Book contents
- Frontmatter
- Contents
- Acknowledgments
- 1 The Unanswered Question of Legislative Perceptions
- 2 A Dyadic Theory of Subconstituency Representation
- 3 The Psychology of Constituency Representation
- 4 Subconstituents Relevant to Health Policy and Natural Resources Policy
- 5 Explaining Legislative Perceptions
- 6 The Effects of Legislative Perception on Participation
- 7 Reassembling the District as a Whole
- 8 Perception, Reform, and Representation in Congress
- Appendix A Sampling
- Appendix B Interviews
- Appendix C Measurement of Primary Independent Variables
- Appendix D Measurement of Legislative Participation
- Appendix E Instrumental Variables Model of Legislative Participation
- References
- Index
Appendix D - Measurement of Legislative Participation
Published online by Cambridge University Press: 05 October 2010
- Frontmatter
- Contents
- Acknowledgments
- 1 The Unanswered Question of Legislative Perceptions
- 2 A Dyadic Theory of Subconstituency Representation
- 3 The Psychology of Constituency Representation
- 4 Subconstituents Relevant to Health Policy and Natural Resources Policy
- 5 Explaining Legislative Perceptions
- 6 The Effects of Legislative Perception on Participation
- 7 Reassembling the District as a Whole
- 8 Perception, Reform, and Representation in Congress
- Appendix A Sampling
- Appendix B Interviews
- Appendix C Measurement of Primary Independent Variables
- Appendix D Measurement of Legislative Participation
- Appendix E Instrumental Variables Model of Legislative Participation
- References
- Index
Summary
In order to measure the quantity and content of legislators' participation in the policy debate on behalf of their constituents, the transcripts of committee (and subcommittee) hearings, committee markups, and the House floor debate were analyzed. Across the two policies examined in Chapter 6 (i.e., the Patients' Bill of Rights and the Securing America's Future Energy Act), fifteen committee (and subcommittee) hearings, six markups, and four floor debates were coded. In the case of hearings and floor debate, the official transcripts were obtained through the Government Printing Office, each transcript was coded independently by two coders, and reliability checks were conducted. Committee markup reports were not available publicly but were made available by the House committee by request in the committee office on Capitol Hill. Neither duplication nor removal of the material was possible, and as a result, the markup transcripts were coded only by the author.
The purpose of the content analysis is to determine how many times each legislator in the sample spoke on behalf of each subconstituency relevant to the policy at hand and to further categorize each comment as either supportive (positive or neutral in tone) or unsupportive (negative tone) of the subconstituency. Each sentence of a legislator's comments is coded, and a legislator can only participate on behalf of a given subconstituency once per sentence (even if the legislator invokes the subconstituency multiple times within the sentence).
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- Information
- Constituency Representation in CongressThe View from Capitol Hill, pp. 187 - 190Publisher: Cambridge University PressPrint publication year: 2010