Assessing Legislator-Constituency Policy Agreement

Assessing Legislator-Constituency Policy AgreementAuthor(s): Robert WeissbergSource: Legislative Studies Quarterly, Vol. 4, No. 4 (Nov., 1979), pp. 605-622Published by: Comparative Legislative Research CenterStable URL: http://www.jstor.org/stable/439407 .

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ROBERT WEISSBERG

University of Illinois Urbana-Champaign

Assessing Legislator-Constituency Policy Agreement

This paper concerns some of the conceptual and methodological problems that arise when efforts are made to assess the degree of policy agreement between legislators and constituents. Constituents may be asked general questions about their views on policy; legislators must make choices among very specific legislative options. An ap- parently high correlation between the issue positions of legislators and constituents may be deceptive unless the two scales have substantively identical end points. There are problems of both defining the constituency and aggregating constituency opinions. Finally, it is necessary to pay some attention to the range of a legislator's policy positions that may be acceptable to constituents.

The concept "representation" is a widely debated and analyzed term (e.g., Eulau, Wahlke, Buchanan, and Ferguson, 1959; Pitkin, 1967; Achen, 1978; Eulau and Karps, 1977). Recent analyses, however, are less concerned with the theoretical and historical meaning of representation than whether or not legislators actually heed the preferences of their constituents (i.e., act as delegates). The basic question has been: Do legislators follow the policy preferences of their constituents? This empirical question initially appears to be a relatively simple, largely technical problem. Nevertheless, we shall argue that this question contains many unresolved theoretical and methodological issues that must be dealt with if we are to analyze correctly the policy relationship between legislator and citizens. Indeed, several of these measurement issues are as complex and troublesome as the problems associated with the conceptual analysis of representation.

We shall proceed by first explicating some of the more popular solutions to establishing a delegate type of representation. Our analysis then considers three specific measurement-related issues: (1) the correspondence between legislative voting and constituency preferences; (2) the aggregation of individual preferences into a "constituency preference"; and (3) evaluating the closeness of legislators to their constituents on a particular policy. Our purpose in raising these issues is to show that, despite many technical breakthroughs in examining both citizen preferences and legislative behavior, serious and rarely acknowledged problems still remain when asking whether

Legislative Studies Quarterly, IV, 4, November, 1979 Copyright 1979 by the Comparative Legislative Research Center 0362-9805/79/0404-0605$00.90 605



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legislators faithfully heed the desires of their constituencies.

Previous Approaches to Measuring Constituency-Legislator Agreement

An ideal test of whether a legislator perfectly followed a majority of constituents on an issue requires two pieces of data: (1) a referendum (or a survey) on an issue in which all citizens (or a representative cross- section) participated; and (2) a legislative vote on precisely the same issue at approximately the same time. Needless to say, these requirements are rarely-if ever-perfectly met, though several studies have come closer than others. Arneson (1927), for example, analyzed 25 Ohio referenda in which a legislative roll call vote preceded a popular vote on the same issue. Thirty years later Crane (1960) employed a similar design in his study of legislator and constituency votes on daylight savings time in Wisconsin. Finally, Hedlund and Friesema (1972) compared citizen and legislative votes on four amendments to the Iowa constitution involving home rule, reapportionment, annual legislative sessions, and the item veto.

While the above referendum studies may come closer to the ideal, in actual practice even this approach provides an imperfect analytical strategy. First, studies of referenda voting suggest that referendum voters are not a representative cross-section of the population in terms of their policy preferences (e.g., Hamilton, 1970). Second, rarely do citizens and legislators vote on precisely the same issues, even in states and communities that bombard citizens with referenda (and referenda are completely absent at the national level). Finally, even when these fortunate situations occur, it is doubtful whether the referenda issues are a good sample of all political issues. Questions such as daylight savings time or prohibition are not trivial, but whether they are indicative of broader issues is quite moot. In short, a researcher interested in constituency-legislator correspondence is unlikely to follow the lead of Arneson, Crane, and the like.

Given the problems of referenda votes, what can be done? Over the years, analysts have devised several solutions. The most common was the use of demographic characteristics (e.g., percent blue collar) as surrogate indicators of citizen policy preferences together with legislative roll call votes (e.g., MacRae, 1958; Jackson, 1974; Van der Slik, 1969; Shannon, 1968). Though useful in initial exploratory investigations, the problems of inference associated with this strategy are sufficiently well-known and troublesome so that it can be ruled out as a long-term, satisfactory alternative. A second solution uses legislators' own reports about constituency preferences on the likely assumption that legislators have both the motivation and opportunity to ascertain citizen preferences (e.g., Kingdon, 1973). Unfortunately, given

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our knowledge of how information can be distorted plus the selective nature of legislator-citizen interaction, this second solution similarly is only an approximation of the ideal measure of constituency-legislator agreement.

