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Representational style in Congress : what legislators say and why it matters / Justin Grimmer

Author
Grimmer, Justin
Published
Cambridge : Cambridge University Press, 2013.
Physical Description
1 online resource (xi, 201 pages) : digital, PDF file(s).
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Contents
Representation inside and outside congress: Position takers and appropriators ; Presentational styles, representational styles, and representation : an overview of the argument ; Conclusion -- Representation and evaluation on the Senator's terms: The study of representation and the irony of home style ; Presentational styles and evaluation on the Senator's terms ; Conclusion -- Measuring presentational styles with Senate press releases: Existing sources for measuring how senators engage constituents ; Why press releases ; Conclusion -- Measuring presentational styles in thousands of press releases: A Bayesian statistical model to measure expressed priorities ; Identifying the topics of discussion ; Assessing the validity of the topic classification ; Validating the estimated priorities ; Conclusion., The types of presentational styles in the U.S. Senate: The types of presentational styles in the Senate ; Position-takers to credit-claimers : validating the policy-pork spectrum ; Conclusion -- The electoral connection's effect on Senators' presentational styles: Introduction ; The electoral connection and presentational style choice ; The farmer and the lawyer ; The electoral connection's influence on expressed priorities ; Stable and slowly changing presentational styles ; Conclusion -- The correspondence between Senators' work in Washington and presentational styles: Introduction ; Appropriators in presentational styles and roll-call votes ; Senators' positions in press releases are positions articulated in floor speeches ; Correlation between presentational styles and bill introductions ; Conclusion., and What presentational styles matter for dyadic presentation: Introduction ; What constituents know about representatives and how they evaluate their members of Congress ; How press releases drive newspaper coverage ; The effect of presentational styles on constituent evaluations ; Legislators' presentational styles and dyadic representation -- Why presentational styles matter for collective representation: Partisan convergence in issue attention ; Partisan debates in presentational styles ; Distorted debate and extremist domination ; The collective consequences of presentational styles -- Presentational styles and representation: What legislators say and why it matters ; Consequences for existing studies of ideological representation ; How politicians are covered in the press ; Credit claiming : The personal vote and the budget ; Rhetorical polarization ; How politicians engage the public ; Representation inside and outside the Senate -- Methods appendix: Statistical model and estimation ; Latent Dirichlet allocation ; Chapter 3 appendix.
Summary
This book demonstrates the consequences of legislators' strategic communication for representation in American politics. Representational Style in Congress shows how legislators present their work to cultivate constituent support. Using a massive new data set of texts from legislators and new statistical techniques to analyze the texts, this book provides comprehensive measures of what legislators say to constituents and explains why legislators adopt these styles. Using the new measures, Justin Grimmer shows how legislators affect how constituents evaluate their representatives and the consequences of strategic statements for political discourse. The introduction of new statistical techniques for political texts allows a more comprehensive and systematic analysis of what legislators say and why it matters than was previously possible. Using these new techniques, the book makes the compelling case that to understand political representation, we must understand what legislators say to constituents.
Subject(s)
ISBN
9781139207782 (ebook)
9781107026476 (hardback)
9781107557451 (paperback)
Note
Title from publisher's bibliographic system (viewed on 05 Oct 2015).
View MARC record | catkey: 34847856