Ideology and representation in the United States
Abstract/Contents
- Abstract
- What is the mapping from constituent preferences to legislator roll call votes in Congress? This question is at the heart of the study of representation in American government. In this dissertation I argue that answering this question requires an understanding of three factors: (1) how the structure of constituent preferences compares to the structure of legislator roll call voting, (2) what constituent preferences look like at the district level and lower levels of aggregation, and (3) how different constituencies are represented differently. Each of the following chapters tackles one of these topics. In the first chapter I show that constituent policy preferences can be understood as one-dimensional. Although constituents' preferences are more noisy than legislator positions, their structure is surprisingly similar, and this is contrary to the expectation of much of the literature. The second chapter (joint with Christopher Warshaw) demonstrates a method for estimating the preferences of constituents at low levels of aggregation, such as congressional districts, and demonstrates some applications to the study of representation. The third chapter examines the question of whether legislators represent higher income constituents better than they represent lower income constituents. I show that differential representation is less substantial than previously thought, and that legislators sometimes represent the interests of lower income constituents rather than representing their preferences directly. Although I fall short of elaborating a full mapping of legislator behavior to constituent preferences, these chapters illustrate important components of such a mapping, overcoming many of the constraints of previous research.
Description
| Type of resource | text |
|---|---|
| Form | electronic; electronic resource; remote |
| Extent | 1 online resource. |
| Publication date | 2013 |
| Issuance | monographic |
| Language | English |
Creators/Contributors
| Associated with | Tausanovitch, Christopher Nicolas |
|---|---|
| Associated with | Stanford University, Department of Political Science. |
| Primary advisor | Jackman, Simon, 1966- |
| Thesis advisor | Jackman, Simon, 1966- |
| Thesis advisor | Brady, David |
| Thesis advisor | Fiorina, Morris P |
| Thesis advisor | Lewis, Jeffrey |
| Advisor | Brady, David |
| Advisor | Fiorina, Morris P |
| Advisor | Lewis, Jeffrey |
Subjects
| Genre | Theses |
|---|
Bibliographic information
| Statement of responsibility | Christopher Nicolas Tausanovitch. |
|---|---|
| Note | Submitted to the Department of Political Science. |
| Thesis | Thesis (Ph.D.)--Stanford University, 2013. |
| Location | electronic resource |
Access conditions
- Copyright
- © 2013 by Christopher Nicolas Tausanovitch
- License
- This work is licensed under a Creative Commons Attribution Non Commercial 3.0 Unported license (CC BY-NC).
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