A third alternative that does appear to solve the problems of assessing delegate type representation is Miller and Stokes' (1963) approach employed in their 1958 study of congressional representation. Their procedure involved four steps: (1) survey constituents on general issues such as government ownership of utilities; (2) create broad "ideological" scales based on these survey items; (3) calculate roughly comparable "ideological" scales for legislators from roll call votes; and (4) compute correlation coefficients between mean constituency scale scores and legislator scale positions with high correlations indicating close policy representation. Though considerably more expensive than the Arneson or Crane type of designs, the Miller-Stokes strategy does appear to solve the twin problems of accurate assessment of constituency preferences and suitability to a wide range of issues.

Is the Miller-Stokes approach a reasonable means of assessing constituency-legislator agreement? Judging from the absence of explicit criticism of the strategy (qualms do exist over district sample size), this model seems to have been widely accepted, though limited resources have probably prevented much emulation. Our contention is that this model (and its variants) are based on several crucial and rarely stated assumptions that can lead to erroneous judgements regarding the existence of delegate type representation. Moreover, these assumptions are not unique to the Miller-Stokes research; in varying degrees they have been incorporated into other studies analyzing legislative- constituency linkages. In raising these assumptions our major purpose is not to criticize the Miller-Stokes type of analyses per se, but rather to shed some light on problems that have yet to be fully explored.

Constituency Attitudes versus Legislative Behavior

The most apparent problem faced in comparing constituency attitudes with roll call vote behavior concerns differences in generality or abstractness. Legislators usually vote on specific policies that may be related to broad policy outlooks, but are not necessarily identical to these general perspectives. Surveys do not customarily ask citizens about the policy details that are likely to be important in legislative voting. Such polling practices are justifiable, given the well-documented public ignorance of even elementary political information. That legislators must choose among detailed alternatives while the public selects among broad alternatives would not be a problem if everyone's preferences were perfectly consistent.1 Unfortunately, however, there probably exists enough policy inconsistency to make equating broad policy preferences with more specific legislative decisions a risky business (see, for example,

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data in Weissberg, 1976, pp. 48-50). This problem is particularly troublesome because it may be virtually unsolvable, given the public's limited capacity to deal with specific policy choices of the sort faced by legislators.

The problem of equivalence becomes clear if we compare the typical mass survey questions with relevant legislative choices. Consider, for example, government medical care assistance. What specific legislative mandate is conveyed by a district majority agreeing that "government ought to help people with their medical bills if they need assistance." Should a legislator from this district support any bill that provides any government medical assistance? Might not a legislator with a pro medical assistance district oppose some bills favoring increased government medical expenditures on the grounds that they went "too far" for his or her district? Linking general constituency preferences to specific legislative acts becomes even more perplexing since all legislative choices may be between programs moving in the same direction. That is, the real choice on, say, government assistance for medical expenses may be between two different proposals for such assistance; voting against one proposal does not mean opposing the general idea embodied in a constituency preference.

A related problem is the distinction between what could be described as the best possible representation versus perfect district-roll call vote agreement. Assume that a district conveys a precise policy preference on which a roll call vote could occur. If the district's legislator could completely define the legislative agenda, no problem exists. Given the demands of other legislators, legal requirements, the influence of committees, and other agenda- setting forces in Congress, however, this ideal is seldom realized. Hence, legislators wishing to heed faithfully constituency opinions must settle for the best approximations under the particular circumstances. If confronted by a divergence between district opinion and legislative behavior, the representatives could quite properly say that they chose the best possible alternative, given the available legislative choices. Is this less than perfect agreement evidence of misrepresentation? Or, on the other hand, do we give credit for legislative circumstances and approximating behaviors?

A third problem in comparing constituency opinion with legislative action concerns the meaning of a correlation between scale scores. Assume (as is commonly done) that both legislators and constituents are arrayed on separate "liberal-conservative" scales. A perfect correlation could indicate that the most liberal constituency was represented by the most liberal legislator. This correlation between scale score positions is a relative ordering; a correlation of 1.00 does not necessarily mean that the most liberal legislator and the most liberal constituency share the identical preferences. The most liberal legislator might come from a moderate district yet a correlation of

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1.00 is possible providing that legislator-district pairs are perfectly proportional in their ordering.

To claim that a high correlation indicates good representation, i.e., close legislator-constituency policy agreement, assumes that the end points for both scales are substantively identical. In other words, the most conservative position on the legislator scale is exactly the same thing ideologically as the most conservative point on the constituency scale. Were both scales comprised of the same items, this assumption could be verified and score ad- justments made if necessary. However, as we have previously suggested, a variety of considerations usually preclude the use of identical questions or policy agendas. Thus, we cannot automatically assume that correlative coefficients tell us anything about how close legislators are to constituency preferences (for other criticism of using correlative coefficients in measuring representation, see Achen, 1977).

