Replication Data for: Political Career Ambition and Legislative Representation in the United States

Voters and researchers alike have worried that American politicians may prioritize career ambitions over constituent preferences, but does ambition for a career in politics affect how legislators in the United States represent their constituents? In this three-paper dissertation, I deploy a variety of original data on constituent preferences and legislator behavior and novel methods for comparing them to explore this question. In the first paper, I examine the rise of full-time, career state legislators produced by the state legislative professionalization movement. I argue that ambition for long-term political careers makes the career legislators ushered in by professionalization more interested in re-election and therefore more responsive to constituent preferences than the part-time, amateur legislators they replaced. But because American electorates tend to be more ideologically polarized when aggregated than they are individually, state legislatures with more career legislators tend to be more ideologically polarized as relatively more ambitious legislators more faithfully calibrate their positions to constituent preferences. In the second paper, I explore a combination of survey and cast-vote record data to show that American electorates achieve ideological consistency across different policies in aggregate in spite of widespread individual inconsistency because the positions of large clusters of ideologically inconsistent voters cancel out across different policies. By contrast, small clusters of more ideologically consistent voters have a larger net effect on policy-by-policy constituency majority positions because their positions on different policies are ideologically oriented in a single direction. Finally, in the third paper, I facilitate future research into the quality of American legislative representation by benchmarking various methods of imputing ballot question election returns, considered a 'gold-standard' measure of public opinion, for electoral jurisdictions where such returns are not published. I compare a variety of regression-based areal interpolation approaches to show that a demographics-based method accurately interpolates American state legislative district ballot question results from county-level results in three states. Taken together, these papers sharpen scholarly understanding of how representatives' political career ambition modulates legislative representation in the United States and provides new tools and frameworks for further investigation into this topic.