One Vote Out of Step? The Effects of Salient Roll Call Votes in the 2010 Election

Abstract

We investigate the relationship between controversial roll call votes and support for Democratic incumbents in the 2010 midterm elections. Consistent with previous analyses, we find that supporters of health care reform paid a significant price at the polls. We go beyond these analyses by identifying a mechanism for this apparent effect: constituents perceived incumbents who supported health care reform as more ideologically distant (in this case, more liberal), which in turn was associated with lower support for those incumbents. Our analyses show that this perceived ideological difference mediates most of the apparent impact of support for health care reform on both individual-level vote choice and aggregate-level vote share. We conclude by simulating counterfactuals that suggest health care reform may have cost Democrats their House majority.

Keywords

Congress elections health care

Can one wrong vote end a legislative career? The answer is interesting, and not just for the members of Congress who are kept awake at night by this question. The relationship between roll call votes and election outcomes speaks to how voters make decisions in congressional elections. If individual roll call votes affect how constituents view their representative, then voters are not merely drawing on their partisan affiliation or responding to the presence of a competitive challenger in their district. Instead, they are relying, at least in part, on more specific information about how, and how well, they have been represented by the incumbent. Thus, voter responses to roll call votes have implications for the quality of democratic representation: if individual votes in Congress factor into voter decision-making, then representatives are being held more accountable for their actions than we might otherwise expect.

Political science suggests that legislators have reason to be concerned. Members with high rates of party loyalty (Carson, 2008; Carson, Koger, Lebo, & Young, 2010), ideologically extreme voting records (Canes-Wrone, Brady, & Cogan, 2002), and unpopular positions on controversial pieces of legislation (Ansolabehere & Jones, 2010) appear to pay a price at the polls. However, previous studies have not systematically connected micro- and macro-level evidence to analyze the mechanisms by which members are held accountable for controversial votes. To better understand this process, we examine three salient roll call votes—the votes for health care reform, the economic stimulus, and cap and trade during the 111th Congress—and their impact in the 2010 election.

Our analysis addresses three important questions. First, did these roll call votes matter in 2010? Our previous analyses and those of other scholars have suggested that support for these initiatives hurt incumbent Democrats in the House, especially in competitive districts (Brady, Fiorina, & Wilkins, 2011; Jacobson, 2011; Masket & Greene, 2010; McGhee, Nyhan, & Sides, 2010). These findings are most robust for health care reform. Using statistical matching techniques, we isolate a more comparable set of members and districts and demonstrate that Democratic incumbents’ support for health care reform was associated with lower vote share.

Second, and more importantly, how is it that roll call votes come to affect election outcomes? Previous work has demonstrated an association between support for certain pieces of legislation and vote share but has not identified a causal mechanism. We propose such a mechanism: support for controversial legislation causes voters to see their representatives as more ideologically distant. We find support for this hypothesis among individual voters. We then show that this perception of ideological distance actually mediates much of the apparent impact of support for health care reform on both individual-level vote choice and aggregate-level election outcomes.

Third, could support for health care reform have cost the Democratic Party not only votes but seats? We simulate the Democratic seat share in the House of Representatives in a counterfactual scenario in which all Democrats in competitive districts opposed health care reform. In this scenario, Democrats would have retained an average of an additional 25 seats and would have had a 62% chance of winning enough races to maintain majority control of the House.

Our account benefits from new methods and survey data that have only become available to political scientists in the last few years. It thereby provides a methodological template and accompanying inferential standard for future efforts of this kind. Our account also constitutes one of the first efforts to trace the entire process of electoral accountability: from specific incumbent behavior to voter attitudes to election results. In the 2010 election, health care reform appeared to cost Democrats a large number of votes, primarily by making them appear more liberal, and may have cost them control of the House.

Roll Call Voting and Electoral Accountability

Given voters’ lack of attention to day-to-day events in Congress, it may seem unlikely that they could hold legislators accountable for their voting records. In fact, early research on congressional elections emphasized the visibility of challengers more than the substance of incumbent behavior (Mann & Wolfinger, 1980). However, members of Congress seem to think that their votes matter. Although most of them are reelected even in “anti-incumbent” years like 2010, they act as if reelection depends on avoiding mistakes, consulting extensively before casting votes on controversial issues (Kingdon, 1973).

Members do have some reason to worry because their voting records appear to affect their electoral safety. For instance, members with more ideologically extreme records (Canes-Wrone et al., 2002; Carson, 2008; Erikson, 1971; McGhee & Pearson, 2011) and higher party unity scores (Carson, 2008; Carson et al., 2010) attract less support at the polls than do more moderate members, although the penalty for ideological extremism is most severe in competitive districts (Griffin & Newman, n.d.; Montgomery & Nyhan, 2010).

