuguese parliamentary groups. Interestingly, these results are concordant with those on the MP‐constituency relationship in a different legislature, the US Congress, leading the author to conclude that “while constituents may play a role, at best it seems that it is an indirect and mixed one, with institutional factors such as committee membership being a much more consistent driver of issue sponsorship” (Waggoner : 732).…”

“…Another consistent finding across topics and problem specifications is the positive and significant impact of committee membership (purged of the effect of district characteristics). Regardless of whether supply (MPs’ preferences for a specific committee) or demand (party leaders’ decisions) factors prevail in committee assignment, this result reveals that the division of policy portfolios within parliamentary parties is one of the main predictors of individual agendas (Louwerse and Otjes ; Waggoner ).…”

“…This is an indirect measure of issue salience in the constituency similar to that used byWaggoner (2019). Interestingly, while he reports no consistent direct impact of constituent preferences, measured via survey data, on the content of bill sponsorship, he detects an impact of district characteristics, measured as the percentage of constituents working in specific sectors.…”

Exploring Responsiveness in the U.S. House of Representatives

“…Given the influence of "bill managers" on legislators' options for moving bills through and out of committees (Evans 1991;Hall and Evans 1990), I include two key controls for whether a legislator was a member of a powerful committee (rules, ways and means, or appropriations) and also, whether a legislator was a subcommittee chair, given that these are the workhorses of policy in the chamber. And finally, given the influence of district characteristics on legislative 12 behavior (Waggoner 2018), I adopt Fowler and Hall's (2016) strategy for accounting for issue specific district characteristics using census data, including, percent in district as military personnel (defense model), percent in district in poverty (economy model), percent in district as farm workers (agriculture model), percent in district as education workers (education model), percent of the population over 64 years old (health model), and finally percent of the district that is African American (civil rights/liberties model). 13 In light of the dichotomous variables of bill topics (e.g., Defense bill=1; Non-Defense Bill=0), I estimate six separate multilevel logistic regressions, each with the dependent variable corresponding to a specific issue, with random effects specified for individual legislators, nested For a detailing of the MRP procedure broadly, see Lax and Phillips (2009b, 109-112).…”

“…Legislators may not be as representative of and responsive to constituents as some consider (Bafumi and Herron 2010;Fowler and Hall 2016). And still others find evidence responsiveness, but in conditional, limited, and indirect contexts (Clinton 2006;Lax and Phillips 2012;Waggoner 2018).…”