Legislative Responsiveness: An Empirical Study

Abstract

We use data from the US Congress to investigate the extent to which legislators' ideological positioning responds to changes in the preferences of constituents. We measure the positioning of legislators using DW-Nominate scores (Poole and Rosenthal 1997) and track the ideological preferences of constituents in each legislative district with the vote shares of presidential candidates in that district. We estimate a panel controlling for legislator and congress fixed effects. We find that when districts become more supportive of Democratic (Republican) presidential candidates, the voting records of Democratic (Republican) House Representatives in subsequent congresses become more extreme. The effects we find are small but strongly significant. The effects are stronger for Republicans, suggesting that they are less partisan or more office-oriented. We then construct a relative ordering of legislators' electoral strength and show that the responsive legislators are those whose seats are predicted to be relatively unsafe. We discuss the implications of our results for our understanding of the empirical relevance of various theories of electoral competition.