But can specific roll call votes matter over and above a member’s overall record? There is certainly anecdotal evidence that voters punish members who cast controversial votes on salient issues. For instance, Rep. Jeannette Rankin (R-MT), the first woman to serve in the House of Representatives, lost her seat after just one term because of her vote against U.S. entry into World War I (Lopach & Luckowski, 2005; Smith, 2002). The same fate befell her in 1942 after she was elected to Congress again and voted against entry into World War II. Similarly, Rep. Marjorie Margolies-Mezvinsky (D-PA) was defeated after casting the deciding vote for President Clinton’s 1993 budget (Heidom, 1994).

More systematic analyses have also highlighted the electoral perils of specific votes. Heidom (1994) finds that support for key initiatives of President Bill Clinton—the 1993 budget and NAFTA—hurt Democratic incumbents in the 1994 election. Canes-Wrone, Minozzi, and Reveley (2011) find that Democrats who cast votes that were “tough on crime” did significantly better in the 1994, 1996, and 1998 elections—the period in recent history during which public concern with crime was at its peak. More recently, Green and Hudak (2009) find that Democrats who supported the Troubled Assets Relief Program (TARP) when it was first considered by the House (September 29, 2008) experienced a smaller increase in vote share between 2006 and 2008 than did the Democrats who opposed it. Finally, Ansolabehere and Jones (2010) show that constituents who disagreed with their representatives on salient roll calls taken in 2005 and 2006 were less likely to approve of their job performance and to vote for them.

The midterm election of 2010 provides an ideal test for whether individual roll call votes can affect incumbent electoral performance. During the 111th Congress, House Democrats passed high-profile legislation to reform health care, stimulate the economy, and create a cap and trade system designed to reduce greenhouse gases. These bills helped provoke a popular backlash that was more severe than most Democrats expected. The economic stimulus bill served as a major rallying point for the nascent Tea Party movement, and health care reform only added to the controversy (Saldin, 2010). Cap and trade received less attention—in part because it did not pass the Senate—but the bill was seen as an important issue in districts that would be most affected by the price it would have placed on carbon emissions (Samuelsohn & Bravender, 2010).

Republicans were quick to use these controversial votes in advertisements attacking Democratic incumbents. For instance, the National Republican Congressional Committee (NRCC) ran radio ads attacking pro-stimulus votes by 30 vulnerable House Democrats in February 2009 (Ambinder, 2009) and later ran ads accusing stimulus supporters of providing funds to create jobs in China (Karl, 2010). Similarly, the NRCC ran ads attacking 31 Democratic incumbents who supported health care reform (Sack, 2010) and 14 Democrats who backed cap-and-trade (Power, 2009). The health care assault was especially fierce. By late October 2010, the Campaign Media Analysis Group estimated that reform opponents (including outside groups) had spent US$108 million on advertisements against the legislation, roughly six times the amount spent by supporters (Sack, 2010). Initial estimates from the Wesleyan Media Project show that Republicans mentioned health care in television ads three times as much as Democrats and that 70% of those were attack ads (Fowler & Ridout, 2010).¹

The outcome was record losses for Democrats. Sixty-three Democratic incumbents went down to defeat in 2010, the largest gain for Republicans in the House since 1938. Undoubtedly, many of these losses could be attributed to the weak economy, the size of the Democratic majority, and the number of marginal seats held by Democrats. However, the number of seats lost exceeded even preelection forecasts that included these predictors (Brady et al., 2011; Sides, 2010), suggesting that the controversial roll calls might account for the difference.

Masket and Greene (2010) first picked up on this possibility in a preelection blog post examining the prospects for Democratic House members from conservative districts. They found that those who supported health care reform were running 2.7 percentage points behind opponents of reform. This finding was supported in an initial postelection analysis by McGhee et al. (2010), who estimated that a vote for cap and trade, the economic stimulus, health care reform, or the Troubled Asset Relief Program (a 2008 vote not included in this analysis) may have cost Democratic incumbents in marginal districts approximately 4 percentage points. Subsequent analyses have supported these findings. Jacobson (2011) finds that support for the stimulus, health care reform, and the Dodd-Frank financial regulation bill may have cost Democrats 3 to 4 percentage points in marginal seats. Likewise, Brady et al. (2011) find that health care reform appeared to hurt all Democrats and that cap and trade damaged incumbents from districts where Obama received less than 60% of the vote.

These findings regarding salient roll call votes and Democratic performance in 2010 constitute the point of departure for our analysis, which focuses on the individual-level mechanism by which incumbents were punished and the aggregate-level relationships between roll call votes and electoral outcomes (including seat share).

A Theory of Roll Call Effects

The most plausible case for the electoral effects of roll call votes should connect voter perceptions with aggregate consequences. We adopt this approach and focus on negative effects of roll call votes on electoral performance (which seem more likely than positive effects in a real-world context). For a roll call vote to have a harmful effect on incumbent performance, five criteria must be met.

