Vol.:(0123456789)

Political Behaviorhttps://doi.org/10.1007/s11109-018-9497-x

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ORIGINAL PAPER

Words Speak Louder than Actions: Public Responsiveness to Elite Communication

Jon C. Rogowski1 · Andrew R. Stone1

© Springer Science+Business Media, LLC, part of Springer Nature 2018, Corrected publication October/2018

AbstractCanonical theories posit that reelection-seeking legislators engage in advertising, position taking, and credit claiming, yet empirical studies reach largely mixed con-clusions about the electoral returns from these behaviors. We argue that constituent evaluations are responsive to legislators’ self-presentations through official commu-nications. By emphasizing some components of their records over others, legisla-tors prime the considerations constituents use to evaluate them. We present evidence from two studies to show how this process shapes partisan evaluations of U.S. Sena-tors. In the first, we show that partisanship increases in importance for Senators’ evaluations when Senators’ communications place greater emphasis on their policy positions. In the second, experimental results confirm the causal effects of elite rhetoric and reveal substantially greater partisan differences in evaluations of office-holders who highlight their policy positions. Our results demonstrate that voters are responsive to how officeholders present their records and have important implica-tions for how political communication affects democratic representation.

Keywords Political communication · Partisanship · Legislator approval · Electoral connection

All data and associated files necessary for replicating the analyses contained in this article are posted at the Political Behavior Dataverse and can be accessed at the following link: https ://datav erse.harva rd.edu/datas et.xhtml ?persi stent Id=doi:10.7910/DVN/DE0OV P. Components of this research were supported by the College of Arts and Sciences at Washington University in St. Louis. We thank Margit Tavits, Jonathan Homola, Andrew Reeves, Betsy Sinclair, Michelle Torres, Patrick Tucker, the editor, and three anonymous reviewers, whose thoughtful comments significantly improved our manuscript.

Electronic supplementary material The online version of this article (https ://doi.org/10.1007/s1110 9-018-9497-x) contains supplementary material, which is available to authorized users.

* Jon C. Rogowski rogowski@fas.harvard.edu

Extended author information available on the last page of the article

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How do officeholders maintain constituent support? Canonical theories posit that reelection-minded legislators engage in behaviors including advertising, position taking, and credit claiming (e.g., Mayhew 1974) and have motivated a substantial empirical literature that studies the electoral consequences of legislators’ name recognition (e.g., Kam and Zechmeister 2013; Mann and Wolfinger 1980), roll call voting records (e.g., Ansolabehere and Jones 2010; Buttice and Stone 2012; Canes-Wrone et al. 2002; Montagnes and Rogowski 2015), and provision of federal spending and particularistic goods (e.g., Levitt and Snyder 1997; Stein and Bickers 1994).1 The findings from these diverse studies are largely mixed, however, and sug-gest that positive electoral returns to these forms of behavior are qualitatively small, if present at all (see also Parker and Goodman 2009).

In this article, we study how elected officials generate constituent support through the ways they present their records to voters. We elaborate upon Fenno’s (1977, p. 890) conception of home style in which legislators cultivate constituencies by allo-cating, presenting, and explaining, focusing specifically on the latter two. When presenting themselves to constituents and explaining what they have accomplished, legislators must prioritize among the components of their records to cultivate repu-tations that will best serve them in future elections. Legislators’ choice of empha-sis subsequently primes constituents to apply those considerations when evaluating them. In turn, constituent evaluations reflect how officeholders present themselves and explain their behaviors. While we do not argue that officials’ ideologies and constituency service do not matter, communications from elected officials provide a more accessible and digestible source of information about their behavior in office and free most voters from the burden of independently collecting information about their legislators’ records. Building upon recent research that shows that the provision of distributive resources absent credit-claiming is insufficient to garner constituent support (Grimmer et al. 2012), our argument implies that how officeholders present their records may be at least as important for public evaluations as the content of their records.

We test our argument in the context of communications issued by U.S. Senators. Specifically, we characterize Senators’ self-presentations based on the degree to which their communications emphasized their policy positions. We expect that as Senators place greater emphasis on policymaking in their messages, voters’ evalu-ations of Senators will be more heavily influenced by partisanship and more polar-ized across party lines. Results from observational and experimental studies provide support for our argument. Using data from the 2006 Cooperative Congressional Election Study and the content of Senators’ press releases issued that year (Grimmer 2013a), we find that constituent approval ratings reflect a decreased emphasis on partisanship as Senators devote less attention to their policy positions, which pro-duces greater convergence in how citizens from opposite parties evaluate the same Senator. Evidence from a survey experiment further indicates that elite rhetoric plays a causal role in structuring political evaluations and demonstrates that political

1 Theoretical models further examine the tradeoffs legislators face when choosing among these activities (e.g., Ashworth and Bueno de Mesquita 2006).

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officials substantially reduce partisan differences in their evaluations by emphasiz-ing constituency service rather than their policy positions. Our results have impor-tant implications for understanding how political elites shape public opinion and raise questions about how electoral incentives and political communication inter-act to produce patterns of political representation. Our findings further suggest that while ideals of democratic accountability emphasize the importance for officehold-ers to clearly articulate their positions on major policy issues of the day, voters may not always provide the behavioral incentives for them to do so.

How Citizens Evaluate Elected Officials

Scholarship on political representation often focuses on how citizens respond to the behavior of elected officials. Understanding this relationship helps characterize the incentives the public provides for its representatives and is important for evaluat-ing the quality of representative democracy. For instance, the re-election imperative is believed to influence the ideological tenor of legislators’ roll call voting records (e.g., Canes-Wrone et al. 2002) and generate incentives for position taking, adver-tising, and credit claiming (e.g., Mayhew 1974). But despite their intuitive appeal, an enormous empirical literature finds limited evidence that these factors meaning-fully affect how voters evaluate elected officials (Parker and Goodman 2009). For instance, though ideologically moderate legislators are hypothesized to receive larger vote shares, the bulk of the evidence suggests that the electoral returns to ide-ological moderation are small (e.g., Ansolabehere et  al. 2001; Canes-Wrone et  al. 2002) to negligible (e.g., Montagnes and Rogowski 2015). Scholarship reaches simi-larly limited conclusions about the supposed advantages of name recognition (e.g., Kam and Zechmeister 2013) and securing federal projects and spending (e.g., Stein and Bickers 1994).2

Voters may be more responsive to the reputations their elected officials culti-vate through self-presentation. While it is relatively costly for constituents to obtain comprehensive information about a legislator’s roll call votes and success in secur-ing federal outlays, officeholders go to great effort to develop reputations and form favorable impressions among their constituents (e.g., Parker and Goodman 2009). Fenno (1977, 1978) and Mayhew (1974) both emphasize the importance of self-presentation when legislators interact with their constituents. For Fenno, legisla-tors’ decisions about how to allocate their time and attention, present themselves, and explain their activities in Congress constitute their homestyles. Similarly, for Mayhew, advertising, credit claiming, and even position taking involve the construc-tion of a public face through which constituents perceive their legislators. These accounts stress the importance of how legislators interface with their constituents

2 Some articles do find evidence of electoral returns to federal spending (e.g., Lee 2003; Levitt and Sny-der 1997), though the estimated relationships vary across chambers of Congress, the time periods under investigation, the nature of the federal program, and estimation strategies.

