This book examines the nature of representation in democracy, focusing specifically on the factors shaping constituent evaluations of the US House Representatives and the resulting implications for government.

This book examines the nature of representation in democracy, focusing specifically on the factors shaping constituent evaluations of the US House Representatives and the resulting implications for government.

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

Examines how ordinary citizens view the representative process in Congress.

"This book discusses the theories of the leading writers on representation, including Burke, Bentham and the two Mills in England, Madison and Calhoun in America and the Abbé Sieyès in France. It examines the relationship between ideas which emphasize the representation of interests (whether these be of individuals, sections or classes) and ideas which emphasize the representation of opinion (whether these be of individuals, groups or parties). It also examines the results of recent empirical research on the representative process and discusses the extent to which these findings support or undermine the theories of earlier writers. Finally, the book discusses the functions of political representation under eight headings, in a way which lays the foundation for a value-free analysis of the nature of representative relationships and processes"--Jacket.

At the heart of a representative democracy is the need for open lines of communication between citizens and their representatives. This dissertation is comprised of three stand-alone chapters which examine how responsive American public officials are to constituent communications, Americans' attitudes about elite responsiveness, and how race and gender condition this relationship. In the first chapter, I conduct the first meta-analysis of all experiments that examine how responsive public officials are to constituent communication. I demonstrate at a higher level of precision than any single study the degree to which legislators are biased against racial and ethnic minorities, and find that at least some of these inequalities in responsiveness are driven by personal biases of public officials, rather than strategic, electoral considerations. In the second chapter, I use three survey experiments to examine how individuals evaluate legislative responsiveness to constituent communication. I find that, contrary to the assumptions of many scholars, the personal tone and friendliness of legislative communication often matter more for constituents' evaluations than the actual substance of the communication itself. I develop a statistical measure of legislative responsiveness based on these results and demonstrate its use through a re-analysis of a prominent audit study. In the final chapter, I show how evaluations of legislative responsiveness are conditioned by gender. Female legislators, but not male legislators, are penalized when they take longer to respond to constituents, yet they are not rewarded as much as men are when they use a friendly tone. In fact, it is individuals that hold the most positive views of women that then penalize them when they do not provide quality responsiveness to constituents. These findings suggest that holding women to high standards results in a double-bind for female legislators. As a whole, this dissertation contributes to the burgeoning literature on elite responsiveness by examining how representational home-styles (the way legislators present themselves to their constituents) shape citizens' perceptions of representation. Viewing legislative communication as a "two-way street'' rather than an elite-centered phenomenon is crucial to understanding how to restore trust in the political process.

An investigation of policy preferences in the U.S. and how group opinion affects political representation. While it is often assumed that policymakers favor the interests of some citizens at the expense of others, it is not always evident when and how groups' interests differ or what it means when they do. Who Gets Represented? challenges the usual assumption that the preferences of any one group—women, African Americans, or the middle class—are incompatible with the preferences of other groups. The book analyzes differences across income, education, racial, and partisan groups and investigates whether and how differences in group opinion matter with regard to political representation. Part I examines opinions among social and racial groups. Relying on an innovative matching technique, contributors Marisa Abrajano and Keith Poole link respondents in different surveys to show that racial and ethnic groups do not, as previously thought, predictably embrace similar attitudes about social welfare. Katherine Cramer Walsh finds that, although preferences on health care policy and government intervention are often surprisingly similar across class lines, different income groups can maintain the same policy preferences for different reasons. Part II turns to how group interests translate into policy outcomes, with a focus on differences in representation between income groups. James Druckman and Lawrence Jacobs analyze Ronald Reagan's response to private polling data during his presidency and show how different electorally significant groups—Republicans, the wealthy, religious conservatives—wielded disproportionate influence on Reagan's policy positions. Christopher Wlezien and Stuart Soroka show that politicians' responsiveness to the preferences of constituents within different income groups can be surprisingly even-handed. Analyzing data from 1876 to the present, Wesley Hussey and John Zaller focus on the important role of political parties, vis-à-vis constituents' preferences, for legislators' behavior. Who Gets Represented? upends several long-held assumptions, among them the growing conventional wisdom that income plays in American politics and the assumption that certain groups will always—or will never—have common interests. Similarities among group opinions are as significant as differences for understanding political representation. Who Gets Represented? offers important and surprising answers to the question it raises.