The emphasis here is on individual accomplishment (rather than, say, party or governmental accomplishment) and on the congressman as doer (rather than as, say, expounder of constituency views). 195 The congressman is also a certified diver. The article reccomends that you stay conservative, “cling to your own positions”, but Clinton did not. Thompson's performance at the polls since 1966 is a case study of how an incumbent congressman, out of line with his district's ideological persuasions, can become unbeatable. Some national interest groups watch the votes of all congressmen on single issues and ostentatiously try to reward or punish members for their positions; over the years some notable examples of such interest groups have been the Anti-Saloon League,110 the early Farm Bureau, 111 the American Legion,112 the American Medical Association,l13 and the National Rifle Association.114 On rare occasions single roll calls achieve a rather high salience among the public generally. Interestingly, the particularistic congressional programs in the post–Civil War era were rooted in the pre–Civil War era. Figure 1: Audience overlap between Fox News Channel and MSNBC.

won inclusion of an amendment giving a tax credit to a. California aluminum firm with a plant in the Virgin Islands. They get elected off a false identity and try to act on their true identity. At first bills were not numerous.

This article proves that many congressmen flip flop between policies to gain more voters over time.

He then survived a district-wide drop in his vote two years later. Other Senators have hinted that they may do the same.". Another Clapp congressman: "I was looking at my TV film today-I have done one every week since I have been here-and who was behind me but Congressman X. I'll swear he had never done. To assess these claims more systematically, we consider four conditions that serve as the building blocks of the electoral connection—ambition, autonomy, responsiveness, and accountability. This sort of discretion is in fact a fairly recent (modern) development.

In addition to facing an indirect nominating system during the convention era, some nineteenth-century incumbents also had to deal with state-level term limits. Mayhew's (1974, 2004) notion of the electoral incentive, and the legislative behavior that accompanies it, has become the theoretical foundation for much of the contemporary research examining the U.S. Congress. For instance, members of Congress can utilize casework, express favorable positions on symbolic votes, or secure pork-barrel projects to curry favor with their constituents.