Description
Book SynopsisThis book examines the consequences of legislators' strategic communication for representation, demonstrating how legislators present their work to cultivate constituent support. Using new statistical techniques to analyze massive data sets, Justin Grimmer makes the compelling case that to understand political representation, we must understand what legislators say to constituents.
Trade Review"Representational Style in Congress targets a question long of interest to scholars of legislative politics: how and why do legislators engage in strategic communication with their constituents about their work on Capitol Hill? Grimmer uses new data and new methods to develop measures of senators’ discourse and then demonstrates convincingly how these presentational styles matter for dyadic and collective representation. This book is a compelling and important contribution to the study of congressional behavior and political communication." Tracy Sulkin, University of Illinois, Urbana-Champaign
Table of Contents1. Representation inside and outside Congress; 2. Representation and evaluation on the senator's terms; 3. Measuring presentational styles with Senate press releases; 4. Measuring presentational styles in thousands of press releases; 5. Types of presentational styles in the US Senate; 6. The electoral connection's effect on senators' presentational styles; 7. Correspondence between senators' work in Washington and presentational styles; 8. Why presentational styles matter for dyadic representation; 9. Why presentational styles matter for collective representation; 10. Presentational styles and representation.