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rather than what they accomplish in the legislature.3 Consistent with this characteri-zation, recent research by Grimmer et al. (2012) provides evidence that legislators receive electoral benefits for securing federal projects only when claiming credit for doing so. Further, they find that constituents are more responsive to the number of messages sent rather than the amount of spending, which suggests the importance of legislative communications in generating constituent support.

We build on this research to argue that elite communication primes voters to pri-oritize some considerations over others when evaluating elected officials. Office-holders use agenda-setting powers when communicating with voters and emphasize some parts of their records over others. The dissemination of these messages shapes voters’ impressions of an official’s performance in office. Specifically, the content of elite communications affects the saliency of the considerations voters draw upon when evaluating political officials. Greater emphasis from officeholders on some feature of their record is likely to result in a higher level of focus on this considera-tion in, for instance, campaign advertisements, franked mail, and media reports, and thus these considerations have greater cognitive accessibility for voters.4 Insofar as political attitudes reflect more accessible considerations (e.g., Iyengar and Kinder 1987; Miller and Krosnick 2000; Zaller 1992), the public may provide different evaluations of the same officeholder based on what characteristics the officeholder emphasizes.

While scholars have long recognized that political messages shape voter evalu-ations through processes such as priming,5 our focus on the content of communi-cations issued directly from officeholders is distinct from most existing research in two ways. First, scholars have typically focused on how voters can be primed to place greater emphasis on particular attitudes, political issues, or candidate charac-teristics (e.g., Druckman 2004a; Druckman et al. 2004; Iyengar and Kinder 1987; Valentino 1999) but have paid less attention to whether priming can change how voters evaluate officials across behavioral domains. While extant research suggests that officeholders can prime voters to place greater emphasis on their policy views on, for instance, domestic rather than foreign policy (e.g., Druckman et al. 2004), it is less clear whether politicians can successfully prime voters to place different levels of emphasis on, for example, their policy records versus provision of constitu-ency service. Moreover, while this research finds that politicians can increase pub-lic approval by emphasizing certain issues over others (e.g., Druckman and Holmes

4 Of course, not all messages are likely to receive the same level of media uptake, and those that do may not be reported in the way the official intended (see, e.g., Vavreck 2009). Thus, a key assumption of our theoretical framework is that voters are exposed to an officeholder’s political messages, either directly or as mediated through the press.5 Political messages could also affect voter evaluations by providing information to voters about an officeholder’s behavior or policy views. In this case, evaluations would reflect learning rather than prim-ing (Lenz 2009, 2012). In this article, we focus primarily on priming, and the design of our experiment allows us to specifically rule out learning as an explanation for our findings. However, we acknowledge that political messages can also shape support for officeholders by providing information about them.

3 Parker and Goodman (2009) show that constituents appear to respond to legislators’ efforts to cultivate reputations at home, as increased franking, office expenditures, and travel to the district are associated with higher vote shares.

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2004; Druckman et  al. 2004), these effects are often attributed to priming image rather than the substance of the officeholders’ policy views.6

Second, much (though not all) research in this area studies the influence of elec-toral communication, focusing on campaign advertisements or media coverage of election campaigns (e.g., Druckman et al. 2004; Jacobs and Shapiro 1994). Scholars have paid less attention to the routine communications crafted by officeholders that report on their activities in an attempt to influence subsequent media coverage and cultivate particular reputations. While most Americans do not read the minutiae of official statements distributed by officeholders, more Americans than ever receive communications from (and potentially communicate with) their elected officials due to the availability of email and digital platforms. These newly available communica-tion channels led the Congressional Research Service to conclude in a recent report that “[i]n less than 20 years, the entire nature of Member-constituent communication has been transformed, perhaps more than in any other period in American history.”7 Officials’ statements and press releases may shape subsequent media coverage, and the content of messages officeholders distribute by email and via social media plat-forms suggest the potential for elite communications to exert particular influence in the contemporary context. We therefore extend research by Druckman and Holmes (2004) that finds that presidential addresses can prime the criteria by which vot-ers evaluate the president. We also examine a potential mechanism to explain the relationships documented by Grimmer (2013a, b), who shows that Senators in more competitive electoral or partisan environments place greater emphasis on credit claiming rather than position taking but does not directly examine whether voters respond to these messages in the ways Senators intended.

Our argument suggests that political communications afford officeholders greater benefits than commonly recognized. While strategic officials may indeed craft mes-sages intended to resonate with their constituencies, we argue that the content of these messages affects how voters evaluate officeholders. As an implication, politi-cal communications not only enable officeholders to cultivate name recognition and a personal vote among their constituents, but they also allow officeholders to shape the terms on which voters evaluate them.

Priming, Partisanship, and Political Evaluations

In this article, we focus on studying how partisanship structures constituent evalu-ations of legislators, though our argument applies to a wide range of scenarios in which evaluations of political officials and public policies are shaped by multiple considerations. Applying the model offered by Ashworth et al. (2006) to the domain of political communication, we assume that legislators confront a strategic choice in

6 For instance, Druckman et al. (2004) describe examples in which presidents have touted their foreign policy records or positions on terrorism in order to project competence and strength.7 See Jacob R. Straus and Matthew E. Glassman, May 26, 2016, “Social Media in Congress: The Impact of Electronic Media on Member Communications;” available at https ://fas.org/sgp/crs/misc/R4450 9.pdf.

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the degree to which their official messages emphasize their policy positions relative to their constituency service. Related research shows that political candidates strate-gically emphasize some portion of their records over others (Druckman et al. 2009; Sellers 1998) and finds that emphasizing a particular evaluative consideration can displace the importance of other potential considerations (Boudreau and MacKen-zie 2014; Miller and Krosnick 2000). In the context of elite-driven communications, legislators who place greater emphasis on their policy views do so in an attempt to craft policy reputations and prime voters to evaluate them on that basis. Legislators who emphasize other aspects of their records, in contrast, seek for voters to apply other criteria, such as the legislator’s success in securing local projects, when evalu-ating them. In either case, the content of legislative communications plays an impor-tant role in shaping the information environment from which voters draw when eval-uating their elected officials.

Patterns of legislative communications suggest that the content of officehold-ers’ messages reflects strategic considerations. As Grimmer (2013a, b) shows, U.S. Senators emphasize policy or credit claiming accomplishments in ways that are responsive to their state’s electoral and partisan environments. Senators who are well-aligned with the dominant party in their state prioritize their policy positions when communicating with constituents, while Senators whose constituencies con-tain smaller numbers of copartisans place greater emphasis on credit claiming for federal appropriations. More generally, electoral competition may create incentives for candidates to obfuscate or provide only ambiguous information about their pol-icy views (see, e.g., Franklin 1991; Page 1976). While this body of literature identi-fies strategic factors that affect officeholders’ communications calculations, whether voters are responsive to them remains somewhat of an open question.

Our argument implies that elite communication affects the saliency of partisan cues for how voters view officeholders. Particularly in an era where the two Ameri-can political parties have polarized policy views (McCarty et al. 2006) and in which citizens have more closely aligned their partisan identities with their policy pref-erences (Levendusky 2010), politicians who emphasize their policy positions cue their party affiliation for voters. Party affiliation thus becomes a more salient con-sideration when voters evaluate that public official. Conversely, when politicians emphasize the constituent service aspects of their records, citizens recognize the less overtly political nature of this behavior, thereby reducing the salience of partisan affiliation in how voters evaluate those officials.

