Bill sponsorship is a valuable form of legislative activity in which all legislators are free to signal priorities, stake out positions, and influence legislative agendas. However, decisions to hone in on specific issues have been mostly overlooked, resulting in drivers of issue-specific sponsorship remaining unclear. A reasonable place to look for drivers is constituent preferences, given the representational responsibilities underlying most legislative behavior. To address this question, I leverage advances in opinion estimation to generate a new fine-grained measure of constituent issue preferences at the district level. By keeping the focus on issues, this approach is preferable to other measures of constituent preferences, in that it assumes nothing about constituents’ ideology. Through numerous tests across several issues spanning the 109th to 113th Congresses, I find a largely indirect effect of preferences on sponsorship through employment proxies, yet no consistent direct impact from constituents, opposite expectations of the delegate model of representation.
AdlerE. S.LapinskiJ. S. (1997). Demand-side theory and congressional committee composition: A constituency characteristics approach. American Journal of Political Science, 41, 895-918.
2.
AdlerE. S.WilkersonJ. D. (2012). Congress and the politics of problem solving. New York, NY: Cambridge University Press.
BafumiJ.HerronM. C. (2010). Leapfrog representation and extremism: A study of American voters and their members in congress. American Political Science Review, 104, 519-542.
7.
BarnelloM. A.BrattonK. A. (2007). Bridging the gender gap in bill sponsorship. Legislative Studies Quarterly, 32, 449-474.
8.
BauerR. A.de PoolI. S.DexterL. A. (1972). American business and public policy: The politics of foreign trade (2nd ed.). Chicago, IL: Aldine-Atherton.
9.
BaumgartnerF. R.JonesD. B. (1993). Agendas and instability in American politics. Chicago, IL: University of Chicago Press.
10.
BibbyJ. F. (1966). Committee characteristics and legislative oversight of administration. Midwest Journal of Political Science, 10, 78-98.
11.
BishinB. G. (2009). Tyranny of the minority: The subconstituency politics theory of representation. Philadelphia, PA: Temple University Press.
12.
BroockmanD. E. (2016). Approaches to studying policy representation. Legislative Studies Quarterly, 41, 181-215.
13.
BursteinP. (2003). The impact of public opinion on public policy: A review and an agenda. Political Research Quarterly, 56, 29-40.
14.
BursteinP. S.Bauldry FroeseP. (2005). Bill sponsorship and congressional support for policy proposals, from introduction to enactment or disappearance. Political Research Quarterly, 58, 295-302.
15.
CoxG. W. (2001). Agenda setting in the U.S. House: A majority-party monopoly?Legislative Studies Quarterly, 26, 185-210.
16.
CoxG. W.McCubbinsM. D. (1993). Legislative leviathan: Party government in the House. New York, NY: Cambridge University Press.
17.
CoxG. W.McCubbinsM. D. (2005). Setting the agenda: Responsible party government in the U.S. House of Representatives. New York, NY: Cambridge University Press.
18.
CoxG. W.PooleK. T. (2002). On measuring partisanship in roll-call voting: The U.S. House of Representatives, 1877-1999. American Journal of Political Science, 46, 477-489.
19.
DamoreD. F. (2004). The dynamics of issue ownership in presidential campaigns. Political Research Quarterly, 57, 391-397.
20.
DruckmanJ. N.LupiaA. (2000). Preference formation. Annual Review of Political Science, 3, 1-24.
21.
EganP. J. (2013). Partisan priorities: How issue ownership drives and distorts American politics. New York, NY: Cambridge University Press.
22.
EriksonR. S.WrightG. C.Jr. (1980). Policy representation of constituency interests. Political Behavior, 2, 91-106.
23.
EriksonR. S.WrightG. C.McIverJ. P. (1993). Statehouse democracy: Public opinion and policy in the American States. New York, NY: Cambridge University Press.
24.
EulauH.WahlkeJ. C.BuchananW.FergusonL. C. (1959). The role of the representative: Some empirical observations on the theory of Edmund Burke. American Political Science Review, 53, 742-756.
25.
FowlerA.HallA. B. (2016). The elusive quest for convergence. Quarterly Journal of Political Science, 11131-11149.
26.
FreemanP. K.RichardsonL. E.Jr. (1996). Explaining variation in casework among state legislators. Legislative Studies Quarterly, 21, 41-56.
27.
GailmardS.JenkinsJ. A. (2007). Negative agenda control in the Senate and House: Fingerprints of majority party power. Journal of Politics, 69, 689-700.
28.
GilliganT. W.KrehbielK. (1989). Asymmetric information and legislative rules with a heterogeneous committee. American Journal of Political Science, 33, 459-490.
29.
GriffinJ. D.KeaneM. (2011). Are African Americans effectively represented in congress?Political Research Quarterly, 64, 145-156.
30.
HardenJ. J. (2016). Multidimensional democracy: A supply and demand theory of representation in American legislatures. New York, NY: Cambridge University Press.
31.
HerringM. (1990). Legislative responsiveness to black constituents in three deep south states. Journal of Politics, 52, 740-758.
32.
