Christopher Warshaw

Measuring Constituent Policy Preferences in Congress, State Legislatures, and Cities

Little is known about the American public’s policy preferences at the level of Congressional districts, state legislative districts, and local municipalities. In this article, we overcome the limited sample sizes that have hindered previous research by jointly scaling the policy preferences of 275,000 Americans based on their responses to policy questions. We combine this large dataset of Americans’ policy preferences with recent advances in opinion estimation to estimate the preferences of every state, congressional district, state legislative district, and large city. We show that our estimates outperform previous measures of citizens’ policy preferences. These new estimates enable scholars to examine representation at a variety of geographic levels. We demonstrate the utility of these estimates through applications of our measures to examine representation in state legislatures and city governments.

How Should We Measure District-Level Public Opinion on Individual Issues?

Due to insufficient sample sizes in national surveys, strikingly little is known about public opinion at the level of Congressional and state legislative districts in the United States. As a result, there has been virtually no study of whether legislators accurately represent the will of their constituents on individual issues. This article solves this problem by developing a multilevel regression and poststratification (MRP) model that combines survey and census data to estimate public opinion at the district level. We show that MRP estimates are excellent predictors of public opinion and referenda results for both congressional and state senate districts. Moreover, they have less error, higher correlations, and lower variance than either disaggregated survey estimates or presidential vote shares. The MRP approach provides American and Comparative Politics scholars with a valuable new tool to measure issue-specific public opinion at low levels of geographic aggregation.

Representation in Municipal Government

Municipal governments play a vital role in American democracy, as well as in governments around the world. Despite this, little is known about the degree to which cities are responsive to the views of their citizens. In the past, the unavailability of data on the policy preferences of citizens at the municipal level has limited scholars’ ability to study the responsiveness of municipal government. We overcome this problem by using recent advances in opinion estimation to measure the mean policy conservatism in every U.S. city and town with a population above 20,000 people. Despite the supposition in the literature that municipal politics are non-ideological, we find that the policies enacted by cities across a range of policy areas correspond with the liberal-conservative positions of their citizens on national policy issues. In addition, we consider the influence of institutions, such as the presence of an elected mayor, the popular initiative, partisan elections, term limits, and at-large elections. Our results show that these institutions have little consistent impact on policy responsiveness in municipal government. These results demonstrate a robust role for citizen policy preferences in determining municipal policy outcomes, but cast doubt on the hypothesis that simple institutional reforms enhance responsiveness in municipal governments.

Mayoral Partisanship and Municipal Fiscal Policy

Does it matter for municipal policy which party controls the mayorship in municipal government? The bulk of the existing evidence says no. But there are a variety of theoretical reasons to believe that mayoral partisanship should affect municipal policy. We examine the impact of mayoral partisanship in nearly 1,000 elections in medium and large cities over the past 60 years. In contrast to previous work, we find that mayoral partisanship has a significant impact on the size of municipal government. Democratic mayors spend substantially more than Republican mayors. In order to pay for this spending, Democratic mayors issue substantially more debt than Republican mayors and pay more in interest. Our findings show that mayoral partisanship matters for city policy. Our findings add to a growing literature indicating that the constraints imposed on city policy making do not prevent public opinion and elections from having a meaningful impact on municipal policy.

Incremental Democracy: The Policy Effects of Partisan Control of State Government

How much does it matter whether Democrats or Republicans control the government? Unless the two parties converge completely, election outcomes should have some impact on policy, but the existing evidence for policy effects of party control is surprisingly weak and inconsistent. We bring clarity to this question, using regression-discontinuity and dynamic panel analyses to estimate the effects of party control of state legislatures and governorships on a new annual measure of state policy liberalism. We find that throughout the 1936–2014 period, electing Democrats has led to more liberal policies, but that in recent decades the policy effects of party control have approximately doubled in magnitude. We present evidence that this increase is at least partially explained by the ideological divergence of the parties’ office holders and electoral coalitions. At the same time, we also show that party effects remain substantively modest, paling relative to policy differences across states.

