{"title":"Uniform Punishment and Conditional Reward: Ideological Extremism and Senatorial Approval in the United States","authors":"Benjamin Highton, Erik Engstrom","doi":"10.1111/lsq.70084","DOIUrl":null,"url":null,"abstract":"<div>\n \n <p>Do constituents hold elected officials accountable for their ideological positions? Using over 1 million Senatorial evaluations from the 2006–2024 Cooperative Election Study, we employ a within-respondent design that exploits the fact that each constituent evaluates two Senators, absorbing unmeasured respondent characteristics. We find “uniform punishment, conditional reward”: outpartisan constituents penalize extremism by roughly 14 percentage points of Senatorial approval, while only ideologically aligned copartisans (liberal Democrats and conservative Republicans) reward extremism by 22 percentage points in approval. These results are robust to the inclusion of Senator fixed effects, which identify extremism effects from within-Senator variation over time. Ideological accountability is evident and operates through offsetting channels, which can explain null findings in election-level research.</p>\n </div>","PeriodicalId":47672,"journal":{"name":"Legislative Studies Quarterly","volume":"51 3","pages":""},"PeriodicalIF":1.7000,"publicationDate":"2026-07-02","publicationTypes":"Journal Article","fieldsOfStudy":null,"isOpenAccess":false,"openAccessPdf":"","citationCount":"0","resultStr":null,"platform":"Semanticscholar","paperid":null,"PeriodicalName":"Legislative Studies Quarterly","FirstCategoryId":"90","ListUrlMain":"https://onlinelibrary.wiley.com/doi/10.1111/lsq.70084","RegionNum":3,"RegionCategory":"社会学","ArticlePicture":[],"TitleCN":null,"AbstractTextCN":null,"PMCID":null,"EPubDate":"","PubModel":"","JCR":"Q2","JCRName":"POLITICAL SCIENCE","Score":null,"Total":0}
引用次数: 0
Abstract
Do constituents hold elected officials accountable for their ideological positions? Using over 1 million Senatorial evaluations from the 2006–2024 Cooperative Election Study, we employ a within-respondent design that exploits the fact that each constituent evaluates two Senators, absorbing unmeasured respondent characteristics. We find “uniform punishment, conditional reward”: outpartisan constituents penalize extremism by roughly 14 percentage points of Senatorial approval, while only ideologically aligned copartisans (liberal Democrats and conservative Republicans) reward extremism by 22 percentage points in approval. These results are robust to the inclusion of Senator fixed effects, which identify extremism effects from within-Senator variation over time. Ideological accountability is evident and operates through offsetting channels, which can explain null findings in election-level research.
期刊介绍：
The Legislative Studies Quarterly is an international journal devoted to the publication of research on representative assemblies. Its purpose is to disseminate scholarly work on parliaments and legislatures, their relations to other political institutions, their functions in the political system, and the activities of their members both within the institution and outside. Contributions are invited from scholars in all countries. The pages of the Quarterly are open to all research approaches consistent with the normal canons of scholarship, and to work on representative assemblies in all settings and all time periods. The aim of the journal is to contribute to the formulation and verification of general theories about legislative systems, processes, and behavior.
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