Has Representation Declined over Time?

So intertemporal change, congruence has declined since the 1970s, a little bit of responsiveness has too, but a lot less so. That should be, although less so, not also less so. But the starting year is really critical, as you can see, as you go back over time, if you basically choose any other period than this peak.

The effect of district partisanship on a member's voting is much higher now than it was previously. And it's actually not that much lower now than it was in the 1960s and 70s, it's lower, as you can see, but not that much. So again, and the big thing to note this effect, MC is member of Congress, of course, party.

Is that party was just the dominant force and district partisanship was not a major force in legislative behavior for a very long period. And it sort of increases, peaks, and then has gone down a bit, but not much in terms of responsiveness.

Okay, so I've already mentioned the status quo bias, sort of what are the theories about why this happens and what's the evidence on it?

Status quo bias is constant, so it's explaining the level, it's not really explaining the change. When people point to why have things changed, they tend to point to elite level polarization. So I'm not sure this is true, this was just what someone told me, that there's often these college application questions.

I'm sure some of you must have answered some of these, and that when people ask what are the biggest problems in the country today, polarization ranks really high. So I was sort of not happy because I'm not happy that it's a problem. But wow, a lot of these high school students are thinking about these problems and know about them, so I'm happy about that part of it.

So political scientists as well are particularly concerned about elite level partisan polarization on this responsiveness issue. A lot of the common explanations for why elite level polarization is happening don't really seem to be contributing when you do it more systematically. So primaries have been around for a while, right?

They come in in the 60s and 70s, that's the height of responsiveness. So they don't seem to be driving elite level polarization, it makes sense to me, I see some skeptical faces, I feel it should be a factor. But the evidence suggests that there have been primaries for a long time, so it has to be primaries plus something else right now if you're gonna try to put the blame on primaries.

Ditto redistricting, yeah, we've got better able ability to crunch the numbers and stack districts, that's all true. But it's not as if states have a lot of different procedures for redistricting. Redistricting doesn't work the same way across the 50 states, the polarization doesn't look different in these different procedures.

So it would need to be redistricting plus something. There's some evidence that campaign finance could be a factor. Usually when it's cited as a factor, it's cited as one in ways that suggest a lot of the popular reforms, like increasing the power of small donors would make it worse, right?

The small donors tend to be very polarized and very politically active.

And there's some evidence that it's internal legislative dynamics, as well as this micro-targeting of the base turnout, though those are very hard to establish cause and effects on. Another big explanation, which is, as I promised, we're gonna talk about for a bit, is this micro targeting or sorry, outsized influence of the affluent, but that there's very little evidence that it's even happening.

So there's these, again, two on a personal level, of my favorite people in the field, who hopefully consider me personal friends after they hear what I'm gonna say, really well intentioned, great scholars. So that they go in and this sort of stems more from Marty Gillen's original work.

And compare the relationship of policy to the preferences of the top 10% income bracket, the top 50%, you might say, like the middle income and the bottom 10%.

Marty did this unbelievable herculean effort, took him about a decade, collected almost 2000 polls over a large period of time that matched to, I'm gonna call it a DC policy issue.

This is a federal study, it's not a state study.

And this work shows that on economic and foreign policy, the high income group has the most influence on the set of issues. And we'll get into a moment what he analyzes. On social welfare policy, the impact of the groups is relatively similar, and that includes the low income group, not just the middle income group.

And then on social issues, the high and middle income groups seem to have similar influence, but the low income group doesn't seem to be well represented. And as you may or may not know, I guess, low income groups tend to actually be more conservative on a lot of social issues.

Even if the vote is democratic, often on issues like abortion and other social policies, their views tend to be more conservative than the Democrats. But also more conservative than high income groups by a considerable amount, okay? So what are the caveats and critiques? So the first is that the high and middle income groups agree on 90% of the bills.

I mean, this is just, like, huge. So I'm actually doing a study right now with some colleagues across the country. And we actually found, this is a kind of work in progress that we're presenting next month. Were comparing the preferences of campaign donors, affluent and the general public.

And at first we were really worried because we kept finding that while donors preferences diverge, the general public and the affluent's preferences were looking really similar. And we were saying, everybody's gonna hate this, there must be something wrong. But then we kinda went back and reread this work, and we said, well, wait a second.

Actually, we find they agree less than these guys do. And they are guys. In this case, we actually find it's less than 90%, let's say 66% of the time they agree. So the analysis that's going on in the previous work is on this 10% of policies where the high and middle income don't agree.

So you can say that's what you have to work with, because maybe it's the high income that's driving the policy outcomes on those bills, but it's a big caveat, I would say it needs to be. You don't know that ex ante. And the correlation between the high and middle income groups on those policies on which the sort of majority opinion of each agrees is 0.08.

So it's not sort of, well, the high income group wants it at 90%, and the middle income group wants it at 51%. They're in very strong agreement with each other across the policies. So then you get into this when they disagree, and this is where there's been a bit of a back and forth in the literature.

But I would say the weight of the evidence goes to what I'm putting on the slides. The middle and the high income groups attain their desired bill at similar rates, and the low income group at a moderately lower rate, so they get a little bit less representation. But you get into these sort of questions about representation.

Well, now we're talking about the lowest 10% of income. It's not a large group of people. It's a view that you think that group should have better. These are the worst off. A Rawlsian, if you've taken political philosophy, would say, no, that group should be better represented. They need the most help.

It's a view, but it's not a view that, wow we thought the system was set up to do this, right? That's not what the system was set up to do. And it was set up to represent more the middle income group. And the system is doing that as well as it's representing the high income group.

You could say the high income group that's already over representation. And that's a very fair critique, right? They shouldn't be that well represented. It's fair, but again, we're now talking about 10% of bills. It's not as and then it gets even. Wait, sorry. It gets even more damning.

And I will say this group, I don't ask other colleagues their policy views. But this other group, it's Jeff Lacks, Justin Phillips and Julian Zelitzer on the Senate voting. And Jeff Lacks has sort of gotten in trouble on Twitter for being too leftist. So that doesn't mean I don't know his views.

In his heart, I don't talk to him about it. But this is not a group that's known for being right wing. They go after it even harder and basically say this is all party. And that, in fact, if the affluence views were just dictated policy. Policy would be much more responsive to public opinion than it is currently, that there is some partisan difference.

Republicans are more responsive to the affluent than Democrats, but they highlight, Republicans do it only when the middle income Republicans also want that policy. So it's kind of conditional on the middle income Republicans wanting it. The Democrats are just willing to ignore their middle income constituents in a lot of cases.

And again, what people want, what they don't want, and a normative perspective is a separate question. But this issue that the affluent are sort of overly dominating policy in the way it's often portrayed, I think the evidence is just very, very weak. My biggest caveat on my own kind of statement here would be this is all in the sort of laws, legislative policy, what's going on in the bureaucracy and sort of implementation of policy.

That is a separate question, but that's not what the original studies were about. So that may be that kinda companies and vested interests are well overrepresented there. That would make sense. It's well outside of the public eye. It may not be true, but it might be true. Neither side really comments on that.