Does Legislative Polarization Harm Representation?

Date
-
Event Sponsor
The Munro Lectureship Fund and The Lane Center
Speaker

Chris Warshaw, Fifth Year Graduate Student, Stanford University

 

Abstract

Congress has become steadily more polarized in recent years. But there remains broad disagreement about whether polarization has harmed democratic representation in Congress.  This study moves beyond previous work by comparing legislators’ votes on 36 salient roll call votes from the 108-111th Congresses directly to public opinion on those issues. I use national-level surveys and recent advances in opinion estimation to estimate issue-specific public opinion in each state and congressional district. I find that members of Congress are generally responsive to public opinion on individual issues. However, legislators with ideologically extreme roll call records are substantially less responsive than moderate legislators. As a result, these extreme legislators are much less congruent with majority opinion in their constituencies. These findings show that legislative polarization weakens the link between legislators and their constituents. At a broader level, these results contribute to our understanding of democratic representation in the American Congress.

 

Biography
Chris Warshaw is a fifth year graduate student.  He also received a J.D. from Stanford Law School.  His areas of research are American Politics, Representation, Public Opinion, Congress, State Politics, Judicial Politics, Environmental Policy, and Methodology.  Prior to graduate school, Chris worked in politics for two years and as a environmental economics analyst for two years.
 
Chris's dissertation research focuses on evaluating theories of representation and redistricting.  He compares the political preferences of citizens to the roll call behavior of legislators in order to evaluate theories of representation, such as which constituences are best represented in Congress and state legislatures.  His dissertation also examines how institutional features, such as non-partisan redistricting, term limits, and popular initiatives, affect whose interests are represented in legislatures.