Many Members of Congress are electorally vulnerable this year. Do they have to moderate to survive? They may have another strategy: going local, pointing to their constituency service and the local interests they are serving. Jaclyn Kaslovsky finds that House members facing difficult elections spend more time at home, introduce more locally focused bills, and shift to serving their constituents. They de-emphasize national policymaking rather than dramatically changing their positions.
Guest: Jaclyn Kaslovsky of Washington University
Study: “Adaptive Representation in the U.S. Congress“
Transcript
Matt Grossmann: Vulnerable members of Congress try to save their seats by localizing. This week on The Science of Politics. For the Niskanen Center, I’m Matt Grossmann. It’s midterm campaign season and a lot of incumbents are under threat. Can they respond by moderating or moving away from their party? They may have another strategy up their sleeves. While challengers try to nationalize the elections, incumbents can go local instead, pointing to their constituency service and the local interest they’re advancing. This week I talked to Jaclyn Kaslovsky of Washington University about her co-authored paper, Adaptive Representation in the US Congress. She finds that House members facing difficult elections spend more time at home, introduce more locally focused bills, and focus on serving their constituents. They don’t change their positioning on national policy as much as expected, but they do de-emphasize national policymaking overall. We also talk about her broader research agenda about just how much legislators can still stand out from their party and national trends and whether voters notice and reward that behavior. They may be fighting against the trends, but many legislators are still trying. I think you’ll enjoy our conversation.
So tell us about the findings from your new paper on adaptive representation in Congress. What’d you find?
Jaclyn Kaslovsky: Yeah, so basically the argument of the paper is that there’s this really puzzling, long-standing finding in American politics that members do not seem to be adapting when they’re electorally vulnerable. They don’t seem to moderate, they don’t seem to change their behavior, which is confusing and problematic for accountability purposes. And so what we’re arguing is that this finding might actually be a result of not looking at a broad enough set of actions because really most of these works have focused on roll call voting. And so what we end up finding is that members across a whole host of behaviors actually seem to be shifting their behavior away from the chamber and towards the district when they’re electorally vulnerable. And we collected a bunch of new data to look at this focusing on the district that I think is pretty exciting.
Matt Grossmann: So give us the understanding of why the conventional wisdom was what it was. Why would we expect legislators to change their ideological position? How would we think that they would recognize that they were vulnerable, newly vulnerable and change positions? What was the conventional story and then what’s your story?
Jaclyn Kaslovsky: Sure. Well, the intuition is that members who are vulnerable probably have incentives to moderate in order to try to win over more people in their districts than before, maybe they were too ideologically extreme, their positions were upsetting, too broad of a group of people. And so the idea is that they would move towards the center when they faced a difficult election. And roll call voting is a very important part of what members do, absolutely. But generally we think that there’s also consequences to when people change their positions. You don’t want to be seen as waffling, you don’t want to be seen as untrustworthy. And so we actually do think there are reasons to expect not that much movement, at least along roll call voting. And so that’s why we started to think about broadening the set of behaviors that we were looking at. And in particular, we were really interested in this idea of traveling back to the district and focusing on constituency oriented bills. And so things that maybe members feel more comfortable having more dramatic shifts in those types of behaviors.
Matt Grossmann: So let’s walk through some of the things that you can observe. So what are these activities that you are tracking and what is the mechanism and the time period? Is it that they suddenly notice that they’re vulnerable or does it sort of lead up to the election and how big are these changes?
Jaclyn Kaslovsky: So we collected kind of a series of new measures, but then also looked at some more traditional measures from the existing work. So where we’re contributing some new data is on things like travel to home districts, as I mentioned before, locally oriented speech in members’ floor speeches, as well as bill sponsorships for more district focused or nationally focused bills. But then we also actually look at things that other people have looked at as well, but more in isolation. So things like federal appropriations, if you have constituency oriented committee assignments, roll call attendance, so are you showing up to vote or not, as well as ideological moderation in terms of their roll call voting. And the substantive significance of the change does vary quite a bit across these different measures. The one that I think stands out probably the most is in terms of their travel.
And so electoral threat is associated with what we find being about an extra three weeks at home over the course of a two-year Congress, which seems pretty substantial to me. And in terms of when we see these effects, we do something in the paper to try and investigate this a little bit, although it’s not super precise, but what we end up doing is looking at if we see stronger effects in the first year of a Congress when it’s right after the election. And so you might be thinking about it more fully, it might be at the forefront of your mind or in the second year of the Congress. And our results do seem to be concentrated more in the first year.
