Does It Really Hurt to Be Out of Step?

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Author	Lawrence S. Rothenberg,Kristin K. Rulison,Gary E. Hollibaugh
Published date	01 December 2013
Date	01 December 2013
DOI	http://doi.org/10.1177/1065912913481407
Subject Matter	Articles

Political Research Quarterly

66(4) 856 –867

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DOI: 10.1177/1065912913481407

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Article

A fundamental issue concerning any political system is

whether electoral constituents hold politicians account-

able. Normatively, accountability is typically considered

a virtue, although under specific conditions, it may result

in pandering to voters and an insufficient weighting of

minority welfare (Canes-Wrone, Herron, and Shotts

2001; Fox 2007; Maskin and Tirole 2004; Pratt 2005).

Empirically, the principal issue regarding accountability

is whether elected officials who have fallen “out of step”

with their constituents—that is, members whose ideolog-

ical preferences diverge significantly from those of the

voters they represent—fare worse at the polls than do

those who are better aligned, all else equal.1 While the

existence of voter punishment would appear intuitive,

that elected officials enjoy very high reelection rates

(e.g., Ornstein, Mann, and Malbin 2008), yet seemingly

change their ideological positions little over their careers

despite great geographic mobility among voters, might

suggest otherwise (Poole 2007; but see Kousser, Lewis,

and Masket 2007).2 Put differently, incumbency advan-

tages, coupled with a lack of voter information and the

inherent abilities of those who have been previously

elected, may overwhelm the importance of ideological

correspondence. Although trying to assess accountability

is a long-standing concern (e.g., Miller and Stokes 1963),

there has been a renewed effort in recent years to estab-

lish evidence that accountability works as posited (e.g.,

Canes-Wrone, Brady, and Cogan 2002).

At its root, investigating the existence and extent of

accountability requires measuring constituent prefer-

ences and induced incumbent preferences on the same

dimension, in addition to controlling for other factors of

incumbent success. However, placing elected officials

and voters in the same ideological space, while simulta-

neously finding an adequate number of cases for which

representative and voter preferences can be confidently

estimated at the unit of election, is a daunting task. As

such, previous studies have used measures that are clearly

on different scales, such as roll-call-based ADA or

NOMINATE scores on one hand and district presidential

votes on the other (but see Bafumi and Herron 2010;

Stone and Simas 2010). Consequently, measurement

error almost certainly plagues past efforts to gauge

politician–voter correspondence. Hence, we need to view

any results cautiously.

Fortunately for our purposes, recent advances in sur-

vey technology can be combined with scaling techniques

to measure the preferences of voters and elected officials

in the same space. Per the former, scholars are increas-

ingly using the Internet to develop surveys that generate a

sufficiently large number of responses to measure the dis-

tribution of political preferences and actions by election

district. For example, the Cooperative Congressional

Election Study (CCES), which we principally utilize,

481407PRQXXX10.1177/1065912913481407Political Research QuarterlyHollibaugh et al.

research-article2013

1Vanderbilt University, Nashville, TN, USA

2University of Rochester, NY, USA

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