1
Do valence issues or non-policy valence advantages affect legislative position-taking?
Do distributive policy allocations (“pork”) to constituents affect legislative position-taking? Are
legislators who deliver substantial amounts of federal largesse more likely to diverge from their
constituency medians? Are senators perceived as highly competent able to diverge from their
constituents’ preferences? Much work has shown that non-policy characteristics of candidates or valence
issues (e.g., see Hayes 2005 for a recent summary) has an effect on voters’ choices for office, but no
empirical work and only some theoretical work has posited a relationship between valence issues and
advantages and legislative position-taking.
Adams and Merrill (2003), Adams, Merrill, and Grofman (2005), Ansolabehere and Snyder
(2000), Groseclose (2001), and MacDonald and Rabinowitz (1998) among others, suggest that legislative
candidates with high valence advantages (see Stokes 1963) are likely to lead to election campaigns where
candidates do not necessarily converge to the median voter in their constituency, though this relationship
is not monotonic. In some instances, where a candidate has a slight valence advantage, the advantaged
candidate is likely to be close to the median of the district relative to a candidate with no valence
advantage. However, as the valence advantage grows, the candidate is likely to diverge from the district
median. Examples of candidates’ possible valence advantages are numerous, but can generally be
conceived as characteristics that clearly give the legislator or candidate a clear advantage in their elections
(e.g., charisma, “pork” project allocations, constituency service, and name recognition).
I conceive of an incumbent’s valence advantage as larger “pork” project allocations in Congress
and an incumbent’s greater competence relative to a challenger. Interestingly, little empirical work has
examined the effect of project allocations on position-taking by legislators and no work has examined the
impact of competence on policy divergence from constituents. Also, no theory of valence advantages has
linked both valence issues and non-policy valence advantages and argued that they both lead to the same
predictions regarding legislator positioning relative to constituents. I test these predictions in this paper
with original data on senate-state legislator divergence from 1996-2002. I find empirical evidence for
valence theories of positioning.
Convention