Constituency Population and Representation in the U. S. Senate

Abstract

Using data from the 1988 NES Senate Election Study, we address the influence of the size of constituency population on constituents' expectations of, perceptions of, and support for elected officials. The Senate, with its wide variation in constituency population, provides the perfect opportunity to study these effects, and the 1988 Senate Election Study is an appropriate data source. Our analysis indicates that constituents in lightly populated states are more likely to report some form of contact with their senator, more likely to define the performance of their senator in terms of pork-barrel politics, and much more likely to be able to recall the name oftheir incumbent senator than are constituents in populous states. In spite of these factors, incumbent senators from lightly populated states did not fare better at the polls in 1988 than their colleagues from populous states. To explain this anomaly, we explore a variety of intervening factors and evaluations that might moderate the impact of constituency size on the electoral contests of large state senators.

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