Do Constituents Influence Issue-Specific Bill Sponsorship?

• Author: Philip D. Waggoner
• DOI: 10.1177/1532673X18759644
• Published date: 01 July 2019
• Date: 01 July 2019
• Subject Matter: Articles

759644APRXXX10.1177/1532673X18759644American Politics ResearchWaggoner
research-article2018
Article
American Politics Research
2019, Vol. 47(4) 709 –738
Do Constituents
© The Author(s) 2018
Article reuse guidelines:
Influence Issue-Specific
sagepub.com/journals-permissions
https://doi.org/10.1177/1532673X18759644
DOI: 10.1177/1532673X18759644
journals.sagepub.com/home/apr
Bill Sponsorship?
Philip D. Waggoner1
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.
Keywords
bill sponsorship, representation, responsiveness, Congress, MRP
Congressional bill sponsorship has been shown to be an effective tool for
position-taking (Platt & Sinclair-Chapman, 2008; Rocca & Gordon, 2010;
1University of Houston, Houston, TX, USA
Corresponding Author:
Philip D. Waggoner, Department of Political Science, University of Houston, 3551 Cullen
Blvd., Room 447, Houston, TX 77204, USA.
Email: pdwaggoner@uh.edu

---

710
American Politics Research 47(4)
Schiller, 1995), as well as to achieve specific goals of subgroups (Barnello &
Bratton, 2007). And functionally, bill sponsorship is valuable in that it is the
necessary starting place for most policy creation. Yet why sponsor bills on
specific issues in the first place, despite the downstream benefits (i.e.,
position-taking and agenda setting)? Although fine, the distinction between
the decision to hone in on a specific issue and then the desire to do something
with the bill such as stake out a position remains unclear. Given the dearth of
understanding of the process of honing in on specific issues in sponsored
bills, an ideal place to look for an answer to this question is in responsiveness
to constituent preferences, as legislators are elected to be the representative
voices of their constituents in a crowded, competitive government (Eulau,
Wahlke, Buchanan, & Ferguson, 1959). In short, the representative relation-
ship suggests that the signature of constituents should be on legislators’
behavior to some degree. Regarding issue-specific sponsorship decisions, is
this the case?
To look for the influence of constituents on legislators’ issue-specific
sponsorship, there are two primary ways this influence could take shape:
through proxies for preferences such as employment in a related industry, and
then more directly through stated issue preferences. As such, I start by assess-
ing district characteristics through industry-specific employment as proxies
for constituent preferences. After the proxy tests, I gather new data from dif-
ferent Congresses and drill down to explore the impact of constituents’ stated
issue preferences on sponsorship. To do so, I generate multilevel regression
with poststratification (MRP) estimates of the most pressing problems from
constituents’ perspectives. This approach allows constituents to place them-
selves in policy space, rather than being placed in ideological space as a func-
tion of responses to a battery of positional questions. The direct test, then,
should offer a look at whether constituents’ stated preferences exert any influ-
ence on legislators’ prioritization of related issues in their sponsorship port-
folios. Taken together, the proxy approach capturing general preferences
coupled with the direct look at constituents’ preferences across a variety of
issues should reveal their impact on issue-specific sponsorship, if such an
influence exists.
Across three of the four issues explored in the proxy tests, there was a
substantial, albeit indirect effect of constituents on legislators’ bill sponsor-
ship, whereby industry-specific employment influenced the likelihood of
related issue sponsorship. These findings are in line with the notion of district
characteristics impacting Congressional behavior (Adler & Lapinski, 1997).
However, the direct tests revealed virtually no consistent evidence of con-
stituents’ stated issue preferences impacting legislators’ sponsorship behav-
ior. The direct tests results across a variety of issues and Congresses call into

---

Waggoner
711
question the expectations of the delegate model of representation character-
izing the bulk of empirical work on responsiveness (e.g., Wlezien, 1996).
These findings are in line with research suggesting legislators are likely not
looking to their constituents for guidance to inform policy decisions (Jacobs
& Shapiro, 2000). Or, at the very least, constituents may not have the
resources or capacity to clearly signal preferences to their representatives
(Verba, 1996), greatly weakening the representative relationship. The impli-
cations of these results are important in that bill sponsorship, as a distinct
form of behavior in which all legislators are free to take part to prioritize any
issue, is largely indirectly impacted by districts, though mostly uninformed
by the stated preferences of constituents themselves.
Background and Context
Bill Sponsorship as a Useful and Strategic Tool
Although a relatively low-cost form of behavior, bill sponsorship is vital to
the policy process and opportunities of legislators. Functionally, all bills must
first be introduced if policy is to be created. Given the thousands of bills
introduced in a given Congress and the inversely tiny proportion that passes
out of the chamber, legislators see this form of behavior as valuable to some
degree as they advance their agendas and stake out issue territory in a com-
petitive space (Platt & Sinclair-Chapman, 2008).
But first, why is bill sponsorship worth studying? I suggest bill sponsor-
ship is an active, yet underappreciated form of legislative behavior ideal for
analyzing representation and responsiveness for several reasons. First, given
the crowded and competitive context of legislatures, sponsored bills reflect
some level of priorities of legislators, whether induced by party leaders, con-
stituents, or even members’ personal convictions. Individual sponsored bills,
then, reflect the priorities of individual members at a single point in time, as
a single unit of analysis. This provides an analytical benefit in mapping the
behavior and priorities of a large group of individuals engaging in the same
process. Second, and closely related, if individually sponsored bills reflect
parsimonious, unitary signals of individual priorities, then sponsorship pro-
files comprised of aggregated individual bills on individual issues by indi-
vidual legislators should capture the scope of priorities of each legislator
operating in the same policy space. Thus, the aggregate of sponsored bill
topics and frequencies should allow for a window into the degree to which
legislators are prioritizing issues with this form of behavior. These priorities
should be unique to a single Congress and vary across all Congresses given
that legislators are guaranteed a seat at the policy table for 2 years at a time.

---

712
American Politics Research 47(4)
Third, bill sponsorship represents an outlet of priority signaling for individual
legislators, such that they take this form of behavior seriously, using it to their
strategic advantages. Individual sponsored bills can be thought of as a tangi-
ble expressions of internal cost calculations to prioritize an issue at a single
point in time, especially given the vast amount of work facing legislators
(Bauer, de Pool, & Dexter, 1972).
In addition, despite the need in certain cases to examine policy outcomes
in studies on responsiveness of the entire institution to constituent prefer-
ences, for example (e.g., Lax & Phillips, 2012), there remains a limitation in
the generalizability of inferences on legislative behavior broadly when only
successfully passed pieces of legislation or roll call voting are considered.
Grounded in the legislative gatekeeping literature, the majority of bills that
even make it to the floor to be considered by the chamber, much less those
that actually pass out of the chamber, must be blessed by the majority party
(Lawrence & Maltzman Smith, 2006). The majority party keeps a tight rein
on the chamber agenda, rooted in the desire to retain majority party status
(Cox & McCubbins, 2005). Yet all legislators represent a unique constitu-
ency, and thus all legislators have individual priorities at some level.
Examining all legislators’ sponsorship behavior, then, should allow for gen-
eralizable inferences on issue priorities. Fifth, each sponsored bill must have
at least one legislator’s name attached to it to initiate it in the process. This
informs...