Matt Grossmann: And do you see this, I guess theoretically, but also empirically, is there sort of a direct trade-off between serving your local constituents and national policymaking? Do these things go together more generally? Are there people who are good at both or have you set it up such that these are kind of in conflict?
Jaclyn Kaslovsky: Yeah, so I think there are certainly people who are good at both, but the way that we’re thinking about it in this paper is you have a limited set of time and resources, and so you kind of naturally have to trade off among these different activities. And so what we end up finding is that members experiencing a threat increase their time spent in the district, use more locally oriented speech on the floor, procure more federal appropriations for their constituents, and then serve on more constituent oriented committees. But the flip side of that is that it occurs in tandem with chips away from these Washington focused activities. So they’re also sponsoring fewer policy bills, fewer amendments related to national policy, and they’re serving on fewer policy oriented or prestige kind of committees. And so there does seem to be this trade-off happening where members are shifting their attention away from these more policy-oriented tasks towards district-oriented behaviors.
Matt Grossmann: So one story for this would be that the party as a whole recognizes that it has these vulnerable members and is putting them in different kinds of positions or let them travel more home, for example, or give them committee assignments that they think might help. Another is that this is from the individual member and how they’re responding to being under pressure. Is there any way to differentiate those and what do you think is going on?
Jaclyn Kaslovsky: So it’s an interesting question. Right now, I don’t think there is a good way for us to differentiate them. I don’t think we actually know that much about what leadership wants from legislators in terms of their time spent in the district and the kinds of activities in the district that they’re doing, because generally we tend to think of members as having quite a bit of independence when it comes to thinking about how to allocate their time and resources. But at the same time, we know there’s a lot of really great work right now talking about the rise of centralization in Congress. And so thinking about work by people like Frances Lee or Jim Curry or SoRelle Gaynor, talking about how party leaders are uniting in terms of the messages that they want their members to send. But I think we just don’t know that much about the instructions they’re giving their members about at home. And my guess is that members actually have some of the most leeway in these kinds of activities as opposed to things happening on the floor.
Matt Grossmann: Do we know whether this change behavior actually matters for public opinion or elections? And do we have a reason to think that it would? I mean, I guess the skeptical view would be things like committee assignments and what bills are sponsored don’t really filter down to the public. And there are other circumstances in which members do things for supposed electoral gain that maybe don’t have much.
Jaclyn Kaslovsky: Yeah. So there is some survey work showing that constituents actually do have different preferences for different dimensions of representation. Certain communities and constituents value locally oriented representation, district focused activities, focusing on procuring grants for the district more than policy. And we do see variation across American voters on those issues, but it does get kind of difficult when it comes to mapping that onto actual electoral behavior. So we have a variety of studies showing that constituents seem to increase their approval of members when they’re really good constituent servants and they’re good at helping the district. But at the same time, we know from some studies by Logan Dancey and John Henderson and Geoffrey Sheagley that it translates much more weakly into actual vote choice. And so I think there’s some difficulties with translating some of these public opinion studies towards actual electoral behavior. But at least in some of my previous work, it seems like members can’t necessarily use these kinds of activities to change people’s minds who already disagree with them pretty substantially.
Matt Grossmann: Is this just another story of failed localization in a nationalizing era, or is this a break against it? In other words, is this another thing that might have worked at some point, but everybody is just tied to their national party image now and it’s just presidential vote in the district? Or is this a potential way of slowing or countering nationalization in American politics?
Jaclyn Kaslovsky: Yeah, it’s hard to say because a lot of these kinds of data just are not available for that earlier time period. And so I’m hesitant to make claims saying this did work then, it didn’t work then. We certainly know from more ethnographic type studies that people seem to value these kinds of behaviors more over party maybe in those earlier time periods. But with nationalization and strengthening partisanship in these local communities, it does seem harder to make the argument that people will be willing to change their behaviors based off of these kinds of activities. But again, I think for our work, for example, we don’t actually look at how it impacts how voters are behaving and their opinions. And so I still think it’s kind of an open question and I think it’s exciting that now we do have some more historical data to hopefully start answering these kinds of questions a little bit more.
Matt Grossmann: So in other work, you’ve also found that there are differences by gender and emphasis on local communities and constituency politics. I don’t think you emphasized electoral findings as much there. So I guess what are the basic differences across members in these kinds of measures regardless of electoral impact and how big is the electoral story versus those other stories?