How much distortion is produced by the nonequivalence of scale end points? Unfortunately, while such assessments would be made on a sub- jective basis, no precise formula exists for equating two "ideological" scales comprised of different items. Nevertheless, given background biases in legislative recruitment and legislative norms discouraging "extreme" ideological behavior, a good case would be made that the most liberal representative was not as liberal as the most liberal constituency and the most conservative legislator probably reacts in a more liberal fashion than the most conservative constituency (for an excellent analysis of how legislative alternatives are narrowed down, see Kingdon, 1973, pp. 265-271). Put somewhat differently, the ideological range within an institution such as Congress is probably more restricted than the range among constituencies. Graphically, the relationship between standardized legislative and constituency scales on "dimensions" such as civil rights or social welfare may well look like the trapezoid depicted in Figure 1.2

FIGURE 1 Hypothetical Relationship Between

Legislative and Constituency Ideological Scales

LEGISLATIVE SCALE

liberal - conservative

liberal conservative CONSTITUENCY SCALE

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If Figure 1 were an accurate portrayal of legislature and constituency ideological locations, some constituencies would not be represented accurately even if the correlation were perfect. The statistical standardization of these unequal scales could, however, give the impression that perfect representation was at least possible. While such standardization may make for statistical utility, it obscures one of the more interesting problems in the study of representation, namely, whether legislative institutions reflect a full array of citizen political preferences. A reasonable case can be made that this latter question should be a focus of research rather than be "handled" in a purely statistical fashion.

Summarizing District Preferences

Thus far we have spoken of a "constituency preference" as if it were a preference expressed by a single individual. Such a personification is e- normously useful for purposes of analysis, but this utility should not obscure the fact that "constituency preference" is an abstract concept whose operational definition rests on several politically important decisions. Unfortu- nately, the whole question of empirically establishing a constituency preference has not received much explicit analytical attention. Two questions are involved here. First, we confront the normative issue of exactly who should comprise "the constituency"? Second, given a collection of individuals, how should their opinions be aggregated? Solutions to the questions are not "mere" operational details, but are substantively important decisions that can greatly affect one's conclusions regarding representation.

Defining the Constituency

If a legislator had complete information on all opinions within his district and wanted to follow as closely as possible "constituency opinion," whose preferences would be heeded? Perhaps the simplest (and most common) answer is a majority of the entire adult population. It is equally plausible, however, to maintain that voting in accordance with a majority of the citizens who voted for the legislator also constitutes valid representation of constituency opinions. (A variant of this would be heeding the preferences of a majority of one's partisans since party identification may be more discernible than voting while being closely related to voting choice.) A slightly different version of this conception would be that a legislator should not violate the preferences of his electors when satisfying a majority of the population. Finally, "the constituency" could be defined as only those with opinions (or "meaningful" opinions) on a particular issue. This conception makes con-

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siderable political sense, and, unlike the first alternative, it guarantees the emergence of a majority position that at least can be followed since-by definition-"don't know" responses are eliminated.3

The basic issue here is normative in nature. However, given the typical information available to a legislator about district opinions, the existence of three (or more) differing conceptions of "constituency opinions" usually poses no immediate philosophical problem. The readily available data are simply too fragmentary and unreliable for a legislator to draw a fine line between, say, a population majority and a majority of voting or partisan supporters (see, for example, Fenno, 1978, ch. 1). Hence, at least to the legislator, uncertainty over precisely who in the district agrees with a particular vote does not make this normative issue very salient. The normative question is not, however, irrelevant to the researcher possessing both survey and roll call data who wishes to assess the consistency between constituency opinion and legislator behavior. In effect, the researcher's choice of a constituency opinion indicator constitutes a normative decision on who ought to be represented.

The question of who properly constitutes "the constituency" would, of course, be politically unimportant if virtually everyone in a district agreed on an issue. Under such circumstances violating the preferences of, say, one's voters would automatically mean misrepresentation of the population majority or a majority of one's partisans. For illustrative purposes we selected from the 1958 Miller-Stokes data set twelve districts where the unweighted N was 25 or more and examined responses to the question dealing with the federal government's role in achieving school desegration. Three possible constituencies were distinguished: (1) the entire sample; (2) all those voting for the winning candidate in 1958; (3) all those identifying with the winner's political party.