First, the incumbent must cast a salient vote that contradicts the preferences of the median voter in his or her district. Despite the model of reelection-minded representatives that has become so widely accepted in political science (Jacobson, 1987; Mann, 1978; Mayhew, 1974), newer models of parties (e.g., Aldrich & Rohde, 2001; Cox & McCubbins, 2007) suggest that votes that defy the median voter should occur frequently in the contemporary era. Not only are incumbents likely to have relatively extreme views (e.g., Bafumi & Herron, 2010), but party activists and officials often demand support for proposals that might offend the median voter (Masket, 2009). Given the potential costs of dissent, which could include a primary challenge (Bawn et al., 2006), many representatives will cast such votes despite possible risks to their general election campaign.

The second condition for a roll call effect is the dissemination of information about the vote itself. Put simply, voters cannot react to a roll call vote of which they are not aware. Creating such awareness can be difficult. Representation entails an inevitable principal–agent problem in which the intentions and actions of representatives are often hidden from their relatively inattentive constituents—a problem made worse by meager local media coverage (Arnold, 2005). Nonetheless, voters may learn about roll call votes through the back-and-forth of a competitive campaign (Arnold, 1992; Mann & Wolfinger, 1981), particularly if an out-of-step vote attracts a quality challenger (Jacobson, 1989). We do not test for this step in the process directly, but the presence of any electoral effect from roll calls presupposes its existence.

The third criterion is that the information that reaches voters about the roll call vote must cause them to update their beliefs about the incumbent. Drawing on spatial voting theory, we focus in particular on voters’ perception of the member’s ideology. We hypothesize that votes for salient and controversial party agenda items will cause many voters to perceive legislators as more extreme and ideologically distant than they otherwise would have based on the overall voting record of the incumbent.

The fourth step is that voters who have updated their beliefs about the distance between themselves and the incumbent as a result of the roll call vote must then cast their ballots on that basis. In this case, we hypothesize that constituents vote against the incumbent if he or she is more ideologically distant than the opponent in a manner consistent with spatial voting theory. Perceived ideological distance therefore mediates the effect of the roll call vote on vote choice. Why might such a mediating effect occur? A direct effect of a roll call vote on vote choice or election outcomes could imply that voters have a relatively narrow focus and only update their beliefs about the incumbent on one issue at a time. In this case, however, a roll call vote salient enough to trigger such a direct effect may also signal something broader about a legislator’s ideology. Voters might therefore legitimately use the roll call to update perceptions of that ideology and then use those updated perceptions as the basis for their vote choice. Indeed, this sort of two-step process is arguably less taxing for the average voter since it requires neither a detailed understanding of the bill nor a passion for that specific issue. The voter need only know—possibly after hearing from a trusted third party—that the roll call vote in question sends an important signal about the legislator’s worldview. That said, both direct and indirect effects are possible and we test for each of them below.

If enough voters update their beliefs as spatial voting theory would suggest (and their shift is not offset by a corresponding positive shift among a different set of voters), this can damage the electoral performance of the incumbent at the aggregate level. Most significantly, if enough voters punish incumbents in competitive districts for controversial roll call votes, they can change the outcome of those elections and potentially shift party control of the relevant chamber of Congress. This micro-macro linkage is the fifth and final step in the representational process.

Our theory thus subsumes several approaches in the previous literature. The stylized spatial voting model presented by Canes-Wrone et al. (2002) suggests that voters vote solely based on spatial considerations. Although the authors’ empirical analysis focuses on candidates’ overall voting records, their logic suggests that the effects of roll call votes would be mediated by perceived ideological difference. By contrast, Jacobson (2011) and Brady et al. (2011) estimate only the total effect of roll call votes and do not separate their mediated and direct effects. Ansolabehere and Jones (2010) estimate the effect of disagreement about roll call votes on vote choice and approval controlling for perceived ideological difference, which may underestimate the impact of those roll calls if their effects are largely mediated by differences in perceived ideology.

Roll Call Votes and Constituent Perceptions

How exactly do roll call votes affect the way constituents perceive their members? We investigate whether members’ roll call voting behavior leads respondents to perceive them as more ideologically extreme and then whether perceptions of ideological difference are associated with support for the incumbent.

Our investigation relies on the 2010 Cooperative Congressional Election Study (CCES). The CCES was administered online by YouGov of Palo Alto, CA, which recruits people to a panel and then solicits panel members to take surveys. In this case, it matched those who agreed to take the CCES to a random sample of the U.S. population on such attributes as race, religion, income, education, sex, party identification, and ideological orientation. As in other types of surveys, the CCES also includes sampling weights that adjust the sample’s demographics to mirror Census data. Ansolabehere and Schaffner (2011) find that this methodology produces samples similar to those produced by other survey modes on most dimensions. The main exception is that respondents tend to be more interested in and knowledgeable about politics (see also Hill, Lo, Vavreck, & Zaller, 2007). For example, in Ansolabehere and Schaffner’s study, 68% of YouGov respondents knew the political party that controlled the House of Representatives compared with only 54% of telephone survey respondents.²

We limit our analysis to respondents who resided in the 230 districts with a Democratic incumbent facing a Republican challenger in the 2010 general election.³ We exclude the districts of four incumbents who faced no Republican opponent and two incumbents who were elected in special elections in 2010. Our sample is comprised of 28,367 respondents and includes respondents living in each of the 230 districts. We examined the consequences of support for three controversial pieces of legislation:

The Patient Protection and Affordable Care Act (health care reform), which passed 219 to 212 on March 21, 2010, with support from 201 of the 230 Democrats in our sample.

