Tyranny of the Minority: The Subconstituency Politics Theory of Representation

8 Conclusion

8 Conclusion A nnie Betancourt fared poorly in her race for Congress, despite taking the majority-preferred position on Cuba—the most visible issue in the election—because the constituents to whom she appealed were less intense than those who supported her opponent. To be sure, factors such as money and a Republican bias inherent in the district almost certainly mattered as well. But the fact that a Cuban American woman with name recognition and previous experience as a state legislator from the same area ran 12 points behind the 2000 Democratic presidential candidate in that district suggests that Betancourt fared especially poorly.1 Mario Diaz-Balart’s supporters were more intense and more willing to work to ensure his election. To answer the question posed at the beginning of the book: politicians take minority-preferred positions to exploit the benefits of citizens’ intensity . This book has developed a new theory of representation that explains why, how, and when these groups’identities are activated and translated into politics. Individuals have multiple, overlapping social identities, most of which are latent at any given time. Politicians take policy and valence positions to activate individuals’ social identities and to exploit those identities that are active. These identities prime citizens’responses to the world. Moreover , politicians activate different group identities in different people by taking positions on a series of issues and in this way build a coalition of intense groups of individuals through the development of a platform. 156 / Chapter 8 This new conceptualization of why and how politicians appeal to groups takes us far beyond traditional characterizations based solely on partisanship (e.g., Bishin 2000; Clinton 2006; Uslaner 1999; Wright 1989) or the reelection constituency (Clausen 1973; Fenno 1978). Contrary to past conceptualizations of subconstituencies, which largely see groups as static across districts, the theory explains both the supply side of legislators’ positions and the demand side of how group identities cause individuals to become interested in and knowledgeable about politics. Unlike these previous theories, it also explains when and why politicians take positions contrary to their partisans’ preferences. Thus, the issues and groups to whom legislators appeal are dynamic as they vary across issues and districts. The evidence shows that citizens are more knowledgeable about issues that relate to their active social identities; that candidates in campaigns often stake out relatively extreme positions to appeal to intense citizens; and that, once elected, legislators continue to service these groups through co-sponsorship and roll-call voting behavior. By describing this process, subconstituency politics provides answers to several unresolved questions of representation. A major goal of this book is to provide a unified theory of representation that explains how the various components of the American representation process fit together. Too often, scholars focus on individual aspects of the democratic process by focusing on the behavior of individuals, of candidates in campaigns and elections, or of legislators in Congress. While these studies have led to reasonably satisfactory explanations for the behavior of actors within each of these domains, the theories that result are seldom useful for understanding who, when, how, and whether people are represented. Moreover, such theories seldom deal with evidence from aspects of the representation process outside their narrow domain that might call the theory into doubt. Developing a general theory allows the use of the broadest range of evidence to develop and test the mechanisms that underlie the representation process and, in so doing, help us to better understand the limits of republican democracy. This work also extends the implications of research on issue ownership and campaign effects by suggesting that campaigns affect outcomes not by changing people’s minds, but by changing the context in which the campaigns are conducted . In particular, subconstituency politics implies that effective campaigns activate or exploit beneficial social identities. Doing so leads citizens to make decisions on the basis of factors or considerations that give one candidate an advantage over the other. The results also highlight the importance of treating the concept of diversity in a nuanced manner. Frequently, districts are designated diverse (or not) by fiat based solely on their citizens’ ideology, race, or ethnicity. This research shows that the degree to which a district is diverse depends critically on the specific Conclusion / 157 dimension being examined. Districts that are diverse in some ways may be homogeneous in others. The cases examined were selected to maximize the generalizability of the results. Conflicting results routinely observed in representation studies are frequently justified by the assertion...