Representational Role, Constituency Opinion, and Legislative Roll-Call Behavior

Despite the attention given to representational role, few efforts have been made to measure its predictive capacity. Using three policy dimensions, it was found that on two salient dimensions, contemporary liberalism and taxation, delegates were more representative of constituency preferences in their roll-call voting than were politicos or trustees. In contrast, the relationship between roll-call voting and constituency opinions on the least salient dimension, government administration, was negative for both delegates and trustees. Furthermore, delegates were much more responsive to electoral competitiveness than either politicos or trustees on the two salient dimensions.