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Party cues provide citizens with low-cost information about their representatives' policy positions. But what happens when elected officials deviate from the party line? Relying on the 2006 Cooperative Congressional Election Study (CCES), we examine citizens' knowledge of their senators' positions on seven high-profile roll-call votes. We find that although politically interested citizens are the group most likely to know their senator's position when she votes with the party, they are also the group most likely to incorrectly identify their senator's position when she votes against her party. The results indicate that when heuristics \"go bad,\" it is the norm for the most attentive segment of the public to become the most misinformed, revealing an important drawback to heuristic use.

This article investigates whether media coverage of elite debate surrounding an issue moderates the relationship between individual-level partisan identities and issue preferences. We posit that when the news media cover debate among partisan elites on a given issue, citizens update their party identities and issue attitudes. We test this proposition for a quartet of prominent issues debated during the first Clinton term: health care reform, welfare reform, gay rights, and affirmative action. Drawing on data from the Vanderbilt Television News Archives and the 1992-93-94-96 NES panel, we demonstrate that when partisan debate on an important issue receives extensive media coverage, partisanship systematically affects—and is affected by—issue attitudes. When the issue is not being contested, dynamic updating between party ties and issue attitudes ceases.

This paper explores public perceptions of congressional partisanship in an era of polarized parties. We use data from a module on the 2014 Cooperative Congressional Election Study (CCES) that asks respondents about the voting behavior of their legislators. Our results show that individuals underestimate the extent to which legislators from their own party vote the party line—even when primed with information about high levels of party-line voting in Congress—while fairly accurately perceiving levels of unity in the opposing party. We also find evidence that this perceptual gap endures, and at times widens, at higher levels of political knowledge and in the presence of elections. Finally, in a separate experiment, we explore how voters respond to differential levels of party-line voting by a hypothetical legislator. The combined results from the experiment and CCES module suggest voters' perceptions often align with what allows them to have the most favorable impression of their party's senators or unfavorable impression of the other party's senators. The results suggest that biases in how voters process information about levels of partisanship in Congress may limit accountability in meaningful ways.

How do party reputations change over time? We construct a measure of the common movement in the parties’ perceived policy handling abilities for the period 1980 to 2016 and investigate its relationship with the public’s evaluation of Congress and the president. In contrast to key claims made in theories of congressional parties, we find an inconsistent relationship between evaluations of Congress and party reputations and find no evidence that successful agenda control enhances the majority party’s reputation. Instead, our analysis shows a strong relationship between party reputations and presidential approval, reaffirming the central role the president plays in shaping party reputations.

This paper argues cynicism toward elected officials colors how individuals in the mass public interpret information about political scandals. Specifically, citizens rely on prior levels of cynicism toward elected officials when assessing new information about potential political malfeasance. Drawing on panel data surrounding two prominent political scandals, this paper demonstrates prior levels of cynicism shape individuals' interpretations of information about scandals, but cynicism does not affect the amount of attention individuals pay to scandals. Ultimately, the results shed light on individual-level variation in response to scandals, and suggest expressed cynicism toward politicians is a politically consequential individual-level attitude that affects whether or not political leaders can survive ethical transgressions.

The authors analyze gender differences in members' speech participation on the floor of the U.S. House of Representatives. Speeches increase members' visibility and voice in the legislative process, providing opportunities for members to highlight their policy knowledge, constituents' concerns, and partisan commitments. The authors hypothesize that women's underrepresentation, coupled with the related challenges that female legislators face in a predominantly male institution, motivates congresswomen of both parties to speak at greater rates than congressmen. Analyzing over ten thousand floor speeches during the 103rd and 109th Congresses, the authors find strong support for their hypothesis, demonstrating that congresswomen's participation in legislative debate increases their visibility and enhances women's substantive representation.

Research into congressional reaction to scandals thus offers an opportunity to investigate both how responsive Congress is to charges of institutional corruption and how individual and collective actors inside the institution seek to shape the politics surrounding reform. The parties' responses to the Abramoff scandal show that calls for reform following a scandal are likely to be bipartisan, but we can expect the types of reforms the parties advocate to differ for both partisan and ideological reasons.

We ask whether women's descriptive representation in Congress enhances women's substantive representation through speechmaking on the House floor. Much of the research on women's substantive representation has focused on members' votes for and sponsorship of “women's issues” legislation. We depart from this research by systematically analyzing how members' gender and partisan identities affect gendered rhetoric in their floor speeches. In an era marked by significant increases in the number of congresswomen and partisan polarization, understanding the interactive effect of gender and partisanship on women's representation is particularly important. In an analysis of more than 30,000 speeches from 1993 to 2008, we find that when members speak about issues of their choosing during one-minute speeches, and during specific legislative debates over the most important policies considered on the House floor, congresswomen in both parties are significantly more likely than men to discuss women, enhancing women's representation.

There are compelling reasons for senators of both parties to take their duty to examine the president's judicial nominees seriously, not only because of the duty's constitutional origins, but also because these Article III nominees, if confirmed, receive lifetime appointments to the federal bench. [...] the stakes are high for both the Senate and the president as they seek to influence the future of legal policy. [...] the relatively low public profile of these district and circuit court nominations gives senators a good deal of discretion over the confirmation process, creating the opportunity for variation in the level of scrutiny employed when considering different nominees.9 Lower Court Nomination and Confirmation Previous studies of lower court nominations and confirmations have focused on the length of the confirmation process and the likelihood of confirmation, both of which provide insight into the multiple theoretical motivations senators may have for exercising discretion over the confirmation process.

Scholarly work assumes, and public opinion polls routinely show, that members of Congress (MCs) enjoy personal popularity despite public dissatisfaction with Congress as a whole. This fact raises the possibility that individual MCs face no incentives to push for reforms that restrict perks of office, limit the power of lobbyists, or increase the transparency of the legislative process. In spite of this, there are times MCs strive to make the legislative process more ethical and transparent. What explains this? This dissertation argues partisan electoral incentives provide a reason for MCs from both parties to take up the issue of legislative integrity in the presence of threats to Congress' reputation (e.g. low levels of congressional approval and media attention to congressional scandals). However, individual MCs vary in their attention to congressional integrity, despite the fact nearly all constituents care about the ethical climate in Congress. This work grounds these individual differences in the circumstances surrounding members' first election to the House. Specifically, members who first enter Congress during periods of heightened public dissatisfaction with the institution prove especially committed to reform in their first Congress and beyond. In the end, however, this dissertation demonstrates reform efforts often become a vehicle for both parties' broader electoral and policy goals, which leads to partisan and ideological conflict over an issue that seems both non-partisan and non-ideological in the abstract. Ultimately, the results shed light on both when MCs will prioritize issues of broad, national concern and why the congressional parties divide even over issues that generate public consensus.