By studying how political messages condition the salience of partisanship for voter evaluations of officeholders, we contribute to a larger literature on the condi-tions under which partisanship shapes political decision making. Though scholar-ship on expressive partisanship emphasizes the strong effect of partisanship on polit-ical decisions, even “[independent] of policy preferences” (Huddy et al. 2015, p. 1), other research finds that exposure to policy information can weaken and potentially supersede the role of partisanship (Boudreau and MacKenzie 2014, 2018; Bullock 2011).8 In contrast with this latter body of research, however, our argument suggests

8 Druckman et al. (2013), however, finds that elite polarization may intensify the effects of partisan cues.

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that an officeholder’s emphasis on policy information reinforces and amplifies parti-san cues rather than reduces their importance.

It is important to note, however, the potential scope conditions of our account. Studies of media priming generally find that these effects are particularly strong when the messages are conveyed by a trusted source (see, e.g., Miller and Krosnick 2000). Though we do not empirically investigate this possibility, this literature sug-gests that a politician’s credibility may affect her ability to successfully prime vot-ers through political messages, as officeholders thought to be untrustworthy or who attempt to convey blatantly false messages may not be able to prime voters with the same effectiveness as politicians with reputations for trustworthiness. We suspect, however, that the potential reputational costs of attempting to deceive or lie to voters will deter most politicians from adopting messaging strategies that engage in that behavior.

The account we offer generates two main hypotheses. Overall, we expect to find larger partisan differences in evaluations of legislators when those legislators place greater emphasis on their policy positions as opposed to their non-policy behav-ior. Democratic and Republican identifiers in the electorate are likely to have more dissimilar evaluations of legislators whose communications prioritize their policy views, while partisan differences should attenuate in evaluations of legislators who de-emphasize their policy positions in favor of constituency service. We further expect that constituent response to the content of legislative communications is con-ditional on the partisan match between respondents and legislators. In particular, legislators who prioritize constituency service over policy positions are especially likely to cultivate greater support among voters who do not share their partisan-ship. Our expectations concerning responses from legislators’ copartisans are more agnostic. On the one hand, given intense partisan loyalties in the contemporary elec-torate, communication from legislators may not affect copartisan constituents who already provide extremely favorable evaluations of their copartisan representations. On the other hand, the close association between partisanship and policy preferences may create expectations among copartisan audiences that legislators should empha-size their policy commitments, and thus result in decreased evaluations among copartisans of legislators who emphasize their non-policy behaviors.

Data and Methods

We conduct two complementary studies to test our hypotheses about the capacity of political communications to shape how voters evaluate officeholders. The first study uses political messages issued by U.S. Senators and data from the 2006 Coopera-tive Congressional Election Study to evaluate how priming the relative important of partisanship in messages affects the approval ratings of respondents’ representatives in the U.S. Senate. In the second study, we conduct an original survey experiment to obtain greater causal leverage in understanding how the public responds to political communications. This approach combines the virtues of external validity afforded by public evaluations of real-world politicians and their messages with the internal validity provided through experimentation.

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Our observational study uses data on approval ratings of U.S. Senators from the 2006 Cooperative Congressional Election Study (CCES), which included more than 36,000 respondents. Respondents were asked to rate their Senators’ job per-formances along a four-point scale that ranged from “strongly approve” to “strongly disapprove.” For simplicity, we converted these responses into a binary dependent variable, where 1 indicates respondents who “strongly” or “somewhat” approved of their Senator’s job performance, and 0 indicates respondents who “strongly” or “somewhat” disapproved of their Senator’s job performance.9 Because each state has two Senators, each respondent provided two Senator approval evaluations. In our analysis, we include all respondents who correctly identified the partisanship of their Senators due to our focus on how partisanship shapes Senator approval ratings.10 Altogether, we analyze approximately 57,000 unique Senator approval ratings.

Figure  1 below shows the average approval ratings of each Senator. Overall, about 55.7% of respondents approved of their Senator, significantly higher than the percentage of respondents (39.9) who approved of President George W. Bush. Sena-tor approval ratings varied considerably both across and within states. Thad Cochran (R-MS) had the highest approval rating (76.6%; N = 163), while Mike DeWine (R-OH) had the lowest (38.7%; N = 1392). Respondents appeared to distinguish their Senators on the basis of characteristics beyond partisanship and ideology. For instance, 71.6% of Illinois respondents (N = 1431) approved of Senator Barack Oba-ma’s (D) job performance, compared with 55.8% of Illinois respondents (N = 1357) who approved of Senator Dick Durbin’s (D) job performance, even though their vot-ing records, measured by DW-NOMINATE scores, were virtually indistinguishable (− 0.401 and − 0.471, respectively).11 In other states, though, respondents provided similar ratings to opposite party Senators whose voting records differed considera-bly. For instance, 74.4% (N = 109) and 70.9% (N = 113) of South Dakotans approved of Tim Johnson’s (D) and John Thune’s (R) performances, respectively, though their DW-NOMINATE scores (− 0.322 and 0.530, respectively) indicate that they repre-sented their state in quite different ways.

Our analysis examines how political communications condition the importance of partisanship for Senators’ approval ratings. We rely on two sets of explanatory vari-ables. In light of the importance of partisanship as an evaluative criterion for voters, we posit that Senator approval ratings are largely a function of shared partisanship between the Senator and the respondent. Thus, we created indicators for whether respondents are members of the Opposite party as the Senator in question or are Independent. We classified “leaners” as partisans though we note that this decision does not affect our findings. Respondents who identified with the same party as the

9 Results using the full four-point range of our dependent variable are consistent with the results we uncover using our binary measure and are presented in Table A.1.10 We note, however, that our results are robust to the inclusion of all respondents, not just those who correctly identified the partisanship of their Senators. Results from estimation of our models including all respondents are presented in Table A.2.11 It is also possible that Obama’s high approval rating reflected voters’ greater familiarity with Durbin and his policy views. Durbin had served in the Senate since 1997 after serving seven terms in the House, while most Illinoisans probably only became familiar with Obama during the 2004 Senate election.

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Senator are the omitted category. We expect that the coefficients for Opposite party and Independent will be negative, indicating that both groups of respondents pro-vided lower approval ratings of their Senators relative to respondents who shared the Senator’s partisanship. A casual look at the data confirms this expectation. More than 85% of the respondents in our data approved of their copartisan Sena-tor (N = 27,401), compared with around 21% of respondents who approved of their Senator across party lines (N = 23,501). Given high levels of partisan polarization in contemporary American politics, this measure also is likely to capture policy agree-ment between constituents and their Senator.

