Representation in Congress

Kim Hill is the Cullen-McFadden Professor of Political Science and Presidential Professor of Teaching Excellence at Texas A & M University. He is the author, co-author, and editor of several political science textbooks and of the following books of original research: Toward a New Strategy of Development (1979), The Criminal's Image of the City (1979), Democracies in Crisis: Public Policy Responses to the Great Depression (1988) and Democracy in the Fifty States (1994). Professor Hill has also served as editor of the American Journal of Political Science and as the President of the Southern Political Science Association. He has been on the editorial boards of a number of professional journals, and he has served in a variety of leadership roles in national and regional political science professional associations. Soren Jordan is a PhD candidate in the Department of Political Science at Texas A & M University. His research has appeared in the Forum. Patricia Hurley is a Professor of Political Science and the Associate Dean of Liberal Arts at Texas A & M University. Her articles have appeared in the American Journal of Political Science, the Journal of Politics, Legislative Studies Quarterly and American Politics Quarterly, among others. Professor Hurley is a past president of the Southwestern Social Science Association and the Southwestern Political Science Association. She has been a member of the executive councils for the Legislative Studies Section and the Elections, Voting Behavior and Public Opinion Section, both organized sections of the American Political Science Association. She has been a member of the National Science Foundation's Advisory Panel for the Political Science grants program and of the Committee of Visitors for the Political Science program at the National Science Foundation. She also presently serves on the editorial boards of the Journal of Politics and the American Journal of Political Science, and has been a member of editorial boards for a number of other political science journals.

• 1. The scientific study of constituency representation; 2. The party polarization and issue complexity theory of dyadic representation; 3. The research design and data for the principal verification tests for the party polarization and issue complexity theory; 4. Verification tests for the original predictions about patterns of representational linkage; 5. Novel implications of the theory about elections and representation; 6. Electoral marginality and constituency representation; 7. Conclusions, implications, and future research.

'Representation in Congress pushes our parsimonious understanding of policy representation forward in qualitative and consequential ways. Over the past sixty years, scholars have proposed a diverse and largely disconnected set of models to explain how legislators represent their constituents in roll call voting. These include belief-sharing, delegate, responsible party, trustee, and party elite-led perspectives on representation. Hill, Jordan, and Hurley propose that all such forms of representation occur in Congress, but that they occur in very different contexts.' Lawrence C. Dodd, Manning J. Dauer Eminent Scholar in Political Science, University of Florida