Who is Punished?

Conditions Affecting Voter Evaluations of Legislators who Do Not Compromise

Web Appendix

Nichole M. Bauer

Assistant Professor, Department of Political Science

University of Alabama

Laurel Harbridge[footnoteRef:1]** [1: ** Corresponding author. Contact information: l-harbridge@northwestern.edu, (847) 467-1147.]

Assistant Professor, Department of Political Science

Faculty Fellow, Institute for Policy Research

Northwestern University

Yanna Krupnikov

Assistant Professor, Department of Political Science

Stony Brook University

In American politics, legislative compromise is often seen as a necessary and desirable aspect of policymaking, yet people also value politicians who stick to their positions. In this article, we consider these conflicting expectations of legislators and ask two intertwined questions: what conditions lead people to punish legislators for not compromising (when legislative action is at stake) and, conversely, what conditions leave people more willing to overlook a legislators unwillingness to engage in compromise? Relying on previous research, we suggest that legislator gender, legislator partisanship, and issue area may all affect which legislators are punished for not compromising. Relying on two national experiments, we demonstrate that the extent to which lawmakers are punished for not compromising is conditional on the intersection of the three factors in this study. In general, our results suggest that people may be most willing to overlook unwillingness to engage in compromise when party, gender and issue ownership align than when party, gender, and issue ownership are at odds.

Keywords: Compromise, Congress, Gender, Partisanship, Issue ownership, Public Opinion

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Web Appendix 1: Content Analysis of Women in Congress

To consider the prevalence of gendered discussions of compromise, we conducted a content analysis. The details of this analysis are described below.

Sampling Frame: We used a Lexis Nexis search of women and politics (as a joint search term), limited to the three years: November 2012 to November 2015 (this frame was deliberately designed to include election and non-election years). Sources in the search were US newspapers, which includes both local and national sources.

Total N: The full list of the sampling frame includes 113 articles and opinion pieces.Of these, we had a number of duplicates (due to wire service use by local newspapers), which left us to 88 unique articles. Opinion pieces were included in the sample.

Of 88 articles, some were not relevant. These are:

- Articles about a speaker from a "Women and Politics" center giving a talk (not about the particular topic)

- Articles about female voters deciding on male candidates, focusing on the fact that "this candidate needs female voters"

- Articles about leadership in business that happened to use the word "politics" to describe business relationships

Excluding non-relevant pieces left us with 54 unique articles about the idea of women in politics over the course of 3 years. This is not an unusually low number for a topic. Now, of course, the question becomes, is this too narrow of a list -- so for example, is every article about Hillary Clinton an article about women in politics? Our sample would not treat it as such unless it explicitly spoke about Clintons experiences as a woman in politics.

Coding: Coding was conducted by an independent coder. Articles were coded for the following mentions:

Compromise: contained mentions of women engaging in bipartisanship and compromise while in political leadership positions. For example, the article Women of the Senate Band Together Over Missing Girls (New York Times, May 14, 2014) discusses how female Senators broke party lines to form a bipartisan group to support missing Nigerian girls.

Representation of women: contained some discussion the presence and proportion of women in a legislature. For example, the article Glass Ceilings in Statehouses in the Northeast (New York Times, May 18, 2014), discusses the low numbers of women in state-level governmental leadership positions.

Discrimination: contained mentions and discussion of gender gaps and active discrimination against women in politics. For example, the article As Obama Spotlights Gender Gap in Wages, His Own Payroll Draws Scrutiny (New York Times, April 7, 2014) discussed gender wage disparities in White House positions.

Note: Although all the examples provided above are from the New York Times, this is done for the sake of consistency; our sample included a wide set of newspapers.

Results within our sample of relevant 54 articles:

13% discuss compromise

16% discuss the representation of women

24% discuss discrimination

If we limit it to articles (33) that only cover national politics, all three topics are discussed at roughly equal rates:

16% discuss compromise

13% discuss representation

16% discuss discrimination

Why such a drop in discrimination? Because local stories are disproportionately more likely to mention discrimination (female politicians at local level are more likely to talk about it).

