Assessing Legislator-Constituency Policy Agreement

Abstract

This paper concerns some of the conceptual and methodological problems that arise when efforts are made to assess the degree of policy agreement between legislators and constituents. Constituents may be asked general questions about their views on policy; legislators must make choices among very specific legislative options. An apparently high correlation between the issue positions of legislators and constituents may be deceptive unless the two scales have substantively identical end points. There are problems of both defining the constituency and aggregating constituency opinions. Finally, it is necessary to pay some attention to the range of a legislator's policy positions that may be acceptable to constituents.