How Policy and Procedure Shape Citizens' Evaluations of Senators
| DOI | http://doi.org/10.1111/lsq.12074 |
| Published date | 01 May 2015 |
| Author | David Doherty |
| Date | 01 May 2015 |
DAVID DOHERTY
Loyola University Chicago
How Policy and Procedure Shape
Citizens’ Evaluations of Senators
I report findings from survey experiments that improve our understanding of how
people want individual Senators to approach their role as represent atives. The findings
show that people are committed to the idea that Senators should prioritize their states’
preferences over those of the national public. This preference persists in situations where
a Senator’s advocacy for her state plays a key role in defeating nationally supported
legislation. This finding contradicts popular claims that voters are hungry for Senators
who prioritize national preferences over those of their constituents. I also find that peo-
ple who support a piece of legislation—but not those who oppose it—evaluate a Senator
who helps to defeat the legislation by filibustering substantially less favorably than one
who accomplishes the same ends through majoritarian means. This suggests that how
people respond to some procedural characteristics of politicians’ behavior depends on
how they feel about the outcomes it yields.
Research on citizen evaluations of a representative’s legislative
behavior typically focuses on their agreement with the substantive pol-
icy positions the legislator adopts. However, people may also care
about how legislators decide which policies t o support, the procedures
they use in advocating for those positions, and how their actions relate
to the broader democratic process. Some scholars even argue that peo-
ple “are more affected by the processes of government than by the poli-
cies government enacts” (Hibbing and Theiss-Morse 2002, 34) .
Although substantial work has assessed how chara cteristics of political
processes affect how people evaluate political institutions and the polit-
ical system in general, little work has examined how procedural charac-
teristics of individual legislators’ behavior affect how they are
evaluated as individuals. This is an important lacuna because disliked
characteristics of how Congress operates as an institution are unlikely
to change unless voters punish legislators for their individual contribu-
tions to these aggregate outcomes.
In this article, I report findings from experiments that examine
how two characteristics of a Senator’s legislative behavior affect how
she is evaluated. First, the experiment varies whether the Senator’s
LEGISLATIVE STUDIES QUARTERLY, 40, 2, May 2015 241
DOI: 10.1111 /lsq.12074
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C2015 The Comparative Legislative Research Center of The University of Iowa
position suggests that she is responding to constituent preferences or to
the national public—a trade-off that is central to many normative mod-
els of political representation. Second, I manipulate information about
whether the individual Senator’s behavior proves decisive in defeating
a bill through majoritarian means, helps to defeat a bill t hrough the use
of the filibuster, or does not directly affect the final disposition of the
bill. The design allows me to shed light on what types of behavior peo-
ple are inclined to reward Senators for and, more broadly, on the role
people think individual Senators should play in the process of demo-
cratic representation.
This research makes three contributions. First, the findings suggest
that people are committed to the idea that Senators are, first and fore-
most, charged with advocating for their states. People evaluate a Senator
who prioritizes the preferences of the majority of her constituents more
favorably than one who takes a position that is congruent with the will of
the national public. This preference extends to situations where a Sena-
tor’s advocacy for state preferences plays a pivotal role in defeating a
bill supported by the national public.
Second, little is known about how the role an individual legislator
plays in determining the disposition of a particular piece of legislation
affects how she is evaluated. Of particular interest is how people respond
to situations where a Senator’s efforts to defeat legislation opposed by
those in her state lead her to employ the filibuster to achieve these ends.
The findings indicate that, on average, people evaluate a Senator who
proves pivotal in defeating a bill through simple majoritarian means
more favorably than a Senator who participates in a filibuster to defeat a
bill. Notably, I find that people reward a Senator for advocating for state
preferences—even to the point of using the filibuster to defeat legislation
opposed by their state but supported by the national public. Additionally,
I find that people are no more averse to a Senator’s use of the filibuster
when it is employed to prevent the passage of legislation supported by
the national public, but opposed by those in the Senator’s state, than
when it is used to defeat legislation opposed by the national public.
Finally, the findings improve our understanding of whether argu-
ments about how political processes should work, in some situations,
serve as proxies for debates about substantive outcomes. I leverage the
fact that I manipulate the direction of the policy being considered by the
Senator, and thus how the respondents feel about the substance of
the Senator’s position, to assess whether the effects described above are
moderated by individuals’ policy preferences. I find suggestive, but
inconsistent, evidence that people’s commitment to the idea that Sena-
tors should prioritize state-level public opinion over national preferences
242 David Doherty
is mitigated in situations where an individual’s own preferences are con-
gruent with those of the national public. I also find evidence that those
who oppose a bill are indifferent between a Senator casting the pivotal
“51st vote” to defeat the bill and a Senator defeating the bill by filibuster-
ing. In contrast, among those who support a bill, a filibustering Senator
is evaluated significantly less favorably than a Senator who adopts the
same position and accomplishes the same ends through simple majoritar-
ian means.
The remainder of the article proceeds as follows. In the next sec-
tion, I discuss characteristics of Senators’ behavior with an eye toward
highlighting the competing considerations that may affect how people
respond to them. I also address how people may rely on their substan-
tive preferences to adjudicate between these competing considerations
when responding to a Senator’s behavior. Then I preview the structure
of the experiments used in my analysis and present my expectations
regarding how people respond to characteristics of a Senator’s behav-
ior. Next, I describe my experimental design in more detail and pres-
ent my findings. In the final section of the article, I discuss the
implications of my findings and the limitations of the analysis pre-
sented here.
Individual Senators and the Legislative Process
Researchers find that the characteristics of decision-making proc-
esses can affect how people evaluate those processes and the institutions
within which they are carried out (Birch 2010; Durr, Gilmour, and Wol-
brecht 1997; Gangl 2003; Gibson 2002; Hibbing and Theiss-Morse
1995, 2002; Leventhal 1980; Thibaut and Walker 1975; Tyler 2006).
Some work has also explored how people say they want the legislative
process to work and how they think legislators should make decisions
(e.g., Barker and Carman 2012; Cantril 1967; Carman 2007; Davidson
1970; Fenno 1975; Griffin and Flavin 2011; Hibbing and Theiss-Morse
2002; Kimball and Patterson 1997; Neblo et al. 2010; Sigelman, Sigel-
man, and Walkosz 1992; Smith and Park 2013). Other work has
directly examined how the characteristics of elites’ decisions (Sigelman,
Sigelman, and Walkosz 1992), citizen preferences regarding where
legislators should focus their efforts (Grant and Rudolph 2004), and the
decision rules they claim guided their behavior (McGraw, Best, and
Timpone 1995; McGraw, Lodge, and Jones 2002) can affect how peo-
ple evaluate legislators and other political elites. These dynamics are
important to examine directly because the standards people advocate for
in response to survey questions do not always neatly translate into
243Citizen Evaluations of Senators
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