Beyond the Median: Voter Preferences, District Heterogeneity, and Political Representation

“Other methods for scaling political actors have been developed (e.g., Gerber and Lewis 2004; Bonica 2011), but they rely on particular disclosure institutions that are often absent in other democracies.”

“The common-space CFscores joins a fledgling literature on estimating ideal points for state politics (Aldrich and Battista 2002; Berry et al. 1998, 2007; Gerber and Lewis 2004; Kousser, Lewis, and Masket 2007; Shor and McCarty 2011; Wright 2007).”

“As a result, scholars have relied on a variety of proxies for public opinion, all of which have serious flaws.”

“In order to jointly estimate the ideologies of actors with (primarily) disjoint choice sets one must have some set of choices that “bridges” choice divides (Bafumi and Herron 2010; Bailey 2007; Gerber and Lewis 2004; Poole and Rosenthal 1997).”

“…Messing, 2015; Bonica, 2013; Caughey and Warshaw, 2014; Caughey, 2014; Clinton, 2006; Ellis and Stimson, 2012; Erikson, MacKuen and Stimson, 2002; Gerber and Lewis, 2004; Griffin and Newman, 2005, 2007; Masket and Noel, 2012; Pan and Xu, 2015; Peress, 2013; Rogowski and Tucker, 2014; Saiegh,…”

“…(Downs, 1957) makes the strong prediction that the preferences of this single voter receive 100% of the weight in the legislator’s decision function; Gerber and Lewis (2004), Levitt (1996) and Stratmann (1995, 1996) all provide evidence that the average or median voter is one factor among many…”

“Gerber and Lewis (2004) recover legislators’ ideology using roll call votes and obtain comparable estimates of voter preferences from data on statewide ballot measures in Los Angeles County, California.”

“Others demonstrate that legislators’ responsiveness to constituent policy views weakens or strengthens by several factors, including heterogeneity or perceived changes in those views (Bailey and Brady 1998; Gerber and Lewis 2004; Harden and Carsey 2012; Kousser, Lewis, and Masket 2007).”

“…start end roll Calls Bridges Ca 1993 2008 16,632 20 Co 1996 2005 5,874 8 Fl 1996 2005 2,013 15 il 1996 2008 4,759 6 la 1997 2006 3,292 5 Mi 1996 2006 7,281 7 NC 1995 2006 2,889 6 NJ 1996 2005 1,778 5 Ny 1996 2003 3,011 6 oh 1995 2008 1,416 10 pa 1996 2007 2,663 8 425a Bridge to somewhere”

“…literature on estimating ideal points for state politics (Berry et al. 1998, Downloaded from https://academic.oup.com/jleo/article-abstract/31/3/472/807729 by guest on 27 July 2018 2007; Aldrich and Battista 2002; Kousser et al. 2007; Wright 2007; Gerber and Lewis 2004; Shor and McCarty 2011).”

“Scholars generally agree that the vot- ing behavior of legislators is partly a function of local constituency preferences (Brewer, Mariani, and Stonecash 2002; Gerber and Lewis 2004; Jackson and Kingdon 1992).”

“Moreover, district heterogeneity (Gerber and Lewis 2004) and voter margins (Lee et al. 2004) among other factors may induce divergence between constituents and legislators.”

“…elicited about those same roll calls or use a set of roll call votes in joint scaling procedures to provide more precise measures of citizen and legislator preferences in a common space (e.g., Bafumi and Herron, 2010; Clinton, 2006; Gerber and Lewis, 2004; Tausanovitch and Warshaw, 2013).”

“Specifically, we concatenate the above answer with the following prompt: In the above Text, who is described to be the more liberal, more progressive, or less conservative senator: [senator 1] or [senator 2]?”

“…relate to studies that examine the nexus between voter preferences and political representation with US, Swedish and Swiss data (e.g., Levitt 1996; Gerber and Lewis 2004; Brunner et al. 2013; Ågren et al. 2006; Eichenberger et al. 2012; Portmann et al. 2012; Stadelmann et al. 2012; Portmann and…”

“Rather than driving elite polarization, such voter sorting may be its consequence (see Levendusky 2009). on variation across the nation as a whole, or on the average or median traits of citizens in each district (e.g., Jacobson 2004; Clinton 2006; McCarty, Poole and Rosenthal 2006; Levendusky 2009).”

“…competing claims that this or that system—plain pro- 25 An interesting option, inspired by the call for flexible democratic mechanisms in other contexts (see Gersbach 2005, 2009), would be to specify different voting rules for different policy domains of an organization like the European Union.”

“10 Butler (2009) and Clinton (2006) use survey data to find an influence of primary voters or partisan subconstituencies on representative voting.11 Gerber and Lewis (2004), however, do not find an effect of legislator partisan subconstituency on roll call voting when mea- suring preferences using…”

“In spite of its theoretical robustness and elegance in political economy models, empirical evidence shows that legislators deviate significantly from the median voter (see, e.g., Bender and Lott 1996; Gerber and Lewis 2004).”