Jaclyn Kaslovsky: Yeah, so I think both stories can be true. So in that other work, we find that women tend to use more locally oriented speech in comparison to their men colleagues in committee hearings mostly. And that paper is looking at a different specification, and so it’s using just previous vote chair instead of whether they’re actually electorally vulnerable. It’s looking within districts instead of within members, and so it’s a different specification.
And then it’s also a different time period. The paper with Ben and Dan, it’s really cool because it goes back to 1978 is when we’re starting our analyses. And so there’s a bunch of differences I think between the analyses that make it hard to say this is a story here, but this isn’t a story here. But I think certainly that gender is a big part of the story in terms of which kinds of members tend to be more locally oriented than others, but as well as marginality too. We might’ve just been previously looking in the wrong places.
Matt Grossmann: And you’ve also found that some legislators who have roots in the district might pay more attention to constituency work. So to what extent is this kind of, I guess, a stable attribute of members that comes based on whether they actually have strong ties to the district or something that they can really shift? And does it matter if we have a member that’s not really from the district, are they still able to do that?
Jaclyn Kaslovsky: So I think all members can choose to be locally oriented if they want to. I don’t think you need to be from the district. However, it probably does make the kind of connections that you need to credibly make those kinds of claims more authentic. So maybe it gives you greater connections to people in the community. Maybe you have just a longer standing experience with the people that live there. Maybe people more credibly buy that you empathize with them if you grew up in that area or you’ve lived there for a really long time. But I mean, I think certainly members who feel like they want to focus more on the local community and trying to emphasize that they’re going to be able to specifically focus on local kinds of needs as opposed to these national stories.
I think all different kinds of members can do that. It’s just maybe it’s a story about what is the most strategic choice for you to make and what constituents will be most likely to approve of. But actually, I don’t think we know a lot about how voters respond to different home styles based off of member backgrounds, but I think it’s an interesting question.
Matt Grossmann: And you also have work on social media messaging, and in that case you looked at I think redistricting driven changes, but that also is in some ways reflective of potential vulnerability. So talk us through those findings compared to these and how you’re looking at all the different sources of vulnerability and all the different outcomes that might come from that.
Jaclyn Kaslovsky: Yeah, it’s kind of a similar idea where we’ve been so focused on roll call voting, which again is very important. I’m glad that we focus on roll call voting, but members just do so much more than voting. There’s so much more to representation. There’s so much more that constituents value. And so in that paper, we’re really focused on the difference between how members are voting and how members are portraying themselves on social media. And the idea was that we actually ended up finding that the shift in ideology that comes as a result from redistricting is larger in terms of their social media speech than in terms of their actual voting behavior. But I think they kind of go nicely together because…
So on the one hand, we’re also showing we should be looking at these alternative measures of shifting and adaptation. And on the other hand though, we do actually in this paper find a small change in ideology. So in both papers, we’re showing that members do seem to moderate even if the effect size isn’t that large. So I think they actually kind of go nicely together.
Matt Grossmann: We haven’t really talked about it normatively yet. So is this something that we should actually want? We want people who might lose their next election to shift toward local representation. Isn’t there a case that voters who are just voting party line for one member out of hundreds, that’s pretty a normal behavior because it is their kind of national issues that will predominate and which party controls Congress is a lot more important? Or is this something we should really want to incentivize because these members are geographic representatives?
Jaclyn Kaslovsky: Yeah, so I always try quite carefully to not make normative claims about these different kinds of representation because I think it’s perfectly fair for people to want different things from their legislators. I think it’s totally fine if someone values more locally focused representation, but I also think it’s okay if someone is purely focused on policy and it’s okay to expect different things from your legislators and then vote them out if you don’t like it.
But in terms of there can be some consequences for collective representation that I think maybe we can get a little more normative on. So one of the consequences from this paper with Ben and Dan is that the members who have incentives to moderate instead are focusing on shifting their behaviors away from policy and towards these local activities. And what does that mean for the kind of voices that end up being the loudest in our political discussions? This is something that Justin Grimmer and his co-authors talk a lot about in their work on these kinds of topics. And so I think in terms of the normative implications, I don’t know that I feel comfortable saying that certain kinds of representation are better than others, but it is important to think about how the rising safety of these congressional districts, the disappearance of swing districts, what that means for the kinds of voices that get magnified in our political landscape.
