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26-09-2018 | Original Paper

Words Speak Louder than Actions: Public Responsiveness to Elite Communication

Authors: Jon C. Rogowski, Andrew R. Stone

Published in: Political Behavior | Issue 2/2020

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Abstract

Canonical theories posit that reelection-seeking legislators engage in advertising, position taking, and credit claiming, yet empirical studies reach largely mixed conclusions about the electoral returns from these behaviors. We argue that constituent evaluations are responsive to legislators’ self-presentations through official communications. By emphasizing some components of their records over others, legislators prime the considerations constituents use to evaluate them. We present evidence from two studies to show how this process shapes partisan evaluations of U.S. Senators. In the first, we show that partisanship increases in importance for Senators’ evaluations when Senators’ communications place greater emphasis on their policy positions. In the second, experimental results confirm the causal effects of elite rhetoric and reveal substantially greater partisan differences in evaluations of officeholders who highlight their policy positions. Our results demonstrate that voters are responsive to how officeholders present their records and have important implications for how political communication affects democratic representation.

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Theoretical models further examine the tradeoffs legislators face when choosing among these activities (e.g., Ashworth and Bueno de Mesquita 2006).

Some articles do find evidence of electoral returns to federal spending (e.g., Lee 2003; Levitt and Snyder 1997), though the estimated relationships vary across chambers of Congress, the time periods under investigation, the nature of the federal program, and estimation strategies.

Parker and Goodman (2009) show that constituents appear to respond to legislators’ efforts to cultivate reputations at home, as increased franking, office expenditures, and travel to the district are associated with higher vote shares.

Of course, not all messages are likely to receive the same level of media uptake, and those that do may not be reported in the way the official intended (see, e.g., Vavreck 2009). Thus, a key assumption of our theoretical framework is that voters are exposed to an officeholder’s political messages, either directly or as mediated through the press.

Political messages could also affect voter evaluations by providing information to voters about an officeholder’s behavior or policy views. In this case, evaluations would reflect learning rather than priming (Lenz 2009, 2012). In this article, we focus primarily on priming, and the design of our experiment allows us to specifically rule out learning as an explanation for our findings. However, we acknowledge that political messages can also shape support for officeholders by providing information about them.

For instance, Druckman et al. (2004) describe examples in which presidents have touted their foreign policy records or positions on terrorism in order to project competence and strength.

See Jacob R. Straus and Matthew E. Glassman, May 26, 2016, “Social Media in Congress: The Impact of Electronic Media on Member Communications;” available at https://fas.org/sgp/crs/misc/R44509.pdf.

Druckman et al. (2013), however, finds that elite polarization may intensify the effects of partisan cues.

Results using the full four-point range of our dependent variable are consistent with the results we uncover using our binary measure and are presented in Table A.1.

We note, however, that our results are robust to the inclusion of all respondents, not just those who correctly identified the partisanship of their Senators. Results from estimation of our models including all respondents are presented in Table A.2.

It is also possible that Obama’s high approval rating reflected voters’ greater familiarity with Durbin and his policy views. Durbin had served in the Senate since 1997 after serving seven terms in the House, while most Illinoisans probably only became familiar with Obama during the 2004 Senate election.

We note, however, that Senators do not have perfect control over how their press releases are covered by the media.

Senators up for re-election issued an average of 233 press releases, with a range of 39–722, whereas those not standing for re-election issued an average of 185, with a range of 2–653. These averages and distributions are not statistically distinguishable from one another at standard confidence levels. The p value from a two-sided t test of difference in means is 0.13, and the p value from a Kolmogorov–Smirnov test is 0.22. Some Senators not facing re-election issued a large volume of press releases (such as Chuck Schumer, D-NY, who issued 653), while other Senators that were standing for re-election issued a small volume of press releases (such as Lincoln Chafee, R-RI, who issued only 64).

Grimmer (2013b, Chapter 4) details his model’s estimation procedure, presents the topics his model uncovers and provides a validation of these topics. Validation checks show that the topics of Senators’ press releases correlate well with their committee assignments and geographic interests (such as immigration for border state Senators) and that the model’s topic classifications uncover more coherent topics than do the topic classifications provided by Senators themselves for the press releases on their websites.