Web Appendix 2: Experimental Conditions, Treatments and Measures

Table A2.1: Experimental Conditions (Study 1: N=841; Study 2: N=799)

Same PID

Different PID

Group 1:

Woman, compromises

(Study 1, n=110, Study 2 n=98)

Group 5:

Woman, compromises

(Study 1 n=104, Study 2 n=102)

Group 2:

Woman, does not compromise (Study 1 n=106, Study 2 n=99)

Group 6:

Woman, does not compromise (Study 1 n=99, Study 2 n=100)

Group 3:

Man, compromises

(Study 1 n=102, Study 2 n=100)

Group 7:

Man, compromises

(Study 1 n=110, Study 2 n=100)

Group 4:

Man, does not compromise (Study 1 n=106, Study 2 n=101)

Group 8:

Man, does not compromise (Study 1 n=104, Study 2 n=99)

In this appendix we outline the experimental groups (Table A2.1) as well as the experimental treatments.

Experimental Treatments:

Female Legislator Image

Male Legislator Image

Compromise treatment:

In this term, Congress faces a critical crossroads in regard to [energy/early childhood education]. With the deadline for a vote swiftly approaching, Congress must determine the future of [energy policy/early childhood education] in America.

A number of non-partisan organizations have urged Congress to reach a compromise on this issue. Time, however, is running short.

In order for this critical bill to pass, legislators on both sides of the aisle will have to put aside their differences and reach a compromise. Nonetheless, while many in Congress are still debating their positions, some members of both the Democratic and Republican parties have already expressed a willingness to compromise, and each party already has its own hardliners.

One of those willing to compromise is [Party, Gender]. Bailey has already stated publically that [he/she] is willing to compromise and will vote for the bill. Although the vote is still a week away, Bailey has told numerous media sources that [he/she] will not change [his/her] vote.

This is an issue on which I am willing to compromise, Bailey said. My voters knew this when they elected me.

Baileys staff reports that [he/she] will be present to cast a vote on this bill.

Non-Compromise treatment:

In this term, Congress faces a critical crossroads in regard to [energy/early childhood education]. With the deadline for a vote swiftly approaching, Congress must determine the future of [energy/early childhood education policy] in America.

A number of non-partisan organizations have urged Congress to reach a compromise on this issue. Time, however, is running short.

In order for this critical bill to pass, legislators on both sides of the aisle will have to put aside their differences and reach a compromise. Nonetheless, while many in Congress are still debating their positions, some members of both the Democratic and Republican parties have already expressed a willingness to compromise, and each party already has its own hardliners.

One of those unwilling to compromise is [Party, Gender]. Bailey has already stated publically that [he/she] is unwilling to compromise and will vote against this bill. Although the vote is still a week away, Bailey has told numerous media sources that [he/she] will not change [his/her] vote.

This is simply not an issue on which I am willing to compromise, Bailey said. My voters knew this when they elected me.

Baileys staff reports that [he/she] will be present to cast a vote on this bill.

Measures: In both studies we use the same three measures: (1) Favorability, (2) Perceptions of ability to represent Constituents and (3) Perceptions of leadership. The question-wording of these measures is as follows:

Favorability: How favorable or unfavorable do you feel towards Bailey?

Extremely unfavorable = 1, Extremely favorable = 7

Representative: How well do you think the following statement describes Bailey: Bailey is a good representative of constituent opinions

Describes Bailey very well =1, Describes Bailey very poorly = 6

Leader: Do you believe that Bailey is likely to move up in leadership positions in Congress?

Highly likely = 1, Highly unlikely =5

Of these measures, the favorability outcome is presented in the main text, the other two measures are presented in Appendix 6. All are re-coded so that 1 indicates greatest agreement with the question and 0 indicates least agreement. We rely on these measures following previous literature both on gender and politics, and candidate evaluation more generally. First, the favorability measure has commonly been used as an indication of satisfaction (D. Brooks 2011, 602; D. J. Brooks 2013) with the politician. Moreover, as Elis, Hillygus and Nie (2010) note, while favorability measures do not measure precise responses to individual politicians, they capture respondents general evaluations of politicians (584). Furthermore as Elis et al. (2010) demonstrate, this type of general favorability measure is heavily related to vote choice; indeed, they suggest it is possible that other important determinants of vote choice actually function through overall favorability (footnote 15).

Next, the representative measure is included because the politicians in our particular experiment are hypothetical. Since these are not individuals who represent the participants in our particular study, we ask participants to consider the extent to which they may would be good representatives for some other group of voters. Perceptions of legislative compromise and cooperation may be directly related to perceptions of representation (Doherty 2013; see also Funk 2001). Indeed, other studies that aim to consider beliefs about Congressional behavior and overall evaluations of the legislator rely on similar measures of perceptions of representation (see for example Doherty 2013).

