PRepresentation in Congress: Constituents and Roll Calls in the 106th House

This paper examines the extent to which constituency and subconstituency preferences are reflected in roll-call voting in the 106th House. Aggregating 100,814 randomly selected respondents to measure subconstituency preferences pro-vides an unprecedented ability to measure subconstituency preferences in the House. Looking at the relationship over all votes, “key votes, ” and on individual votes confirms that representatives are not completely responsive to the district mean voter, that only majority party Republicans are especially responsive to the preferences of same-party constituents, and that same-party constituency preferences cannot entirely account for systematic differences in Republican and Democratic voting behavior. I extend existing work in several important and con-sequential ways. First, I aggregate the responses of 100,814 randomly selected respondents to measure constituency and subconstituency preferences. Whereas previous aggregations of individual-level survey data are constrained by sample size, the small-est district sample I use is more than twice the average sample in Miller and Stokes ’ (1958) seminal study. It consequently provides one of the best attempts at measuring the potential influence of subconstituency preferences in the House. Second, whereas most work which investigates subconstituency influence focuses on the Senate (e.g.