Demands for Representation: Three papers on Political Representation

This dissertation looks at political representation in the United States at a time where Americans are extremely polarized. I seek to answer questions from all areas of political representation with the goal of getting a holistic understanding of how elected officials and citizens understand one another. Throughout the dissertation, I make three contributions that can apply to the fields of American Political Institutions, American Political Behavior, and Public Policy. The first contribution I make is in the first chapter \textit{Redistricting, Electoral Uncertainty, and Inequality}, where I test how Members of Congress respond to a changing institutional environment--specifically, redistricting. This paper’s main contribution is that it uses redistricting as an exogenous shock to electoral outcomes to test legislative behavior on social welfare policy. I find both parties respond to this changing environment; but not in a way that benefits those least well off, as previously predicted in the literature. I find legislators respond to their constituents on ideological issues. Next, I turn to the voters in \textit{Primary Demands for Representation: A conjoint experiment on multidimensional representation}. In this chapter, I investigate how strong the demands for ideological representation are when compared to other representational demands. To do this, I use a candidate-choice experiment set in a primary campaign. My findings are that voters have a strong preference for candidates to share their ideology, but voters also have a strong preference for candidates to deliver distributional allocations. Finally, I look at how legislative ideology and distributional ideology intersect one another in \textit{Legislative Cooperation and Selective Benefits: An experimental investigation on the limits of credit claiming}. This chapter blends the previous two chapters together by investigating voter demands for the legislative process regarding distributional policy. I argue and find that voters prefer it when they can give the most credit to officeholders whose party is close to theirs. This is an important finding because it makes the findings of the past two papers cohesive. Politicians respond to changing situations by adapting their ideology. Voters demand ideological congruence from their representatives, but also want to be provided with goods. Voters like goods, but they prefer those goods to be given to them by people whose ideology is like them. This dissertation shows how officeholders and voters interact within the representational space in order to produce policy. I show that politicians respond to changing environments, and that voters have preferences over the types of representation that they are receiving. Specifically, voters prefer to receive a high degree of distribution, especially when they are ideologically aligned with the officeholders providing the distributions. I now proceed with the three empirical chapters, and then I conclude and provide future directions for research.