Of these twelve Congressional districts, eight exhibit a pattern of perfect constituency congruity, i.e., majorities of all three possible constituencies are on the same side of the issue (not surprisingly given a civil rights issue, since five of the eight are Southern districts). In the other four cases, the degree of consistency of constituency opinion varies from slightly muddled to downright contradictory. Noncongruency of constituencies is perhaps most strikingly demonstrated by the 17th Ohio district that elected J. Harry McGregor in 1958. Here a plurality (48.3) of the entire district opposes integration, but both a plurality of McGregor's fellow Republicans and 50.0 percent of his voters favor government intervention in school desegregation. A similar conflict confronts Albert P. Morano (R) of the 4th Congressional District of Connecticut. In this instance, a majority of the district sample favors government integration efforts, as does a plurality of the Republican

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partisans, but 583 percent of those voting for Morano oppose such government intervention. It should be apparent that since neither McGregor nor Morano can satisfy both a district majority and a majority of those voting for them on this issue, the determination of whether each representative "truly" represents constituency opinion simply rests on which criterion is employed. No doubt, if only for convenience, each legislator could make a (justifiable) claim to represent the folks back home regardless of what position they took on government's role in school desegregation.

We are not implicitly criticizing researchers who choose one or the other definition of constituency opinion. Certainly we cannot here settle the normative problem of what constitutes the constituency opinion. Our goal is to show that the researcher's definition of constituency can be very important in deciding whether or not a legislator represents. Unfortunately, discussions of why we should employ, say, a population majority as opposed to a majority of a candidate's voters are exceedingly rare. To be sure, the entire problem can be nicely avoided by selecting questions whose response distributions within each district are so one-sided that incongruity is impossible, but such a solution is hardly theoretically satisfactory in the long run.

A different theoretical problem related to conceptions of "constituency" arises when we analyze "constituency influence." This concept is generally employed in two different but similar ways. The first usage entails some notion of constituency majority (however defined). This conception is embodied in discussions over whether, say, a legislator ought to follow his district, his party, or own opinion in voting. This majority-oriented conception also commonly underlies the question "do representatives represent?" The second conceptualization of "constituency influence" emphasizes that legislators, in some systematic way, adjust their votes on the basis of some constituency preferences or characteristics. There is no requirement that a majority is followed. The basic focus is on the legislator's constituency- related voting calculations.

Unfortunately, while the distinction between these conceptions is theoretically clear and crucial, only rarely does analysis separate these two notions. Researchers employing the second notion of constituency influence may conclude that constituency characteristics are "determining," yet constituency majorities may be systematically violated in every instance. Showing that a legislator's votes systematically co-vary according to the size of some group in their district is not saying that majorities are faithfully represented. For example, congressmen may increasingly become more liberal as the proportion of blacks goes from zero to 50 percent, yet if the white majority prefers all the anti-civil rights legislative measures, the majority is increasingly misrepresented. Legislators may respond to particular minority

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preferences if they strive to maximize such goals as re-election, legislative influence, career mobility or the like, but this action is not increasing the extent of majority representation.

Analyzing "constituency influence" in terms of the calculus linking some constituency characteristic to a voting decision is important. Certainly it is relevant to ask how constituency preferences or characteristics relate to legislative votes. The problem is that the search for this calculus, i.e., how district characteristics affect legislative votes, can obscure the question of whether the district is indeed accurately represented. Theoretically, there are probably an infinite number of statistical models appropriate to the study of legislator-constituency relationships (see, for example, Fiorina, 1975; Jackson, 1974, Appendix A), but we should not confuse a good statistical fit with the simple criterion of delegate representation. This latter question, we maintain, is the crucial one and should not be entangled with arguments claiming that constituency attributes operating in some complex fashion "explain" 100 percent of a legislator's voting choice.

Aggregating Individual Opinions

In the abstract, there is no problem in assessing a collective (somehow defined) preference: responses to a question are aggregated and the position receiving the most choices is the constituency position. The extent to which a legislator strictly follows constituency opinion is simply the proportion of times he or she votes in accordance with a majority. However, for a variety of reasons, this one-issue-at-a-time approach is relatively rare. Instead, constituency responses across questions are aggregated and then contrasted with the roll call votes of legislators which are also the result of aggregating across issues. We shall argue here that these summation procedures can frequently lead to distortions in assessing legislator-constituency policy agreement. Essentially, accurate representation involves the adherence to majority preference and this is not necessarily reflected in correlations of multi-question/roll call scale scores.