We characterize the nature of Senators’ communications using a measure devised by Grimmer (2013a), who studies the content of approximately 19,770 press releases issued by U.S. Senators in 2006. Press releases are an apposite means through which to examine the impact of communication style on constituent evalua-tions of their legislators. These messages are directed to constituents, meaning their content can be viewed as a product of a representative’s choice of communications. While it is unlikely that many constituents read the press releases themselves, their content is representative of the kinds of messages regarding Senators’ behavior that voters receive from the broader media environment.12 Senators’ press releases affect the presence and content of local newspaper stories regarding Senators’ behavior, as well as increase voter knowledge about the Senator (Grimmer 2013b). Press releases are issued throughout the year, even when Congress is in recess (Grimmer 2013b), and their frequency does not seem to be strongly related to strategic considerations such as the pursuit of re-election.13

Press releases contain substantial references to both policy positions and credit claiming, or behavior that is less policy-oriented in nature. Grimmer (2013a) dis-tinguishes the content of Senators’ press releases and links these topics to a Sena-tor’s expression of position taking, credit claiming, or neither.14 For instance, press releases oriented around position taking emphasized the Senator’s position on an important policy debate (referencing topics such as the Iraq war, the budget, health care, the mortgage crisis, or stem cell research), whereas press releases that empha-sized credit claiming trumpeted the Senator’s efforts in securing appropriations for local use (such as transportation grants, defense construction, education, water

12 We note, however, that Senators do not have perfect control over how their press releases are covered by the media.13 Senators up for re-election issued an average of 233 press releases, with a range of 39–722, whereas those not standing for re-election issued an average of 185, with a range of 2–653. These averages and distributions are not statistically distinguishable from one another at standard confidence levels. The p value from a two-sided t test of difference in means is 0.13, and the p value from a Kolmogorov–Smirnov test is 0.22. Some Senators not facing re-election issued a large volume of press releases (such as Chuck Schumer, D-NY, who issued 653), while other Senators that were standing for re-election issued a small volume of press releases (such as Lincoln Chafee, R-RI, who issued only 64).14 Grimmer (2013b, Chapter 4) details his model’s estimation procedure, presents the topics his model uncovers and provides a validation of these topics. Validation checks show that the topics of Senators’ press releases correlate well with their committee assignments and geographic interests (such as immi-gration for border state Senators) and that the model’s topic classifications uncover more coherent topics than do the topic classifications provided by Senators themselves for the press releases on their websites.

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resources and funding for science research).15 We use the difference between the proportion of press releases that focus on credit claiming and those that focus on position taking to characterize the variable Non-policy emphasis for each Senator.16 The values of this variable range from − 0.56 (Joe Biden) to 0.73 (Richard Shelby), where positive numbers indicate that a Senator prioritized credit claiming over posi-tion taking and negative numbers indicate that a Senator emphasized position taking

MenendezLieberman

Dayton

Lincoln

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FeingoldReid

SalazarPryorBoxerKerry

LandrieuHarkin

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ConradJohnson

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TalentSantorumFristAllen

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30 40 50 60 70 80

Senator approval ratings (percentage points)

Average Senator approval

(55.7)

Bush approval

(39.9)

Democrats Republicans

Democrat

Republican

Fig. 1 State-level approval ratings of U.S. Senators, 2006

15 Senators frequently issue press releases whose subjects vary between position taking and credit claim-ing. In early 2018, for example, Senator Debbie Stabenow, D-MI, issued press releases related to efforts to secure federal funding for the protection of the Great Lakes (see this press release issued on January 18, 2018: https ://goo.gl/UBTrb 2) and infrastructure improvements in Michigan (January 29, 2018: https ://goo.gl/px1GD S) while also taking policy positions in opposition to new tariffs (January 23, 2018: https ://goo.gl/G9aBp 2) and in support of net neutrality (February 28, 2018: https ://goo.gl/1b1nn V).16 Grimmer (2013a, p. 630) uses this measure to argue that Senators’ “home styles” are “separated pri-marily by how they balance position taking and credit claiming”.

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relative to credit claiming. Thus, larger values of Non-policy emphasis indicate that the Senator’s messages placed less emphasis on policy positions.

In Table A.3 of the Appendix, we present descriptive statistics that show how average values of Non-policy emphasis vary across potential relevant characteristics of the Senators in our dataset, including partisanship, how long the Senator has been in office, and whether they faced reelection in 2006. These differences are minimal and we find no statistically significant differences in the content of Senators’ mes-sages on the basis of any of these characteristics.

Our main hypothesis concerns how Senators’ political communications condition the association between partisanship and Senator approval ratings. In particular, we expect that decreased emphasis on position taking weakens the association between partisanship and Senate approval. We test our hypothesis by examining the interac-tion of partisan alignment and Non-policy emphasis. Significant differences in the weight voters place on partisanship across different levels of Non-policy emphasis would suggest that elites possess the capability to change how voters evaluate their behavior through their press releases.17

Given the binary nature of the dependent variable, we estimate the following logistic regression:

where i and j index respondents and Senators, respectively, and Yij indicates whether respondent i approved of Senator j. Opposite party and Independent are the indi-cators described above that characterize whether the respondent identifies with the opposite party as Senator j or as an Independent, and Non-policy emphasis is the measure of a Senator’s relative emphasis on position taking versus credit claiming. We also control for a series of potential confounders (X), including the Senators’ partisanship, number of years in office (in decades), the state Republican presiden-tial vote in 2004, and whether the Senator was up for re-election in 2006. Finally, we account for demographic factors that may be associated with respondents’ approval ratings of their Senators, including age and indicators for racial group, sex, and respondents with college degrees. Because each respondent generally appears in the dataset twice, we cluster all standard errors on respondents.18

(1)

Pr(

Yij = 1)

= logit−1[�0+ �

1Opposite partyij + �

2Independentij + �

3Non−policy emphasisj

+ �4(Opposite partyij ∗ Non−policy emphasisj)

+ �5(Independentij ∗ Non−policy emphasisj) + XijΩ + �ij]

17 We note, however, that even press releases that emphasize credit claiming (rather than position taking) are likely to reference the Senator’s partisanship; and even if they do not, subsequent media reports based on the press releases are likely to include the Senator’s party. This may lead us to underestimate the mag-nitude of the relationship between communication emphases and attitudes toward the Senators.18 We note that we used a number of other approaches to address the inclusion of multiple responses from the same survey respondent, including models with respondent random effects and that estimated respondent-specific varying intercepts. We find substantively identical patterns across all these additional models. For simplicity, we focus on presenting results from Eq. (1) shown above.

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Our primary hypothesis is assessed by evaluating the coefficients for β1, β2, β4, and β5. The coefficients for β1 and �

2 characterize the importance of partisanship on

Senator approval when Non-policy emphasis has a value of zero, which indicates that a Senator emphasized credit claiming and position taking at equal rates. Due to the importance of partisanship for political evaluations, we expect that the estimates of β1 and �

2 will be negative. If Non-policy emphasis reduces the importance of par-

tisanship for Senator approval, however, we expect that the estimates of β4 and β5 will be positive. This pattern of results would indicate that the association between partisanship and approval attenuates as Senators place less emphasis on their policy positions. As a consequence, this pattern would show greater convergence in Sena-tor approval ratings among respondents from opposite parties.

At the outset, we recognize that observational studies such as this are subject to endogeneity concerns. In an ideal world, we would randomize voters to be repre-sented by a Senator who places some relative degree of emphasis on credit claiming versus position taking. The main concern for testing our hypothesis in an observa-tional study is that Senators chose their communication styles based upon constitu-ency desires for their Senators to emphasize their work on policy areas or securing valuable local projects. The data reveal that same-state Senators often develop very different communication strategies, however. For instance, in 2006, approximately 78% of Richard Shelby’s (R-AL) press releases were focused on credit claiming, compared with just 29% of his colleague Jeff Sessions’s (R-AL) press releases.19 These intra-state differences in communication styles help weigh against the con-cern that any observed results are simply due to constituency-induced behavior from Senators. Nonetheless, as we describe below, we conducted a series of robustness checks and performed a second study in an experimental context to address endoge-neity concerns.

