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Replication data for: Explaining Explanations: How Legislators Explain their Policy Positions and How Citizens React

Harvard Dataverse (Africa Rice Center, Bioversity International, CCAFS, CIAT, IFPRI, IRRI and WorldFish)

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Title Replication data for: Explaining Explanations: How Legislators Explain their Policy Positions and How Citizens React
 
Identifier https://doi.org/10.7910/DVN/26714
 
Creator Grose, Christian
Malhotra, Neil
Van Houweling, Rob
 
Publisher Harvard Dataverse
 
Description Legislators claim that how they explain their votes matters as much as or more than the roll calls themselves. However, few studies have systematically examined legislators' explanations and citizen attitudes in response to these explanations. We theorize that legislators strategically tailor explanations to constituents in order to compensate for policy choices that are incongruent with constituent preferences, and to reinforce policy choices that are congruent. We conduct a within-subjects field experiment using U.S. senators as subjects to test this hypothesis. We then conduct a between-subjects survey experiment of ordinary people to see how they react to the explanatory strategies used by senators in the field experiment. We find that most senators tailor their explanations to th
eir audiences, and that these tailored explanations are effective at currying support -- especially among people who disagree with the legislators' roll-call positions.
 
Subject Social Sciences
Congress
Mechanical Turk
Surveys
Voting
Field experiments
Political participation
Immigration policy
Senate
Representation
 
Contributor Grose, Christian
 
Type Study 1: Field experimental data; Study 2: Survey experimental data.