The American Clean Energy and Security Act (cap and trade), which passed 219 to 212 on June 26, 2009, with support from 190 of the 230 Democrats in our sample.

The American Recovery and Reinvestment Act (the stimulus), which passed 244 to 188 on January 28, 2009, with support from 216 of the 230 Democrats in our sample.

Roll Call Votes and Perceptions of Member Ideology

Our first analysis examines respondents’ perceptions of their Democratic representative and how those perceptions vary with the incumbent’s support for the stimulus, health care reform, and cap and trade. The CCES asked respondents to place the incumbent on a 7-point scale from very liberal (1) to very conservative (7). Figure 1 displays the distribution of responses for those who could place the Democratic incumbent on this scale.⁴ In each of the three subfigures, we present a kernel density plots of the distributions of perceived ideology for incumbents who supported and opposed each roll call vote. This provides an initial test of whether roll call voting is associated with perceptions of members’ ideology.

Figure 1.

Constituent perceptions of ideologies of Democratic incumbents

As expected, the distribution of supporters is skewed more to the left than that of opponents. Simple t tests confirm that these roll call votes are associated with different perceptions of member ideology. Most notably, the difference in the average perceptions of supporters and opponents of health care is 0.93 on the 7-point ideology scale (p < .001). For the other roll call votes, the comparable differences are statistically significant but smaller in magnitude (stimulus: 0.63; cap and trade: 0.46).

How do perceptions of Democratic incumbents compare to constituents’ perceptions of themselves? We subtracted the respondent’s self-reported ideology, also on a 7-point scale, from the perceived ideology of their representative and present the distribution of this measure in Figure 2. Most respondents (58%) consider themselves more conservative than their representative, while 19% place themselves at the same place as their representative and 12% consider themselves more liberal. The vertical lines denoting the average Democratic, independent, and Republican respondents suggest, not surprisingly, that Republicans and independents tend to consider themselves more conservative than their Democratic representatives, while Democrats tend to view themselves as slightly more liberal.

Figure 2.

Constituent perceptions of ideological distance from Democratic incumbents

Of course, voters may perceive supporters of these bills as more liberal because those members have liberal records, not because of the individual votes themselves. We thus test for whether roll call votes are associated with perceived member ideology while controlling for respondent partisanship and member ideology. We estimate OLS models in which the dependent variables are the 7-point measure of the perceived ideology of the incumbent or the signed measure of perceived ideological difference between the incumbent and constituent (which ranges from −6 to 6). The key independent variables are indicators for each of the three roll call votes. We control for the party identification of the respondent as measured using the conventional 7-point scale (with higher values indicating a less Democratic or more Republican identification) because Republicans and independents are likely to perceive Democratic incumbents as more liberal than Democrats do. We also control for members’ ideology via their first-dimension DW-NOMINATE scores because perceptions of member ideology should be associated with members’ overall voting records.⁵

Table 1 presents the results of these models.⁶ Party identification and member ideology have their expected association with perceived ideology: as party identification shifts toward the Republican end of the spectrum, the expected placement of the Democratic incumbent shifts toward the liberal end. On average, a strong Republican would place these incumbents 1.5 units to the left of where a strong Democrat would place them. Members who have more moderate voting records (as measured by their first-dimension DW-NOMINATE scores) are also perceived to be less liberal: the most liberal and conservative representatives in this sample of Democratic incumbents would be perceived to be 0.66 units apart, other things equal.

Table 1.

Models of Perceived Ideologies of Democratic Incumbents

	Ideological placement of Democratic incumbent	Perceived ideological difference
Party identification	−0.25*	−0.80*
	(0.01)	(0.01)
DW-NOMINATE score	0.75*	0.61*
	(0.17)	(0.20)
Health care reform	−0.73*	−0.64*
	(0.10)	(0.11)
Stimulus	−0.13	−0.22*
	(0.11)	(0.10)
Cap and trade	−0.18*	−0.08
	(0.07)	(0.08)
Constant	4.85*	2.51*
	(0.13)	(0.12)
R ²	0.17	0.48
Unweighted N	21,878	21,576

Note: Cell entries are ordinary least squares regression coefficients with standard errors in parentheses. The data are weighted with sampling weights and the standard errors are calculated to reflect clustering within congressional districts. Ideological placement is coded 1 (very liberal) to 7 (very conservative). Perceived ideological difference is coded −6 (more conservative than incumbent) to +6 (more liberal than incumbent).

p < .05.