Results: Press Releases and Approval Ratings in the U.S. Senate

We begin by estimating Eq. (1) but exclude the interaction terms. The results of this model are shown below in the first column of Table 1. For reasons of space, we have omitted the coefficients for the demographic covariates, and the full table of results can be found in Table A.4.20 Consistent with the raw data reported above, Senator approval ratings are strongly dependent upon partisanship. A Senator’s constituents who identify with the opposite party or are Independents are significantly less likely than a Senator’s copartisans to report approving of the Senator’s job performance. As one might expect, the coefficients differ in magnitude, with the coefficient for

19 Other examples of same-state Senators with different communication styles include Daniel Akaka (D-HI) and Daniel Inouye (D-HI), for whom 13 and 39%, respectively, of their press releases mentioned credit claiming, and Jim DeMint (R-SC) and Lindsey Graham (R-SC), for whom 12 and 35%, respec-tively, of their press releases emphasized credit claiming.20 We note that our findings do not depend on our use of logistic regression. We report the results from estimating our primary models using OLS instead of logistic regression in Table A.5. The directionality and statistical significance of our model’s coefficients are preserved under this alternative specification.

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Opposite party significantly more negative than the coefficient for Independent. The results also show that respondents were significantly less likely to approve of Repub-lican Senators’ job performances, which likely reflects President George W. Bush’s relatively low approval ratings in 2006. Respondents were more likely to approve of Senators who had served for longer periods of time, as the coefficient for years in office is positive and statistically significant. This reduced model also shows that Non-policy emphasis is not significantly associated with Senator approval ratings.

Column (2) presents results of the full model described above, allowing us to test our main hypotheses. As in column (1), the results for Opposite party and Independ-ent are consistent with our expectations and indicate that partisanship is strongly associated with respondents’ evaluations of Senators when Non-policy emphasis takes a value of zero. More importantly for our argument, the coefficients for the interactions between Non-policy emphasis and the indicators for Opposite party and Independent are consistent with our expectations. The coefficient (1.23) for the interaction between Opposite party and Non-policy emphasis indicates that the neg-ative association between being a member of the party opposite from the Senator’s and approval of that Senator attenuates as the Senator places greater emphasis on non-policy forms of behavior. Similarly, the positive coefficient (0.66) for the inter-action between Independent and Non-policy emphasis indicates that Independents provide more positive evaluations of Senators whose communications emphasize non-policy attributes. Both sets of results point to a common conclusion: as Senators de-emphasize their issue positions and instead focus to a greater degree on constitu-ency service and other forms of behavior that are less policy-oriented, the impor-tance of partisanship declines in voters’ evaluative calculus.21

Figure 2 presents the key results graphically. Our argument predicts greater con-vergence across party lines in approval ratings of the same Senator as that Senator’s communications reference non-policy behaviors to greater degrees. Put differently, we expect that the differences in approval ratings on the basis of partisanship attenu-ate as the value of Non-policy emphasis increases.

Using the estimates from column (2) of Table 1, Fig. 2 shows that partisan dif-ferences in approval ratings diminish as Senators emphasize non-policy attributes. The x-axis shows the range of values of Non-policy emphasis, where larger values indicate that Senators’ communications placed less emphasis on their policy posi-tions. The curve plotted at the top of the figure shows the difference in the predicted probability of approving of a Senator’s job performance between respondents who shared the Senator’s partisanship and respondents who identified with the oppo-site party. Senators with the minimum value of Non-policy emphasis (such as Joe Biden) prioritized communicating their policy positions, and the figure shows siz-able partisan differences in evaluations of such a Senator. The Senator’s copartisans

21 Our substantive findings persist when focusing on only respondents who are “very interested” in poli-tics (see Table A.6), weighing against that concern that our results are spurious and driven by inattentive respondents who are unlikely to be exposed to Senators’ press releases. Additionally, this provides evi-dence for the strength of our theoretical argument, as we find those respondents who are least likely to be susceptible to priming effects still respond to changes in a Senator’s level of Non-policy emphasis.

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approved of the Senator with probability 0.87, compared with 0.15 of respondents from the opposite party that are predicted to approve of the Senator. Thus, the differ-ence in predicted approval is 0.72. This predicted difference declines significantly as Senators de-emphasize their policy positions. At the maximum value of Non-policy emphasis, as would characterize the communications from Richard Shelby, the pre-dicted difference in approval declines by approximately one-third, to 0.49. While Senators’ copartisans are predicted to approve of their job performance at greater rates than members of the opposite party no matter what the communication style, respondents from different parties exhibit substantially greater agreement in their evaluations of Senators when those Senators de-emphasize their policy positions.

We find a similar pattern when comparing the predicted differences in approval between a Senator’s copartisans and respondents who identify as Independents. Across the range of values along the x-axis, the predicted differences in approval

Table 1 Responsiveness of Senator approval ratings to political communications

Data are from the 2006 Cooperative Congressional Election Study. Entries are logistic regression coefficients with standard errors clustered on respondents in parentheses. The dependent variable is whether respondents reported approving of their Senator’s job per-formance. The full set of coefficients including demographic covari-ates are shown in Table A.4 in the Appendix*Significance at p < 0.05 (two-tailed tests)

(1) (2)

Opposite party − 3.11*(0.03)

− 3.00*(0.03)

Independent − 1.89*(0.04)

− 1.83*(0.04)

Non-policy emphasis − 0.05(0.05)

− 0.69*(0.08)

Opposite party × non-policy emphasis 1.23*(0.10)

Independent × non-policy emphasis 0.66*(0.16)

Years served (decades) 0.08*(0.01)

0.08*(0.01)

Republican Senator − 0.25*(0.03)

− 0.25*(0.03)

State partisanship − 0.53*(0.24)

− 0.55*(0.24)

Seat up for re-election − 0.11*(0.02)

− 0.11*(0.02)

(Intercept) 1.99*(0.14)

1.94*(0.14)

N (total) 56,611 56,611N (unique respondents) 30.943 30.943Log-likelihood − 27,122.76 − 27,046.52Demographic controls X X

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fall from 0.43 to 0.32. However, given the much smaller sample of Independents in our data relative to partisans, we are reluctant to make much of this finding.

To address concerns related to endogeneity—namely, that Senators choose their communication styles to reflect constituency preferences—we conduct a supplementary analysis wherein we re-estimate the two models we fit above but subset the dataset to include only observations from states with Senators that have considerably different communication styles. By examining only states with Senators that employ divergent communication strategies, we help guard against the possibility that Senators are catering their communication style to match the desires of their constituents. We select those Senators whose value of Non-policy

Fig. 2 Effect of communications and partisanship on Senator approval. Plot shows the differences in the predicted probability of approval between a Senator’s copartisans and opposite partisans (top line) and a Senator’s copartisans and Independents (bottom line). The values along the x-axis describe the rela-tive emphasis of Senate communications on policy positions (negative numbers) or non-policy attributes (positive numbers). The rug denotes the distribution of Non-policy emphasis. Large values along the y-axis indicate higher levels of predicted approval among copartisans relative to either members of the opposite party or Independents. The shaded regions represent the 95% confidence intervals

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emphasis differs from that of their same-state colleague by one standard devia-tion or more of Non-policy emphasis. We further investigate the possibility that these same-state Senators may be curating their messages to separate in-state constituencies and conduct our examination with only respondents who have two Senators of the same party with values of Non-policy emphasis that differ by more than one standard deviation. In short, the key terms of our full model—the interactions between Opposite party and Independent with Non-policy empha-sis—are positive and statistically distinguishable from zero, consistent with our theoretical expectations.22 Though not dispositive, these supplemental investiga-tions increase confidence in the findings presented above.23 Our results also hold when we re-estimate our primary models while including state-level fixed effects, which allow us to account for endogeneity concerns by identifying our model’s parameters using differences in same-state Senators’ communication styles.24

Our theoretical discussion posited that emphasizing policy considerations increases the salience of policy concerns for voters and subsequently activates a par-tisan response. Consistent with this mechanism, we expect that the response to the content of political communications varies across individuals based on whether their policy views and partisanship are aligned. We expect greater divergence in approval ratings among partisans whose party identification and ideological perspec-tives are aligned and for whom policy-based messages should activate the strong-est partisan response. In contrast, policy messages should evoke a weaker partisan response among constituents whose policy views are less strongly aligned with their partisanship.

