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Representational Style: the Central Role of Communication in Representation

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Representational Style: the Central Role of Communication in Representation Representational Style: The Central Role of Communication in Representation A dissertation presented by Justin Ryan Grimmer to The Department of Government in partial fulfillment of the requirements for the degree of Doctor of Philosophy in the subject of Political Science Harvard University Cambridge, Massachusetts May 2010 c 2010 − Justin Ryan Grimmer All rights reserved. Advisor: Professor Gary King Justin Ryan Grimmer Representational Style: The Central Role of Communication in Representation Abstract Quantitative studies define representation through roll call votes, but roll call votes alone are insufficient to describe a legislator’s representational style: how legislators re- spond, anticipate, and shape their constituents’ preferences. Representational style is com- posed of three elements: how legislators invest their time and resources in Washington, their Washington styles; the way they connect to their constituents in their district, their home styles; and how they vote on legislation, their voting. In this book, I use new compre- hensive, systematic, and verifiable measures of home style to demonstrate its central role in representational style. Home styles are important on their own as the primary way legis- lators define the representation provided to constituents. Legislators define diverse, stable, and nonpartisan home styles that reflect senators’ multiple motivations in the institution. Home styles are also important because they are much more than cheap talk. I demonstrate that home styles are systematically related to what legislators do in Washington and how senators vote on controversial legislation, therefore providing a credible indicator of legis- lators’ representational styles. Legislators also value opportunities to maintain their home styles, which bureaucrats exploit to cultivate support for their agencies. Because analyzing home styles across all legislators using standard methods and data is infeasible, I introduce a new Bayesian statistical model for political texts (estimated using a variational approx- imation, a deterministic alternative to MCMC) and an original collection of over 64,000 Senate press releases to measure home style. iii Contents List of Tables viii List of Figures ix 1 Home Style and Political Representation 1 1.1 Introduction . .2 1.2 Home Style and Representation: Sessions and Shelby . .3 1.3 Representational Style . .9 1.4 The Neglect of Home Style . 12 1.5 Why the Neglect: A Lack of Tools and Data . 17 2 The Central Role of Home Style in Political Representation and Representa- tional Style 19 2.1 Introduction . 20 2.2 Why Roll Call Votes are Insufficient . 23 2.3 Work in Washington . 25 2.4 Home Style and Representation . 27 2.5 A Road Map for the Book . 30 2.5.1 A Diverse, Stable and Nonpartisan Home Style . 30 2.5.2 Not Cheap Talk: A Valued and Credible Indication of Representa- tional Style . 32 2.6 A Public Image: Modifying the Concept of Home Style . 33 2.6.1 The Verbal Presentation of Self: Home Style and Expressed Priorities 34 2.6.2 An Impersonal and Strategic Home Style . 35 2.7 Conclusion . 39 3 Measuring Home Style in Senate Press Releases 40 3.1 Measuring Home Style: Existing Sources . 41 3.2 Why Press Releases . 43 3.2.1 Comparing the Contents of Floor Speeches and Press Releases . 46 3.2.2 Press Releases are Important: “Ventriloquism” and “Uptake” . 49 iv 3.3 Conclusion . 53 4 A Statistical Model for Measuring Home Styles 55 4.1 The Problem: Measuring Home Style in Large Collections of Text . 56 4.2 A Statistical Model to Measure Expressed Priorities . 58 4.2.1 Intuition . 58 4.2.2 Text as Data . 60 4.2.3 Data Generation Process . 61 4.2.4 Posterior Summary and Approximation . 64 4.3 Identifying the Topics of Discussion . 66 4.3.1 Manual Cluster Labels . 67 4.3.2 Automatic Cluster Labels Using Mutual information . 67 4.3.3 Using Senate Debates and External Events to Validate Topics . 70 4.4 Additional Structure Leads to Better Document Classification . 72 4.4.1 The Limits of Ad-Hoc Modifications of Existing Methods . 72 4.4.2 Evaluating Cluster Quality . 74 4.5 Assessing Validity of Estimated Priorities . 77 4.5.1 Committee Leaders Focus on Their Committee’s Issues . 77 4.5.2 Validating Measures of Credit Claiming . 79 4.5.3 Expressed Priorities Cluster Geographically . 81 4.6 Conclusion . 84 5 A Typology of Home Styles in the US Senate 85 5.1 Introduction . 86 5.2 The Types of Home Styles in the US Senate . 