Constituency Service and Incumbency Advantage

The article addresses the long-standing discrepancy between scholarly support for the effect of constituency service performed by U.S. legislators on the electoral advantages of incumbency and the large body of contradictory empirical evidence. It first demonstrates that many of the methodological problems noticed in past research reduce to a single measurement problem that is readily resolved. The core of the article then provides among the first systematic empirical evidence for the constituency service hypothesis.