Replication Data for: Revealing Issue Salience via Costly Protest: How Legislative Behavior following Protest Advantages Low-Resource Groups

Collective action, particularly by low-resource groups, presents an opportunity for re-election-minded legislators to learn about and subsequently represent the salient interests of their constituents. In fact, legislators are more likely to support the preferences of protesters than non-protesters. Legislators are also more likely to support the preferences of racial and ethnic minority, low-income, and grassroots protesting groups than they are to represent higher resourced protesters. This argument emerges from a formal theory and is empirically tested using legislative roll call vote data from the 102nd through the 104th U.S. Congresses and data on Civil Rights, Minority Issues, and Civil Liberties issue area protests reported in the New York Times. This counterintuitive result sheds new light on our understanding of inequalities in representation. It demonstrates that under certain conditions political representation favors disadvantaged populations.