Representational Style in Congress
What Legislators Say and Why It Matters

This book demonstrates the consequences of legislators' strategic communication for representation in American politics.

Justin Grimmer (Author)

9781107026476, Cambridge University Press

Hardback, published 23 December 2013

214 pages, 27 b/w illus. 9 tables
23.1 x 15.7 x 2 cm, 0.48 kg

"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

This book demonstrates the consequences of legislators' strategic communication for representation in American politics. Representational Style in Congress shows how legislators present their work to cultivate constituent support. Using a massive new data set of texts from legislators and new statistical techniques to analyze the texts, this book provides comprehensive measures of what legislators say to constituents and explains why legislators adopt these styles. Using the new measures, Justin Grimmer shows how legislators affect how constituents evaluate their representatives and the consequences of strategic statements for political discourse. The introduction of new statistical techniques for political texts allows a more comprehensive and systematic analysis of what legislators say and why it matters than was previously possible. Using these new techniques, the book makes the compelling case that to understand political representation, we must understand what legislators say to constituents.

1. 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.

Subject Areas: Politics & government [JP], Media studies [JFD]