This book demonstrates the consequences of legislators' strategic communication for representation in American politics. Representational Style in Congress shows how legislators present their work to cultivate constituent support. Using a massive new data set of texts from legislators and new statistical techniques to analyze the texts, this book provides comprehensive measures of what legislators say to constituents and explains why legislators adopt these styles. Using the new measures, Justin Grimmer shows how legislators affect how constituents evaluate their representatives and the consequences of strategic statements for political discourse. The introduction of new statistical techniques for political texts allows a more comprehensive and systematic analysis of what legislators say and why it matters than was previously possible. Using these new techniques, the book makes the compelling case that to understand political representation, we must understand what legislators say to constituents.

Prizes

Winner of Richard F. Fenno, Jr Prize, Legislative Studies Section, American Political Science Association 2014

"Representational Style in Congress targets a question long of interest to scholars of legislative politics: how and why do legislators engage in strategic communication with their constituents about their work on Capitol Hill? Grimmer uses new data and new methods to develop measures of senators’ discourse and then demonstrates convincingly how these presentational styles matter for dyadic and collective representation. This book is a compelling and important contribution to the study of congressional behavior and political communication." Tracy Sulkin, University of Illinois, Urbana-Champaign

Justin Grimmer is an Assistant Professor in the Department of Political Science at Stanford University, California, which he joined after receiving his PhD from Harvard University's Department of Government in 2010. His research combines new statistical techniques, machine learning, and massive data sets to study how political representation occurs in American politics. His work has appeared in the American Political Science Review, the American Journal of Political Science, The Journal of Politics, Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences, Political Analysis, and Regulation and Governance. Grimmer's research has received several awards, including the Warren E. Miller prize for best paper published in political analysis, the Robert H. Durr award from the Midwest Political Science Association, and the John T. Williams prize from the Society for Political Methodology.