Policy Preferences and Policy Change: Dynamic Responsiveness in the American States, 1936–2014

Using eight decades of data, we examine the magnitude, mechanisms, and moderators of dynamic responsiveness in the American states. We show that on both economic and (especially) social issues, the liberalism of state publics predicts future change in state policy liberalism. Dynamic responsiveness is gradual, however; large policy shifts are the result of the cumulation of incremental responsiveness over many years. Partisan control of government appears to mediate only a fraction of responsiveness, suggesting that, contrary to conventional wisdom, responsiveness occurs in large part through the adaptation of incumbent officials. Dynamic responsiveness has increased over time but does not seem to be influenced by institutions such as direct democracy or campaign finance regulations. We conclude that our findings, though in some respects normatively ambiguous, on the whole paint a reassuring portrait of statehouse democracy.

Spatial variation in messaging effects

There is large geographic variation in the publics views about climate change in the United States. Research now shows that climate messages can influence public beliefs about the scientific consensus on climate change, particularly in the places that are initially more skeptical.

The Ideological Nationalization of Mass Partisanship: Policy Preferences and Partisan Identification in State Publics, 1946–2014

Since the mid-20th century, elite political behavior has increasingly nationalized. In Congress, for example, within-party geographic cleavages have declined, roll-call voting has become increasingly one-dimensional, and Democrats and Republicans have diverged along this main dimension of national partisan conflict. The existing literature finds that citizens have displayed only a delayed and attenuated echo of elite trends. We show, however, that a very different picture emerges if we focus not on individual citizens but on the aggregate characteristics of geographic constituencies. Using estimates of the economic, racial, and social policy liberalism of the average Democrat, Independent, and Republican in each state-year 1946–2014, we demonstrate a surprisingly close correspondence between mass and elite trends. Specifically, we find that: (1) ideological divergence between Democrats and Republicans has increased dramatically within each domain, just as it has in Congress; (2) economic, racial, and social liberalism have become highly correlated across state-party publics, just as they have across members of Congress; (3) ideological variation across state-party publics is now almost completely explained by party rather than state, closely tracking trends in the Senate; and (4) senators’ liberalism is strongly predicted by the liberalism of their state-party subconstituency, even controlling for their party affiliation and their state public’s overall liberalism. Taken together, this correspondence between elite and mass patterns suggests that members of Congress are actually quite in synch with their constituencies, if not with individual citizens.

Polarization and Partisan Divergence in the American Public, 1946-2012

In this paper, we examine polarization and partisan divergence in the American public on economic issues over the past 70 years. We bring to bear a new dataset that contains over half a million respondents from hundreds of individual polls. This dataset contains the responses to over 150 question series about economic issues. We combine this dataset with a dynamic group-level item response model to measure the ideology of the American public at both the state and national levels between 1946 and 2012. We find that the American public has only become modestly more polarized on economic issues over the past 70 years. However, the two parties are much more clearly sorted on economic issues today than in earlier decades. Moreover, members of the two parties are now further apart than ever before at both the state and federal levels. Our results speak to debates about polarization. They also suggest that partisan divergence in the mass public may have contributed more to elite polarization than scholars have previously thought.

Incremental Democracy: The Policy Effects of the Partisan Composition of State Government

How much does it matter whether Democrats or Republicans control the government? Unless the two parties converge completely, election outcomes should have some impact on policy, but the existing evidence for policy effects of party control is surprisingly weak and inconsistent. We bring clarity to this question, using regression-discontinuity and dynamic panel analyses to estimate the effects of party control of state legislatures and governorships on a new annual measure of state policy liberalism. We find that throughout the 1936-2014 period, electing Democrats has led to more liberal policies, but that in recent decades the policy effects of party control have approximately doubled in magnitude. We present evidence that this increase is at least partially explained by the ideological divergence of the parties officeholders and electoral coalitions. At the same time, we also show that party effects remain substantively modest, paling relative to policy differences across states.