"Democratic Representation and Stratified Public Opinion"

Abstract

A recent advance in opinion estimation, multilevel regression and poststratification (MRP), allows for estimation of sub-national opinion using national poll samples. This greatly expands the scope of issues for which researchers can study sub-national opinion directly or as an influence on policymaking. We present the first systematic assessment of the predictive accuracy of MRP and use this technique in two applications that address foundational questions of democratic representation.

We conduct a nuanced assessment of how well state policymaking responds to the public will. Under what conditions and under what institutions is state policy responsive to policy-specific public opinion? How and when to opinion majorities get what they want? On the positive side, we show for the first time that there is clear and widespread influence of policy-specific opinion over and above the influence of diffuse voter ideology. However, we also uncover a rather striking democratic deficit in state policymaking. Roughly half the time, opinion majorities lose. Together, the presence of clear responsiveness to opinion combined with clear evidence of policy incongruence create a more complicated picture of statehouse democracy than the state politics literature has previously conceived.

We next present an extention of MRP to create state sub-constituency opinion, in the following application: Do senators respond to the preferences of their state's median voter or only to the preferences of their co-partisans? We study responsiveness of the senators to partisan constituencies using roll call votes on ten recent Supreme Court nominations. We find that senators indeed give extra weight to their partisan base when casting roll call votes on Supreme Court nominees.