Let us begin by considering the most elementary approach to aggregating individual opinions into an overall position, namely, a simple additive scale. Here individuals (or districts) are given points on several questions and the extremes are typically defined by terms such as "liberal" or "conservative."5 If, for example, there were three questions, each "liberal" response were given a 1 and the "conservative" response a 0, the scale would run from 3 to 0 with 3 being the most "liberal." For sorting out citizens into rough categories this procedure has its merits; for assessing representation, however, potentially severe drawbacks exist. Specifically, given a set of questions, there are KN possible sequences that can occur (where K is the number of possible

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responses per question and N the number of questions). Hence, even if only three questions comprised a scale, there would still exist 8(23) possible outcomes. Scores would range from 1 to 3 (assuming a 0, 1 coding), but not all scores would "mean" the same thing since a total score of "1" (or "2") could be derived in one of three distinct ways. Only the extremes-here 0 and 3-would indicate a single possible pattern. Hence, even if, say, the constituency and legislator both had scores of "1" on this three-question scale, all this would mean was that on at least one of three questions agreement existed. More generally, there would exist only a .33 probability of identical scores of 1 reflecting an identical pattern of agreement (the probability of at least two agreements for three questions is .67). In short, if we take representation to mean citizen preference/legislator roll call agreement on a particular issue, the use of simple additive scale scores does not necessarily reflect such issue-by-issue agreement. To be sure, identical scores may indicate precise agreement across all issues; however, given both the likelihood of distortion and the availability of alternative procedures, such an approach is less than ideal.

A reasonable solution to this problem of identical scale scores produced by differing response combinations is to employ Guttman type scales. Such scales, by definition, eliminate certain response combinations as "errors" so each particular scale score is comprised of a single pattern. Does this mean Guttman scales-such as those employed by Miller and Stokes-solve the problem of aggregating district preferences? It depends on how scale scores are summated across individuals.

To understand the importance of how individual positions are combined into a district preference, let us imagine a district with a single individual whose scale score is 3, i.e., gives the liberal response on all three questions. Perfect representation would thus consist of liberal legislative votes on all corresponding issues. Let us add a second individual with a score of 1. What is the "correct" legislative position necessary to represent this district? If the mean score (i.e., 2) is used, the legislator should vote for the two least liberal bills. If, however, the criteria of 50 percent plus one is employed, it is only the least liberal position that requires a positive vote. In a nutshell, when one is concerned with majorities, the mean (and other measures of central tendency) is inappropriate and possibly misleading. The severity of this problem becomes more apparent when larger numbers of people are considered. Imagine, for example, the following two districts:

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District A District B Scale Score Frequency Scale Score Frequency

0 5 0 25 1 10 1 5 2 20 2 15 3 65 3 55

X =1.80 X= 1.45

The usual interpretation of these data would be that district A is more liberal than district B; thus if perfect delegate representation existed, we should find district B's legislator voting more conservatively. Such an interpretation ignores the crucial fact that majorities in both districts favor all three positions, i.e., have scores of "3." Both legislators ought to have identical voting records to represent their constituencies. In effect, this confusion between "average constituency preference" and majority preferences derives from a confusion between the number of people who hold a particular issue position and the extremity of this position on some continuum. While it may be fair to characterize an entire district as "very liberal" if, say, 80 percent hold the most liberal scale position, this collective preference is not a preference for different types of legislation than where only, say, 51 percent of a district express a "very liberal" preference. Just because more people endorse a position does not imply that a legislator should follow a more extreme version of that position. Put somewhat differently, what is to be represented is independent of whether 51 percent or 100 percent of the constituency favor it; since a legislative vote is dichotomous, such differences in degree are irrelevant.

To illustrate this problem let us consider some of the data from our twelve districts where the N is 25. We shall only use social welfare index scores since the other scales are comprised of only two items. Districts in which the preferences on one or more issues were evenly divided are also excluded. Table 1 presents district mean scale scores arrayed according to district policy majorities (or pluralities). As one might expect, a certain amount of clustering occurs within each policy preference pattern. At the same time, however, note that a sizable gap-.66 of a scale point-exists between the highest and lowest mean scores in the first column. More importantly, one of the districts having pro-government intervention majorities on all three issues actually has a more conservative mean score than a district opposing one such measure (3.92 vs. 3.89). Such an anomaly occurs simply because the size of the majority, as opposed to the mere existence of a policy majority, influences the opinion aggregation results.

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TABLE 1 Mean Social Welfare Scale Scores

by District Majoritya

Position of District Majorityb Anti-govt. housing Pro-govt. housing Anti-govt. housing Pro-govt. jobs Pro-govt. jobs Anti-govt. jobs Pro-govt. school money Pro-govt. school money Anti-govt. school money

Mean Score District Mean Score District Mean Score District

4.33 (Conn.-4th) 3.92 (Pa.-21st) 5.18 (Oh.-17th) 4.09 (NC-Sth) 3.60 (Ky.-3rd) 3.89 (NC-9th) 4.55 (Tx.-17th) 4.38 (Wash.-7th)

aExcluded are four districts in which sentiment on one of the three questions was exactly evenly divided.

bThe questions were: The government should leave things like electric power and housing for private businessmen to handle; the government in Washington ought to see to it that everybody who wants to work can find a job; if cities and towns around the country need help to build more schools, the government in Washington ought to give them the money they need.