“…and their individual motivations to be good representatives—and thus by the preferences of their voters—politicians still have a certain leeway for pursuing their selfinterests and following their personal motivations (see, e.g., Adams et al., 2010; Gerber and Lewis, 2004; Levitt, 1996).”

“Several scholars have proposed the use of referendum voting returns as an alternative to the reliance on demographics for measuring constituents’ preferences (Gerber and Lewis 2004; Kuklinski 1978; Lewis 1998; McDonagh 1993; Snyder 1996, 2005).”

“>THE IMPORTANCE OF VOTER PREFERENCE Gerber and Lewis (2004) studied the link between voter preferences, district heterogeneity, and legislator 282 HEALTH PROMOTION PRACTICE / July 2006 Policy and Politics Jones et al. / STATE HEALTH POLICY MAKERS 283 behavior in Los Angeles County, California.”

“Alternatively, several scholars contend that heterogeneity produces a noisy signal of constituent preferences to representatives, and thus provides legislators with a sort of ideological freedom (Bailey and Brady 1998; Gerber and Lewis 2004).”

“Political representatives deviate from voters’ positions (see, among others, Gerber and Lewis, 2004; Levitt, 1996; Matsusaka, 1995; Stadelmann et al., 2013).”

“The assumption made that the old type owns initially more capital than the young type implies, by (5) and (6), that (9)Although this economy has no explicit age structure, I refer to the two types as old and young since they are distinguished by their endowment of capital, and in the life-cycle model that I analyze la…”

“33 Gerber and Lewis 2004; Stadelmann, Portmann, and Eichenberger 2012.”

“One relatively new approach is to use theory-driven estimates to produce and compare legislator and constituent ideal points based on opinion surveys or ballot measure returns (Gerber and Lewis, 2004; Bafumi and Herron, 2010; Masket and Noel, 2011; Kousser et al., 2014).”

“Population growth, urbanism, and racial diversity are all associated with increased district heterogeneity (Frederick, 2009; Fischer, 1975, 1995; Bailey and Brady, 1998; Gerber and Lewis, 2004), which makes the task of identifying and representing district interests more difficult (Ensley et al.”

“For instance, heterogeneity alters the representational task by making it more difficult to hold legislators accountable to majority opinion (Bailey and Brady 1998; Gerber and Lewis 2004).”

“Some scholars define district homogeneity in terms of political homogeneity as captured by the extent of partisan or ideological variation (e.g., Gerber & Lewis, 2004; Gronke, 2000; Kalt & Zupan, 1990; McCarty, Poole, & Rosenthal, 2009), whereas other scholars focus on demographic homogeneity in…”

“𝑣𝑣 𝑖𝑖𝑗𝑗∗ , where is Robinson (1950) and Cho and Gaines (2004) are critical of the value of aggregate voting data in the context of cross-level inference, though Greiner and Quinn (2010) find that a combination of exit poll and aggregate data can be optimal under certain circumstances.”

“Gerber and Lewis (2004) argue the legislators from districts with more heterogeneity are less constrained by the location of the median voter because greater heterogeneity gives legislators more discretion in the positions they adopt (see also Bailey and Brady 1998; Bishin 2000; Bishin et al.…”

“, 1981), gerrymandering (Gilligan and Matsusaka, 2006), the executive veto (Cameron, 2000; McCarty, 2000), and independence of administrative agencies (Gerber et al., 2001). At the same time, the high propensity of non-median voter outcomes (41 percent of the time) raises questions about political economy models that…”

“According to this approach, a ‘majority rule voting system’ will result in an outcome that is most preferred by the median voter (Gerber and Lewis 2004).11 This is the voter (in our case a FIFA member nation) whose preference separates the other voters into two equal groups when they are arranged…”

“Previous studies have relied on samples of congressional districts that are not nationally representative (Gerber and Lewis 2004).”

“6 Previous research on congruence has estimated í µí±Œí µí±Œ í µí±›í µí±› and í µí±Œí µí±Œ í µí±›í µí±› * as points on the real line based on a sample of votes ---roll call votes for legislators and some sort of district-level election returns for constituents (following Gerber and Lewis (2004)).”

“Empirical evidence suggests that a representative may take positions that differ significantly from his district’s median when voter preferences within that district are sufficiently heterogeneous (Gerber and Lewis 2004).”

“In contrast to this, by allo- 10This is also increasingly supported by empirical evidence, see, e.g., Pommerehne (1978), Peltzman (1992) or, more recently, Gerber and Lewis (2004).”

“House elections. Using voter data, Gerber and Lewis (2004) find that legislators are most constrained to the median voter in homogeneous districts.”