Incumbent legislators in developing countries are often found to not possess an electoral advantage relative to challengers. This paper traces this effect to the balance of power between legislators and party leaders, and formal and informal constraints on legislators’ ability to influence policy and stake positions. This theory is tested on a dataset of Indian national elections since 1977, us...

In the US House and Senate, each piece of legislation is sponsored by a unique legislator. In addition, legislators can publicly express support for a piece of legislation by cosponsoring it. The network of sponsors and cosponsors provides information about the underlying social networks among legislators. I use a number of statistics to describe the cosponsorship network in order to show that ...

In most states, trial judges’ sentencing is constrained by both ex ante constraints, in the form of mandatory and guideline sentences, and ex post review, often by the electorate. Might voters alter their evaluation of judges given the existence of boundaries on judicial discretion? Further, can legislators exploit this response? We present a model of ex ante and ex post control of judges given...

Studies comparing the ideological leanings of voters and elected officials are often hampered by the lack of a common measure. The authors use legislative referenda—on which state legislators and voters both vote on the same issue—as bridging observations to develop a common measure for both. They use this measure to help assess two theories of legislative representation, the well-known dyadic ...

Are legislators responsive to their constituents in their public communication? To what extent are they able to shape voters’ preferences, as expressed by the issues they discuss? We address this twofold question with an analysis of all tweets sent by U.S. Members of Congress and a random sample of their followers from January to August 2013. Using a Latent Dirichlet Allocation model, we extrac...

Research on black representation in Congress emphasizes the material gains associated with black office holding over the intangible goods associated with citizens’ ability to identify racially with their legislators. This article considers the effect of descriptive representation on the relationships among citizens, legislators, and the Congress. With data from the 1980–1998 ANES, I show that w...

In this paper, we analyze the equilibrium of a sequential game-theoretical model of lobbying, due to Groseclose and Snyder (1996), describing a legislature that vote over two alternatives, where two opposing lobbies, Lobby 0 and Lobby 1, compete by bidding for legislators’ votes. In this model, the lobbyist moving first suffers from a second mover advantage and will make an offer to a panel of ...

BACKGROUND There is a dearth of advocacy training in graduate medical education in the United States. To address this void, the Legislative Education and Advocacy Development (LEAD) course was developed as an interprofessional experience, partnering a cohort of pediatrics residents, fourth-year medical students, and public health students to be trained in evidence-informed health policy making....

The conventional wisdom in political science is that legislators’ electioneering practices are closely linked to the electoral systems in which they compete.1 Since electoral concerns are argued to shape legislators’ representation and policy decisions, understanding how electoral incentives differ across electoral systems is useful for explaining cross-national differences representation and p...

Contrary to popular opinion, we find evidence that the views of residents of both higher and lower income neighborhoods are represented by their legislators. Analyzing the voting behavior of California state legislators on 77 proposals on which both the legislature and the public cast ballots, we find first that the opinions of higher and lower income voters within a district are highly correla...