Measuring Constituent Policy Preferences in Congress, State Legislatures, and Cities

Abstract

Little is known about the American public’s policy preferences at the level of Congressional districts, state legislative districts, and local municipalities. In this article, we overcome the limited sample sizes that have hindered previous research by jointly scaling the policy preferences of 275,000 Americans based on their responses to policy questions. We combine this large dataset of Americans’ policy preferences with recent advances in opinion estimation to estimate the preferences of every state, congressional district, state legislative district, and large city. We show that our estimates outperform previous measures of citizens’ policy preferences. These new estimates enable scholars to examine representation at a variety of geographic levels. We demonstrate the utility of these estimates through applications of our measures to examine representation in state legislatures and city governments.