In this chapter, we investigate whether Fox News’ presence in districts shaped the competitive electoral landscape by influencing potential candidates’ perceptions about the partisan make-up of the constituency in the district and shaping their perceived chances of winning or losing. Specifically, in this chapter, we test whether the entry of Fox News created the perception of a rightward shift in district party composition among potential Republican candidates considering a run in the district. We find that in districts with more Fox News availability, high-quality potential Republican candidates were more likely to challenge Democratic incumbents, especially if the districts were closely competitive.

If the conventional wisdom brought about by Obama's success with Black voters was true then community commitment signaling should not be necessary for Black politicians as the shared physical similarities should be enough to garner support from Black voters. The findings in this chapter do not support that conventional thinking. On the contrary, I find that community commitment signals are very effective for Black man politicians when the signals they use are costly ones that rely on personal sacrifice. Black woman politicians, however, are perceived to be committed without the use of signals offering important evidence of gendered differences even within the ranks of Black politicians.

This chapter investigates whether the community commitment signaling framework is only applicable to Black politicians. Much of the work that explores Black political representation focuses on the relationship that Black people have with Black politicians despite the fact that they, on average, vote for more White politicians than Black ones, especially at higher levels of office. Using the same experimental design from the two previous chapters, I look into whether Black voters' expectations for commitment only exist for politicians who look like them. I find that while the baseline preference for politicians does favor Black ones, White politicians, particularly White men politicians, who engage costly sacrificial behavior still gain Black support. White woman politicians, however, see little to no improvement in perceptions of them regardless of the signal they use. This effect is driven primarily by Black woman respondents. On the whole, this chapter provides strong evidence for the generalizability of the community commitment framework outside of the same-race representation context.

This chapter relies on a large-scale experimental test with approximately 4,200 Black respondents. The experiment is designed to assess whether certain kinds of signals from politicians influence the information Black voters glean about the politician and their subsequent evaluations. This chapter looks at the aggregate effect of the signals for the purposes of seeing what if anything certain signals do regardless of who employs them. The consistent finding from this chapter is that signals of personal sacrifice are the most effective at communicating commitment to the Black community. However, questions remain about whether the race and/or gender of the politician informs these results. Taken together, Black voters' preference for costly signals is apparent here, setting the stage for the nuance discussed in the next two chapters.

In this concluding chapter, we review our findings in the context of our initial pre-analysis plan and discuss the limitations of our studies. We then analyze the implications of our study and findings for their scholarly contributions and discuss next steps for future research. We conclude with a discussion of the normative implications of our findings. Despite the hubbub about Fox News being a bull-in-the-china shop, its effects on politicians were contingent on the context of the district they represented. Even if its effects were circumscribed, our evidence shows that the consequences were real. The implications of our findings are twofold. On the one hand, it throws some cold water on the popular notion that Fox News was a right-wing bulldozer that pulled American politics uniformly in a conservative direction. On the other hand, it makes clear that standard theoretical models of congressional behavior are founded on an assumption that, while useful, is most certainly flawed. Namely, politicians are not fully informed rational calculators. Politicians are people.

This chapter focuses on collective representation, examining whether Fox News affects how the American public is represented. Chapter 5 revealed Fox News effects on dyadic representation; we cannot assume similar effects on collective representation. Yet, in some ways, the path by which Fox News would affect collective representation is clearer than at the district-level. Because Fox News is a national outlet with a wide following, it could affect collective representation through agenda-setting. If many people across many districts regularly watch Fox News, it may draw the attention of both legislators and constituents to the same set of issues. To test for Fox News effects on collective representation, we examine whether the presence of Fox produced different policy outcomes than would have occurred in its absence. We simulate a world where Fox News does not exist in any member’s district and then compare it to the actual behavior of members of Congress given the observed levels of Fox News. The results suggest a boost for Republican policies in four of the six Congresses we examined. However, the effects are only statistically significant for one Congress, the 108th (2003–2004).

This chapter asks the question: Where did Black individuals' desire for community commitment come from? The answer this, I draw on numerous primary and secondary sources starting in the Reconstruction era to show where Black voters' expectations of those representing them came from and how they shifted over time. The latter part of the chapter focuses on the Civil Rights Movement out of which many Black voters received the right to engage in politics. I contend that these new rights and those who helped acquire them for the Black community created the lens through which most Black people see effective leadership today, and solidified the desire for representatives willing to put their lives on the line for the sake of the racial group's progress.

This chapter begins with a description of the arrival and proliferation of Fox News across the United States during its early years and concludes with a description and some analyses of Fox News’ content. Both demonstrations are critical to our case. The former is required because our identification strategy requires that we satisfy the assumption that the Fox News rollout was as-if random – or haphazard – in the sense that it is not related to political factors capable of shaping House members’ behavior. The latter is important for both our empirical evidence and theoretical arguments. First, if we expect the arrival and presence of Fox News to have a unique influence on elite political behavior, it is important to demonstrate whether and to what degree Fox News’ content is different from other networks. Second, examining Fox News’ content can tell us something about the mechanisms for its effects or the process by which it shapes the attitudes and behaviors of political elites.