Doctoral Dissertation Research in Political Science: Out of Sight, Out of Mind: Legislators' Perceptions and Representation in Congress

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Over twenty years ago, Fenno (1978) called attention to what he called the "key problem facing students of the representative-constituency relationship.. .the problem of perception." More specifically, Fenno noted the importance of viewing the constituency as the legislator does. In other words, "what does an elected representative see when he or she sees a constituency." (Fenno 1978). This Doctoral Dissertation Research project addresses this question and employs theories from cognitive and social psychology to develop a more complete theory of congressional representation. The project centers on the ways in which legislators' conceptions of their constituents are constrained by the availability heuristic (Tversky and Kahneman 1974). While political scientists have frequently invoked psychological theories in the study of public opinion, such theories have rarely been examined in the context of political elites. Part of the task of representation requires legislators to decide who in the district is interested in a given issue. The student argues that the availability heuristic offers important insight into legislators' perceptions of their districts. When making judgments about the interests of their district, legislators do not use all the relevant information, but rather rely on a subset of relevant information. Those interests (whether organized or unorganized) that are more easily accessible are more likely to be included in the legislator's perception of the district's interests on a given issue. In this dissertation the student examines selective perception and argues that the answer to this question requires the consideration of the availability heuristic. The central question investigated is what explains perceptual variations across legislators? The student offers that any answer to this question must take into account numerous hypotheses from the political science literature in combination with theories from cognitive psychology. It is this latter question that constitutes the majority of the empirical focus of this project.The student approaches the question of who legislators perceive as being part of the interested constituency on a given issue by focusing on current members of the U.S. House of Representatives and their legislative staff. Since the research is issue-specific, he focuses on two policies within each of two issue areas: the Patients' Bill of Rights and Medicare reform (health policy), and bankruptcy reform and the Internet tax moratorium (financial services policy). She uses in-person interviews with legislative staff and legislators to answer the question of how legislators see their constituents. The dependent variable of legislators' perceptions of who in their district is interested in a given issue is measured by two instruments included in the interviews with legislative staff and legislators. The combination of interviews and a dataset comprised of economic, political, and demographic variables allows both descriptive and qualitative analysis as well as a more conventional statistical analysis.