Constituency, Party, and Representation in Congress

Using congressional districts as primary sampling units, the 1978 National Election Survey provides improved (though still imperfect) measures of district opinion. Together with Census data on district demography, roll call voting scales, and information on congressmen's party and personal characteristics, they permit a new examination of representation in Congress. Using these data we found a high degree of representation of district opinion on social welfare and (surprisingly) on women's issues, nearly as much on racial issues, and much less on law and order or on abortion. District demography and congressmen's party add substantially to the explanation of roll call votes. There is not, however, much "responsible party" representation in Congress. Future representation studies must face questions about the complex interplay among these factors, including reciprocal influences. Benjamin I. Page holds the Frank C. Erwin, Jr., Chair in Government at the University of Texas, Austin, and is a Research Associate at the National Opinion Research Center. Robert Y. Shapiro is Assistant Professor of Political Science at Columbia University and an NORC Research Associate. Paul W. Gronke is a doctoral student at the University of Michigan. Robert M. Rosenberg is Deputy Director of the State of Florida Division of Pari-Mutual Wagering. The authors wish to thank Calvin Jones for collaborating in this research and Eric Smith, Bruce Peterson, Robert Erikson, Lutz Erbring, Eleanor Singer, and the anonymous reviewers for offering helpful comments. Kathy Bawn provided capable assistance. The research was supported by the National Opinion Research Center and the Social Science Division of the University of Chicago. The 1978 American National Election Study data were made available by the Inter-university Consortium for Political and Social Research; the responsibility for analysis and interpretation is the authors'. Public Opinion Quarterly Vol. 48:741-756 e by the Trustees of Columbia University Published by Elsevier Science Publishing Co., Inc. 0033-362X/84/0048-741/$2.50 742 PAGE, SHAPIRO, GRONKE, AND ROSENBERG 1963, 1966). A number of researchers using the 1958 data (Cnudde and McCrone, 1966; Achen, 1977, 1978; Erikson, 1978; Karps and Eulau, 1978; Weissberg, 1976, 1978) and other National Election Studies (Stone, 1977, 1979) have conducted increasingly sophisticated empirical analyses, but they have always been limited in their conclusiveness because of poor samples within congressional districts. A small number of interviews was conducted within each district, and the sampling scheme was not designed to produce random samples of opinion for districts. It is now possible to study representation in Congress using better data on constituents' opinions from the 1978 National Election study (see Erikson, 1981). The 1978 survey, unlike others before, designated congressional districts as primary sampling units (PSUs). These PSUs promise considerable improvement in the representativeness of constituency samples. Moreover, the political times have changed in the more than two decades since 1958. New policy issues have arisen while some old ones have changed or faded. The newer survey, with a better sampling frame, offers a fresh opportunity to examine representation. At the same time, however, we must not exaggerate the virtues of the 1978 data. For reasons of economy, interview administration within districts was not random; interviews were geographically clustered, counteracting some of the advantages of the new PSUs. Sample sizes (average n = 21) in the 108 district PSUs were larger than in 1958 (average n = 13), but by no means enormous. In addition, the lack of any parallel survey of congressmen means that some intervening processes involving representatives' attitudes and their perceptions of district opinion cannot be