Do Constituents Influence Issue-Specific Bill Sponsorship?

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...

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Bibliographic Details
Published in:American politics research 2019-07, Vol.47 (4), p.709-738
Main Author: Waggoner, Philip D.
Format: Article
Language:English
Subjects:
Constituents
Employment
Estimation
Expectations
Legislators
Leverage
Representation
Sponsorship
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Summary: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.
ISSN:1532-673X
1552-3373
DOI:10.1177/1532673X18759644