Hostname: page-component-7c8c6479df-27gpq Total loading time: 0 Render date: 2024-03-27T09:57:35.568Z Has data issue: false hasContentIssue false

Do Politicians Shape Public Opinion?

Published online by Cambridge University Press:  14 December 2012

Abstract

Most research on political representation focuses on how citizens’ ideology and partisanship influence their support for political candidates – leaving the question of whether (and how) elected officials influence citizens’ positions on political issues open to debate. The hypothesis tested here – using a unique, quasi-experimental design with American National Election Study data between 1956 and 2004 – is that Democratic representatives shift the opinions of constituents in the pro-Democratic and liberal direction, while Republican representatives shift constituents’ opinions in the pro-Republican and conservative direction. The findings show that incumbent representatives indeed move their constituents’ opinions in a particular direction, and that representatives have a stronger impact on constituents who are more frequently exposed to their messages.

Type
Articles
Copyright
Copyright © Cambridge University Press 2012

Access options

Get access to the full version of this content by using one of the access options below. (Log in options will check for institutional or personal access. Content may require purchase if you do not have access.)

Footnotes

*

Department of Political Science, University of North Texas (email: tmatsubayashi@unt.edu). The author wishes to thank Gary Jacobson for sharing his Congressional election data and Kim Hill, Jan Leighley, Michiko Ueda and seminar participants at the University of North Texas and the University of North Carolina at Charlotte for their valuable comments.

References

1 Miller, Warren E. and Stokes, Donald E., ‘Constituency Influence in Congress’, American Political Science Review, 57 (1963), 4556CrossRefGoogle Scholar

Gerber, Elizabeth R. and Lewis, Jeffrey B, ‘Beyond the Median: Voter Preferences, District Heterogeneity, and Political Representation’, Journal of Political Economy, 106 (2004), 13641383CrossRefGoogle Scholar

Powell, G. Bingham, ‘Political Representation in Comparative Politics’, Annual Review of Political Science, 7 (2004), 273296CrossRefGoogle Scholar

Stimson, James A., MacKuen, Michael B. and Erikson, Robert S., ‘Dynamic Representation’, American Political Science Review, 89 (1995), 543565CrossRefGoogle Scholar

2 Gerber, Elizabeth R. and Jackson, John E., ‘Endogeneous Preferences and the Study of Institutions’, American Political Science Review, 87 (1993), 639656CrossRefGoogle Scholar

Ward, Hugh, ‘Preference Shaping and Party Competition: Some Empirical and Theoretical Arguments’, in Judith Bara and Albert Weale, eds, Democratic Politics and Party Competition (New York: Routledge, 2006), pp. 245270Google Scholar

3 Arnold, R. Douglas, The Logic of Congressional Action (New Haven, Conn.: Yale University Press, 1990)Google Scholar

Fenno, Richard F., Home Style: House Members in Their Districts (Boston, Mass.: Little, Brown, 1978)Google Scholar

Mayhew, David R., Congress: The Electoral Connection (New Haven, Conn.: Yale University Press, 1974)Google Scholar

4 Jacobs and Shapiro, Politicians Don't Pander.

5 Dunleavy, Patrick and Ward, Hugh, ‘Exogenous Voter Preferences and Parties with State Power: Some Internal Problems of Economic Theories of Party Competition’, British Journal of Political Science, 11 (2011), 351380CrossRefGoogle Scholar

6 Ward, ‘Preference Shaping and Party Competition’.

7 Jacobs and Shapiro, Politicians Don't Pander.

8 Chong, Dennis and Druckman, James N., ‘Framing Theory’, Annual Review of Political Science, 10 (2007), 103126CrossRefGoogle Scholar

Nelson, Thomas E. and Oxley, Zoe M., ‘Issue Framing Effects on Belief Importance and Opinion Issue Framing Effects on Belief Importance and Opinion’, Journal of Politics, 61 (2011), 10401067CrossRefGoogle Scholar

Druckman, James N., Jacobs, Lawrence R. and Ostermeier, Eric, ‘Candidate Strategies to Prime Issues and Image’, Journal of Politics, 66 (2011), 11801202CrossRefGoogle Scholar

Jacoby, William G., ‘Issue Framing and Public Opinion on Government Spending’, American Journal of Political Science, 44 (2000), 750767CrossRefGoogle Scholar

9 Dunleavy and Ward, ‘Exogenous Voter Preferences and Parties with State Power’.

10 Ward, ‘Preference Shaping and Party Competition’, p. 248Google Scholar

11 Druckman, James N. and Nelson, Kjersten R., ‘Framing and Deliberation: How Citizens’ Conversations Limit Elite Influence’, American Journal of Political Science, 47 (2003), 729745CrossRefGoogle Scholar

