A Good Partisan? Ideology, Loyalty, and Public Evaluations of Members of Congress

• Published date: 01 August 2023
• Author: Geoffrey Sheagley,Logan Dancey,John Henderson
• Date: 01 August 2023
• DOI: http://doi.org/10.1111/lsq.12399

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LEGISLATIVE STUDIES QUARTERLY, 48, 3, August 2023

DOI: 10.1111/lsq.12399

GEOFFREY SHEAGLEY

University of Georgia

LOGAN DANCEY

Wesleyan University

JOHN HENDERSON

Independent scholar

A Good Partisan? Ideology, Loyalty,

and Public Evaluations of Members of

Congress

In recent years, legislators from both parties have drawn attention for

their public support or opposition to leading figures within their party, such

as Donald Trump and Nancy Pelosi. Yet we know relatively little about the

extent to which voters care about members’ professed loyalty to party lead-

ers, especially when compared to competing considerations such as mem-

bers’ policy positions. In two national survey experiments, we independently

manipulate hypothetical Democratic and Republican legislators’ ideological

reputations and levels of support for a leading party figure. Through our

experiments and a supplemental observational analysis, we find that parti-

sans in the electorate do use information about support for or opposition to

leading party figures as a basis for evaluating members of Congress. At the

same time, the results reaffirm the importance voters attach to policy and

ideological factors and suggest these considerations are not overwhelmed by

partisan loyalty considerations.

“It’s not that you just have to be with the president on

policy— you can’t question his behavior and still be a Republican

in good standing, apparently, in a Republican primary” (quoted in

Edelman2017): In explaining his decision not to seek re- election,

former Senator Jeff Flake (R- AZ) pointed to the electoral difficul-

ties he faced as a result of his public criticism of then- President

Donald Trump. Despite voting with the Republican Party 99%

of the time in 2017 (“CQ Vote Studies” 2018)— including on

signature Republican agenda items such as efforts to repeal the

Affordable Care Act and the confirmation of Neil Gorsuch to

© 2022 Washington University in St. Louis.

658 Geoffrey Sheagley, Logan Dancey and John Handerson

the Supreme Court— Flake had little support among Arizona

Republicans by the end of 2017 (Prokop2017). Nearly four years

later, Representative Liz Cheney’s (R- WY) criticism of Trump re-

sulted in her removal from Republican leadership in the House.

Elise Stefanik (R- NY), who replaced Cheney in leadership, had a

less conservative voting record during her time in Congress (Lewis

et al. 2022), but had been a more consistent supporter of then-

former- President Trump. In a contest between conservative cre-

dentials and Trump loyalty, Republican voters and elites seem to

prefer the latter.

The intra- party conflict among Republicans during the

Trump era highlights how members of Congress are evalu-

ated not just on their policy records, but also on whether they

are “team players” who refrain from criticizing leaders in their

party. Although congressional scholars are increasingly atten-

tive to how both ideology and partisan considerations structure

legislative behavior (Lee2009, 2016; Theriault2013; Koger and

Lebo2017), there is minimal research on how voters evaluate

candidates on these two dimensions (although see Carson et

al.2010). Research on vote choice and electoral accountability

has largely focused on whether voters reward or punish legisla-

tors for their policy positions (e.g., Ansolabehere and Jones2010;

Erikson and Wright2013). Now the expression of support or

opposition to party leaders has also become a salient campaign

issue. For example, in 2016, multiple publications kept track of

where Republican elected officials stood on Donald Trump’s

candidacy (e.g., Graham2016), while in 2018 many Democratic

House candidates staked out a public position on whether or not

they supported Nancy Pelosi as leader of the House Democrats

(Green and Harris2020).

While these examples suggest that voters care about their

elected officials’ support for party leaders, the degree to which

this is the case, especially when considered alongside policy in-

formation, is less well known. Do voters evaluate candidates

based on their support for key party leaders? How important is

support for a party leader when voters also have access to sub-

stantive information about the official’s ideological record and

policy positions? Do co- partisan and out- partisan voters react

in different ways to these types of information?

We address these questions using a combination of survey

experiments and observational data. The survey experiments—

included on the 2018 Cooperative Election Study (CES)1 and an