Every election cycle, voters are told by pundits and commentators that this particular election counts and that it is likely to shape public policy for decades to come. In new research, Anthony Fowlerand Andrew B. Hall find that elections definitely do have consequences; for example, a barely elected Republican is 40 percent more likely to vote conservatively in Congress than a Democrat would have. They also find that because of legislators’ ambitions and the advantage of incumbency, one election result can influence the future results in that district for more than a decade.
Before every major election, American voters are told that the upcoming race is “more important than ever” (e.g., here and here). Candidates, pundits, and the press alike harp on the important issues that will be taken up by the government in the next session—issues like health care, voting rights, taxes, sexual equality, national security, the budget deficit, etc. To excite the interests of voters, these opinion leaders often claim that the outcome of the current election will shape the outcomes of these policy debates, not only today but far into the future. Are they right? Do elections hold sharp and far-reaching consequences for policy?
In new research, we confirm that they do. In particular, we show that voters’ choices to elect Democratic or Republican candidates for their districts dramatically alters the representation they receive. Put another way, voters in a given district will see their representative cast dramatically different roll-call votes if they elect a Democrat instead of a Republican, or vice-versa. Since policy results from the aggregate behavior of individual representatives, our findings illustrate how elections as a whole affect the policy process.
* For reasons that are still poorly understood, we know that close election results significantly influence subsequent election results. When a party or candidate barely wins office as opposed to barely losing office, they are much more likely to win subsequent elections. This means that election results today don’t just influence representation and policy over the next electoral cycle, they might influence representation and policy over many cycles spanning decades.
* How can these effects persist for so long? The long-term consequences of election results appear to be explained by several important factors that we explore in our research. First and foremost, legislators typically seek long careers in office, and the combination of these career ambitions and a large personal incumbency advantage, means that a very close election today, where voters are essentially indifferent between a Democratic and Republican candidate, can lead voters to continue reelecting that same person repeatedly. At the same time as these legislators serve long careers in office, perhaps even representing moderate districts that don’t agree with many of their policy positions, they continue to cast roll-call votes in the same way that they did at the beginning of their careers. We might expect that senior legislators continue to be reelected precisely because they alter their behavior to match the district, but we find no evidence of this, explaining why the divergent effects of election results on roll-call votes are so large and persistent.
Representation in American legislatures is both divergent—voters must choose between two stark choices that are more extreme than the median voter’s preferences—and persistent—the consequences of this choice last for decades. Furthermore, the phenomena that we uncover at the state or district level have important consequences for aggregate policy, which can remain consistent over many electoral cycles even when the preferences of voters are far from those of their elected representatives. So when the pundits warn voters that the upcoming election is important, they may be even more correct than they realize.
From the paper: The evidence in this article identifies and illuminates the phenomenon of divergent and persistent representation in American legislatures. Representation is divergent because legislators do not converge to the preferences of the district – that is, Democratic and Republican legislators differ significantly in the way they represent the same district at the same time. Representation is persistent – at both the district and aggregate levels – because it can remain consistent over many electoral cycles even when the preferences of voters are far from those of their elected
representatives.
* The long-term consequences of election results for partisan representation and roll-call representation decay in almost exact proportion to one another, suggesting that legislators do not, on average, [change] over time. Even when a legislator fails to closely match her district, and even when the district continues to re-elect her over the course of many terms, the legislator continues to cast roll-call votes in the same way without moderating to the positions of the district.