Hurley, Patricia A. and Hill, Kim Quaile, ‘Beyond the Demand-Input Model: A Theory of Representational Linkages’, Journal of Politics, 65 (2003), 304326CrossRefGoogle Scholar

Schneider, Saundra K. and Jacoby, William G., ‘Elite Discourse and American Public Opinion: The Case of Welfare Spending’, Political Research Quarterly, 58 (2005), 367379CrossRefGoogle Scholar

Zaller, John, The Nature and Origins of Mass Opinion (New York: University of Cambridge Press, 1992)CrossRefGoogle Scholar

Wood, B. Dan, The Myth of Presidential Responsiveness (New York: Cambridge University Press, 2009)CrossRefGoogle Scholar

12 Gabel, Matthew and Scheve, Kenneth, ‘Estimating the Effect of Elite Communications on Public Opinion Using Instrumental Variables’, American Journal of Political Science, 51 (2007), 10131028CrossRefGoogle Scholar

Shigeo Hirano and James M. Snyder, Jr, ‘Using Multimember District Elections to Estimate the Sources of the Incumbency Advantage’, American Journal of Political Science, 53 (2009), 292306CrossRefGoogle Scholar

Huber, Gregory A. and Arceneaux, Kevin, ‘Identifying the Persuasive Effects of Presidential Advertising’, American Journal of Political Science, 51 (2007), 961981CrossRefGoogle Scholar

13 Gabel and Scheve, ‘Estimating the Effect of Elite Communications on Public Opinion Using Instrumental Variables’.

14 Hahn, Jinyong, Todd, Petra and Klaauw, Wilbert der, ‘Identification and Estimation of Treatment Effects with a Regression-Discontinuity Design’, Econometrica, 69 (2001), 201209CrossRefGoogle Scholar

Lee, David S. and Lemieux, Thomas, ‘Regression Discontinuity Designs in Economics’, Journal of Economic Literature, 48 (2010), 281355CrossRefGoogle Scholar

15 Zaller, The Nature and Origins of Mass Opinion; Gabel and Scheve, ‘Estimating the Effect of Elite Communications on Public Opinion Using Instrumental Variables’.

16 Cain, Bruce, Ferejohn, John and Fiorina, Morris, The Personal Vote: Constituency Service and Electoral Independence (Cambridge, Mass.: Harvard University Press, 1987)CrossRefGoogle Scholar

Steven D. Levitt and James M. Snyder; ‘Political Parties and the Distribution of Federal Outlays’, American Journal of Political Science, 39 (1995), 958–980CrossRefGoogle Scholar

Stein, Robert M. and Bickers, Kenneth N., Perpetuating the Pork Barrel: Policy Subsystems and American Democracy (New York: Cambridge University Press, 1995)CrossRefGoogle Scholar

17 Lipinski, Daniel, Congressional Communication: Content and Consequences (Ann Arbor: University of Michigan Press, 2004)CrossRefGoogle Scholar

18 Lipinski, Congressional Communication.

19 Fenno, Home Style: House Members in Their Districts; Jacobs and Shapiro, Politicians Dont Pander.

20 Gerring, John, Party Ideologies in America, 1828–1996 (New York: Cambridge University Press, 1998)CrossRefGoogle Scholar

Poole, Keith T. and Rosenthal, Howard, Ideology and Congress (New Brunswick, N.J.: Transaction, 2007)Google Scholar

21 Poole and Rosenthal, Ideology and Congress.

22 Adams, Greg D., ‘Abortion: Evidence for Issue Evolution’, American Journal of Political Science, 41 (1997), 718737CrossRefGoogle Scholar

Carmines, Edward G. and Stimson, James, Issue Evolution (Princeton, N.J.: Princeton University Press, 1989)CrossRefGoogle Scholar

Layman, Geoffrey C. and Carsey, Thomas M, ‘Party Polarization and “Conflict Extension” in the American Electorate’, American Journal of Political Science, 46 (2002), 786802CrossRefGoogle Scholar

Stimson, James A., Tides of Consent: How Public Opinion Shapes American Politics (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2004)CrossRefGoogle Scholar

23 Gary C Jacobson, The Politics of Congressional Elections, 4th edn (New York: Longman, 1997)Google Scholar

24 Arnold, R Douglas, Congress, the Press, and Political Accountability (Princeton, N.J.: Princeton University Press, 2004)Google Scholar

Schaffner, Brian F., ‘Local News Coverage and the Incumbency Advantage in the U.S. House’, Legislative Studies Quarterly, 31 (2006), 491511CrossRefGoogle Scholar

Vinson, Danielle, Local Media Coverage of Congress and its Members: Through Local Eyes (Cresskill, N.J.: Hampton Press, 2003)Google Scholar