We examine this hypothesis by estimating model (2) from Table 1 and including an indicator for Ideological alignment. This variable takes a value of 1 for respond-ents whose ideological self-placements are consistent with their partisan identities, and zero otherwise.25 We interact Ideological alignment with Non-policy empha-sis and the indicator for Opposite party. If our hypothesis is correct, we expect the interaction between Ideological alignment and Opposite party to be negative, which would indicate that respondents who identify with the party opposite from their Senator have less favorable views of the Senator when their partisan and ideologi-cal identities are aligned. More importantly, we expect the triple interaction term to be positive, which would provide evidence that non-policy messages weaken the importance of partisanship for Senator approval at greater rates among individuals whose partisanship and policy views are aligned.

22 These results are shown in Table A.7.23 Additional analyses suggest that the effects are present for both Democratic and Republican respond-ents, albeit in somewhat different magnitudes. See Table A.8.24 These results are presented in Table A.9.25 The Ideological alignment item is coded 1 for Democrats who describe themselves as “liberal” or “somewhat liberal” and Republicans who describe themselves as “conservative” or “somewhat conserv-ative” on a five-point ideological scale. We omit Independents and leaners from our analysis, but our results are substantively unchanged when including these respondents.

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We present the results graphically in Fig. 3 below.26 As with Fig. 2, larger val-ues along the x-axis indicate that Senators’ communications placed less emphasis on their policy positions and the y-axis represents the difference in the predicted prob-ability of approval between a Senator’s copartisans and respondents who identify with the opposite party. The plotted curves provide support for our hypothesized mechanism. First, partisan differences in Senator approval ratings are larger among respondents whose partisan identities and policy views are aligned. Second, the curve is steeper for respondents whose partisanship and policy views are aligned, indicating that respondents from different sides of the partisan aisle exhibit greater convergence in approval ratings as Senators de-emphasize their policy views. In combination, these two findings support our argument that policy messages from political officials activate partisan responses and subsequently induce greater parti-san disagreement in constituent evaluations.

The results in this section provide support for our argument that the content of Senators’ political communications has important consequences for how their con-stituents evaluate their performance in office. Using data from tens of thousands of constituents across all 50 states, we find that the partisan alignment between Sena-tors and their constituents serves as a less important evaluative criterion as Senators place less emphasis on their policy positions. A series of robustness and endogene-ity checks help guard against the possibility that this relationship is spurious. None-theless, we remain conscious of the limitations of using observational data to study our research question and conducted a survey experiment to address these concerns.

Experimental Design

We conducted a survey experiment to better identify the causal relationship between elite communication and political evaluations. Our experiment was conducted using Amazon Mechanical Turk (MTurk) with a sample of 1009 respondents in March 2016. Although our sample of MTurk respondents was not drawn from a nationally representative sample, existing research has shown that the effect of experimental treatments conducted with MTurk samples closely mimics treatment effects from more representative national samples (Berinsky et al. 2012; Levay et al. 2016). In line with typical MTurk samples, our respondents were predominately male (61% of respondents), relatively young (50% of respondents were between 18 and 29), well educated (59% of respondents had at least a bachelor’s degree) and white (79% of respondents). Our sample’s demographic and political characteristics are shown in Table A.11 in the Appendix.

Our respondents were randomized into one of four treatment conditions, each of which provided them with a short vignette about a U.S. Senator running for re-election

26 The coefficients are displayed in Table A.10.

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in a state similar to their own.27 Each respondent was provided with the same brief description of the Senator’s accomplishments in office, which highlighted that the Sena-tor served as a policy leader for his party in Congress and was successful in securing federal funding for his constituency. We also randomly assigned the partisanship of the Senator. This component of the vignette ensures that all respondents have the same base-line knowledge about the Senator’s behavior in office. Then, the respondent was pre-sented with one of two different statements attributed to the Senator at a rally to begin his re-election campaign. The first set of respondents received the policy emphasis state-ment, in which the Senator emphasized his actions in Congress supporting his party’s stance on Obamacare. The Democratic Senator’s policy emphasis statement emphasized how he worked to stop recent attempts to repeal Obamacare, whereas the Republican Senator’s statement emphasized how he introduced bills to repeal Obamacare.28 The sec-ond set of respondents received the non-policy emphasis statement, whereby the Senator made a statement that emphasized bringing federal funding home to improve the state’s transportation infrastructure. Such a statement closely mirrors the types of press releases that receive high credit claiming scores in our observational data.29 In the non-policy emphasis treatment, both the Democratic and Republican Senator made the same state-ment.30 The basic setup of the experiment is presented in Table 2.

By randomizing subjects to receive the two types of Senator messages, we ensure that treatment is exogenous to a respondent’s preference over a specific type of com-munication from their legislator. Thus, unlike with our observational data, the mes-sage a respondent receives is independent of his propensity to prefer Senators who distribute certain kinds of messages. Our introductory description of the Senator’s accomplishments in office reflects normal political discourse in which constituents are exposed to a mixture of political messages that emphasize explicit policy posi-tions as well as constituency service and other characteristics. In addition, provid-ing information about both types of Senator behavior limits the obtrusiveness of our treatment, as the Senator’s statement—the key manipulation—highlights an activity on which the Senator has a record.

After receiving the treatment, respondents were asked whether they support the Senator for re-election if he were running in their own state. We measured support

28 Given the strong correlation between partisanship and support for the Affordable Care Act, respond-ents were unlikely to have been surprised that a Republican officeholder opposed the ACA while a Dem-ocratic officeholder supported it.29 Transportation funding itself may also animate contentious policy debates; however, to the extent respondents recognize transportation infrastructure as a policy issue, this would likely serve only to mute any potential differences between the policy emphasis and non-policy emphasis treatment conditions.30 We used transportation as an example of a non-policy area because roads and bridges would be likely to be appreciated by respondents of all partisan stripes.

27 As our experimental conditions are hypothetical, we ask our respondents to consider a state similar to their own to better mimic real-world conditions. Full wording of these vignettes is available in Table A.12. We acknowledge that the use of a hypothetical scenario raises questions about external valid-ity; however, we sought to avoid introducing potential confounders and issues of deception by asking respondents to evaluate statements attributed to a sitting elected official whom they recognize.

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on a four-point scale ranging from “strongly opposed” (1) to “strongly support” (4), which we collapse into a binary measure to parallel the outcome variable in our observational study.31

Fig. 3 Partisanship, ideology, and the effect of communications on Senator approval. Plot shows the dif-ferences in the predicted probability of approval between a Senator’s copartisans and opposite partisans for respondents whose partisan and ideological identities are aligned (top line) and unaligned (bottom line). The values along the x-axis describe the relative emphasis of Senate communications on policy positions (negative numbers) or non-policy attributes (positive numbers). The rug denotes the distribu-tion of Non-policy emphasis. Large values along the y-axis indicate higher levels of predicted approval among copartisans relative to members of the opposite party. The shaded regions represent the 95% con-fidence intervals

31 Given our focus on respondents’ support for a putative incumbent Senator, however, we note the absence of a competing candidate in our survey experimental design. Electoral contests generally feature two-sided flows of information, and the incumbent Senator’s messaging strategy would likely be cali-brated by her expectations of the behavior of a potential challenger in addition to her expectations about their effects on constituents.

