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Do Politicians Shape Public Opinion?

Published online by Cambridge University Press:  14 December 2012

Tetsuya Matsubayashi
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Abstract

Most research on political representation focuses on how citizens’ ideology and partisanship influence their support for political candidates – leaving the question of whether (and how) elected officials influence citizens’ positions on political issues open to debate. The hypothesis tested here – using a unique, quasi-experimental design with American National Election Study data between 1956 and 2004 – is that Democratic representatives shift the opinions of constituents in the pro-Democratic and liberal direction, while Republican representatives shift constituents’ opinions in the pro-Republican and conservative direction. The findings show that incumbent representatives indeed move their constituents’ opinions in a particular direction, and that representatives have a stronger impact on constituents who are more frequently exposed to their messages.

Type
Articles
Information
British Journal of Political Science , Volume 43 , Issue 2 , April 2013 , pp. 451 - 478
Copyright
Copyright © Cambridge University Press 2012

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Footnotes

*

Department of Political Science, University of North Texas (email: [email protected]). The author wishes to thank Gary Jacobson for sharing his Congressional election data and Kim Hill, Jan Leighley, Michiko Ueda and seminar participants at the University of North Texas and the University of North Carolina at Charlotte for their valuable comments.

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56 In addition, our supplementary analysis shows that the strong reverse coattail effect exists when we analyse the data after 1980. This implies that the effect of reverse coattail became larger as the major parties became more cohesive. The results of the supplementary analysis are available upon request.

57 The graphical analysis presents similar results, which are available upon request.

58 As noted previously, the media usage variable is available only after 1982. The evidence for the conditioning impact of media consumption in Table 1 might not be generalizable to the prior time period between 1956 and 1980.

59 The results are similar if the analysis focuses on respondents with high political awareness.

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61 As a supplementary analysis, we also examined whether the representatives elected at t have any impact on constituent opinion and behaviour at t+2. The results indicated that a Democratic victory has a significant impact on the limited set of outcome variables such as candidate thermometer scores, party identification, government job guarantee and the vote in House and Senate elections among people with a high education and high median consumption levels. Importantly, the estimated impacts on these variables are smaller at t+2 than at t+1. These results seem to suggest that the impacts of representatives’ messages on constituent opinion are still large at t 2 but decaying over time. These results are available upon request.

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