Cook, Timothy E., Making Laws and Making News: Media Strategies in the U.S. House of Representatives (Washington, D.C.: The Brookings Institution, 1989)Google Scholar

Robinson, Michael, ‘Three Faces of Congressional Media’, in Thomas E. Mann and Norman J. Ornstein, eds, The New Congress (Washington, D.C.: American Enterprise Institute, 1981)Google Scholar

25 Carmines, Edward G. and Kuklinski, James H., ‘Incentives, Opportunities, and the Logic of Public Opinion in American Political Representation’, in John A. Ferejohn and James H. Kuklinski, eds, Information and Democratic Processes (Urbana: University of Illinois Press, 1990), pp. 240268Google Scholar

Lupia, Arthur and McCubbins, Mathew D., The Democratic Dilemma (New York: Cambridge University Press, 1998)Google Scholar

26 Tomz, Michael and Sniderman, Paul M., ‘Brand Names and the Organizations of Mass Belief Systems’ (paper presented at the Annual Meeting of the Midwest Political Science Association, 2005)Google Scholar

27 Chong, Dennis and Druckman, James N., ‘A Theory of Framing and Opinion Formation in Competitive Elite Environments’, Journal of Communication, 57 (2007), 99118Google Scholar

Miller, Joanne M. and Krosnick, Jon A., ‘News Media Impact on the Ingredients of Presidential Evaluations: Politically Knowledgeable Citizens Are Guided by a Trusted Source’, American Journal of Political Science, 44 (2000), 301315CrossRefGoogle Scholar

28 Zaller, The Nature and Origins of Mass Opinion; Lupia and McCubbins, The Democratic Dilemma.

29 Specifically, the data include no measure of people's political predispositions measured prior to the exposure to new information delivered by representatives. All attitudinal measures are subject to change in response to the representatives’ messages.

30 The ANES data are available from the ICPSR data archive. The House election data were generously provided by Gary Jacobson.

31 Broockman, David, ‘Do Congressional Candidates Have Reverse Coattails? Evidence from a Regression Discontinuity Design’, Political Analysis, 17 (2009), 418434CrossRefGoogle Scholar

32 Grose, Christian R. and Yoshinaka, Antoine, ‘The Electoral Consequences of Party Switching by Incumbent Members of Congress, 1947–2000’, Legislative Studies Quarterly, 28 (2003), 5575CrossRefGoogle Scholar

33 When incumbent representatives do not run for re-election, respondents were asked about a new candidate. We assume that incumbent representatives can lead people to be positive about a new candidate who belongs to the same party.

34 The percentages of respondents with high and low education are 39 per cent and 61 per cent, respectively.

35 John Zaller, ‘The Myth of Massive Media Impact Revived: New Support for a Discredited Idea’, Political Persuasion and Attitude Change (Ann Arbor: University of Michigan Press, 1996)Google Scholar

36 The question on the frequency of reading a daily newspaper is available only after 1982. The percentages of respondents with high and low media usage are 50 per cent each. Note that the ANES survey question does not specify whether respondents read a local or national newspaper. I assume that typical respondents read a local newspaper because national newspapers are read by only a small fraction of the American public (for example, in 1999, The Washington Post and USA Today sold about 1.7 million copies, while the New York Times sold about 1.1 million copies on a weekday. The total circulation of daily newspapers in the United States was about 56 million in 1999, according to Editor & Publisher International Year Book, 2000.

37 A list of all attitudinal and behavioural variables with the corresponding years of the ANES survey is available upon request.

38 Adams, ‘Abortion’; Carmines and Stimson, Issue Evolution; Layman, The Great Divide; Stimson, Tides of Consent. The survey questions are available from the codebook of the ANES cumulative data file.

39 Lee, David S., ‘Randomized Experiments from Non-Random Selection in U.S. House Elections’, Journal of Econometrics, 142 (2008), 675697CrossRefGoogle Scholar

Lee, David S., Moretti, Enrico and Butler, Matthew J., ‘Do Voters Affect or Elect Policies? Evidence from the U.S. House’, Quarterly Journal of Economics, 119 (2004), 807859CrossRefGoogle Scholar

40 Lee, ‘Randomized Experiments from Non-Random Selection in U.S. House Elections’; Broockman, ‘Do Congressional Candidates Have Reverse Coattails?’.

41 Note that there may be some conservative Democrats and liberal Republicans. If many conservative Democrats and liberal Republicans are elected, the impacts of the Democratic (Republican) victory on constituents’ opinions are estimated to be weak.