The use of mean scores when we are really thinking in terms of discrete entities (i.e., majority or nonmajority) is a case of inappropriate, and possibly misleading, statistical precision. Moreover, since the numerical variations within the district response patterns in Table 1 are theoretically meaningless, correlations between district and legislator scores may be reduced. That is, even if two districts have majorities on the same side on three issues and the legislators vote with these majorities, the correlation coefficient will be less than 1.00 if district mean scores are not identical (which is likely given the usual procedure of aggregating individual preferences). This problem of substantively meaningless variation is even more crucial when the actual distance (or proximity) between constituencies and leaders is the focus of analysis, as in a spatial analysis of voters, incumbant congressmen, and challengers.

Assessing Misrepresentation

When Miller and Stokes published their analysis of constituency influence in the House they not only presented us with a set of often repeated substantive conclusions, but also provided a criterion for misrepresentation, i.e., the lower the correlation the "worse" the representation. Our previous

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discussion has suggested several aspects of the Miller-Stokes strategy (and its variants) that can cause problems in assessing representation, but the measurement of "misrepresentation" is sufficiently important to deserve special attention.

To comprehend the complexity of measuring misrepresentation, we must first acknowledge a very obvious point-the degree of misrepresentation ultimately rests on assessments of what issues mean to citizens. Put bluntly, unless we know the choices involved in a legislative decision and the nature of citizen preferences, numerical indices such as correlation coefficients or scale differences can tell us little about how much representation exists. To be sure, differences in scale scores may be useful in showing the relative pattern of misrepresentation, but numbers by themselves cannot say whether the degree of representation is big or small, important or trivial, or politically relevant or irrelevant.

Separating trivial from important misrepresentation requires information that is not usually collected in mass surveys-citizen toleration of specific policy alternatives on a single issue. While most survey questions require a specific choice among alternatives, it is also true that most citizens are willing to endorse some range of alternatives as acceptable or tolerable. For example, a citizen may be asked whether he or she supports greater government antipollution efforts and a "yes" answer may reflect an underlying acceptance of policies ranging from purely symbolic action to rigorous en- forcement of comprehensive regulations. One point along this range of acceptance may be most preferred, but a variety of different policy alternatives may be acceptable.6

It would seem reasonable that on any given issue there exists a divergence of most preferred choices, that is, variable ranges in latitudes of acceptance and rejection even if most constituents in a district are generally on the same side of a general survey type of question. Hence, it may be more appropriate to speak of a legislator's behavior as being "acceptable" to his constituents, i.e., falling within a majority of the acceptance ranges, than to categorize such behavior as precisely representing or misrepresenting the constituency opinion. What such "acceptable" legislative voting behavior implies, of course, is that much of the discrepancy between the measured constituency opinion (which is but one point on an array of positions) and legislative voting is, in effect, trivial. Put more succinctly, a legislator may not do exactly what most constituents want, but all things considered, he or she may be close enough.

Approaching the amount of misrepresentation from the perspective of "acceptable" ranges of legislative behavior possesses several important research benefits. First, from the perspective of a citizen, choosing sets of

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possible policy alternatives categorized in terms of a range of most preferred to least acceptable is far more realistic than a forced choice between two extremes. Moreover, since this set of alternatives can be quite specific, such a survey strategy is clearly more relevant to legislative decisions than simplistic, vague inquiries such as "Should the federal government make a greater effort in . . . ?" In particular, this measurement strategy overcomes much of the problem previously mentioned of trying to relate a single broad citizen preference to a large number of specific and vaguely consistent legislative behaviors. At a minimum we would be spared problems of interpreting the policy impli- cations of phrases like "make greater effort" or "spend more money."

More importantly, however, this approach to assessing the degree of representation calls attention to a key aspect of the legislation process-the structuring of policy alternatives-that can have an important bearing on representation. Previous approaches to representation implicitly assume that legislative alternatives are mutually exclusive, i.e., one is either for or against a proposal. This conception is quite appropriate where an issue is resolved as a single, all-or-nothing vote. However, the legislative process frequently entails a series of votes on an issue; consequently, a vote against a measure does not necessarily mean that one opposes that policy entirely but rather that one may merely favor a different version of the particular policy. For example, voting against a particular civil rights measure does not necessarily make one anti-civil rights if the actual choice is one of a strong opposed to a weak bill. It is entirely possible, then, that despite the array of discrete choices, the legislative conflict may be over policies that differ in degree rather than fundamentally.

