Measuring Constituent Policy Preferences in Congress, State Legislatures, and Cities

Little is known about the American public’s policy preferences at the level of Congressional districts, state legislative districts, and local municipalities. In this article, we overcome the limited sample sizes that have hindered previous research by jointly scaling the policy preferences of 275,000 Americans based on their responses to policy questions. We combine this large dataset of Americans ’ policy preferences with recent advances in opinion estimation to estimate the preferences of every state, congressional district, state legislative district, and large city. We show that our estimates outperform previous measures of citizens ’ policy preferences. These new estimates enable scholars to examine representation at a variety of geographic levels. We demonstrate the utility of these estimates through applications of our measures to examine representation in state legislatures and city governments. A well-functioning democracy requires legisla-tors to represent the will of their constituents. Despite this fact, political scientists still have only a limited understanding of the extent of constit-uency influence in Congress (Clinton 2006). Moreover, we know even less about the extent of constituency