ELECTORAL CHANGE AND POLICY CONSEQUENCES Representation in the 97th Congress

This article compares constituency opinion and roll call voting behavior of U.S. representatives in the 96th (1979-1980) and 97th (1981-1982) Congresses for four classes of district types: those that switched party in the 1980 election, those that replaced a representative with a new member of the same party, those that returned Democrats, and those that returned Republicans to Congress. Switched-seat districts exhibit the largest changes in voting behavior from the 96th to the 97th Congress, yet the behavior of the new representative is not always consistent with constituency preferences. All four groups of representatives voted more conservatively in the 97th Congress than they or their counterparts had in the 96th, suggesting that House members may have interpreted the 1980 election as a mandate for conservatism. Yet more often than not this conservatism moved representatives away from, rather than toward, constituency preferences, suggesting that voters made retrospective rather than prospective choices in 1980. Since Walter Dean Burnham ( 1970: 10) wrote that partisan realignments &dquo;result in significant transformations in the general shape of policy,&dquo; a number of scholars have inves-tigated the linkages between electoral change and policy change. Brady and Lynn (1973; see also Brady, 1978) have argued that members of Congress from switched-seat districts play a major role in effecting this policy change. While Brady (1978: 92-94) has shown that aggregate changes in the levels of party voting in the House have occurred during realigning sequences, neither he nor the study by Brady and Lynn (1973