Legislative Responsiveness to Constituency Change

• Author: Kristina Miler
• DOI: 10.1177/1532673X15620838
• Published date: 01 September 2016
• Date: 01 September 2016
• Subject Matter: Articles

American Politics Research

2016, Vol. 44(5) 816 –843

© The Author(s) 2015

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DOI: 10.1177/1532673X15620838

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Article

Legislative

Responsiveness to

Constituency Change

Kristina Miler1

Abstract

Across democracies, elected officials are expected to represent their

constituents, but how do legislators react to changes in their constituency?

This core question of legislative responsiveness is examined in the context

of the bicameral U.S. Congress where more than 100 legislators have served

in both chambers since 1960. These chamber-changers provide a unique

vantage point for examining constituency representation, including competing

expectations based on the electoral connection and the ideological stability

of legislative voting. Based on analyses of original data, I find overwhelming

evidence of legislative responsiveness to both constituency change and

constituency stability. Moreover, when legislators’ constituencies change,

they respond by changing their behavior in ways that reflect both the

direction and magnitude of constituency change.

Keywords

U.S. Congress, constituency representation, responsiveness, legislative

behavior

Introduction

The question of whether legislators are responsive to their constituents is at

the heart of much theoretical and empirical scholarship. It is a question so

fundamental to our beliefs about representative government that it might

1University of Maryland, College Park, USA

Corresponding Author:

Kristina Miler, University of Maryland, 3140 Tydings Hall, College Park, MD 20742, USA.

Email: kmiler@umd.edu

620838APRXXX10.1177/1532673X15620838American Politics ResearchMiler

research-article2015

Miler 817

seem surprising that there is disagreement as to whether legislators react to

changes in their constituency by changing their behavior. In fact, modern

legislative research offers two competing visions of legislators. For more

than two decades, the notion of ideological consistency in legislative voting

behavior has assumed a prominent place in the field and influenced research

agendas focused on both the United States and Europe (e.g., Hix, Noury, &

Roland, 2007; Poole, 2005, 2007; Poole & Daniels, 1985; Poole & Rosenthal,

1997). According to this view, legislators should have stable voting records

because they are driven by the constancy of their ideological preferences.

However, this tenant of behavioral stability is at odds with other well-estab-

lished theories of electoral accountability and responsiveness found in classic

works such as Mayhew’s (1974) The Electoral Connection and subsequent

research that argues that the pursuit of reelection compels legislators to

respond to changes in their electoral context (Arnold, 1990; Clinton, 2006;

Fenno, 1978; Fiorina, 1974; Grose, 2011; Kingdon, 1989; Mayhew, 1974).

This article leverages the careers of legislators who move from the U.S.

House to the U.S. Senate to assess whether legislative behavior responds to

changes in the constituency. The bicameral structure of the U.S. Congress

provides an ideal context in which to examine legislators’ behavior in the face

of a changed constituency. From 1960 to 2008, 106 legislators served in both

the U.S. House and the U.S. Senate. Included in this class are well-known

political figures such as Barbara Boxer (D-CA) and Trent Lott (R-MS), each

of whom served in the House for 10 or more years before being elected to the

Senate. The phenomenon of changing chambers continues today with 53% of

the U.S. Senate in the 114th Congress (2015-2016) previously having served

in the U.S. House, including 14 of 33 Senators who were elected in 2014.

When changing chambers, these legislators retain their partisan, ideologi-

cal, and personal identities yet they change constituents. The latter point is

often overlooked, but it means that in each of these cases, a legislator went

from representing a congressional district within a state to representing a

statewide constituency. Moreover, the political composition of a legislator’s

House constituency can look very different from his Senate constituency. In

some cases, a legislator who moves from the House to the Senate may experi-

ence a more conservative statewide constituency, whereas in other cases, the

chamber-changing legislator represents a Senate constituency that is more

liberal than his prior House constituency. In addition, some legislators experi-

ence a large change in their constituency when they change chambers,

whereas other legislators represent a Senate constituency that is quite similar

to their House district. The key question, then, is whether legislators change

their behavior in response to these constituency changes or whether they “die

in their ideological boots” (Poole & Rosenthal, 1997)?