What They Don?t Know Won?t Hurt Them: Representation and Constituent Ignorance.

A central tenet of democratic theory is that the elected should reflect the preferences of the citizenry. However, despite generating contradictory and directly testable hypotheses, leading representation theories have not yet been empirically tested. This paper bridges this gap by testing the conflicting predictions of two important representation models, the Standard Control Model (Bernstein 1989) and the Alternative Control Model (Arnold 1990, 1993). The results demonstrate that legislators reflect constituents? preferences even on issues about which citizens know little. A shift in constituents? ideology from moderately conservative to moderately liberal corresponds to about a 30 point change in the probability that a legislator will vote for a bill. This research is important because it provides the most conservative test of representation?if representation occurs on issues about which citizens have little knowledge, it seems certain to occur on issues about which citizen knowledge is high. Consequently, this research provides substantial evidence for the Alternative Control Model. Check author’s web site for an updated version of the paper. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]