87 5.2.1 Senate Statespersons . 90 5.2.2 Domestic Policy Wonks . 93 5.2.3 Pork and Policy . 95 5.2.4 Appropriators: Firefighters and Worker’s Rights . 96 5.3 From Statespersons to Firefighters: A Validation of the Home Style Measures 98 5.4 Conclusion . 102 6 Stable Home Styles 103 6.1 Introduction . 104 6.2 Senators Adopt Stable Home Styles . 106 6.3 Stability from Pressure and Goals . 111 6.4 Conclusion . 115 v 7 Nonpartisan Home Styles, Partisan Arguments 118 7.1 Introduction . 119 7.2 Partisan Differences in Issue Attention . 120 7.3 Republicans and Democrats Articulate Highly Similar Home Styles . 124 7.3.1 The Daily Issue Convergence in Senate . 126 7.4 Nonpartisan Home Styles, But Partisan Rhetoric . 130 7.4.1 Two Methods for Identifying Partisan Words . 131 7.4.2 Partisan Differences in Iraq War and Gas Prices . 134 7.5 Conclusion . 137 8 The Value of Words: The Illusion of Influence and The Cultivation of Support in Senate Press Releases 139 8.1 Introduction . 140 8.2 Claiming Credit When No Credit is Due . 144 8.3 The Abundance of Credit Claiming About Grants . 149 8.4 The Assistance to Firefighter Grant Program . 152 8.4.1 The Grant Application Process: No Congressional Influence or Bu- reaucratic Meddling . 152 8.4.2 Legislators Announce Grants Before The Agency . 155 8.5 Conclusion . 162 8.5.1 Future Research . 163 8.5.2 Implications for Studying Credit Claiming . 164 9 Connecting Votes and Communication: Home Style Appropriators are Roll Call Appropriators 166 9.1 Introduction . 167 9.2 Correspondence Between What Legislators Say and Do . 169 9.3 Appropriations Votes in the Senate . 171 9.3.1 Correspondence Between Votes and Press Releases Due To a Com- mon Cause . 174 9.4 Home Style Appropriators are Roll Call Appropriators . 176 9.4.1 Coburn Amendment to Emergency Supplemental . 177 9.4.2 The General Correspondence Between Home Styles and Votes . 180 9.5 Conclusion . 181 10 Conclusion 184 10.1 Introduction . 185 10.2 The Causes of Home Styles . 187 10.2.1 Implications for the Causes of Home Styles . 190 10.3 How Elected Officials Communicate with Constituents . 193 10.4 Representation Outside the Senate . 195 vi A Methods Appendix 196 A.1 Replication Data . 197 A.2 Posterior Approximation by Variational Approximations . 197 A.2.1 Variational Approximations: Bayesian Inference for Complicated Posteriors . 198 A.2.2 Approximating the Posterior . 199 A.2.3 Maximizing a Lower Bound to Minimize the KL-Divergence . 200 A.2.4 Iterative Algorithm . 201 A.2.5 Determining Number of Topics and Styles . 205 A.2.6 Number of Topics . 206 A.2.7 Number of Styles . 208 A.3 Latent Dirichlet Allocation . 208 A.4 Chapter 3 Appendix . 209 A.4.1 Collecting the Press Releases . 209 A.4.2 Using Mutual Information to Compare Collections of Texts . 210 Bibliography 212 vii List of Tables 3.1 “Ventriloquism” of Press Releases in Local Newspapers . 51 3.2 Measuring the Coverage Rate in Senate Press Releases . 53 4.1 Topics in Press Releases . 69 8.1 Press Releases Predict Grant Announcements . 158 A.1 Pseudo Code for Variational Approximation . 206 viii List of Figures 1.1 The Decline of the Study of Home Style . 15 1.2 The Rise of the Study of Roll Call Votes . 16 2.1 Constituents Learn About Legislators Through Impersonal Means . 36 3.1 Press Releases are Regularly Used By Each Senate Office . 44 3.2 Press Releases are Regularly Used Throughout the Year . 45 3.3 Comparing Press Releases to Floor Speeches . 48 4.1 Diagram for Statistical Model . 65 4.2 Senate Debates and External Events Explain Spikes in the Daily Press Re- leases from Each Topic . 71 4.3 Comparing the Statistical Model to Humans and Other Statistical Models . 75 4.4 Chairman and Ranking Members of Committees Allocate More Attention to Issues Under Their Committees’ Jurisdiction than Other Senators . 79 4.5 Validating the Measures of Credit Claiming . 81 4.6 Attention to Issues Follows Expected Geographic Patterns . 83 5.1 A Typology of Home Styles in the US Senate . 89 5.2 Visualizing Senators Expressed Priorities . 90 5.3 Validating the Policy-Pork Spectrum . 100 6.1 Comparing Within Senator Variation to Across Senator Variation . 108 6.2 Comparing Same Senators’ Change to Seat Switching Change . 109 6.3 Senators Maintain the Same Type of Home Style . 110 6.4 Change in Expressed Priorities is Unrelated to Senators’ Class . 113 7.1 Aggregated Democrat and Republican Home Styles Are Extremely Similar 125 7.2 Democrats and Republicans Allocate Attention to the Same Issues . 127 7.3 Democrats and Republicans Evenly Engage Salient Issues . 129 7.4 Partisan Differences when Discussing the Iraq War.
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