42 Lee, ‘Randomized Experiments from Non-Random Selection in U.S. House Elections’, p. 684Google Scholar

43 Broockman, ‘Do Congressional Candidates Have Reverse Coattails?’ p. 6Google Scholar

44 Lee and Lemieux, ‘Regression Discontinuity Designs in Economics’.

45 In addition, the model described below controls differences across election years by including the year-fixed effect.

46 This procedure for graphical presentation is recommended by Lee and Lemieux.

47 Guido Imbens and Karthik Kalyanaraman, ‘Optimal Bandwidth Choice for the Regression Discontinuity Estimator’, NBER Working Paper, No. 14726 (2009).

48 The results reported in the following section are similar even if state-fixed effects are included in this model.

49 Lee and Lemieux, ‘Regression Discontinuity Designs in Economics’.

50 See Imbens and Kalyanaraman for more details of their algorithm. We use the edge kernel for calculating the optimal bandwidth. The R codes for the algorithm were made available by Devin Caughey.

51 Lee and Lemieux, ‘Regression Discontinuity Designs in Economics’.

52 Caughey, Davin M. and Sekhon, Jasjeet S., ‘Regression-Discontinuity Designs and Popular Elections: Implications of Pro-Incumbent Bias in Close U.S. House Races’, Political Analysis, 19 (2011), 385408CrossRefGoogle Scholar

Grimmer, Justin et al., ‘Are Close Elections Random?’ (Working Paper, Stanford University, 2011)Google Scholar

53 Note that there is a possibility that these results capture the effect of time, not education, because of the high correlation between the two.

54 Michael B. MacKuen, Robert S. Erikson and James A. Stimson, ‘Macropartisanship’, American Political Science Review, 83 (1989), 11251142CrossRefGoogle Scholar

Erikson, Robert S., MacKuen, Michael B. and Stimson, James S., The Macro Polity (New York: Cambridge University Press, 2002)Google Scholar

55 The overall effect (15.3) in this analysis is larger than Lee's estimate (9), partly because our analysis uses the linear probability model for the binary dependent variable. This implies the possibility of a slight overestimate.

56 In addition, our supplementary analysis shows that the strong reverse coattail effect exists when we analyse the data after 1980. This implies that the effect of reverse coattail became larger as the major parties became more cohesive. The results of the supplementary analysis are available upon request.

57 The graphical analysis presents similar results, which are available upon request.

58 As noted previously, the media usage variable is available only after 1982. The evidence for the conditioning impact of media consumption in Table 1 might not be generalizable to the prior time period between 1956 and 1980.

59 The results are similar if the analysis focuses on respondents with high political awareness.

60 Imbens and Kalyanaraman, ‘Optimal Bandwidth Choice for the Regression Discontinuity Estimator’.

61 As a supplementary analysis, we also examined whether the representatives elected at t have any impact on constituent opinion and behaviour at t+2. The results indicated that a Democratic victory has a significant impact on the limited set of outcome variables such as candidate thermometer scores, party identification, government job guarantee and the vote in House and Senate elections among people with a high education and high median consumption levels. Importantly, the estimated impacts on these variables are smaller at t+2 than at t+1. These results seem to suggest that the impacts of representatives’ messages on constituent opinion are still large at t 2 but decaying over time. These results are available upon request.

62 Downs, Anthony, An Economic Theory of Democracy (New York: Harper & Row, 1957)Google Scholar

63 Jackson, John E., ‘Electoral Competition with Endogenous Voter Preferences’, in Ken Kollman, John Miller and Scott Pag, eds, Computational Models in Political Economy (Cambridge, Mass.: The MIT Press, 2003), pp. 109142CrossRefGoogle Scholar

64 Hurley and Hill, ‘Beyond the Demand-Input Model’.

65 Ladd, Jonathan McDonald and Lenz, Gabriel S, ‘Exploiting a Rare Communication Shift to Document the Persuasive Power of the News Media’, American Journal of Political Science, 53 (2011), 394410CrossRefGoogle Scholar

66 Yet we expect that the partisan bias is reinforced in favour of the incumbent's personal evaluation. It is reasonable to assume that the evaluation of incumbent candidates is affected by their activities but unaffected by other political figures. If representatives keep promoting their reputations, the bias is constantly reinforced in favour of them. This stabilization mechanism is found in the high rate of incumbent re-election.

67 Druckman, James N., ‘Political Preference Formation: Competition, Deliberation, and the (Ir)Relevance of Framing Effects’, American Political Science Review, 98 (2004), 671686CrossRefGoogle Scholar

Sniderman, Paul M. and Theriault, Sean M., ‘The Structure of Political Argument and the Logic of Issue Framing’, in Willem Saris and Paul M. Sniderman, eds, Studies in Public Opinion (Princeton, N.J.: Princeton University Press, 2004), pp. 133165CrossRefGoogle Scholar

68 Arnold, Congress, the Press, and Political Accountability.

69 Yet the recent development of news media on the internet may allow legislators and parties to communicate with their supporters more directly and frequently.