Senators frequently issue press releases whose subjects vary between position taking and credit claiming. In early 2018, for example, Senator Debbie Stabenow, D-MI, issued press releases related to efforts to secure federal funding for the protection of the Great Lakes (see this press release issued on January 18, 2018: https://goo.gl/UBTrb2) and infrastructure improvements in Michigan (January 29, 2018: https://goo.gl/px1GDS) while also taking policy positions in opposition to new tariffs (January 23, 2018: https://goo.gl/G9aBp2) and in support of net neutrality (February 28, 2018: https://goo.gl/1b1nnV).

Grimmer (2013a, p. 630) uses this measure to argue that Senators’ “home styles” are “separated primarily by how they balance position taking and credit claiming”.

We note, however, that even press releases that emphasize credit claiming (rather than position taking) are likely to reference the Senator’s partisanship; and even if they do not, subsequent media reports based on the press releases are likely to include the Senator’s party. This may lead us to underestimate the magnitude of the relationship between communication emphases and attitudes toward the Senators.

We note that we used a number of other approaches to address the inclusion of multiple responses from the same survey respondent, including models with respondent random effects and that estimated respondent-specific varying intercepts. We find substantively identical patterns across all these additional models. For simplicity, we focus on presenting results from Eq. (1) shown above.

Other examples of same-state Senators with different communication styles include Daniel Akaka (D-HI) and Daniel Inouye (D-HI), for whom 13 and 39%, respectively, of their press releases mentioned credit claiming, and Jim DeMint (R-SC) and Lindsey Graham (R-SC), for whom 12 and 35%, respectively, of their press releases emphasized credit claiming.

We note that our findings do not depend on our use of logistic regression. We report the results from estimating our primary models using OLS instead of logistic regression in Table A.5. The directionality and statistical significance of our model’s coefficients are preserved under this alternative specification.

Our substantive findings persist when focusing on only respondents who are “very interested” in politics (see Table A.6), weighing against that concern that our results are spurious and driven by inattentive respondents who are unlikely to be exposed to Senators’ press releases. Additionally, this provides evidence for the strength of our theoretical argument, as we find those respondents who are least likely to be susceptible to priming effects still respond to changes in a Senator’s level of Non-policy emphasis.

These results are shown in Table A.7.

Additional analyses suggest that the effects are present for both Democratic and Republican respondents, albeit in somewhat different magnitudes. See Table A.8.

These results are presented in Table A.9.

The Ideological alignment item is coded 1 for Democrats who describe themselves as “liberal” or “somewhat liberal” and Republicans who describe themselves as “conservative” or “somewhat conservative” on a five-point ideological scale. We omit Independents and leaners from our analysis, but our results are substantively unchanged when including these respondents.

The coefficients are displayed in Table A.10.

As our experimental conditions are hypothetical, we ask our respondents to consider a state similar to their own to better mimic real-world conditions. Full wording of these vignettes is available in Table A.12. We acknowledge that the use of a hypothetical scenario raises questions about external validity; however, we sought to avoid introducing potential confounders and issues of deception by asking respondents to evaluate statements attributed to a sitting elected official whom they recognize.

Given the strong correlation between partisanship and support for the Affordable Care Act, respondents were unlikely to have been surprised that a Republican officeholder opposed the ACA while a Democratic officeholder supported it.

Transportation funding itself may also animate contentious policy debates; however, to the extent respondents recognize transportation infrastructure as a policy issue, this would likely serve only to mute any potential differences between the policy emphasis and non-policy emphasis treatment conditions.

We used transportation as an example of a non-policy area because roads and bridges would be likely to be appreciated by respondents of all partisan stripes.

Given our focus on respondents’ support for a putative incumbent Senator, however, we note the absence of a competing candidate in our survey experimental design. Electoral contests generally feature two-sided flows of information, and the incumbent Senator’s messaging strategy would likely be calibrated by her expectations of the behavior of a potential challenger in addition to her expectations about their effects on constituents.

Complete summary statistics are shown in Figure A.1. We further note that all our findings are also obtained when estimating logistic regressions and including demographic and political controls. We present these results in Table A.13.

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Title: Words Speak Louder than Actions: Public Responsiveness to Elite Communication
Authors: Jon C. Rogowski
Andrew R. Stone
Publication date: 26-09-2018
Publisher: Springer US
Published in: Political Behavior / Issue 2/2020
Print ISSN: 0190-9320
Electronic ISSN: 1573-6687
DOI: https://doi.org/10.1007/s11109-018-9497-x

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