TY - JOUR
T1 - Extremity in Congress
T2 - Communications versus Votes
AU - Cormack, Lindsey
N1 - Publisher Copyright:
© 2016 Washington University in St. Louis
PY - 2016/8/1
Y1 - 2016/8/1
N2 - I propose a theory of legislator-to-constituent communication that describes a relationship between the types of votes a legislator reveals and the partisan composition of her constituency. To test this theory, I use an original data set of 40,000 official communications containing 30,000 vote revelations from the 111th Congress. I find evidence substantiating this theory; the extent to which a legislator endeavors to appear more ideologically extreme in communications varies systematically with the relative amounts of different types of voters in her district. This result is contrasted with an analysis of voting extremism where I find that the ideological preferences of donors better explain voting patterns.
AB - I propose a theory of legislator-to-constituent communication that describes a relationship between the types of votes a legislator reveals and the partisan composition of her constituency. To test this theory, I use an original data set of 40,000 official communications containing 30,000 vote revelations from the 111th Congress. I find evidence substantiating this theory; the extent to which a legislator endeavors to appear more ideologically extreme in communications varies systematically with the relative amounts of different types of voters in her district. This result is contrasted with an analysis of voting extremism where I find that the ideological preferences of donors better explain voting patterns.
UR - http://www.scopus.com/inward/record.url?scp=84980012095&partnerID=8YFLogxK
UR - http://www.scopus.com/inward/citedby.url?scp=84980012095&partnerID=8YFLogxK
U2 - 10.1111/lsq.12126
DO - 10.1111/lsq.12126
M3 - Article
AN - SCOPUS:84980012095
SN - 0362-9805
VL - 41
SP - 575
EP - 603
JO - Legislative Studies Quarterly
JF - Legislative Studies Quarterly
IS - 3
ER -