Matt Grossmann: And what about the, I guess, a normative view on the change? Do we want people to change behavior in response to their electoral circumstances or is that sort of trying to hide true colors right before they’re going up for reelection?
Jaclyn Kaslovsky: Yeah, I think that’s a hard question. I think my instinct is that we do want them to change. If people are vulnerable, it’s usually for a reason that their constituents are unhappy with something that they’re doing. And maybe I would be more concerned about this if we did find that members are very strongly changing their voting behavior because maybe that signals some kind of just movement away from principles or a kind of playing to the masses idea, I guess. But that’s not even really what we’re finding. We’re finding some small movement on ideology, yes, but really what we’re showing is that members are then turning to doing things that people like. And so it does seem good for members to be doing more of things that people like, generally speaking. Maybe where we can start to worry about this is in terms of constituent awareness and voter knowledge of the many different activities that members are doing. So if people are just completely unaware of how their members are voting, that makes it harder maybe for them to hold them accountable and to evaluate how they even feel about these different kinds of activities, which is certainly a concern. But generally speaking, I do think we want members to adapt if their voters are expressing unhappiness with their behavior.
Matt Grossmann: And how do you think that the media should react to this? Obviously, one of the reasons why this might have trouble working now is less local media, but that I think was one of the traditional reasons for this, that you would want to go back to the district in order to not just directly meet constituents, but have that portrayed. But there’s also an argument that maybe that’s not necessarily what voters should be paying attention to and that the reason it worked in the past is because people thought their member was more different than other members than they really were. So your local reporter perceiving this in a swing district this year, how should you think about that?
Jaclyn Kaslovsky: That’s an interesting question. I mean, I guess I think that these local reporters should cover it as they see fit. There’s some interesting work by people like Eric Peterson focusing on the different frames that journalists can take when covering politics. And should we be using these kinds of horse race-based framing versus this accountability kind of framing that I think speaks to these questions nicely. But we know that voters really hate hearing about the nitty-gritty of legislating and the process of legislating because it signals conflict, but deliberation is a part of Congress and a part of good government. And so to a certain extent, I still think it’s important to discuss all of that.
Matt Grossmann: Give us a sense of the overall balance of this for the average member. We’re talking about shifts between members based on electoral vulnerability, but how much is the average member dealing with constituency projects or sponsoring local versus national bills? And is that something that is relatively consistent or has been shifting over time a lot?
Jaclyn Kaslovsky: Yeah. So I mean, at least in terms of trips home, members are going home a lot. And in fact, it’s something that people talk about as a negative sometimes in that they want their members to spend more time in Washington instead of having this Tuesday to Thursday kind of schedule. But it also is something that’s changed a lot over time, partly because of the changing rules in Congress and how members are allowed to spend their money and giving them more freedom to make the kind of choices about how often they want to be in DC versus their individual districts.
In terms of how often they’re sponsoring locally oriented bills and stuff like that, the average member introduced about 3.24, so about three constituency focused bills over the entire time period of our data with a standard deviation also of three. And so, in terms of magnitude, I think it depends on the substantive significance of those bills. I have a hard time thinking about it that way because three bills is nothing to sneeze at. But on the other hand, if we’re looking at more nationally focused bills, that average is 14 over the course of our time period. So members are doing more nationally focused kind of legislation than constituency focused, but I think that also makes sense, again, if we’re thinking about that kind of an outcome.
Matt Grossmann: So one thing that we have seen change is vulnerability. That is we have fewer competitive general elections and a more kind of agreed upon board. So what would you expect to be the effects of that given your findings here and do you find that?
Jaclyn Kaslovsky: With many of these activities, as nationalization increases, I think you’d naturally expect more of a shift towards these kinds of policy focused activities overall. On the flip side though, as with the rise of centralization and the rise of party leadership strength, if members have less influence over these kinds of policy activities, you could also imagine then members turning towards thing that they have more control over, which are these kinds of locally focused activities.
And so I think there’s competing factors that could influence with rising nationalization how members would increase or decrease these factors depending on how much control they feel like they have over these activities as well as what they view their constituents as wanting because constituents always want their members to do all these things. There’s generally a danger with not partaking in constituent-focused activities and being viewed as negligent. And so I mean that’s something, for example, that members who cancel their town halls have a danger of seeing over time too. And so I think there’s competing forces that different members respond to differently.
Matt Grossmann: And another more recent trend is that members have become more concerned that they might lose a primary election compared to a general election. So we’ve been talking about general election vulnerability, but what might change if members come to be more concerned about losing in a primary? Would you expect that to have the same effects or disrupt these kinds of processes?
