The Partisan Vote: Shared Partisanship and Constituent Service in the U.S. Congress

• Published date: 01 November 2024
• DOI: http://doi.org/10.1177/1532673X241273154
• Author: Rochelle Snyder
• Date: 01 November 2024

Article

American Politics Research

2024, Vol. 52(6) 639–654

© The Author(s) 2024

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DOI: 10.1177/1532673X241273154

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The Partisan Vote: Shared Partisanship and

Constituent Service in the U.S. Congress

Rochelle Snyder

1

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Abstract

The theory of the “personal vote”assumes that constituent service, or the process by which members of Congress help their

constituents navigate the federal bureaucracy, is a component of representation that transcends par tisanship. However, recent

research suggests that affective polarization and negative partisanship may discourage constituents from reach ing out to ask for

help from cross-partisan legislators. Using a conjoint experiment, I show that shared partisanship has a strong effect on

constituents’decisions about which of their legislators to contact for assistance. However, positive in-party affect is unrelated to

these preferences, suggesting that negative partisanship is responsible for this result. Gender and seniority also matter for

constituents’preferences even when accounting for shared partisanship. The results suggest that legislators’ability to build a

“personal vote”by performing constituent service may be weakened in an era of strong partisanship.

Keywords

representation, constituent service, partisanship

Constituent service, or the process by which legislators help

their constituents navigate the federal bureaucracy, is a key

activity of congressional offices. Interactions with constitu-

ents help legislators build and maintain their “home styles”

(Fenno, 1978), and constituent service, as an ostensibly

nonpartisan component of representation that does not de-

pend on shared policy preferences between legislators and

their constituents, has long been a critical component of the

“personal vote,”helping legislators build goodwill and

support among constituents who may not have supported

them otherwise (Cain et al., 1987). Legislators signal the

importance of providing constituent service in various ways,

such as highlighting casework accomplishments in com-

munications with constituents and allocating nearly half of

their total staff to district offices where most constituent

service takes place. However, recent changes in partisanship

among the electorate, including the decline of split-ticket

voting (Jacobson, 2015) and the rise of both affective po-

larization (Mason, 2018) and negative partisanship

(Abramowitz & Webster, 2018), raise questions about the

contemporary power of the personal vote, especially as the

size of legislators’constituencies has grown in ways that have

made legislators less accessible (Frederick, 2008). Is shared

partisanship between constituents and their legislators now

important enough to influence even a nonpartisan component

of representation like constituent service?

In this paper, I examine the personal vote from constit-

uents’perspectives and ask if constituents are equally likely

to reach out to all types of legislators, particularly those who

do not share their partisanship. I answer this question by

conducting a conjoint experiment that is designed to reflect

the process by which constituents decide which of their

federal representatives to contact for assistance once they

have made the initial decision to ask a legislator for help (e.g.

Lee & Oppenheimer, 1999). The experiment allows me to

vary several legislator characteristics, such as partisanship,

gender, seniority, and race and ethnicity of their staff

members, simultaneously and to examine how the absence of

information about partisanship, which constituents may not

encounter during the process of contacting their legislators,

affects constituents’choices. Three main findings emerge

from the analysis. First, constituents show a strong preference

for seeking help from co-partisan legislators, but there is no

evidence that positive in-party affect is driving these results.

Second, legislators’gender is also an important cue for re-

spondents, although respondents’partisanship tempers this

relationship in the absence of information about legislators’

partisanship, as only female Democrats and male Republi-

cans prefer to seek help from same-gender legislators. Finally,

1

University of Wisconsin-Madison, Madison, WI, USA

Corresponding Author:

Rochelle Snyder, Department of Political Science, University of Wisconsin,

110 North Hall, 1050 Bascom Mall, Madison, WI 53706, USA.

Email: rsnyder4@wisc.edu

in all analyses, legislators’seniority matters to respondents,

suggesting that constituents value experience in the provision

of constituent service.

The paper proceeds as follows. I begin by describing the

historically non-partisan nature of constituent service and the

“personal vote”before establishing the logic of my hy-

potheses. Next, I review my experimental design and

methods of analysis. I then present the results of the condition

of the experiment that includes information about the leg-

islators’partisanship, which show the strong influence of

shared partisanship on constituents’decisions, followed by

the results of the condition without a partisan cue, which

show the additional importance of information about legis-

lators’gender in the absence of information about legislators’

partisanship. I also present the analysis of the mechanisms

through which constituents’selections are operating, showing

that positive in-party affect is unrelated to respondents’

preferences for asking for help from co-partisan legislators.

