Bringing Representation Home: State Legislators Among Their Constituencies

Abstract

Bringing Representation Home: State Legislators Among Their Constituencies. By Michael A. Smith. Columbia: University of Missouri Press, 2003. 227p. $34.95.In his seminal essay on state legislatures (“The State of U.S. State Legislative Research,” Legislative Studies Quarterly 6 [February 1981]: 1–25), Malcolm Jewell seemed puzzled that our knowledge of state legislative representation was so limited. After all, there was a long and productive history of work on representation in Congress, and the states provided variation that could help advance our theoretical understanding of this important topic. Unfortunately, apart from recent work by Alan Rosenthal (The Decline of Representative Democracy, 1998) and a few articles on particular aspects of representation (such as casework), research over the last 20 years has not advanced our knowledge of representation as much as Jewell might have liked.