The upshot of all this is that, where citizens find a wide range of issue positions acceptable, all or even most of the legislative alternatives under consideration could be satisfactory, though significant differences would still exist on what is most preferred. In effect, it is conceivable that by the time an issue has passed through committee review, been subject to negoti- ations among party leaders, and otherwise modified, the actual legislative choices may be relatively constrained. This constraining is perhaps most evident in appropriations bills where the choices are usually over expenditure levels, not whether to spend or not to spend. Highly constrained choices can even exist, however, where new programs are created. What occurs, then, is that institutional rules for decision making create situations where severe violations of constituency preferences (defined as ranges of acceptable alternatives) can be unlikely regardless of what the legislator does. Lest our argument be misunderstood, we are not suggesting that legislator's votes are trivial since the choices are meaningless; given broad ranges of acceptable positions among citizens, such could be the case. We are not claiming anything

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substantive about representation here; rather, we are suggesting a plausible alternative way of approaching the entire question of misrepresentation. Our claim is simply that numerical indices are poor indicators of misrepresentation unless we know the nature of the legislative choices and what constituents define as satisfactory or acceptable policy.

Summary and Conclusions

Our basic motivation in undertaking the foregoing analysis is the belief that the question, "Do representatives faithfully represent their constituents' opinions," has not received the theoretical scrutiny it deserves. Previous concerns with measuring the delegate type of representation, probably due in part to enormous problems of data collection, have either ignored many crucial theoretical issues or resolved them on an unsystematic ad hoc basis. Though such tactics may be reasonable under difficult conditions, such theoretical and operational temporizing should not be viewed as perma- nent, as-good-as-could-be-gotten solutions. Our criticisms do not hold the efforts of others up to an impossibly rigorous standard. To be sure, most researchers may lack the resources to move beyond traditional approximate solutions, but none of our criticisms depend on major technical or conceptual breakthroughs. Moreover, even if we never achieve perfect indicators of delegate type of representation, we should at least be aware of the discrepancies between our conception of representation and the different empirical indicators.

Finally, the existence of delegate type of representation is in itself a worthy question, but its measurement is crucial for other important questions. Such questions include: "What is the relationship between accurate policy representation and citizen satisfaction with leaders and institutions?" and "What is the role of institutional roles and decision making in the translation of citizen preferences and public policy?" Each of these questions requires that we first establish some baseline of perfect representation before we can analyze what determines departures from this standard. Without such explicit, agreed-upon criterion, we cannot even be sure whether scholars are talking about the same thing when they analyze data on the extent of legislature representation.

NOTES

1. There is another issue here that is so obvious that it should only be mentioned in passing, namely, the pitfalls of comparing constituency attitudes to legislative behavior. This is a very complex question well beyond the focus of this analysis, though

619



620 Robert Weissberg

we must acknowledge its existence. We have reason to believe, however, that mass attitudes on distant, broad issues would not be good predictors of voting behavior under far more constrained conditions. For an excellent, and very relevant discussion of such predictions, see Crespi (1971).

2. A plausible alternative is that, due to the constitutional bias against positive action, the biases of the American interest group system, and the internal

organization of legislative and bureaucratic power, all of which lead in a conservative direction, the relative position of the public and Congress are:

Public

liberal conservative

Congress

In any case, whether this or any other alternative is correct, the point remains that this is an interesting and neglected question.

3. A review of several studies using the concept reveals a variety of operation- alizations both across and within analyses. Miller and Stokes (1963) use a sample of all citizens in a district as "the constituency," though in subsequent analysis (Miller, 1964) does consider majority party identifiers as the constituency. Hedlund and Friesema (1972), Crane (1960), and Jackson (1974) focus on voters as the constituency, though it is interesting to note that Jackson (1974, pp. 40-41) would weigh voters' preferences by their degree of issue concern. Multiple conceptualizations of "constituency" are offered by Kingdon (1973) and Clausen (1973). At different times (and for different analytical purposes) Clausen defines the constituency as voters for the winning candidate (p. 126); the members of the winning candidate's political party (p. 128); and the entire, legally defined district (p. 137). Kingdon (1973, pp. 33-34) uses legislative perceptions of "the constituency" and thus constituency becomes almost a psychological reference group which at different times comprises the entire district, special interest groups, electoral supporters, district elites, and various combinations of these groups. In short, it is quite likely that no two researchers can agree for any period of time just what constitutes "the constituency" whose desires a legislator might or should follow.

4. Unfortunately, when such discussions occur they are usually justifications for data one must deal with rather than some normative theory. Hence, for example, those dealing with referenda votes see little value in using fellow partisan supporters as the definition of "the constituency."

5. The simple additive scales we are considering here abound in political science, but are less common in studies of legislator-constituency linkages for the very simple reason that those doing work in the area typically use the Miller-Stokes data which are comprised of Guttman scales. However, when roll call behavior is studied, researchers thus have greater freedom in scale constructions, and simple additive scales are more common (e.g., Sullivan and O'Connor, 1972). Our remarks, then, are more in the way of a caution than a criticism of specific studies.

