US Legislators’ Public Responses to the 2017 Travel Ban

• In Event: Legislative Effectiveness and Representation

Abstract

On January 27, 2017, President Trump signed an executive order that banned foreign nationals from seven predominantly Muslim countries from entering the United States. The Muslim Ban, as it became commonly known, sparked immediate protests around the country. However, the responses among members of Congress was varied even among co-partisans. This paper asks if and how protests impacted the public responses of members of Congress. Rooted in sub-constituency politics, we expect that representatives will strategically respond to protests via their public statements. Based on an original dataset comprised of protest data and over 100,000 tweets from members of the House of Representatives in 2017, we confirm this expectation. More particularly, we show that protests in Democratic representatives’ districts led them to more strongly oppose the Muslim Ban in comparison to Democratic representatives who did not experience protests in their district. Moreover, we find Republicans who experienced protests in their districts were less staunch in their support of the Ban than Republicans who did not experience protests.

Authors

• LaGina Gause, University of California, San Diego

• Jennifer Garcia, Oberlin College

• Christopher T. Stout, Oregon State University