The Shared Fortunes of Congress and Congressmen: Members May Run from Congress, but They Can't Hide

Political scientists frequently decry the so-called legislature-legislator dichotomy, whereby appraisals of individual congressmen are thought to be independent of those characterizing the congressional institution. In reality, the supporting evidence cited by proponents of the idea is insufficient; neither substantial disparities between the overall positivity of the two evaluations, nor differences in the way they are structured, foreclose the possibility of direct interevaluation linkage. We find in this study that judgments of Congress's performance indeed serve as strong predictors of members' reputations from 1978 to 1986. However, any temptation to read into these results confirmation that an important ideal of democratic accountability is successfully being realized in this country must be tempered by the accompanying discovery that ironically, it is constituents with lower levels of cognitive sophistication who are more prone to link together personal assessments of Congress and their own legislator.