The final section concludes with a discussion of the results

and their implications for existing and future research.

Constituent Service and the Personal Vote

In the 1970s and 1980s, as the incumbency advantage among

members of Congress increased and the importance of par-

tisanship for voters in congressional elections declined

(Romero & Sanders, 1994), scholars sought to explain these

trends in terms of the “personal vote”(e.g. Fiorina, 1977).

The personal vote, broadly understood to refer to electoral

support based on attributes of individual legislators rather

than partisanship, is often narrowly understood to refer to the

electoral support that accrues to incumbents as the result of

their providing benefits and service to their districts (Herrera

& Yawn, 1999). Fenno (1978) famously observed the pro-

cesses by which members of Congress cultivated their “home

styles”to establish themselves as representatives of their

districts and connect with individuals and communities there.

Legislators sought to distinguish themselves electorally by

emphasizing their connections and service to the district.

Political scientists and members of Congress have both

assumed that constituent service, along with other perks of

office such as the franking privilege, provided a vehicle for

incumbents to build support among their constituents in a

way that was entirely unrelated to partisanship. Cain et al.

(1987) made the most notable contribution to this theory,

finding that, in a time of relatively weak partisan attachments,

legislators received electoral benefits from performing con-

stituent service. Although some studies have found no evi-

dence that the “personal vote”matters (Johannes &

McAdams, 1981), research has supported the notion that

casework pays off for incumbents (Serra & Moon, 1994;

Serra & Pinney, 2004;Yiannakis, 1981).

However, as the importance of partisan attachments has

grown in recent decades (Jacobson, 2015), contemporary

research has begun to suggest that partisanship also matters

for constituent service. Constituents who do not share their

legislator’s partisanship express less satisfaction with con-

stituent service and are less likely to view their legislator as

helpful (Wagner, 2007). Looking beyond constituent service,

Kaslovsky (2022) finds that district visits, another key

component of legislators’home styles, actually hurt senators’

reputations among constituents who disagree with them,

likely because the visits make senators’policy records more

salient. Most notably, Broockman and Ryan (2016) show that

constituents are more likely to contact co-partisan legislators

to express opinions and to seek assistance, but their study

does not explicitly test the mechanisms underlying these

preferences or examine how other traits may work in concert

with partisanship. Building on these findings, in the next

section I identify several reasons why, according to recent

changes in partisanship among the electorate, constituents

may prefer to contact co-partisan legislators for assistance, as

well as why constituents may prioritize factors other than

shared partisanship in this context.

Partisanship as a Challenge to the

Personal Vote

Recent research on partisanship and polarization has iden-

tified the emerging phenomenon of “negative partisanship,”

or the tendency to express stronger negative feelings toward

the opposing party than positive feelings toward one’s own

party (Abramowitz & Webster, 2016,2018;Iyengar et al.,

2019). Negative partisanship makes it extraordinarily difficult

for members of Congress to emphasize their individuality

when representing their districts or campaigning for votes, as

“Americans care less about what individual represents them

and more about which party controls Congress”(Abramowitz

& Webster, 2018, p. 130). Elected officials with an over-

whelming incentive to attack and denigrate the other party

have little reason to focus on the provision of constituent

service. These changes to the nature of partisanship have

significant implications for representation and the theory of

the personal vote. Gone, according to recent findings on

partisanship, are the days in which members of Congress

could effectively solicit casework as a means of garnering

electoral support, as partisans are increasingly less likely to

support members of the opposite party (Bartels, 2000).

Existing work on partisanship points to several potential

mechanisms through which shared partisanship may influ-

ence constituents’decisions about which of their legislators to

contact for assistance. If affective polarization originates in

differences in ideology and policy preferences (Orr et al.,

2023;Webster & Abramowitz, 2017), constituents may be

drawn to co-partisan legislators because they believe they

share their beliefs and values. Conversely, if partisan identity

is driving affective polarization (Huddy et al., 2015;Iyengar

et al., 2012;Mason, 2016), constituents’preferences for co-

partisan legislators may be grounded in perceptions of

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