The View from the Hill: Legislative Perceptions Of the District

• Date: 01 November 2007
• DOI: http://doi.org/10.3162/036298007782398477
• Published date: 01 November 2007
• Author: KRISTINA C. MILER

597View from the Hill

LEGISLATIVE STUDIES QUARTERLY, XXXII, 4, November 2007 597

KRISTINA C. MILER

University of Illinois

The View from the Hill:

Legislative Perceptions

Of the District

This article addresses legislative perceptions of constituents’ interests and

develops a theory of perception that highlights the role of information accessibility

in the formation of legislative offices’ views of their districts. I used original data

regarding health policy in the U.S. House to analyze perceptions of constituents’

interests. I found that legislators do not see all constituents in their district, nor do

they see the largest constituencies. Rather, legislators are more likely to see active

and resource-rich constituents. These findings provide unique evidence of the influence

of money in Congress and suggest that legislative misperception is both common

and systematically biased.

In his classic book, Home Style, Richard Fenno posed one of the

most fundamental questions in the study of representation: “What does

an elected representative see when he or she sees a constituency?”

“The key problem is perception,” he added, “and the key assumption

is that the constituency a representative reacts to is the constituency

he or she sees” (1978, xiii). Fenno was not the first scholar to focus on

legislators’ perceptions, but he articulated the central question and

offered guidance for the next generation of research. Unfortunately,

few scholars have followed his lead. To the contrary, many have skipped

to the analysis of what Fenno understood “as a natural follow-up”

(1977, 883) to the study of legislative perceptions—how legislators

behave when representing their districts. The literature on

representation therefore includes numerous behavioral studies, without

attending to the logically prior question that Fenno posed: What is the

constituency that the representative sees?

In this article, I take up this overlooked question and extend

Fenno’s study in three ways. First, I ask the question not in the district

environment but on Capitol Hill, the place where representation takes

place. Second, I recast Fenno’s concentric circles to include issue-

specific constituencies. Third, I analyze the perceptions not of the

598 Kristina C. Miler

legislator exclusively, but of what Salisbury and Shepsle (1981) refer

to as “congressman as enterprise,” in which the legislator serves as

CEO but most of the everyday work in Washington is done by staff.

In this article, I develop a theory of legislative perception that

draws on cognitive psychology literature and focuses on the role that

information about constituents—specifically the accessibility of this

information—plays in affecting legislative perceptions. I then discuss

personal interviews conducted in legislative offices to assess percep-

tions of constituents with respect to health policy in the U.S. House of

Representatives. These interview data constitute an original dataset of

representative-constituency relationships that allow me to investigate

how legislative enterprises perceive the issue-specific constituencies

in their districts. The results of this study show that legislators and

their staffs do not see the full collection of constituents’ interests in

their districts, but rather see only a small percentage of the relevant

constituency interests. Moreover, contrary to expectations about con-

gressional representation, it is not the number of citizens who make up

a constituency that determines whether or not those constituents will

be seen by a congressional enterprise. Rather, legislative offices are

more likely to see those constituents who contact them and who make

financial contributions. Cynical observers of politics might not find

this revelation surprising, but numerous studies have failed to establish

that money consistently matters in legislators’ behavior. I show that

money does matter, but the mechanism through which it matters—

affecting perceptions of the constituency—is different, and, in some

ways, more troubling, than the conventional votes-for-cash exchange

story. In sum, this research shows that legislative misperceptions of

the district are common and systematically favor active and resource-

rich constituents.

Legislative Perception

The question of how legislators perceive their constituents

actually predates Fenno. In fact, nearly a half century ago, some of the

foremost scholars of congressional behavior posed this same question.

Writing in 1957, Dexter argued that a legislator’s perception of the

district may differ from the legal definition of the district and noted,

“the fact is the congressman represents his image of the district or of

his constituents” (1957, 2). Miller and Stokes (1963) proposed a model

of representation in which legislators’ perceptions of constituency

preferences, as well as constituents’ preferences and legislators’ own

preferences, were suggested to influence legislators’ voting behavior.

599View from the Hill

Similarly, Kingdon (1968, 55) observed, “A full account of represen-

tation . . . must include representatives’ perceptions of their constituents

as a variable intervening between the constituents and the behavior of

the elected policy-maker.” In his 1974 study of Congress, Fiorina noted

the importance of a representative’s perception of constituents as a

consideration in legislative decision making. To use Fiorina’s language

(1974, 30–32), what the representative perceives “the state of nature”

to be shapes the way the legislator represents his constituency, because

“reality is funneled through the representative’s perceptions.” Finally,

in his own study of House members, Fenno (1978, xiii) emphasized

the importance of viewing the constituency as the legislator does, and

he called perception “central to the representative-constituency rela-

tionship.” In sum, although many scholars have noted the importance

of legislative perceptions for representation, we still do not have a

good theoretical understanding of how legislators see their districts.

Despite having identified the problem of perception, most studies

of congressional representation have focused on the congruence

between district preferences and legislative activity, particularly roll-

call votes. The general conclusion drawn from these studies is that

individual legislators are responsive to the preferences of their

constituents and that Congress as a legislative body reflects the national

public opinion (see, for example, Bartels 1991; Kuklinski and Elling

1977; Page and Shapiro 1983; and Stimson, MacKuen, and Erikson

1995). Additionally, some scholars have considered legislators’

expectations of aggregate district opinion on policy issues at the state

and national levels (for example, Erikson, Luttbeg, and Holloway 1975;

Hedlund and Friesema 1972; and Lascher, Kelman, and Kane 1993),

as well as in other countries (see Clausen, Holmberg, and deHaven-

Smith 1983; and Converse and Pierce 1986). While these studies shed

light on important aspects of the constituency-representative relation-

ship, they tend to overlook a basic, yet fundamental, matter of

representation—whether a constituency is seen, or is on a legislator’s

“radar screen.”

One reason congressional perceptions are understudied is because

perceptions are difficult to conceptualize and even harder to measure

(see Clausen 1977). Since perception is a cognitive process, I contend

that the cognitive psychology literature is a natural place to turn for

insights into legislative perceptions. Cognitive psychology is increas-

ingly employed by political scientists to gain a better understanding of

how individuals use information and make judgments in the political

context. The majority of such scholarship focuses primarily on citizens

(for instance, Conover and Feldman 1989 and Huckfeldt et al. 1999),