Out of Step ...
Out of Congress
February, 2003
IN 1994,
MARJORIE MARGOLIES-MEZVINSKY, a freshman Democrat representing Pennsylvania’s
13th Congressional District, cast the deciding “yes” vote
on President Clinton’s budget. Figuring that tax-averse voters
in her suburban district would be angry, delighted Republican congressmen
sang, “Goodbye, Marjorie,” in the well of the House. They
were right. The liberal Democrat was swept away in the Gingrich revolution
later that year. Margolies-Mezvinsky had plenty of company in that
election. More than 40 incumbent Democrats lost their seats.
Twelve years earlier,
the reverse had occurred: Nearly two dozen Republican House members
lost their seats despite the enormous popularity of President Ronald
Reagan. What explains the heavy losses by incumbents in those mid-term
elections? Were those elections anomalies, or are there lessons that
can be applied to the analysis of future elections and, perhaps more
important, the behavior of our elected officials?
Research by three Stanford
scholars who analyzed the results of more than 6,500 congressional
races held between 1956 and 1996 suggests that there is an important
lesson: Popular and even scholarly opinion that the public does not
hold members of Congress accountable for their votes is wrong.
Moreover, the researchers
found, voting with the ideological extremes of his or her party can
greatly decrease an incumbent representative’s reelection prospects.
Incumbent representatives
like Margolies-Mezvinsky, who support their party’s sitting
president by voting for programs seen as extreme in their districts,
are often punished by their constituents.
The research was conducted
by GSB Professor David W.
Brady; Hoover Fellow John Cogan; and Brandice Canes-Wrone, a former Stanford graduate student, now on the Massachusetts
Institute of Technology faculty.
The researchers scored
congressional voting records by using the Americans for Democratic
Action (ADA) report cards, which reflect the proportion of liberal
positions taken by a member in a given year on key votes (taxes, budget,
abortion, school prayer, etc.) selected by the ADA. Relative liberalism
and conservatism of districts were measured by using presidential
voting patterns and demographic data. The researchers controlled for
factors such as challenger quality, incumbent and challenger spending,
control of the White House, and the condition of the economy.
“For at least
two decades, scholars have believed that the dominant factor in congressional
elections was incumbency,” Brady said. In fact, earlier studies
suggested that “the typical representative might be able to
vote on legislative matters as she pleased without fearing that she
could lose reelection.”
But politicians, Brady notes, “were ahead of the scholars.”
He recounts a remark made by then-Congressman Lyndon Johnson explaining
why he refused to vote for a civil rights proposal by President Franklin
D. Roosevelt. “You can only go so far in Texas … there’s
nothing more useless to the Democrats than a dead liberal,”
the future president said.
Johnson grasped what
the scholars didn’t: Voters notice how their representatives
vote on key issues and act accordingly. Certainly this flies in the
face of conventional wisdom that most of us are ignorant of what actually
happens in Congress. How do voters find out? Brady isn’t sure
and says the question could be the basis for future research.
But the tie between
voting records and prospects for reelection is much clearer. Democrats
who move too far to the left in conservative or moderate districts
tend to lose their seats; Republicans who move too far to the right
also lose. And incumbent presidents who pull House members to either
extreme often lose seats for their party.
By the same token, representatives
from very liberal districts, for example Barbara Lee in Berkeley and
Oakland, Calif., or conservatives like Tom DeLay of Texas, are most
likely safe because their “extremism” mirrors that of
their constituents.
If these researchers
are correct when they conclude that we do hold our representatives
accountable, a hope expressed by James Madison in the Federalist
Papers may have come to pass:
“It is particularly
essential that [the House of Representatives] should have an immediate
dependence on, and intimate sympathy with, the people,” Madison
wrote. “Frequent elections are unquestionably the only policy
by which this dependence sympathy can be effectively secured.”
—BILL SNYDER
Out of Step, Out of Office: Electoral Accountability and
House Members' Voting, David Brady, John Cogan, and Brandice
Canes-Wrone, American Political Science Review, March 2002
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Out
of Step . . . Out of Congress
