Familiarity and the Emergence of Constituent Attitudes

• In Event: Public Opinion and Legislative Politics

Abstract

How does familiarity with one's member of Congress affect constituent attitudes toward the member? In order to resolve a long-standing debate over this question, we conducted a field experiment that gave constituents the chance to gain familiarity with their representative by interacting directly with their sitting member of Congress in an online town hall. We measure the familiarity construct as the latent propensity to offer a substantive response across a range items measuring the constituent's attitudes toward the member, as opposed to a ``don't know'' (DK) response. We conduct the analysis in two steps. First we assess the construct validity of our familiarity measure using a measurement model, examining the correlations between the respondent's measured familiarity with the member, the measured propensity to express substantive policy preferences, and the measured level of political knowledge. In the construct validity study, we show that our member familiarity measure is correlated with latent political knowledge, which is similar to familiarity in its epistemological requirements, but not with the latent propensity to express policy attitudes. Second we examine the mediating effect of familiarity on attitudes toward the member using the causal mediation approach recommended by Imai et al. (2011), augmented with a novel approach to identification that uses repeated compliance observations to satisfy the sequential ignorability assumption. We find that relative to an experimental control group, respondents who were exposed to their member in the online town hall were both more to be familiar with the member, and were more likely to report a more positive attitude as a result of enhanced familiarity. This effect is more pronounced among constituents who are the same political party as the member (same-partisans) than it is among those of the opposite party (opposite-partisans), but in neither case did familiarity breed contempt. These findings demonstrate the importance of familiarity in legislative trust and approval and that both familiarity and esteem can be enhanced through online interactions.

Authors

• Kevin M. Esterling, University of California, Riverside

• William Minozzi, Ohio State University

• Michael Neblo, Ohio State University