Electoral Accountability and House Member’s Voting (Law Essay)

Electoral Accountability and House Member’s Voting
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Electoral Accountability and House Member’s Voting
Elections are an imperative element in any political organization to choose officials whose tasks are to make policies that benefit the public. The question to date remains whether the voters hold the chosen officials liable for their policy choices. The state should have a common interest with the public, and as such, elections are the only guaranteed way to ensure the reliance and sympathy of the people to the House of Representatives.
Although frequent House elections dictate that electoral outcomes depend upon the officials' policy decisions, studies have established that the public is incredibly ignorant of the official's choices. There is a possibility that the elected officials vote as they seem fit; however, House members trust that roll-call voting influences their likelihood of re-election. The shreds of evidence below try to expound on whether House members should place importance on legislative voting.
Most of the studies involve a small set of polls, which established evidence of the more conservative a Republican or, the more liberal a Democrat was on roll-call voting, the lower their vote shares. As such, members lost their electoral backing if they increased the degree to which they voted with their party's limit. Perhaps the most reliable pieces of evidence come from Wright and Erikson, who found that a Democrat who changed from moderate to liberal voting reduced his dual-party poll share by only five percentage points.
Apart from the individuals mentioned above, others focus on their ideologies to relate the support of candidates to their party's extremes and the votes they garnered. They include Stewart and Snyder, who looked at the elections of 1976-1996 and 1952-1974 in which a sitting official was defeated (Canes-Wrone., 2002). Nevertheless, this research did not show the possibility of an official losing a seat and does not take into account controls such as campaign costs; thus, there was a study to explain further the possibility of winning for safe and marginal officials.
The ideological differences between a Democrat and Republican in a district increase officials' votes when they find moderation in their parties' ideologies. According to the Ideological Extremity Hypothesis, voters need not be entirely up to the basis of the officials' legislative record (Canes-Wrone et al., 2002). However, a diffusion model by Erikson illustrates that leaders take note of the members’ voting while voters take preference on officials that share their thoughts and Bailey shows how challengers inform the voters if their counterparts vote contrary to the districts’ inclinations.
A better understanding of the matter involves an adaptation of an econometric representation where we regress each person's vote share on the polls while measuring roll-call conceptual limits and establishing control factors. The estimation of legislative voting on Americans for Democratic Action (ADA) results reflect their decisions on fundamental policies discussed in a session lik...