Carson et al. say that we should look at the partisan tilt of each member’s voting record. Look at partisanship, not ideology. Of course, ideology and partisanship are closely related. But Carson et al. argue that voters are more willing to tolerate ideological extremity than partisan extremity. In political sciency terms, voters would rather tolerate a bad DW-NOMINATE score than a bad party unity score. They back this claim up with both experimental and observational evidence.

This view makes sense. Think back to 2008, when the Obama campaign had great fun advertising McCain’s 90+% “presidential support” score. Likewise, it seems that a Republican in a House race could blast her opponent’s high party unity score in an effort to tie her opponent unfavorably to Pelosi.

It’s not clear to me how revolutionary this research is given the strong correlation between ideology and partisanship, but it’s certainly interesting to think that maybe voters dislike partisans more than ideologues.

Political scientists have spilled a lot of ink over the past several decades debating whether all that really happens. Ansolabehere and Jones ran a survey to find out. Surprisingly, that hadn’t been done before. Turns out democracy isn’t quite perfect, but it works well enough. They look at each of the three steps listed above:

1. Most voters offered an opinion on most of the specific issues (from 2005-2006) that the authors asked about (partial birth abortion, gay marriage, stem cell research, capital gains tax cuts, ratifying CAFTA, immigration reform, bankruptcy reform, the Patriot Act).
2. Most voters ventured a guess as to how their representative actually voted on each of this issues. The guesses weren’t perfect. On average, the guesses were accurate about 72% of the time. That’s not perfect, but it’s enough to produce accountability in the aggregate. As the authors remind us, “One need only require that the average perceptions of constituencies square with the [actual] voting records of Representatives. The law of large numbers would make the electorate as a whole act as if individuals were highly informed” (see pg 587).
3. To the extent that a voter’s policy preferences are similar to the member’s roll call record as perceived by the voter, voters are more likely to support their representative.

That “as perceived by the voter” bit is critical. Still, the articles goes a long way toward showing that voters really do hold members of Congress accountable for their voting records.

Comment and Criticism

I have only one quibble with the article. They are asking people about bills that already came before Congress in the previous year. It’s possible that people changed their position on these bills after seeing how their Representative (and other Representatives from their preferred party) voted on it. This is a central part of the Michigan school’s “funnel model,” which says that voters start off with a partisan attachment, and they then adopt the issue positions that they perceive are consistent with that partisan attachment.

So, if we believe The American Voter, then maybe voters had different views about all these issues before Congress addressed them, but when they saw how their party took a side on each issue over the course of 2005-2006, their views shifted to match the party line. Thus, members of Congress aren’t responding to voters–voters are responding to members of Congress.

I’m not a huge fan of this line of argument from The American Voter, but it’s still an influential view within political science, so I expect that Ansolabehere and Jones may take some flack from Michigan loyalists.

A wise Latina

We like to think that in our form of government, political officials represent the citizens at large. Trouble is, it’s hard to know what “represent” means. Often, we talk about representation through two major lenses. “Descriptive” representation refers to whether people in government look like Americans generally (in terms of race, gender, maybe even age, occupation, class). “Substantive” representation refers to whether people in government make the sorts of decisions that Americans generally would make.

In a recent article, Bonneau and Rice take those two concepts into the world of judicial politics. Their basic question: Do black judges make different decisions than white judges? Bonneau and Rice provide a nice empirical answer to the question, but their interpretation of what their findings mean is confusing and less than persuasive.

Do black judges make different decisions than white ones?

Although there’s a large stack of existing articles asking the same question, previous work has produced mixed results. Bonneau and Rice argue persuasively that institutional context matters enough to resolve those mixed results in the literature.  Specifically, they argue that discretion matters. Some judges have discretion over which cases they hear; others do not. This contrast is most apparent when looking at state supreme courts. Some states have a three-tiered court similar to the federal system, with trial courts, intermediate courts of appeal, and then a state supreme court. Other states omit the intermediate courts of appeal. In either system, criminal defendants always have a right to appeal. In the absence of an intermediate court of appeals, then, the state supreme court has no discretion over which cases it will hear; it must hear all appeals.

Bonneau and Rice “contend that descriptive representation is translated to substantive representation when the court has discretion over their docket and thus an intermediate court of appeal is present” (p 3887).  Elsewhere, they state that “the link between descriptive and substantive representation relies on the expectation that minority and non-minority actors behave differently when faced with the same set of facts”–a curious statement that I discuss below, but one that I’ll accept for the time being. Putting it together, these two statements lead us to expect that race will have an effect (“minority and non-minority actors behave differently”) only when an intermediate court of appeal is present.

They test this argument by looking at the voting records of state supreme court judges, using a variety of appropriate controls (judge’s race, ideology, type of crime committed, etc). And what do they find? In states with an intermediate court of appeal, the judge’s race has no effect on voting; in states without an appeals court, race has a strong effect.

Wait–they find exactly the opposite pattern from what their theory implies. Didn’t they say that race should have an effect when there IS discretion (an intermediate court), not when there isn’t?

Perhaps I read too quickly, but nowhere did they acknowledge this curiosity or seek to explain it. We’re left, then, with an unexplained, unforeseen empirical finding. I know a fellow who likes to say, “The world is correlated at 0.3.” In other words, there are all sorts of correlations out there, but without a strong theoretical story explaining a particular correlation, we have no reason to suppose any particular finding is not random.

Bonneau and Rice are smart people, so I’m sure I missed something. But near as I can tell, the data did not support the theory.

Does substantive representation require that white and black judges vote differently?

Perhaps most curious about Bonneau and Rice’s article is this assertion, stated several times in different forms (including in the quotation given above):

“If there are no differences between white and African-American judges, then it also means that there is no substantive representation on the bench. After all, if African-American judges are deciding cases the same way as white judges, then neither group is representing the interests of minorities” (p 382).

Somebody help me understand why that needs to be true. Bonneau and Rice say nothing to back it up. Perhaps if black and white judges are deciding cases the same way, then BOTH groups are representing the interests of minorities. Must it be the case that only a “wise Latina” can make decisions about Latino defendants? Indeed, in their conclusion, Bonneau and Rice give evidence that would seem to indicate that both groups are reasonably fair to everybody:

“The vast majority of judges … are distinguished jurists with years of experience in the judicial system. These judges are also socialized the same way (both in law school and in the legal profession). This homogeneity in socialization and experience–largely unique to the judiciary–may serve to mitigate any racial differences that exist.”

I’m not trying to make an argument either way about whether the legal system is biased against minority defendants. I’m only saying that Bonneau and Rice need to back up their claim rather than merely assert it.

Parting thoughts

So where are we left?

• The authors find exactly the opposite of what their theory predicts–but they should have tried to explain this.
• The authors need to give further justification for one of their major theoretical assumptions: That substantive representation requires black and white judges to behave differently.