number of the Tax Day rally in 2010 was 57,845 (Messamore 2010). The Tea Party still exercised its influence in the 2012 elections. Citizens’ support or concern to the movement declined in 2013 and 2014, according to public opinion surveys. The chief goal of the Tea Party is, in a nutshell, to downsize the federal government. ‘Tea’ in the name of the movement is said to be the acronym of ‘taxed enough already,’ and the ‘Tea Party’ symbolism was “a perfect rallying point since it brings to mind the original American colonial rebels opposing tyranny by tossing chests of tea into Boston Harbor” (Skocpol and Williamson 2012, p. 7). The speech made by Santelli spoke to adoration for freedom and patriotic sentiment of the U.S. citizens. Santelli exclaimed: “[h]ow many of you people want to pay for your neighbor’s mortgage that has an extra bathroom and can’t pay their bills?,” and “If you read our Founding Fathers, people like Benjamin Franklin and Jefferson, what we’re doing in this country now is making them roll over in their graves.” Such a narrative was seen in protest events with expressions such as ‘to take back the country.’ What the Tea Party wants is to downsize the federal government and to expand freedom of citizens. The goals of the Tea Party include reducing taxes, slashing public spending, curbing public sector unions, and clearing away regulations on business. Participants in the movement also supported policing immigrants, safeguarding Second Amendment gun rights, and promoting pro-life and traditional family values. The American Recovery and Reinvestment Act, signed into law by President Obama on February 17, 2009, and the Affordable Care and Patient Protection Act, signed into law on March 23, 2010, were opposed by most Tea Party members (Skocpol and Williamson 2012). Zernike (2011) writes that the participants put more focus on economic issues than on social issues.
assumption that legislators are single-mindedly interested in reelection can be analogically inferred from this argument. This assumption does not exclude factors other than economic. Anthony Downs’ seminal work An Economic Theory of Democracy (1957) is often cited as a monumental work that examined the mechanisms of how legislators, legislative parties, and voters act. In this book, Downs presents a theory that legislative parties determine behavior of legislators because it is legislative parties that provide job positions to legislators. Actually, legislators receive significant supports from their legislative parties, such as financial resources and shortcuts for their constituents to know about those legislators’ policy preferences. In the contemporary political context, legislative parties seem to be a significant source of legislative vote choice. A criticism, which is related to the case of the Tea Party movement, is that individual legislators receive significant amount of financial contributions from their citizen supporters as well as private advocacy organizations, in today’s political arena. Another often cited work, David R. Mayhew’s Congress: the Electoral Connection (1974) sheds lights on the discretion of individual legislators. Mayhew argues that individual legislators have to make their individual efforts to gain votes from their constituents, through advertising, credit claiming, and position taking. Advertising is defined as any action to publicize legislators’ name among constituents. Credit claiming is to emphasize individual contribution to policy making, often by emphasizing individual legislators’ specific policy area of concern. Position taking means public enunciation of legislators’ policy preferences through, for example, roll-call votes. Legislators’ participation in the Tea Party movement can be understood as an effective tool of advertising. It can also be regarded as an action of credit claiming, if proposed policy goals are achieved. In other words, as was mentioned in Introduction, legislators have incentives to participate in the movement for their own sake.