The apparent effects of these roll calls are also evident. We find that Democratic incumbents who supported health care reform and cap and trade, although not the stimulus, are perceived to be more liberal. Of these votes, health care reform is most strongly associated with perceived ideology. All else equal, a supporter of health care reform would be placed 0.73 units further to the left of the respondent than an opponent—a larger shift than the estimated DW-NOMINATE effect noted above.

Our model of perceived ideological differences in the second column of results in Table 1 supports this finding. In contrast to the ideological placement model, we find that members who supported the stimulus were seen as more liberal than their constituents, but cap and trade had no significant association with ideological difference. The apparent effect of health care reform is still present: relative to opponents of health care, supporters were seen as more liberal than their constituents. Auxiliary analyses (available on request) show that the effects of health care reform were concentrated among Republicans and independents, who were naturally less likely to support the bill. The relationship between supporting health care reform and perceived ideological difference was greater for pure independents (b = −0.78; SE = 0.27) and Republicans (b = −0.89; SE = 0.13) than for Democrats (b = −0.38; SE = 0.13).

In short, roll call votes in support of these controversial bills appeared to lead constituents to see Democratic incumbents as more liberal. The strongest and most consistent relationships involved health care reform, especially among independents and Republicans.

Estimates of the Mediating Effect of Perceived Member Ideology

If roll call votes are associated with how constituents perceive their representative’s ideology, are they also associated with how they voted? We analyze the relationship between these roll call votes and self-reported vote choice, which is coded 1 for a vote for the Democratic incumbent and 0 for the Republican challenger. Just above half (55%) of the sample reported voting for the Democratic incumbent. We first determine whether roll call votes appeared to affect vote choice directly, controlling for the respondent’s party identification, Obama’s share of the 2008 vote in the district, and the incumbent’s first-dimension DW-NOMINATE score estimate (Poole & Rosenthal, 2007). We then test our proposed mechanism by adding perceived ideological difference to the model. The relationship between this variable and vote choice, as well as any differences in the apparent effects of the roll call votes compared to the first model, will suggest whether perceived ideological difference mediates the relationship between the roll calls and vote choice.

Before conducting this analysis, we modify the perceived ideological difference variable from the version analyzed in Figure 2 and Table 1. First, we collapse the small number of respondents who placed themselves to the left of the Democratic incumbent. No matter how far to the left they were, the vast majority of these respondents voted for the Democrat. Second, we reversed the coding of this variable so that higher values indicate that respondents placed themselves further to the ideological right of the incumbent. The resulting measure ranges from 0 to 6 where 0 indicates that the respondent is to the left of or ideologically the same as the incumbent and 6 indicates that the respondent believes that he or she is very conservative and the incumbent is very liberal.

Finally, we estimate models both for the entire sample and for Democrats, independents, and Republicans separately. (Independents who lean toward a party are counted as partisans.) Partisans were quite polarized in their support for health care reform and these other initiatives and thus their responses may differ. In the models for independents, we drop party identification. In the models for Democrats and Republicans, we substitute a measure of strength of partisanship, which is coded 1 for independents who lean toward the party, 2 for weak partisans, and 3 for strong partisans.

The first model, which is estimated for all respondents who reported voting in their House election, suggests that support for health care reform is associated with a lower likelihood of voting for the incumbent. Respondents are approximately five points less likely to vote for an incumbent who supported health care reform than one who opposed it. None of the other roll call votes has a statistically significant relationship. When the perceived ideological difference between respondent and representative is included (Model 2), it is strongly associated with approval and vote choice. A one standard deviation shift from the mean (from approximately 2 to 4 on the 0-6 scale) is associated with 44-point decrease in the probability of voting for the Democratic incumbent. Moreover, as expected, perceived ideological difference appears to mediate some of the effect of health care reform. The coefficient for health care reform is much lower in magnitude in this model (b = −0.27) than in Model 1 (b = −0.52).

The results for the separate partisan groups tell a similar story. Among Democrats, a Democratic incumbent’s support for health care reform is not significantly associated with a lower likelihood of voting for that incumbent. Interestingly, the only important roll call vote is for cap and trade; support for this initiative actually appears to increase the likelihood that Democratic voters will support a Democratic incumbent. Among independents and Republicans, however, support for health care reform is associated with a lower probability of voting for the Democratic incumbent. The apparent mediation effect emerges among independents and Republicans as well. For both groups, including perceived ideological difference in the model weakens the relationship between the incumbent’s support for health care reform and vote choice. For independents, this relationship is also no longer statistically significant at conventional levels.

Appendix A presents several robustness checks to demonstrate that these individual-level results are not spurious. Our results hold when the dependent variable is job approval instead of vote choice as a dependent variable and when we account for the potential endogeneity between perceived ideological distance and vote choice. We also present a more sophisticated mediation analysis that estimates the direct effect of the roll call votes on individual vote choice as well as the indirect effect via perceived ideological difference. These results provide even stronger evidence that most of the relationship between the health care reform vote and vote choice is mediated by perceived ideological difference. Our results are thus consistent with the analysis presented above and appear relatively robust to confounding factors.