6. It is important to realize that we are talking about sets of questions that allow respondents to select several alternatives; this is a very different process from taking binary choices across different issues and creating a Guttman type scale. A Guttman scale may indicate a range of acceptance and rejection if all the choices pertain to the same issue, but with rare exceptions Guttman scales of legislative voting are comprised of several different issue areas. We should not confuse a Guttman scale score that indicates an acceptance-rejection point on a broad dimension with a set of acceptable positions on



Legislator-Constituency Congruence 621

a single issue that may be one component of that scale. For example, if we had aGuttman scale with questions on black voting rights, racial discrimination in housing, and school integration, we could not use the resultant score as an indicator of what policy choices among the range of all possible policy choices the individual prefers on each separate issue (for example, how far should the government go in school integration). Actually, the general use of Guttman type scales in analyzing legislative-constituency relationships is open to reconsideration. See, for example, discussions by Jackson (1974, Appendix B), and in particular the work of Niemi and Weisberg (1974) which deals with the inability of Guttman scales to portray single-peakedness and most preferred choice.

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Achen, Christopher H. 1977. "Measuring Representation: The Perils of the Correlation Coefficient," American Journal of Political Science 21 (November, 1977): 805-815.

. 1978. "Measuring Representatives," American Journal of Political Science 22 (August, 1978):475-510.

Arneson, Ben A. 1927. "Do Representatives Represent?" National Municipal Review 16 (1927):751-754.

Clausen, Aage. 1973. How Congressmen Decide: A Policy Focus. New York: St. Martins. Crane, Wilder. 1960. "Do Representatives Represent?"Journal ofPolitics 22 (May, 1960):

295-299. Crespi, Irving. 1971. "What Kind of Attitude Measures are Predictive of Behavior,"

Public Opinion Quarterly 35 (Fall, 1971):327-334. Eulau, Heinz, John C. Wahlke, William Buchanan, and Leroy C. Ferguson. 1959. "The

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Eulau, Heinz and Paul D. Karps. 1977. "The Puzzle of Representation: Specifying Com- ponents of Responsiveness," Legislative Studies Quarterly 2 (August, 1977): 233-254.

Fenno, Richard F. ,Jr. 1978. Home Style: House Members in Their District. Boston: Little, Brown.

Fiorina, Morris P. 1975. "Constituency Influence: A Generalized Model and Its Impli- cations for Statistical Studies of Roll Call Behavior." Political Methodology 2 (1975):249-266.

Hamilton, Howard D. 1970. "Direct Legislation: Some Implication of Open Housing Referenda," American Political Science Review 64 (March, 1970): 124-137.

Hedlund, Ronald D. and H. Paul Friesema. 1972. "Representatives' Perception of Constituency Opinion," Journal of Politics 34 (August, 1972):730-752.

Jackson, John E. 1974. Constituencies and Leaders in Congress. Cambridge: Harvard University Press.

Kingdon, John W. 1973. Congressmen's Voting Decisions. New York: Harper and Row. MacRae, Duncan Jr. 1958. Dimensions of Congressional Voting. Berkeley: The Uni-

versity of California Press. Miller, Warren E. and Donald E. Stokes. 1963. "Constituency Influence in Congress,"

American Political Science Review 57 (March, 1963):45-56. Miller, Warren E. 1964. "Majority Rule and the Representative System of Government,"

in E. Allardt and Y. Lithunen, eds., Cleavages, Ideologies and Party Systems: Contributions to Comparative Political Sociology. Helsinki: Transactions of the Westermark Society, pp. 343-376.



622 Robert Weissberg

Niemi, Richard G. and Herbert F. Weisberg. 1974. "Single-Peakedness and Guttman Scales: Concept and Measurement," Public Choice 20 (Winter, 1974):33-45.

Pitkin, Hanna G. 1967. The Concept of Representation. Berkeley: The University of California Press.

Shannon, Wayne. 1968. Party Constituency and Congressional Voting. Baton Rouge: Louisiana State University Press.

Sullivan, John L. and Robert E. O'Connor. 1972. "Electoral Choice and Popular Control of Public Policy: The Case of the 1962 House Election," American Political Science Review 66 (December, 1972):1256-1268.

Van der Slik, Jack. 1969. "Roll Call Voting in the House of Representatives of the 88th Congress: Constituency and Party Affiliation." Carbondale, Illinois: Public Affairs Research Bureau.

Weissberg, Robert. 1976. Public Opinion and Popular Government. Englewood Cliffs, New Jersey: Prentice-Hall.



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Assessing Legislator-Constituency Policy Agreement