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Our analysis focuses on two key comparisons. First, we distinguish respondents based on whether their self-reported partisanship is the same as or different from the Senator’s partisanship mentioned in the vignette and compare levels of support. We expect that the non-policy emphasis treatment will weaken the association between partisanship and support for the Senator. More specifically, we expect to observe a smaller difference in support between copartisans and respondents from the opposite party in the non-policy emphasis condition than in the policy emphasis condition.

We also compare the relative effect of the non-policy emphasis treatment among the Senator’s copartisans and members of the opposite party. In particular, we expect that respondents from the party opposite the Senator would react more favorably when the Senator emphasized his non-policy accomplishments rather than his efforts related to the Affordable Care Act. To the degree that transportation infrastructure appeals to respondents of all party affiliations, respondents who would ordinarily be inclined to oppose a Senator due to partisan differences may be more willing to support a candidate who emphasizes non-policy accomplishments rather than party accomplishments. Our expectations are less clear concerning the effect of the non-policy emphasis treatment effect on the Senator’s copartisans but we consider this an empirical question.

In addition to allowing us to draw causal inferences due to our control over respondents’ exposure to treatment, our experimental design improves upon our observational analysis by providing greater leverage for examining the mechanism posited in our theoretical account. Specifically, the vignette sharply limits the oppor-tunity for respondents to learn about the Senator from the Senator’s political rheto-ric. All respondents are provided the same information about the Senator’s policy accomplishments and success in securing federal funding for the state. Moreover, because the Affordable Care Act is a highly partisan policy issue, respondents would have been unlikely to have “learned” about the Senator’s support for [opposition to] this policy after already being told the Senator’s partisanship. Thus, while we can-not fully rule out the possibility that any treatment effects are due to learning rather than priming, the vignette we used strongly weighs against learning as an alternative explanation.

Table 2 Experimental treatment conditions

The table shows the treatment conditions of the experiment. Respondents received one of four treat-ments: either a policy or non-policy statement attributed to either a Republican or Democratic Senator. In the policy condition, Senators are attributed with a party-specific policy statement about Obamacare. In the non-policy condition, Senators from both parties are attributed with the same non-policy statement about infrastructure

Senator party Message type

Policy Non-policy

Republican Opposition to Obamacare Funding for infrastructureDemocrat Support for Obamacare Funding for infrastructure

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Experimental Results

Our experimental results are shown below in Fig.  4.32 The upper panel compares mean levels of support for the Senator between copartisan respondents and respond-ents who identify with the opposite party or as Independents. The plotted points show the differences in Senator support among the groups shown on the y-axis, where positive numbers indicate that the Senator’s copartisans provided greater sup-port than respondents in the comparison group. The horizontal lines are the 95% confidence intervals of the mean differences. Respondents in the policy emphasis condition are shown in black and respondents in the non-policy emphasis condition are shown in gray.

The figure provides strong support for our hypothesis. Consider the results at the top of the plot, which compare support for the Senator between the Senator’s copar-tisans and members of the opposite party. Among respondents in the policy empha-sis condition, the average level of support among the Senator’s copartisans was 0.92, compared with 0.26 among respondents who identified with the opposite party. The plotted point, 0.66, reflects this difference. This difference is considerably larger than the mean difference in evaluations for copartisans and members of the opposite party among respondents in the non-policy emphasis condition, 0.27. The difference in these differences is 0.39, with a 95% confidence interval ranging from approxi-mately 0.30 to 0.50 (p < 0.001). Therefore, our results show that respondents across party lines were in substantially greater agreement about their support for the Sena-tor when he emphasized his non-policy attributes rather than his policy positions.

We find a similar pattern when comparing support between Independents and the Senator’s copartisans. Although the magnitude of both differences is somewhat smaller than the differences between the Senator’s copartisans and members of the opposite party, the pattern is quite similar. The difference in support between a Senator’s copartisans and members of the opposite party is considerably larger in the policy emphasis condition than it is in the non-policy emphasis condition, with the difference in these two equal to 0.17 with a 95% confidence interval rang-ing from approximately 0.02 to 0.33 (p < 0.03). Thus, the experimental results con-firm the results shown in the observational analysis and indicate that respondents from different parties provided substantially more similar evaluations of the same Senator when that Senator emphasized non-policy characteristics rather than policy accomplishments.

The lower panel of Fig. 4 shows how the effects of assignment to the non-policy emphasis condition vary across partisanship. Positive values along the x-axis indi-cate that support was higher in the non-policy emphasis condition. While emphasiz-ing non-policy attributes increased support for the candidate across all respondents, the difference was smallest (0.02) and not statistically distinguishable from zero for the Senator’s copartisans. The absence of a significant finding may be due to ceiling

32 Complete summary statistics are shown in Figure A.1. We further note that all our findings are also obtained when estimating logistic regressions and including demographic and political controls. We pre-sent these results in Table A.13.

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effects, as more than 92% of copartisan respondents in the policy emphasis condi-tion reported supporting the Senator and there may not have been any capacity to significantly raise support over this baseline level. Among respondents who identi-fied with the opposite party, however, the treatment effect of emphasizing non-pol-icy attributes was considerable. The mean level of support was 0.42 greater among respondents in the non-policy emphasis condition. Similarly, among Independ-ents, mean support was 0.19 greater among respondents assigned to the non-policy emphasis condition. In sum, the effect of emphasizing non-policy information varies with respondents’ partisan alignments with the Senator, and has the greatest positive effect among opposite party members.

Our theoretical mechanism suggests that exposure to either the policy emphasis or non-policy emphasis vignette will increase the salience of policy or non-policy considerations, respectively, in respondent evaluations. To assess this expectation, we examine respondents’ self-reported reliance on these considerations when evalu-ating the Senator. After respondents indicated their level of support for the Senator, we asked them to rate the importance of the Senator’s legislative accomplishments and ability to secure funding for their decision to support (or not) his re-election. We measure this importance on a four-point scale, and then collapse these meas-ures into a binary measure of important (1) or not important (0). We then subtract reported importance of non-policy considerations from policy considerations to cre-ate a measure of the difference in the relative importance of legislative and funding considerations in a respondent’s evaluation of the Senator. This variable has a possi-ble range of values from − 1 to 1, where positive numbers indicate that a greater per-centage of respondents reported policy considerations as being more important than non-policy considerations in their evaluations. This measure allows us to directly characterize the saliency of these considerations.

The results are shown in Fig. 5. Both groups of respondents rated the Senator’s legislative accomplishments as somewhat more important than the Senator’s abil-ity to secure funding. The average difference in the importance of policy and non-policy considerations for individuals who received the policy emphasis treatment is significantly higher, however, than the difference for those who received the non-policy emphasis treatment (0.15 as opposed to 0.10, respectively, p < 0.05). Consistent with the mechanism implicated by our theory, respondents exposed to policy-related messages reported placing greater importance on the legislator’s policy record relative to respondents who received the non-policy messages, even though both sets of respondents received nearly identical information about the Senator’s record in office.

