A reexamination of the principal-agent relationship in politics

Abstract

Abstract That senators from the same state often have a large difference in their ideological voting records has proven inconvenient for a literature that has largely relied on a median voter model of elections. One exception is Palfrey ( Review of Economic Studies , 1984, 51, 139–156), whose analysis implies the hypothesis that the expected difference in such voting records varies directly with the variance of that state's density function of constituent ideological preferences. This paper provides empirical testing consistent with this hypothesis. The paper then argues that currently accepted methodology for measuring senatorial shirking is systematically biased towards indicating shirking and provides empirical analysis consistent with this argument.