Description
This book demonstrates the consequences of legislators' strategic communication for representation in American politics. Representational Style in Congress shows how legislators present their work to cultivate constituent support. Using a massive new data set of texts from legislators and new statistical techniques to analyze the texts, this book provides comprehensive measures of what legislators say to constituents and explains why legislators adopt these styles. Using the new measures, Justin Grimmer shows how legislators affect how constituents evaluate their representatives and the consequences of strategic statements for political discourse. The introduction of new statistical techniques for political texts allows a more comprehensive and systematic analysis of what legislators say and why it matters than was previously possible. Using these new techniques, the book makes the compelling case that to understand political representation, we must understand what legislators say to constituents.
Chapter
2 Representation and Evaluation
2.1 The Study of Representation and the Irony of Home Style
2.2 Presentational Styles and Evaluation on the Senator's Terms
3 Measuring Presentational Styles with Senate Press Releases
3.1 Existing Sources for Measuring How Senators Engage Constituents
4 A Model for Presentational Styles
4.1 A Bayesian Statistical Model to Measure Expressed Priorities
4.2 Identifying the Topics of Discussion
4.3 Assessing the Validity of the Topic Classification
4.4 Validating the Estimated Priorities
5 The Types of Presentational Styles
5.1 The Types of Presentational Styles in the Senate
5.1.1 Issue Oriented Senators
5.1.2 Domestic Policy Wonks
5.2 Position-Takers to Credit-Claimers
6 The Electoral Connection's Effect
6.2 The Electoral Connection and Presentational Style Choice
6.3 The Farmer and The Lawyer
6.4 The Electoral Connection's Influence on Expressed Priorities
6.5 Stable and Slowly Changing Presentational Styles
6.5.1 Stable Presentational Styles over the Electoral Cycle
6.5.2 Stable Presentational Styles over a Career
7 The Correspondence between Senators' Work
7.2 Appropriators in Presentational Styles and Roll-Call Votes
7.3 Senators' Positions in Press Releases
7.4 Correlation between Presentational Styles and Bill Introductions
8 Why Presentational Styles Matter for Dyadic Representation
8.2 What Constituents Know about Representatives
8.2.1 Why Presentational Styles Affect Press Coverage
8.2.2 Why Presentational Styles Affect Constituents
8.3 How Press Releases Drive Newspaper Coverage
8.4 The Effect of Presentational Styles on Constituent Evaluations
8.5 Legislators' Presentational Styles and Dyadic Representation
9 Why Presentational Styles Matter for Collective Representation
9.1 Partisan Convergence in Issue Attention
9.2 Partisan Debates in Presentational Styles
9.3 Distorted Debate and Extremist Domination
9.4 The Collective Consequences of Presentational Styles
10 Presentational Styles and Representation
10.1 What Legislators Say and Why It Matters
10.2 Consequences for Existing Studies of Ideological Representation
10.3 How Politicians Are Covered in the Press
10.4 Rhetorical Polarization
10.5 rhetorical polarization
10.6 How Politicians Engage the Public
10.7 Representation Inside and Outside the Senate
A.1 statistical model and estimation
A.1.1 Posterior Approximation by Variational Approximations
A.1.2 Maximizing a Lower Bound to Minimize the KL Divergence
A.2 latent dirichlet allocation
Representational Style in Congress
：What Legislators Say and Why It Matters
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