Cayton, Adam and Brian Crisher. Forthcoming. “Disaster, Distributive Politics, and the Persistence of Partisan Divides on Climate Policy.” Political Research Quarterly.
Can district interests mitigate partisan differences over climate policy? While debates over climate policy are highly partisan, local economic and national defense interests may create cross-cutting pressures that reduce polarization. Here, we analyze whether district characteristics mitigate partisan differences on climate change, particularly public opinion and exposure of military installations to weather-related damage. Using two studies – one using a large language model to measure the positions lawmakers take in congressional email newsletters and another employing a survey experiment testing framing effects – we assess whether national defense and economic concerns mitigate partisan divisions. Our findings suggest that Republicans representing districts where severe weather events threaten local military infrastructure express more support for “pro-climate” policy than other Republicans, and that Democrats representing environmentally conservative districts express less support. However, our experiment found no evidence that the issue frame influences voters’ opinions.
We examine how legislative representation and issue activism change as parties polarize on an issue by examining immigration politics in the U.S. House. Using an original data set of the policy positions in immigration bills from 1983 to 2014, an original coding of email newsletters from 2010 to 2020, and existing speech data, we show that increased partisan disagreement on immigration and the sorting of immigrants into the Democratic Party changed the way lawmakers represent their districts on that issue. Larger foreign-born populations consistently have representatives who take pro-immigration positions, but the effect has changed from a direct effect to one mediated by partisanship. Issue attention also became asymmetrical, with Democratic lawmakers who represent more immigrants being more active on immigration policy, but no such relationship for Republicans. This suggests that for Democrats, immigration is a distributive issue driven by geographically concentrated “policy demanders” but for Republicans, it is a partisan issue that is less connected to geography. These findings have implications for who and where new policy proposals come from.
How do members of Congress respond to economic shocks in their districts? This study uses constituency-level unemployment data from 2006–2011 and data on the policy instruments included in individual bills to estimate the district-level effects of the Great Recession on the kinds of policies individual lawmakers introduce. Few previous studies have examined lawmaker responsiveness to rapid changes in district conditions and fewer still examine policy instruments instead of issue priorities. Measuring instruments matters because they capture what the policy actually does (as opposed to what it is about) which is both consequential and ideologically loaded. The results show that Democrats and Republicans respond differently. Republicans are more responsive, particularly with policy instruments that conform to their ideology, while Democrats are as likely (in the case of tax cuts), or more likely (in the case of spending) to support economic stimulus without an economic crisis. Differences in the macropolitical situation cannot be ruled out as an explanation of the differences between parties.
The electoral connection incentivizes representatives to take positions that please most of their constituents. However, on votes for which we have data, lawmakers vote against majority opinion in their district on one out of every three high profile roll calls in the U.S. House. This rate of “incongruent voting” is much higher for Republican lawmakers, but they do not appear to be punished for it at higher rates than Democrats on Election Day. Why? Research in political psychology shows that citizens hold both policy specific and identity-based symbolic preferences, that these preferences are weakly correlated, and that incongruous symbolic identity and policy preferences are more common among Republican voters than Democrats. While previous work on representation has treated this fact as a nuisance, we argue that it reflects two real dimensions of political ideology that voters use to evaluate lawmakers. Using four years of CCES data, district level measures of opinion, and the roll call record, we find that both dimensions of ideology matter for how lawmakers cast roll calls, and that the operational-symbolic disconnect in public opinion leads to different kinds of representation for each party.
Ideological differences in Congress are often presented as disagreement over what the government should do, but no study has systematically measured the policy instruments in bills. This article uses an original data set of policy instruments in all substantive House bills from 2007 to 2012 to test an argument about the kinds of instruments that most divide the contemporary ideological/partisan coalitions and uses an exploratory factor analysis of policy substance (combinations of instruments and topics) that lawmakers support to reveal the structure and content of the policy space. The analysis shows that disagreement
over whether to increase or decrease taxes and spending are more divisive than disagreement over regulations and communication. Policy ideologies are characterized by a dominant economic dimension that is highly correlated with NOMINATE 's first dimension, but with lower polarization and explanatory power. A second dimension that is conceptually similar to NOMINATE 's second, and many smaller, issue-specific dimensions also exist.
In the article, we argue that closer competition for control of the House of Representatives and increases in the cost of campaigns have elevated the importance of campaign fundraising in the committee assignment process. When the majority party holds a narrow margin, we expect them to give freshmen and electorally marginal lawmakers abnormally lucrative committee assignments. We test this argument using both a novel measure of committee fundraising quality and data on committee assignments, campaign contributions, and election results from 1985 to 2012. We find support for our expectation regarding freshmen, but not marginal lawmakers. Our findings are consistent with the view that party leaders are using committee assignments to increase their party’s total fundraising when control of the chamber is close, possibly at the expense of other goals. We show how recent political trends are changing the dynamics of the committee assignment process, with implications for both the institution’s function and lawmaker behavior.
When constituent opinion and district conditions point in two different directions, which factor is most influential for representatives who face important legislative roll calls? To address this question, we combine four types of data for the period from 2000-2012: key congressional roll call votes, district-level survey data, objective measures of district conditions, and other district demographics. We show 1) that material conditions in a district have an effect on legislative behavior independent of constituents’ opinions; 2) that opinions are not always a better predictor of lawmaker decisions, compared to conditions; and 3) whether lawmakers tend to reflect constituent opinions or district conditions is a function of the demographic makeup of their districts.
While democratic theory suggests that representatives should be willing to adjust their issue positions to adapt to new circumstances, politicians face serious political risks from “flip flopping.” How do members of Congress balance these pressures? Using an original data set of district economic conditions and opinion from 2007 to 2010 and sets of repeated roll call votes, I leverage the exogenous shock of the Great Recession to explain position change on three major economic policies. I find that position change occurs in response to the constituency on final passage votes, but that partisanship exerts greater influence, especially on procedural votes. This novel test of responsiveness has implications for the nature of policy representation and the mechanisms behind aggregate responsiveness.
Why are some institutions quickly replaced while others endure for more than a century? Majority cycling over institutions is theoretically unavoidable, but politics provides few opportunities to study it empirically. Using data on state constitutional characteristics and legislative composition from 1834 to 2012, this paper advances the theory that institutions are more likely to be endogenously replaced when the society of actors differs from the time of enactment, and institutional characteristics can exacerbate or mitigate these risks. Results show that political change interacts with institutional particularism to preserve or undermine state constitutions. More particularistic constitutions have shorter life spans because they are more vulnerable to changes in the political environment.