Issue Ownership and Representation: A Theory of Legislative Response to Public Opinion.” (working paper

Scholars of politics have long endeavored to identify the conditions under which elected officials respond to citizens ’ preferences by enacting the public’s preferred policies. But most of this work has failed to consider how such responsiveness might vary from one political issue to another. In this article, I show that the Democratic and Republican parties in the United States each enjoy long-term trust in their ability to handle specific issues that cannot be explained away by Americans ’ policy preferences. Incorporating this “issue ownership ” in a simple model of electoral competition generates the prediction that representatives can exploit this trust advantage to be less responsive to citizen opinion on issues their party “owns. ” This prediction is confirmed with issue-by-issue analyses of roll-call voting in the U.S. Congress, which show that representatives from the issue-owning party are less than half as responsive to constituency opinion as those from the other party