The Policy Legacy of Congressional Campaigns Tracy Sulkin Assistant Professor

1. The Policy Legacy of Congressional Campaigns Tracy Sulkin Assistant Professor Department of Political Science University of Illinois, Urbana-Champaign

2. Why Congressional Campaigns Matter • They can affect voters • -choice of candidate • -turnout decisions • -knowledge and interest in politics • They can affect winners • -uptake of challengers’ issues • -promise-keeping

3. Why The Lack of Attention to the Campaigns-Policy Linkage? • Data constraints • The “Two Congresses” division of labor in legislative studies research • -legislators’ careers in Washington • vs. • -their careers in their districts or states

4. Questions to be Addressed • Do winning legislators respond to the critiques raised by their challengers? • Are campaign appeals just "cheap talk" or do elected officials keep their campaign promises? • Do candidates' decisions to picture certain types of people in their ads serve as a meaningful signal about their subsequent behavior?

5. Candidate Strategy • Highlight your own accomplishments and qualities and call the opponent’s into question • Signal to relevant constituencies that you are “one of them” • Discuss issues on which you enjoy the advantage -issue ownership strategy -riding the wave strategy

6. Types of Legislative Activity • Voting -On roll calls • Agenda-Setting -Introduction of legislation (bills & resolutions) -Cosponsorship • Deliberation -Floor statements -Participation in committees and subcommittees

7. Defining Uptake Conceptual Definition: The extent to which issues highlighted by challengers in their campaigns are pursued by winning legislators in their activity in office. Measured As: The number of bills, resolutions, and amendments introduced or cosponsored, and the number of floor statements made, by a legislator on his or her challenger's top three issue themes from the campaign (measured by news coverage of the campaign).

8. The Theory Summarized • Challengers focus their campaigns on their opponents’ issue weaknesses. • This threat leads legislators to become attentive to their challengers’ issues and use their time in office to act to remedy their weaknesses. • To accomplish this goal, they use the legislative activities at their disposal to gain a reputation for action on these issues. • Engaging in this credit-claiming pays off for them in the next campaign.

9. Anecdotal Evidence of Uptake 1988 Tim Johnson (D, SD) vs. David Volk "Just as Volk was preparing to attack Johnson for what he deemed the incumbent's failure to protect Social Security recipients, Johnson immunized himself by announcing his cosponsorship of a bill designed to remove the Social Security trust fund from budget-deficit calculations" 1988 Jim Jontz (D, IN) vs. Pat Williams "On a range of issues that Williams might want to use during the campaign, Jontz can head her off at the pass. He was given a seat on the Agriculture Committee when he got to Washington in 1987 and has used it to good advantage," focusing in particular on drought-relief legislation.

10. Data and Coding Procedures Sample: 400 representatives and 51 senators elected in 1988- 1992 and followed across their next terms Legislative Activities: 17,166 Introductions 151,931 Cosponsorships 31,144 Floor Statements Campaign Themes: Content analysis of campaign coverage to identify top three issue themes in each campaign

11. Issue Attention in Campaigns and in Congress

12. Uptake in Legislative Activity Calculating Uptake: # of activities on challenger’s themes/total number of activities How Does Uptake Vary Across Legislators? Range—0-73% of legislators’ agendas Mean—14% for the House 19% for the Senate

13. Explaining Variation in Uptake Levels • What factors don’t matter? • Party • Seniority • Characteristics of the constituency • What factors do matter? • Ideological extremity • Electoral vulnerability

14. The Effects of Uptake • On legislators’ electoral fortunes? • Increases their vote shares in the next election • Makes it less likely that they will face an experienced challenger • On public policy outputs? • Bills and resolutions that “begin” as uptake are just as likely to pass as any other bill • In the 101st-105th Congresses, 66 uptake measures introduced by the sample became law

15. Conclusions about Uptake • Challengers’ campaigns shape the content of winning legislators' activity in office. • Legislators’ uptake levels serve as an indicator of their responsiveness to salient issues. • Individual uptake decisions have downstream consequences for public policy outputs.

16. Promise-Keeping Definition: The extent to which campaign appeals provide strong signals about legislators’ behavior in office. Questions: • Are those legislators who raise an issue in their campaigns more active on it in Congress? • Are those who show pictures of particular demographic and occupational groups in their advertising more likely to pursue policies to help those groups? • Does the language that candidates use when talking about issues serve as a signal about their subsequent probability of being active on those issues?

17. Two Campaign Appeals about Education John Sweeney (R-NY) “Schools—first, last, and always about children.” Ernie Fletcher (R-KY) "Fletcher wants parents and teachers, not Washington bureaucrats, to control education. He voted to make class sizes smaller so children get the attention they deserve, and for increased funding for disadvantaged children so no child is left behind."

18. Data Sources Sample: 130 winning House candidates in the 2000 election Legislative Activities: Bills and resolutions introduced and cosponsored by the winners in the 107th Congress, from the Congressional Bills Project’s datasets Campaign Appeals: Content analysis of candidates’ televised ads, from storyboards made available by CMAG and the Wisconsin Ads Project

19. Coding Scheme • For issues: • What issues were discussed? • Were they discussed in reference to the candidate or the opponent? • How specific was the claim? • For images: • Were women, seniors, kids, African- Americans, Latinos, farmers, police, teachers, veterans/military personnel, workers, or businesspeople pictured?

20. Question #1—Do the images that candidates use serve as signals about their policy activity in Congress? • For the majority of the demographic and occupational groups, those who picture them engage in more activity on issues of interest to them than those who do not picture them • Imagery seems to serve as a better predictor of Democrats’ behavior than Republicans’

21. Question #2-Are those who talk about an issue in their campaigns more active on it in the following Congress than those who do not? • Effect of talking about yourself? -On 10 of the 16 issues, those who had made at least one claim about the issue were more active than those who had made no claim • Effect of talking about your opponent -Matters for only 4 issues, and for 3 of those, the effect is negative!

22. Question #3--Does specificity matter? Do candidates who make more detailed appeals follow through more than those who are vague? • Specificity “matters” for 5 of the 16 issues • For the other issues, mentioning the issue seems to be the important distinction—not how it was discussed

23. Conclusions about Promise-Keeping • Discussing an issue or picturing a group does seem to indicate legislators’ policy commitments • Systematic linkages exist between how candidates make appeals and whether they follow through on them • So, campaigns are more than just "cheap talk"

24. Campaigns, Legislative Behavior, and Public Policy • Campaigns have a legacy in individual legislative activity and in collective public policy outputs, so they clearly “matter” • Work that bridges the gap between the “Two Congresses” has the potential to raise new questions and provide fresh insight into old ones

25. Sources of Data on Legislative Activity Policy Agendas Project-- http://www.policyagendas.org

28. Congressional Bills Project—http://www.congressionalbills.org

29. THOMAS—http://thomas.loc.gov

30. Sources of Data on Campaign Ads National Journal--http://nationaljournal.com/members/adspotlight/2006

31. Wisconsin Advertising Project/CMAG--http://www.polisci.wisc.edu/tvadvertising

32. Class Project Ideas • Develop a simple coding scheme for negativity in ads. Assign each student one candidate’s storyboards and have them use the scheme to code them. Calculate average levels of negativity across groups of interest (e.g., incumbents vs. challengers, Democrats vs. Republicans.) • Use the Policy Agendas Project data tool to graph attention to a particular issue across time. Does it rise and fall as one might expect given outside events? • Use THOMAS to identify all of the activities undertaken by your legislator. Which policy areas seem most important to this person?