Finally, we use the leadership measure as one of our considerations is gender, and previous scholarship suggests that one place where female politicians may face a disadvantage is in the perceptions of their leadership abilities (Eagly 2007). Therefore, we follow Brooks (2011) again and use a measure that addresses leadership directly to capture the possibility of these perceptions.

Web Appendix 3: Study Pre-Tests

Candidate Name and Photo Pre-Test: The candidate names, Karen Bailey and Kevin Bailey, come from previous research (see D. J. Brooks 2013; Krupnikov and Bauer 2014). Past research using these names indicates that the names do not cue respondents to think of existing politicians (D. J. Brooks 2013). We use these names with photos of female and male candidates to cue candidate gender. We conducted a separate pre-test of the candidate names and photos using a sample recruited through Amazons Mechanical Turk, N=129 in September 2012. Participants evaluated a photo of either Karen Bailey or Kevin Bailey. We found no significant differences in the average ratings of the female or male candidate in terms of age, p=0.1460, education, p=0.9887, or attractiveness, p=0.3630.

Stimulus & Dependent Variables Pre-Test: We tested our stimuli and outcome measures in another pre-tested conducted through Amazons Mechanical Turk (N=191) in March 2013. In this pre-test, the stimulus did not mention whether the legislator compromised (rather, the stimulus indicated that a vote was upcoming and the legislator would be present), but did manipulate lawmaker gender (male or female) and controlled for partisanship so that participants read about lawmakers with whom they shared partisanship. The pre-test focused on energy policy as in Study 1. This means Democrats read about Democratic lawmakers and Republicans read about Republican lawmakers. In the pre-test, we focus on testing whether there are baseline gender differences in the evaluations of the female and male candidate. Controlling for relative partisanship in this way gives us the best estimate for baseline gender differences. Essentially, we can be sure any differences are due to the lawmakers gender and not perceived ideological and partisan differences.

For each of our dependent variables, favorability, being a good representative of constituent opinion, and whether the lawmaker was likely to move up to higher levels of leadership in Congress, we looked for whether individuals systematically skipped answering any of the variables and whether there are any gender differences in evaluations of the lawmakers. First, there were no systematic cases of non-response on any of the outcome variables. For each outcome variable, there were five observations with a missing response, three in the female lawmaker condition and two in the male lawmaker condition. Each of these cases of non-response indicates a participant who dropped out of the study on an earlier question. In addition, there are no differences in non-response for the female and male lawmakers.

Next, we compared the means for the female and male lawmakers on each of the outcome variables to test for baseline gender differences. Each outcome variable was scaled from 0-1 and coded so that higher values indicate more positive evaluations. On favorability, the female lawmaker received a rating of M=0.53 (SD=0.17) and the male lawmaker received a rating of M=0.51 (SD=0.14), and these are not significantly different using a two-tailed t-test, p=0.2969. On being a good representative of constituent opinion, the female lawmaker received a rating of M=0.58 (SD=0.19) and the male lawmaker received a rating of M=0.59 (SD=0.18), and these are not significantly different, p=0.7358. In addition, on the leadership variable, the female lawmakers rating was M=0.55 (SD=0.24) and the male lawmakers rating was M=0.59 (SD=0.19), and these are not significantly different, p=0.2117.

We also measured whether there were any differences in the perceived importance of the issue at hand, in this pre-test energy policy, whether participants thought more or less attention should be paid to energy policy, which party is paying more attention to energy policy, and the ideological extremity of the lawmaker. These questions allow us to ensure that the stimulus does not prime other considerations that may affect voter responses to the subsequent compromise treatments. These variables are also recoded from 0-1 and higher values indicate more favorable evaluations where appropriate.

There were no differences in the perceived importance of energy as an issue in the female (M=0.86, SD=0.23) compared to the male lawmaker (M=0.83, SD=0.25) conditions, p=0.3006. We also found no differences in our pre-test on whether participants thought more or less attention should be paid to energy policy when the lawmaker was a woman (M=0.82, SD=0.32) compared to a man (M=0.81, SD=0.30), p=0.7883. On the question asking which party is paying more attention to energy policy, we also find no differences across candidate gender. Participants in the female and male lawmaker conditions were both more likely to think the Democratic Party was more focused on energy policy, p=0.5894. Finally, we found no differences in the perceived ideological extremity of the female and male lawmakers. Both lawmakers were placed near the ideological center of the scale, p=0.4914.

