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Rethinking Responsiveness

Do campaigns matter? The traditional approach to this question has been to examine the influence of campaigns on voters' knowledge, attitudes, and decisions. I argue that this approach, while valuable, yields a necessarily limited conception of the ways in which campaigns might be important. Accordingly, I propose a change in focus in the study of campaign effects, away from voters and toward legislative politics and public policy. In particular, I focus on the "uptake" of issues from congressional campaigns into the content of legislators' activity in office. The study of uptake unites questions from a variety of research traditions in American politics, providing a fresh perspective on the relationship between campaigns and governance and a new agenda-based standard for assessing legislative representation.

I begin by theorizing about why rational, re-election oriented legislators should want to engage in uptake, which I define as occurring when legislators introduce or cosponsor legislation or make floor statements about those issues highlighted by their opponents in the previous campaign. I argue that challengers' choices of campaign themes provide an important signal to legislators about their potential weaknesses, and that acting on these issues in their next term helps to inoculate them against future attacks. Thus, uptake should be associated with future electoral security, a hypothesis borne out by the statistical analysis.

Drawing on these assumptions about what motivates uptake, I then develop a model of the uptake process and derive predictions about the factors that should explain variation in uptake levels, across individuals, across legislative activities, and across institutional settings. In particular, I hypothesize that electoral vulnerability should be significantly related to uptake levels; that when legislators do engage in uptake, they should be more likely to do so on those activities that are most visible to constituents and most amenable to credit-claiming; and that, overall, given the greater frequency of elections, members of the House should exhibit more uptake than senators.

To test these hypotheses, I first code the issue content of a sample of 483 House and Senate campaigns from 1988-1996 and the legislative activity of the winners of these races (over 500,000 bill, resolution, and amendment introductions and cosponsorships and floor statements) using a procedure developed by the Policy Agendas Project housed at the University of Washington. The analyses employ a variety of methods, including pooled cross-sectional studies of uptake in the House and Senate in the 101st through 105th Congresses; a longitudinal study of the dynamics of uptake for 85 representatives across several campaigns and Congresses, and a detailed case study of legislative activity on national debt and deficit policy.

The most important findings of these analyses are that, while nearly all legislators engage in some degree of uptake, safer ones consistently exhibit the highest levels. Moreover, evidence of uptake is most prevalent in the introduction of legislation, particularly on bills, an activity that enjoys relatively high visibility and has potentially important policy implications. I conclude that taking up challengers' campaign themes, while clearly a strategic choice, is not merely symbolic, since the end result is responsiveness to salient issues. Thus, uptake provides the mechanism by which campaigns are linked to legislative agendas, and, perhaps, to the content of public policy.

Tracy Sulkin (Ph. D).