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

理解各种影响当选代表行为的相对重要性是现代政治经济学的核心问题之一。可能的影响包括议员的选区、竞选捐款和特殊利益集团的游说努力、议员自己的偏好，以及来自各党派和非党派领导人（如总统和委员会主席）的压力。尽管在代表制的实证研究中，汇总的投票数据经常被用来衡量公民的偏好，也在直接民主的研究中被分析，但很少有人把统计模型与选民选择的定义良好的模型仔细地联系起来。因此，这些实证研究背后的行为假设往往是模糊的。这对于投票数据的分析尤其有问题，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某些合理模型不一致。该项目的贡献在于开发了一个框架，用于统计分析研究人员在研究投票提案和候选人选举时经常遇到的那种汇总投票数据，该框架基于标准空间投票模型。该框架应用于自1892年以来不同时期加州和其他州投票提案的投票数据的实证研究。这些研究不仅利用了投票提案的投票数据，还利用了人口统计信息、总统、州长和其他选举的投票数据，以及州立法机构和美国国会的唱名投票数据。一个特别重要的问题是当选代表在多大程度上为其大多数选民的利益行事。

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.