IDEAS home Printed from https://ideas.repec.org/a/now/jnlpip/113.00000073.html
   My bibliography  Save this article

The Quality of District Representation in U.S. House Committees

Author

Listed:
  • Josh M. Ryan

Abstract

How well do members of the House adhere to the preferences of their constituents within standing committees? Roll call voting behavior on the floor largely reflects district preferences, but voting in committees is not easily monitored by constituents. This may allow legislators to disregard constituent preferences without suffering electoral consequences. I use a dataset of individual committee votes to create Optimal Classification scores for legislators within committee-congresses. Two-way fixed effects estimates and a redistricting natural experiment show that members of the House are largely responsive to district preferences, but the quality of representation declines over time as the district changes. Representation quality is also conditioned by committee heterogeneity and electoral security. In committees where jurisdictional complexity is high and party preferences are outlying, legislators’ voting records diverge from the preferences of their district, though low incumbent vote share strengthens the relationship between district preferences and committee voting.

Suggested Citation

  • Josh M. Ryan, 2023. "The Quality of District Representation in U.S. House Committees," Journal of Political Institutions and Political Economy, now publishers, vol. 4(1), pages 1-81–110, February.
    • Handle: RePEc:now:jnlpip:113.00000073
    DOI: 10.1561/113.00000073
    as

    Download full text from publisher

    File URL: http://dx.doi.org/10.1561/113.00000073
    Download Restriction: no
    File URL: https://libkey.io/10.1561/113.00000073?utm_source=ideas
    LibKey link: if access is restricted and if your library uses this service, LibKey will redirect you to where you can use your library subscription to access this item
    ---><---

    Corrections

    All material on this site has been provided by the respective publishers and authors. You can help correct errors and omissions. When requesting a correction, please mention this item's handle: RePEc:now:jnlpip:113.00000073. See general information about how to correct material in RePEc.

    If you have authored this item and are not yet registered with RePEc, we encourage you to do it here. This allows to link your profile to this item. It also allows you to accept potential citations to this item that we are uncertain about.

    We have no bibliographic references for this item. You can help adding them by using this form .

    If you know of missing items citing this one, you can help us creating those links by adding the relevant references in the same way as above, for each refering item. If you are a registered author of this item, you may also want to check the "citations" tab in your RePEc Author Service profile, as there may be some citations waiting for confirmation.

    For technical questions regarding this item, or to correct its authors, title, abstract, bibliographic or download information, contact: Lucy Wiseman (email available below). General contact details of provider: http://www.nowpublishers.com/ .

    Please note that corrections may take a couple of weeks to filter through the various RePEc services.

    IDEAS is a RePEc service. RePEc uses bibliographic data supplied by the respective publishers.