The results from our experiment confirm and extend the findings reported in our observational study. Political communications shape how respondents evaluates elected officials depending upon whether voters share the partisanship of the elected official in question. These findings lend support to the effect we uncover with our observational data—as public officials place greater emphasis on their non-policy characteristics (and thus less emphasis on their policy positions), members of oppo-site parties exhibit substantially greater agreement in their evaluations of the official.

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●

●

Differences in suppor t

Differences in Average Senator Support

0 0.25 0.5 0.75 1

●

●

Copartisans vs.

Independents

Copartisans vs.

Opposite partisans

0.27

0.66

0.18

0.35

●●

Policy emphasisNon– policy emphasis

●

●

●

Increase in suppor t

Treatment Effects by Partisanship

0 0.2 0.4 0.6

Independents

Opposite partisans

Copartisans

0.02

0.42

0.19

a

b

Fig. 4 Effects of policy emphasis on Senator support. a Plot shows the differences in the average level of support for the Senator between the Senator’s copartisans and respondents who identified with the opposite party (top) and the Senator’s copartisans and Independent respondents (bottom). Larger values along the x-axis indicate larger differences in support for the Senator. Differences among respondents in the policy emphasis condition are shown in black and differences among respondents in the non-policy emphasis condition are shown in gray. The horizontal lines are 95% confidence intervals of the mean differences. b Plot shows the differential treatment effect of the non-policy treatment and the policy treat-ment within copartisans (top), opposite partisans (middle) and Independents (bottom). Positive values indicate higher expressed support for the Senator among respondents who received the non-policy treat-ment. The horizontal lines are 95% confidence intervals of the mean differences

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Conclusion

Political officials use communications to their advantage. Presidents “go public” to rally support for their legislative agendas (Kernell 1993) and other politicians leverage processes such as framing and priming to attract public support for their policy positions and shape their approval ratings (e.g., Druckman 2004b; Iyengar 1990; Krosnick and Kinder 1990). We contribute to this enterprise by showing that the relative emphasis politicians place on their policy views can shape the importance of partisanship in how voters evaluate those officials. Constraints on resources and cognition may limit voters’ ability to evaluate the actual behaviors legislators exhibit, while the messages legislators disseminate may provide a use-ful heuristic for voters seeking to understand how their officials have represented them in office. Words, in some cases, may elicit more powerful responses from constituents than actions.

Our findings have important implications for scholarship on public opinion, political representative, and communication. First, we demonstrate that voters are responsive to the political content of the messages they receive, which suggests political communication can have more far-reaching consequences than existing scholarship recognizes. Moreover, these communications can lead voters to change the weights voters assign to particular aspects of an elected official’s record, even

Difference in reported importance of policy and non– policy consider ations

0 0.05 0.1 0.15 .2

Non– Policy Treatment

Policy Treatment

0.15

0.10

Difference = 0.05 (p=0.046)

Fig. 5 Effect of experimental treatments on importance of evaluative considerations. Plot shows the aver-age difference in the reported importance of policy and non-policy considerations in a respondent’s eval-uation of the Senator for individuals who received the policy treatment (top) and non-policy treatment (bottom). Larger values along the x-axis indicate higher levels of importance for the Senator’s legislative accomplishments (relative to his ability to secure funding) in the respondent’s evaluation of the Senator. The horizontal lines are the 95% confidence intervals of the mean differences

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when voters have complete information about the officeholder’s behavior. This find-ing raises questions about the potential for manipulation. Can politicians who do not represent constituency interests successfully recruit support by shifting focus away from their policy positions? The ability of citizens to hold officials accountable for their behavior thus depends upon the capacity of citizens to receive information they need to best make that decision and provides an important role for an independent press in helping to satisfy the requirements of democratic governance.

Second, if the importance of partisanship—the “unmoved mover”—can success-fully be influenced by political messages, what other evaluative criteria are also subject to influence? On the one hand, partisanship could be more responsive to political communication simply because partisanship is a readily available evalua-tive cue. On the other hand, it is also possible that political communications can vary the relevance of other evaluative criteria in important ways. Future scholar-ship could interrogate how voters prioritize other dimensions of political evaluation, such as character traits, in response to political communications. Third, our findings provide insight into the relationship between political communication and contem-porary political polarization. Just as intense political rhetoric during electoral cam-paigns (e.g., Iyengar et al. 2012) and high-profile Supreme Court nominations (e.g., Rogowski and Stone 2017) may increase polarization among the mass public, politi-cal communications may also affect the public’s partisan polarization over the elites who send them.

Our results suggest that a legislator’s best communication strategy may depend on the partisan composition of her constituency. For example, we show that officeholders increase their appeal among Independents and voters who identify with the opposite party when they de-emphasize their policy positions. While this may not necessarily be a good strategy for winning a primary election, placing greater emphasis on non-policy characteristics may be useful when winning office depends on appealing to voters outside of one’s party constituency. Our studies did not provide consistent results, however, about the effects of de-emphasizing policy messages on a legislator’s copartisans, possibly because Mechanical Turk respondents are well-sorted into political parties on the basis of their ideologies such that copartisans of the hypothetical Senator were less willing to penalize their candidate for de-emphasizing policy. More research is needed to understand how the effect of political communications vary across politically relevant groups of voters.

Additional research is also needed to study the relationship between commu-nication and political evaluations in other contexts. Our studies were conducted during a period of high partisan polarization, which may increase voters’ sensitiv-ity to communications that reference partisanship and issue positions compared with time periods or contexts with lower polarization. It is also less clear whether the effects we observed in the context of the U.S. two-party system would transfer to multi-party systems, particularly when the nature of governing coalitions or the dispersion of political parties across the policy spectrum makes it more dif-ficult to attribute a particular policy position to a party.

While our study combines the merits of controlled experiments for establish-ing causality with the external validity of observational data, each of the analyses

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has important limitations of its own. For example, our observational analysis does not allow us to directly study how legislators’ communications were filtered through the news media and processed by constituents. Future research could focus on media uptake of political communications to better understand how and when media communications are used to influence constituents. Furthermore, our observational analysis cannot rule out potential endogeneity between constituent preferences and a Senator’s communication strategy. And while the observational analysis offers a high level of external validity for evaluating the consequences of political messages in 2006, it is somewhat unclear how the results might apply in other partisan and political contexts. For instance, the partisan divide among political elites seems to have widened since 2006; to the extent this similarly characterizes the mass public, partisanship may be more resistant to framing and priming effects. Better identifying how political context shapes the efficacy of political messaging strategies is another important goal for additional research.

Our experimental design offers strong internal validity for identifying the causal effects of political messages; however, its external validity is weakened somewhat by the study’s focus on hypothetical candidates and voting decisions. Moreover, all respondents received the same amount of information, though in the real world we know that voters’ information levels vary widely. Because our experimental treatments are limited to a single political issue and a single val-ance characteristic, further study is needed to establish whether the causal pat-terns we uncover extend to less salient considerations. Finally, the experiment, like the observational study, omits consideration of messaging strategies adopted by potential challengers. This limitation presents interesting opportunities for fur-ther study. For instance, how do messages from incumbents interact with mes-sages issued from challengers or other political opponents? Can a challenger’s message effectively undercut any potential benefits an incumbent hopes to realize through her chosen messaging strategy? Answers to these questions would pro-vide a richer understanding of the strategies and effects of campaign rhetoric in competitive political settings.

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Affiliations

Jon C. Rogowski1 · Andrew R. Stone1

Andrew R. Stone arstone@g.harvard.edu

1 Department of Government, Harvard University, 1737 Cambridge Street, Cambridge, MA 02143, USA