Gendered Issue Ownership Pre-Test: We also conducted tests to ensure that we had appropriately characterized childhood education as an issue associated with women and energy policy as an issue that is less likely to be associate with women. We describe the details of the initial pre-test on the ownership of issues (fielded prior to the launch of the main studies) in the text. Since this initial test was run on Mechanical Turk and our main experiment was conducted on SSI, we also fielded a replication of this study using SSI in April 2016.

The SSI replication of the issue ownership test relied on measures identical to those used in the MTurk pretest: participants were asked whether a male or a female politician would do a better job with a particular issue. All participants answered two questions, one about energy policy and the other about childhood education. Total participants in this study was N=1,011. A discussion of SSI recruitment is included in Web Appendix 4; SSI general population recruitment is consistent across all studies conducted with SSI as it is based on the SSI panel.

Using this test we see that 82.6% of participants report that a female legislator would do a better job handling childhood education, but only 48.3% report that a female legislator would do a better job handling energy policy. This test, conducted on the same sample-type as our main study, replicates and reinforces the findings of the initial MTurk pre-test on issue ownership. This second test again demonstrates that the issues are associated with different genders, just as we argue in our main study.

Web Appendix 4: Sample Information

Recruitment Process: The samples in our main study are both collected via SSI (Study 1 in January 2014, Study 2 in August 2014). SSI is an online survey company that maintains a panel of participants who are then randomly selected to participate in studies. Although the panel itself is opt-in, assignment to a particular study is random. Recruitment occurs via email contact, and qualifications (over 18 years of age, resides in the US) are determined at the start of participation. Moreover, SSI also maintains validity of recruitment by ensuring that participants are actually individuals to whom the survey invitation was sent directly. For other studies using SSI see, Bullock (2011) and Kam (2012).

Table A4.1: Comparison of our Sample to the ANES 2012 Sample

Study 1 Sample

Study 2 Sample

ANES 2012

% Male

62.74%

52.12%

47.93%

% BA+

38.88%

42.32%

31.16%

% $50,000+ income

53.09%

44.82%

43.91%

Mean ideology (1, extremely liberal, 7 extremely conservative)

3.94

3.72

4.15

Web Appendix 5: Group Means

Table A5.1: Group Means

Study 1: Energy

Mean (SD)

Favorability

Good Representative

Leadership

Same PID

Different PID

Same PID

Different PID

Same PID

Different PID

Woman, Compromise

0.638

(0.194)

0.598

(0.205)

0.695

(0.199)

0.670

(0.220)

0.626

(0.217)

0.614

(0.259)

Women, Does Not Compromise

0.521

(0.210)

0.469

(0.289)

0.610

(0.239)

0.585

(0.285)

0.500

(0.246)

0.516

(0.294)

Cost of Not Compromising

0.12***

0.13***

.086***

.084**

0.13***

0.098**

Man, Compromise

0.599

(0.187)

0.590

(0.216)

0.662

(0.200)

0.685

(0.211)

0.600

(0.213)

0.619

(0.222)

Man, Does Not Compromise

0.537

(0.217)

0.411

(0.267)

0.604

(0.244)

0.563

(0.285)

0.560

(0.255)

0.488

(0.281)

Cost of Not Compromising

0.063**

0.18***

0.058*

0.12***

0.040

0.13***

Study 2: Early Childhood Education

Mean (SD)

Favorability

Good Representative

Leadership

Same PID

Different PID

Same PID

Different PID

Same PID

Different PID

Woman, Compromise

0.604

(0.220)

0.618

(0.194)

0.673

(0.210)

0.663

(0.199)

0.612

(0.207)

0.605

(0.198)

Women, Does Not Compromise

0.552

(0.230)

0.443

(0.261)

0.602

(0.238)

0.488

(0.292)

0.553

(0.261)

0.505

(0.291)

Cost of Not Compromising

0.052

0.18***

0.071**

0.18***

0.059*

0.10***

Man, Compromise

0.612

(0.205)

0.598

(0.236)

0.664

(0.190)

0.638

(0.210)

0.628

(0.229)

0.62

(0.220)

Man, Does Not Compromise

0.490

(0.231)

0.432

(0.267)

0.519

(0.267)

0.515

(0.274)

0.518

(0.262)

0.497

(0.251)

Cost of Not Compromising

0.12***

0.17***

0.15***

0.12***

0.11***

0.12***

Group means with standard deviations in parentheses. * p