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The Party or the Purse? Unequal Representation in the US Senate

Published online by Cambridge University Press:  12 July 2019

JEFFREY R. LAX Open the ORCID record for JEFFREY R. LAX [Opens in a new window] ,
JUSTIN H. PHILLIPS Open the ORCID record for JUSTIN H. PHILLIPS [Opens in a new window]  and
ADAM ZELIZER Open the ORCID record for ADAM ZELIZER [Opens in a new window]
JEFFREY R. LAX*
Affiliation:
Columbia University
JUSTIN H. PHILLIPS*
Affiliation:
Columbia University
ADAM ZELIZER*
Affiliation:
The University of Chicago
*
*Jeffrey R. Lax, Professor, Department of Political Science, Columbia University, [email protected].
†Justin H. Phillips, Professor, Department of Political Science, Columbia University, [email protected].
‡Adam Zelizer, Assistant Professor, Harris School of Public Policy, The University of Chicago, [email protected].
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Abstract

Recent work on US policymaking argues that responsiveness to public opinion is distorted by money, in that the preferences of the rich matter much more than those of lower-income Americans. A second distortion—partisan biases in responsiveness—has been less well studied and is often ignored or downplayed in the literature on affluent influence. We are the first to evaluate, in tandem, these two potential distortions in representation. We do so using 49 Senate roll-call votes from 2001 to 2015. We find that affluent influence is overstated and itself contingent on partisanship—party trumps the purse when senators have to take sides. The poor get what they want more often from Democrats. The rich get what they want more often from Republicans, but only if Republican constituents side with the rich. Thus, partisanship induces, shapes, and constrains affluent influence.

Type
Research Article
Information
American Political Science Review , Volume 113 , Issue 4 , November 2019 , pp. 917 - 940
Copyright
Copyright © American Political Science Association 2019 

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Footnotes

This project was funded in part by grant from the Russell Sage Foundation (G-6789, “Who Listens to Whom? Assessing Inequalities in Representation”). We thank Andrew Guess and Michael Malecki for previous work with us on uncertainty in opinion estimation. We thank participants at Columbia University, Wake Forest University, and the American and Midwest Political Science Association Conferences for helpful feedback and discussion. We thank the anonymous reviewers for their careful reading, advice, and patience. Replication files are available at the American Political Science Review Dataverse: https://doi.org/10.7910/DVN/MCWFCS.

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