Taken as a whole, our individual-level results suggest that Democratic incumbents’ support for a controversial piece of legislation—health care reform—led respondents to perceive them as more liberal and more ideologically distant even after accounting for their overall voting record. This perceived ideological difference appeared to mediate the effect of health care reform on the likelihood of voting for the incumbent, particularly among Republican voters.

Roll Call Votes and Democratic Vote Share in 2010

The results in the previous section demonstrate that salient roll call votes, and in particular health care reform, appeared to translate into greater perceived ideological distance and less electoral support for Democratic incumbents among individual voters. But do these effects scale up to the district level? In other words, did those micro-level perceptions have negative macro-level consequences for Democrats?

Effects of Roll Call Votes on Democratic Incumbent Vote Share

We begin by regressing each Democratic incumbent’s two-party vote share on the three roll call votes, the Democratic share of the two-party presidential vote in 2008, which captures the partisan leanings of each member’s district, as well as members’ first-dimension DW-NOMINATE score (Poole & Rosenthal, 2007) and Congressional Quarterly party unity score in the 111th Congress, which capture important characteristics of their overall voting records.⁷

The first column of Table 3 shows that, even after controlling for Obama’s share of the district’s 2008 presidential vote and their DW-NOMINATE and party unity scores, the three roll call votes are jointly significant in an F test (p < .01), suggesting that they provide additional explanatory power. The vote share of Democratic supporters of health care reform was 8.5 points lower than that of Democratic opponents. By contrast, support for the stimulus or cap and trade did not have a statistically significant relationship with vote share.⁸

Table 2.

Models of Vote Choice in House Races

	All		Democrats		Independents		Republicans
	(1)	(2)	(3)	(4)	(5)	(6)	(7)	(8)
Ideological difference		−0.56*		−0.48*		−0.64*		−0.51*
		(0.03)		(0.05)		(0.05)		(0.04)
Health care reform	−0.52*	−0.27*	−0.19	−0.12	−0.56*	−0.25	−0.66*	−0.39*
	(0.12)	(0.12)	(0.18)	(0.18)	(0.21)	(0.25)	(0.14)	(0.16)
Stimulus	0.01	0.13	−0.16	−0.18	0.49	0.71	0.01	0.15
	(0.13)	(0.16)	(0.25)	(0.24)	(0.26)	(0.38)	(0.17)	(0.17)
Cap and trade	0.03	0.12	0.37*	0.33*	−0.15	0.05	−0.13	−0.03
	(0.10)	(0.09)	(0.12)	(0.13)	(0.15)	(0.16)	(0.12)	(0.14)
DW-NOMINATE score	0.16	−0.35	−0.23	−0.57	0.68	−0.34	0.39	0.06
	(0.24)	(0.26)	(0.43)	(0.42)	(0.49)	(0.59)	(0.33)	(0.39)
Obama 2008 vote share	0.01*	0.01*	0.005	0.005	0.02*	0.01	0.01*	0.01
	(0.003)	(0.004)	(0.004)	(0.004)	(0.00)	(0.01)	(0.01)	(0.01)
Party identification	−0.69*	−0.42*
	(0.02)	(0.02)
Strength of partisanship			0.31*	0.20*			−0.17*(0.04)	−0.08(0.05)
			(0.04)	(0.04)			(0.04)	(0.05)
Constant	2.47*	2.18*	0.56	1.12*	−1.11*	−0.15	−1.05*	−0.17
	(0.20)	(0.22)	(0.30)	(0.30)	(0.39)	(0.50)	(0.28)	(0.31)
Unweighted N	15,625	15,625	7,557	7,557	1,291	1,291	6,777	6,777

Note: Cell entries are probit coefficients with standard errors in parentheses. The data are weighted with sampling weights and the standard errors are calculated to reflect clustering within congressional districts. The dependent variable is coded 1 if the respondent reported voting for the Democratic incumbent and 0 if they reported voting for the Republican challenger.

p < .05.

Table 3.

