Representational style

About this book

Quantitative studies define representation through roll call votes, but roll call votes alone are insufficient to describe a legislator's representational style : how legislators respond, anticipate, and shape their constituents' preferences. Representational style is composed of three elements: how legislators invest their time and resources in Washington, their Washington styles ; the way they connect to their constituents in their district, their home styles ; and how they vote on legislation, their voting . In this book, I use new comprehensive, systematic, and verifiable measures of home style to demonstrate its central role in representational style. Home styles are important on their own as the primary way legislators define the representation provided to constituents. Legislators define diverse, stable, and nonpartisan home styles that reflect senators' multiple motivations in the institution. Home styles are also important because they are much more than cheap talk. I demonstrate that home styles are systematically related to what legislators do in Washington and how senators vote on controversial legislation, therefore providing a credible indicator of legislators' representational styles. Legislators also value opportunities to maintain their home styles, which bureaucrats exploit to cultivate support for their agencies. Because analyzing home styles across all legislators using standard methods and data is infeasible, I introduce a new Bayesian statistical model for political texts (estimated using a variational approximation, a deterministic alternative to MCMC) and an original collection of over 64,000 Senate press releases to measure home style.