Jaclyn Kaslovsky: Yeah. So generally speaking, we tend to think of the rising strength of primary challengers and this increasing fear towards these earlier stage of elections as driving members to think more about policy and focus more on policy because of constituents not having that party cue to differentiate between different members. And so if they’re really afraid of facing a quality primary challenger, maybe they dig in their heels to these kinds of ideological battles. And so, it goes hand in hand with these questions of nationalization with how are focuses towards primary challengers going to change members’ willingness to sacrifice their resources to focus on the district and constituency service and things like that.
Again, at the same time, we see, for example, many members still working really hard to get earmarks for their districts. And it goes back to this idea, what do you have that a challenger doesn’t have as an incumbent? And credit claiming is a really big thing. So I don’t see members trying to necessarily give that up anytime soon. But in terms of the incentives, you would imagine it would push members maybe towards these national goals. But I think it’s an open question where hopefully in future versions of this project, we would be able to incorporate primary challengers and quality challengers and how they did in the previous primary election and that kind of thing.
Matt Grossmann: But I think you said that a lot of the effects actually happen in the first year of the Congress, so it isn’t necessarily that people are last minute changing their behavior. Is it something where we should expect as soon as you win one election, you know whether you’re going to be vulnerable the next time? Or is this something that we should expect deciding that you’re vulnerable once a quality candidate challenges you or something like that?
Jaclyn Kaslovsky: Yeah. Well, I think the conventional wisdom is that members are always afraid that they’re going to be vulnerable and members are always worried about winning election. And so with that in mind, it’s like maybe the fear from the previous election fades over time, but I do think it’s very hard for members to credibly make these kinds of very strong pivots over time. So I think it’s probably more of always being on your toes kind of a thing.
Matt Grossmann: So we used to talk a lot about how the public disliked Congress, but still like their own member. We know that’s a little bit in decline and people are also perceiving things more along partisan lines than they used to. How does your story fit into that? Do you think that just makes everything harder being known as a local representative? Was it a big part of how people established those reputations in the past?
Jaclyn Kaslovsky: This is also a hard question to answer because it’s this conventional wisdom that members would separate themselves from people’s dislike of the institution as a whole by running for Congress, by running against Congress is the classic pheno phrase. But as far as I know, there’s actually quite limited evidence that members did that. So Daniel Lipinski looks for that in his book and I don’t think he ends up finding it. And I’ve looked through some franking a little bit and we also didn’t end up really finding that that’s the case. So that’s at least a member’s speech. But, your question about, can members use these kind of locally-oriented activities to do that? I think so. I think it would be a good tool, but, again, I don’t think we necessarily have evidence that these kinds of local activities are just allowing members to distinguish themselves from the institution, as a whole.
I have some new work looking at trying to get at this gap in the literature, actually, a little bit. And so, in a working paper with Albert Rivero and Shiro Kuriwaki, we ran this experiment, where members saw a senator who voted against their party and they either justify that by saying they voted… They did that way because of what’s good for their districts, or they did that way because of what’s good for the country, as a whole.
And no matter the justification you use, it doesn’t really seem to impact constituents’ perceptions of the institution of Congress, as a whole. It doesn’t make them any more or less likely to dislike the Senate. And so, at least, it’s hard to know really if these things are influencing institutional-level perceptions. Things that we do know influence institutional-level perceptions are things that I mentioned earlier, about when you hear about gridlock and conflict in Congress, and more things along those lines, I think.
Matt Grossmann: So, I don’t know if you’ve been following the sort of forecasting debate this year, but, obviously, we have a campaign in the works right now and there’s a difference between the models that just look at national-level factors and are predicting much bigger democratic chances of victory and seat gains than the individual race-by-race forecasters.
And one traditional reason for that might’ve been that the race-by-race forecasters knew the particular candidates and were making determinations based on district-level polls and factors. But, obviously, we also have… The aggregate pattern is still that the folks who do that district by district analysis tend to move their expectations based on the national polls eventually, maybe, catching up with them. So, just wonder what you make of that, in the context of your findings. Is it worth us actually going district by district and saying, “What are these members doing? Are they really as vulnerable as they seem based on the national environment, or is this trying to go against national wins just going to be pretty impossible?”