HightonB.RoccaM. S. (2005). Beyond the roll-call arena: The determinants of position taking in congress. Political Research Quarterly, 58, 303-316.
33.
JacobsL. R.ShapiroR. Y. (2000). Politicians don’t pander: Political manipulation and the loss of democratic responsiveness. Chicago, IL: University of Chicago Press.
34.
KathleneL. (1994). Power and influence in state legislative policymaking: The interaction of gender and position in committee hearing debates. American Political Science Review, 88, 560-576.
35.
KirklandJ. H.HardenJ. J. (2016). Representation, competing principals, and waffling on bills in U.S. legislatures. Legislative Studies Quarterly, 41, 657-686.
36.
LawrenceE. D.MaltzmanF.SmithS. S. (2006). Who wins? Party effects in legislative voting. Legislative Studies Quarterly, 31, 33-69.
37.
LaxJ.PhillipsJ. (2009). Gay rights in the states: Public opinion and policy responsiveness. American Political Science Review, 103, 367-386.
38.
LaxJ.PhillipsJ. (2012). The democratic deficit in the states. American Journal of Political Science, 56, 148-166.
39.
MayhewD. R. (1974). Congress: The electoral connection. New Haven, CT: Yale University Press.
40.
MilerK. C. (2010). Constituency representation in congress: The view from Capitol Hill. New York, NY: Cambridge University Press.
41.
PetrocikJ. R. (1996). Issue ownership in presidential elections, with a 1980 case study. American Journal of Political Science, 40, 825-850.
42.
PetrocikJ. R.BenoitW. L.HansenG. J. (2003). Issue ownership and presidential campaigning, 1952-2000. Political Science Quarterly, 118, 599-626.
43.
PlattM. B.Sinclair-ChapmanV. (2008, January 9-12). Legislative problem-solving: Exploring bill sponsorship in post-war America. Paper presented at Annual Meeting of the Southern Political Science Association, New Orleans, LA.
44.
RoccaM. S.GordonS. B. (2010). The position-taking value of bill sponsorship in congress. Political Research Quarterly, 63, 387-397.
45.
RoccaM. S.SanchezG. R. (2008). The effect of race and ethnicity on bill sponsorship and cosponsorship in congress. American Politics Research, 36, 130-152.
SchillerW. (1995). Senators as political entrepreneurs: Using bill sponsorship to shape legislative agendas. American Journal of Political Science, 39, 186-203.
48.
ShipanC. R.LowryW. R. (2001). Environmental policy and party divergence in congress. Political Research Quarterly, 54, 245-263.
49.
StewartC.III.WoonJ. (2017). Congressional committee assignments, 103rd to 114th congresses, 1993–2017. Cambridge, USA: Massachusetts Institute of Technology.
50.
StimsonJ. A. (2004). Tides of consent: How opinion movements shape American politics. New York, NY: Cambridge University Press.
51.
StimsonJ. A.MacKuenM. B.EriksonR. S. (1995). Dynamic representation. American Political Science Review, 89, 543-565.
52.
SulkinT. (2005). Issue politics in congress. New York, NY: Cambridge University Press.
53.
SulkinT. (2009). Campaign appeals and legislative action. Journal of Politics, 71, 1093-1108.
54.
TateK. (2001). The political representation of blacks in congress: Does race matter?Legislative Studies Quarterly, 26, 623-638.
55.
TausanovitchC.WarshawC. (2013). Measuring constituent policy preferences in congress, state legislatures, and cities. Journal of Politics, 75, 330-342.
56.
VerbaS. (1996). The citizen as respondent: Sample surveys and American democracy. Presidential address, American political science association, 1995. American Political Science Review, 90(1), 1-7.
57.
VoldenC.WisemanA. E. (2014). Legislative effectiveness in the United States Congress: The lawmakers. New York, NY: Cambridge University Press.
58.
WarshawC.RoddenJ. (2012). How should we measure district-level public opinion on individual issues?Journal of Politics, 74, 203-219.
59.
WhitbyK. J. (2002). Bill sponsorship and intraracial voting among African American representatives. American Politics Research, 30, 93-109.
60.
WilsonW. C. (2010). Descriptive representation and Latino interest bill sponsorship in congress. Social Science Quarterly, 91, 1043-1062.
61.
WlezienC. (1995). The public as thermostat: Dynamics of preferences for spending. American Journal of Political Science, 39, 981-1000.
62.
WlezienC. (1996). Dynamics of representation: The case of U.S. spending on defence. British Journal of Political Science, 26, 81-103.
63.
WoonJ. (2008). Bill sponsorship in congress: The moderating effect of agenda positions on legislative proposals. Journal of Politics, 70, 201-216.
64.
WoonJ. (2009). Issue attention and legislative proposals in the U.S. senate. Legislative Studies Quarterly, 34, 29-54.
Supplementary Material
Please find the following supplemental material available below.
For Open Access articles published under a Creative Commons License, all supplemental material carries the same license as the article it is associated with.
For non-Open Access articles published, all supplemental material carries a non-exclusive license, and permission requests for re-use of supplemental material or any part of supplemental material shall be sent directly to the copyright owner as specified in the copyright notice associated with the article.