Models of Two-Party Vote Received by Democratic Incumbents in 2010

		Matched
	All	HCR	Stimulus	Cap/trade
Presidential vote	0.99*	0.56*	0.24*	0.49*
	(0.03)	(0.16)	(0.13)	(0.13)
Party unity	0.03	−0.03	−0.06	−0.13
	(0.06)	(0.06)	(0.07)	(0.09)
DW-NOMINATE 1st dimension	−0.22	−8.65*	−11.47*	−13.0*
	(2.59)	(4.24)	(5.22)	(5.89)
Health care reform	−8.49*	−5.80*
	(1.44)	(0.80)
Stimulus	−1.66		1.75
	(1.62)		(2.96)
Cap and trade	−1.68			−3.12*
	(1.03)			(1.57)
Constant	5.66	25.7*	38.2*	35.9*
	(4.31)	(8.22)	(8.59)	(9.20)
R ²	0.88	0.40	0.19	0.35
N	230	85	99	86

Note: Cell entries are ordinary least squares regression coefficients with robust standard errors in parentheses. Columns 2-4 include matched samples of bill supporters in competitive districts and their most comparable opponents and include weights to maximize balance. HCR = health care reform.

p < .05

However, supporters and opponents of health care reform, the stimulus, and cap and trade represented very different districts and had very different overall voting records. For example, we simply do not observe Democratic incumbents in safe seats opposing health care reform. To visualize this concern, Figure 3 plots the association between district presidential vote in 2008 and the Democratic incumbent’s vote share in 2010 for supporters and opponents of each of the three bills. Black circles represent opponents of the bill in question, and gray triangles represent supporters.

Figure 3.

Roll call imbalance by district partisanship

As Figure 3 illustrates, opponents of the bills appear to have outperformed supporters in swing districts where both are represented, especially in the case of health care reform. In addition, as the interactive models estimated by McGhee et al. (2010) and Brady et al. (2011) suggest, the effect of supporting the bills appears to vary depending on district partisanship. However, most opponents represent competitive districts, while supporters are concentrated in safer districts that backed Obama by wide margins. Since we lack cases in which opponents of health care reform and the other two votes represent more conservative districts, the statistical models presented above may be extrapolating beyond the bounds of the observed data (see, for example, Ho, Imai, King, & Stuart, 2007).

To address these concerns, columns 2 to 4 of Table 3 present regression results for matched samples of Democratic incumbents. These matched samples maximize balance in district presidential vote, party unity, and DW-NOMINATE first dimension scores among Democratic incumbent supporters of the bills in competitive districts and their most comparable opponents (see Appendix A for more details). Our results suggest that the apparent effect of health care reform is not the result of extrapolation. The vote share of Democrats who supported health care reform was 5.8 points lower than that of the most comparable Democrats who opposed the bill. The vote share of supporters of cap and trade was 3.1 points lower than that of opponents, which is consistent with the findings of Brady et al. (2011). The apparent effect of the stimulus is again null.

Estimates of the Mediating Effect of Perceived Member Ideology

Having established that the negative relationship between support for health care reform and vote choice holds at the aggregate level, we now test our hypothesized mediation model. As in the individual-level data, Democratic incumbents who supported health care reform were seen as more liberal on average by their constituents than those who did not.⁹ The question is whether this roll call vote had an indirect effect on vote share via increased perceptions of ideological distance. To test whether individual opinions affected election outcomes, we first need estimates of constituent opinion in each congressional district—specifically, average perceptions of ideological distance from the incumbent. We generate these aggregated opinion estimates with data from the CCES, using multilevel regression and poststratification to improve the precision of these estimates. We then estimated how much these district-level perceptions of ideological distance mediated the relationship between these roll call votes and vote share. (Details of this analysis can be found in Appendix B.)

As in the individual-level analysis, we also find that the relationship between these roll call votes—and health care reform in particular—was substantially mediated by perceived ideological distance. Among all Democratic incumbents, both the mediation effect via perceived ideological distance and the direct effect of health care reform are negative and statistically significant. However, among the matched sample of health care reform supporters and opponents, the direct effect is no longer significant but the mediated effect is significant, reducing supporters’ vote share by approximately 4.5 percentage points via an increase in perceived ideological distance. By contrast, the apparent effects of cap and trade in Table 3 are not evident in the matched sample. Thus both the individual-level and aggregate-level analyses confirm that support for health care reform was associated with electoral losses for Democratic incumbents largely because of the effects of this roll call vote on perceived ideological distance.

Health Care Reform and Democratic Seat Share

The results above suggest that health care reform had a powerful effect on the vote share of Democratic incumbents. But did it actually cost them seats? We simulate a counterfactual scenario where all Democrats in competitive seats (those where President Obama received less than 60% of the two-party vote in 2008) vote no on health care reform. How many additional seats would Democrats have retained in this scenario?

To estimate this effect, we simulate the predicted vote share for these incumbents using the health care reform model for the full sample in Table 3, comparing predicted outcomes in the observed data with a counterfactual in which all Democrats in competitive districts voted against reform.¹⁰ We then compare the number of seats predicted to be held by Democrats in the two scenarios. Over 10,000 simulations, the median outcome hands Democrats 25 additional seats they otherwise lost (95% CI: [21, 29]). In 62% of simulations, Democrats are predicted to win 25 or more additional seats, which would have given them enough to retain the House (they ended up with 193 seats after the election). This estimate suggests that health care reform may account for the difference between Democrats’ 63-seat loss and the median academic forecast of 44 seats in Table 1 of Brady et al. (2011).

