When legislators are uninformed about public opinion, does learning constituents’ opinion affect how legislators vote? We conducted a fully randomized field experiment to answer this question. We surveyed 10,690 New Mexicans about the Governor’s spending proposals for a special summer session held in the summer of 2008. District-specific survey results were then shared with a randomly selected half of the legislature. The legislators receiving their district-specific survey results were much more likely to vote in line with constituent opinion than those who did not. Our results suggest that legislators want to be more responsive to public opinion than they are in their natural state and can be if given solid information about constituent beliefs.
Can Learning Constituency Opinion Affect How Legislators Vote? Results from a Field Experiment* Available to Purchase
Earlier versions of this paper were presented at Columbia, Notre Dame, Yale, the Ninth Annual Conference on State Politics and Policy, and 2010 Annual Political Science Association Meeting. We wish to thank participants at those presentations, along with Kevin Arceneaux, Justin Buchler, James Fowler, Don Green, John Griffin, Greg Huber, and Holger Kern for valuable comments and suggestions. Daniel Butler would like to thank the Institution for Social and Policy Studies at Yale University for partial funding for the study. David Nickerson would like to thank the Center for the Study of Democratic Politics at Princeton University for the time to work on the write-up.
Butler DM, Nickerson DW (2011), "Can Learning Constituency Opinion Affect How Legislators Vote? Results from a Field Experiment*". Quarterly Journal of Political Science, Vol. 6 No. 1 pp. 55–83, doi: https://doi.org/10.1561/100.00011019
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