Issue Salience & Citizen Preferences in Congressional Elections

• In Event: U.S. Senate and Congressional Elections

Abstract

The foundation of democratic politics in the United States rests on the principal-agent relationship between constituents and their legislators. Scholars of congressional representation and electoral accountability in the United States largely focus on two sets of criteria that voters consider. First, rational choice scholars traditionally focus on the quality of congruence between the ideological policy preferences of citizens and the positions of candidates (Miller & Stokes, 1963). By contrast, party scholars instead focus on the role of partisan congruence between citizens and candidates in shaping electoral choice, particularly in an increasingly nationalized and polarized electoral landscape (Jacobson, 2015). In this paper, we seek to integrate these arguments by introducing a third component of effective representation: issue salience advocacy by congressional candidates.

American politics scholars largely omit issue salience from models of electoral choice (Dennison, 2019). If the central component of democratic process is the extent to which the electorate is able to exercise control over the issue content of the political agenda (Dahl, 1989) and ``who gets what, when, and how’’ (Lasswell, 1936), then policy priorities should play a key role in how citizens make electoral choices.

To address this gap, we field a 2022 Cooperative Election Study (CES) module that includes both a survey experiment and questions that ask voters to evaluate real-world congressional elites. These data allow us to determine whether elites' prioritization of issues salient to voters affects voter preferences. Importantly, this effect is investigated while holding candidate ideological position, candidate party, and other electorally salient characteristics constant. In addition, the study leverages perceived issue priorities of real-world congressional candidates, and their parties, to observationally test how voters weigh issue salience advocacy in their electoral choices. This research complements and builds upon existing studies, merging the two distinct theories of electoral legislative accountability by introducing issue salience as a key component of how citizens choose candidates.

Authors

• Carlos Algara, Claremont Graduate University

• Isaac Hale, Occidental College