The Advantage of Disadvantage: Legislative Responsiveness to Collective Action by the Politically Marginalized.

Abstract

Reelection-minded legislators look to participation to discern how potential voters might react to a legislative vote. They rely on voting behavior, campaign contributions, public opinion polls, and other forms of participation to inform their legislative voting. Although members of Congress value this information, participation is costly, particularly for racial and ethnic minorities, the poor and other resource- constrained groups. Using formal theory and data on collective action events reported in the New York Times from 1991 to 1995, I argue that collective action – participation involving multiple participants publicly expressing a grievance or concern – conveys to representatives the salience, or importance, of an issue to constituents. Participants’ resource levels moderate this relationship. While, extant literature on legislative behavior finds that Congress is more likely to reflect the preferences of white and affluent constituents than their low resource counterparts, I make the counterintuitive argument that following collective action legislators are often more likely to represent the preferences of low resource collective action participants. This finding is robust to the measurement of resources, the nature of collective action, the characteristics of legislator and the congressional district, and the group’s organizational resource capacity.