Selection and Incentives in the Electoral Security‐Constituency Communication Relationship

Abstract

The relative importance of selection and incentives is essential for understanding how elections structure politicians’ behavior. I investigate the relative magnitudes of these two effects in the context of US House members’ constituency communication. Consistent with previous research, I find that there is a negative cross‐sectional relationship between electoral security and the intensity of constituency communication. The negative relationship holds in a panel‐data setting where only within‐legislator variation in electoral security is used to identify the effect of electoral security on legislator behavior. Due to the likely presence of myopic voters, the impact of electoral security increases as the election approaches. Point estimates suggest that the total effect is almost entirely driven by incentives, and I am able to reject the hypothesis that the incentive effect is zero at conventional levels of statistical significance.

Out‐of‐District Donors and Representation in the US House

“…Finally, the District Safety and Out‐of‐District Donation hypotheses require additional variables. District Safety is measured with Cook Partisan Voter Index (PVI) scores, which are the deviation of a member's district from the national two‐party presidential vote of the candidate associated with the member's party across the last two elections (e.g., Peskowitz 2018). 13.…”

The Personalization of Electoral Rules: How Shifting Influence From Selectors to Voters Affects Party Unity

“…Re-election considerations are reflected in the weighted mean of the inducements offered by selectors and voters, which is multiplied by a factor ρi ≥ 0 to capture the importance of re-election to the MP. A key component of ρi is electoral vulnerability (Peskowitz, 2018;Sieberer and Ohmura, 2019), but it may also incorporate factors such as ambition and outside options. The relative importance of selectors and voters for re-election concerns is captured by the weight of voters ω ∈ [0,1], with the corresponding value for selectors being 1 − ω.…”

Constituent Communication Through Telephone Town Halls: A Field Experiment Involving Members of Congress

“…Different legislators develop different legislative styles (Bernhard, Sewell, and Sulkin ), and some—district advocates, for example—may be more likely than others to reach out to constituents regardless of cost. Beyond style, electorally insecure members also spend more resources on constituent communication, with increasing urgency as elections approach (Peskowitz ). Thus, the relative value of telephone town halls will vary, and the events will likely be more common for some members, in some districts, at some times.…”