Constituency Preferences and Representation: Evidence From Voting On Ballot Propositions and Roll-Calls

了解各种影响的相对重要性， 当选代表的行为是 现代政治经济的关注点。 在可能的 影响是代表的选区、竞选活动 特殊利益集团的捐款和游说努力， 代表自己的偏好和来自各方的压力， 党和非党领导人，如总统和委员会 主席。 虽然汇总的投票数据通常用于 在实证研究中衡量公民的偏好， 代表性，并在直接研究中进行了分析 民主，很少有工作仔细联系起来， 从统计模型到定义明确的选民选择模型。 作为 结果，这些经验背后的行为假设 研究往往是模糊的。 这对以下方面来说尤其成问题： 分析投票数据，因为过去的工作表明，许多 广泛使用的统计技术可能与 选民行为的合理模式 的贡献 该项目来自开发一个统计框架， 分析汇总的投票数据， 在研究选票提案和候选人时经常遇到 选举，这是基于标准的空间投票模型。 该框架被应用于一些实证研究， 加州和其他州的选票提案投票数据 自1892年以来的不同时期。 这些研究不仅利用 选票提案的投票数据，以及人口统计数据 关于总统、州长和 其他选举以及该州唱名投票的数据 立法机构和美国国会。 一个特别重要 问题是当选代表在多大程度上参与 这是大多数选民的利益。

Understanding the relative importance of various influences on the behavior of elected representives is one of the central concerns of modern political-economy. Among the possible influences are the representative's constituency, campaign contributions and lobbying efforts by special interest groups, the representative's own preferences, and pressures from various party and nonparty leaders, such as the president and committee chairmen. Although aggregated vote data are often used to measure citizens' preferences in empirical studies of representation, and are also analyzed in studies of direct democracy, there has been little work carefully linking the statistical models to well-defined models of voter choice. As a result, the behavioral assumptions underlying these empirical studies are often vague. This is especially problematic for analyses of voting data, because of past work showing that many widely used statistical techniques are probably inconsistent with certain reasonable models of voter behavior. The contribution of the project comes from developing a framework for the statistical analysis of aggregated vote data of the sort that researchers often encounter in the study of ballot propositions and candidate elections, that is based on the standard spatial voting model. The framework is applied in a number of empirical studies of voting data on ballot propositions in California and other states over various periods since 1892. These studies utilize not only voting data on ballot propositions, but also demographic information, data on voting in presidential, gubernatorial and other elections, and data on roll-call voting in state legislatures and the U.S. Congress. One particularly important issue is the extent to which elected representatives act in the interest of a majority of their constituents.