Replication Data for: Perceived Ideological Distance and Trust in Congress

Objectives: We evaluate whether citizens’ trust in Congress is influenced by perceptions of ideological distance between themselves and their representatives. We argue that citizens view members as the “face” of Congress, and thus trust the institution more when the face of that institution is more ideologically proximity to themselves. Methods: We test our hypotheses using responses to survey questions regarding both trust in Congress and perceptions of ideological distance between respondents and members of Congress on the 2008 and 2016 Cooperative Congressional Election Study. We then pair this observational survey data with a survey experiment administered by Qualtrics in 2016. Results: Ordinal logistic regressions from our survey data evince strong empirical support for our arguments, showing that as perceived ideological distance between a respondent and her member of Congress increases, trust in Congress as a whole declines. These observational analyses are corroborated by our survey experiment, which again shows that as perceptions of ideological distance increase trust in legislatures declines. Conclusions: Our results suggest that a lack of faith in legislative institutions is often the result of a failure of representation. One way to restore Americans’ trust in Congress is for members to demonstrate more fidelity to the ideological leanings of their constituents.研究目标：我们旨在评估民众对美国国会的信任度是否会受到其自身与本国议员之间意识形态距离感知的影响。我们提出，民众将议员视为国会的「脸面」，因此当这一机构的「脸面」与自身意识形态越接近时，民众对该机构的信任度便越高。 研究方法：我们依托2008年与2016年合作国会选举研究（Cooperative Congressional Election Study）中针对民众对国会的信任度以及受访者与本国议员间意识形态距离感知的调查问题作答数据，对研究假设进行检验。随后，我们将该观测性调查数据与2016年由魁尔德里克斯（Qualtrics）平台开展的调查实验数据相结合。 研究结果：基于调查数据得到的有序逻辑回归（Ordinal logistic regression）结果为我们的论点提供了强有力的实证支撑，结果显示，受访者与其所属议员间感知到的意识形态距离越大，民众对整体国会的信任度便越低。上述观测性分析结论得到了调查实验的验证，实验结果同样表明，意识形态距离感知越高，民众对立法机构的信任度越低。 结论：我们的研究结果表明，民众对立法机构的信任缺失往往源于代议履职的失效。提升美国民众对国会信任度的途径之一，便是让议员们更贴合其选区选民的意识形态倾向。