Jaclyn Kaslovsky: These days, using the national trends is a pretty good predictor of what’s going to happen, even in these individual districts. Even when we account for things like incumbency and how the member did in the previous election, the models based off of presidential voter, I think, do almost as well. And so, it’s hard to say.
I mean, I think there’s still value in looking at what’s happening in these individual districts and trying to see more… When are these members actually vulnerable? What makes them feel vulnerable, personally? And what are the activities that, maybe, stand out more? So, yeah, I think it’s still worth looking at these individual districts, but, at this point, it does seem like national trends are very good predictors of what’s going to happen.
Matt Grossmann: And I know we didn’t include the Senate in this analysis, but, obviously, this also has been a way that senators have tried to differentiate themselves to be representatives of their state. And we have several examples to test that this year. In Alaska and Maine, we’re running pretty specialized kinds of campaigns based on these individual reputations. So, would you expect this to work better or worse in the U.S. Senate than the House? Or, what are some reasons why it might still be effective or expected, versus not applying?
Jaclyn Kaslovsky: It varies, highly, by state, I think is the answer. And so, we know, for example, that things like state size matter a lot in what people expect of their senators. And so, the larger the state is, the more heterogeneous constituencies you often have, the less likely people are to necessarily expect to see you around. That’s also related to population and not just state size.
And so, some states are quite similar to House districts and some are more different. So, I think it just varies a lot, in terms of the individual races that these members are facing. But, when you have members, or candidates, rather, in these races that you mentioned that are really trying to differentiate themselves from the existing parties in those states and trying to build campaigns around their relationships to the district, like in Alaska, and stuff like that, I think it can matter a lot.
Matt Grossmann: And anything you want to tout about what is next, or what you’re working on now, or looking at in this cycle?
Jaclyn Kaslovsky: I have a lot of future projects that I think are related all to these questions of what do constituents want from their legislators, and then how do legislators try and meet those expectations, is really a question that I’m really interested in.
And so, as I mentioned, I’m working on this paper with Albert Rivero and Shiro Kuriwaki on how legislators are justifying their difficult votes, because even though it’s this really canonical aspect of representation and what we think matters, we haven’t really systematically examined, at least in mass communications, the kind of justifications that legislators are providing. So, I think that’s exciting.
And then, it’s interesting because you also brought up media coverage, which seems like it’s kind of a necessary part of the story that a lot of times we, as Congress scholars, kind of treat as separate. But, I’m working on a new project with Michael Olson and one of our grad students here at WashU, David Wynn, where we’re exploring how, okay, there’s a ton of existing work showing that the decline of local media has really negative consequences for accountability. And, specifically, we know it impacts how state legislators behave, but we also know, at the same time, that voters evaluate candidates off of much more than just information. We know that voters think about identity traits, and gender, and seem to hold women to different standards than they hold men to, at least at the ballot.
And so, what we end up finding is that women seem to respond differently to changing media environments in their districts. And so, as media coverage evolves, it seems like different legislators might be altering their behavior differently, which, I think, has important consequences for representation.
Matt Grossmann: So sorry, we have to go back to the normative question, but it sounds like this is a pretty relatively positive story about Congress that you are not necessarily defending the institution, but at least saying the members are paying attention to what they think their constituents want, and at least trying to respond to that. Is that how you would interpret the field that you’re building?
Jaclyn Kaslovsky: So, that’s how I tend to approach these questions. I talk about this a lot, my Congress class with my undergrads, where I am in no way trying to necessarily say that what individual members are doing is good, or these policy outcomes are good, or anything like that. But, I think we can all acknowledge that it is a very hard job to be a member of Congress and to try to satisfy these different constituencies. And it’s not one that I would necessarily envy. And so, that’s how I tend to approach these questions is what are members…
Even if you say that you’re trying, sometimes that is not enough for constituents, but sometimes it is. And it’s interesting to think about what people are willing to accept from their legislators, just in terms of seeing the effort that they’re putting in, versus the outcomes that they’re able to produce, especially in today’s world of really intense centralization in the chamber.
Matt Grossmann: There’s a lot more to learn. The Science of Politics is available biweekly from the Niskanen Center, and I’m your host, Matt Grossmann. If you like this discussion, here are the episodes you should check out next. Does nationalized media mean the death of local politics? Can TV news keep politics local? Does the 2022 election show how Democratic campaigns win? How voters judge Congress, and how Congress communicates?
Thanks to Jaclyn Kaslovsky for joining me. Please check out Adaptive Representation in the U.S. Congress, and then listen in next time.