Conclusion

To use President Obama’s term, Democrats got a “shellacking” in the 2010 election. This outcome caught many observers by surprise. It was never going to be a good year for the majority party given the number of marginal seats they had to defend, the weak economy, and the president’s middling approval ratings, but few observers thought they would lose 63 House seats. Our analysis suggests one possible reason for these losses: health care reform. Democratic incumbents who supported health care reform were perceived by many of their constituents as more liberal than the individual constituents themselves. And largely because of this ideological gap between representative and constituents, Democrats who supported health care reform received fewer votes—a consequence visible at both the individual and aggregate levels. Ultimately, we estimate that health care reform reduced the Democratic House delegation by 25 seats, which may have cost them control of the chamber.¹¹ This estimate is comparable to the gap between the outcome and forecasts that relied on traditional predictors such as the economy and presidential approval.

Our analysis of the 2010 elections also has broader implications for the study of roll call voting and congressional elections. First, we have sought to identify the apparent causal impact of roll call votes by matching Democratic opponents of health care reform to the supporters most similar to them on several key dimensions. Particularly noteworthy is that, in 2010 at least, support for health care reform mattered above and beyond the incumbent’s ideology or party unity, both of which have been identified by previous research as making incumbents appear “out of step”. In fact, it may take only a single vote on a prominent issue—not a long track record of ideological or partisan fealty—to create that impression among constituents.

Second, we have pinpointed a mechanism for the relationship between roll call votes and aggregate vote share that other studies have noted. Controversial roll call votes—or, more likely, the publicity that they generate in the news media and in campaign communications—can shift constituents’ perceptions of their representative’s ideology. In 2010, Democratic supporters of health care reform were perceived as further to the ideological left, which made them seem more distant from most of their constituents, especially independents and Republicans. Of course, more research needs to be done to compare this explanation to plausible alternatives and to test for its existence in other elections. Nevertheless, our results provide the most specific evidence to date about how roll call votes affect attitudes and vote choice.

Finally, our simulations suggest that the marginal effect of support for health care reform on Democratic incumbents’ vote share “added up” to tangible seat losses in November 2010. This sort of counterfactual is not very common in the literature on voting behavior and elections, but we believe it is critical. After all, what ultimately matters is not whether a Democratic incumbent won his or her seat by a narrower margin due to health care reform, but whether the vote losses changed who actually won the seat. By estimating this counterfactual, the full consequences of roll call voting for representation become clear: members who are out of step, even on a single salient vote, really can end up out of office.

However, there are important caveats to this counterfactual analysis, which varies only the votes for health care reform cast by Democratic House members in competitive districts. The real political world is more dynamic. We have no way of knowing, for example, whether more Democratic dissent in the House would have doomed the health care bill and thereby led voters to see the Obama presidency and Democratic Congress as failures. It is also possible that the failure of health care reform would have demobilized some Democratic donors, interest groups, and voters in 2010. Although our results suggest that Democratic supporters of health care reform lost votes as a consequence, counterfactuals about the number of seats lost inevitably leave out many other factors and possibilities.

Finally, while we go further than previous efforts in testing a causal model of how roll call votes affect elections, there are nonetheless limitations to our analysis. One is simply the challenge of estimating causal effects in observational data. We have made extensive efforts to isolate the effects of roll call votes using statistical matching and sensitivity analysis. But until we convince members of Congress to randomize their votes, our inferences about the effects of those votes will be necessarily provisional. Second, there are missing pieces to the story. Perhaps most important among them is the content of campaign communication. We know that health care reform figured prominently in television advertising and other communication with voters, but we lack the necessary data to examine the effects of such messages on vote choice. This is a question future research should explore.

Despite these caveats and the limitations in the available data, we have attempted to craft a compelling and rigorous case that key roll call votes mattered in 2010. Establishing this result confirms a series of important studies of congressional representation. Health care reform was a bold move by Democrats, and it prompted a strong response.

Footnotes

Appendix A

Appendix B

Declaration of Conflicting Interests

The author(s) declared no potential conflicts of interest with respect to the research, authorship, and/or publication of this article.

Funding

The author(s) received no financial support for the research, authorship, and/or publication of this article.

Notes

Bios

Brendan Nyhan is an assistant professor of government at Dartmouth College. His research focuses on political scandal and misperceptions about politics and health care. He also studies social networks and applied statistical methods.

Eric McGhee is a Policy Fellow at the Public Policy Institute of California. He received his PhD in political science in 2003 from the University of California, Berkeley.

John Sides is an associate professor of Political Science at George Washington University. His research focuses on political behavior in American and comparative politics.

Seth Masket is an associate professor of political science at the University of Denver. He is the author of No Middle Ground: How Informal Party Organizations Control Nominations and Polarize Legislatures (University of Michigan, 2009).

Steven Greene is an associate professor of Political Science at North Carolina State University. He studies public opinion, partisanship, and gender. He is the author of a forthcoming book on the Politics of Parenthood.

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