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Revealing Issue Salience via Costly Protest: How Legislative Behavior Following Protest Advantages Low-Resource Groups

Published online by Cambridge University Press:  18 December 2020

LaGina Gause Open the ORCID record for LaGina Gause [Opens in a new window]
LaGina Gause*
Affiliation:
Department of Political Science, University of California San Diego, La Jolla, CA, USA
*
E-mail: lgause@ucsd.edu
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Abstract

Collective action, particularly by low-resource groups, presents an opportunity for re-election-minded legislators to learn about (and subsequently represent) their constituents’ salient interests. In fact, legislators are more likely to support the preferences of protesters than non-protesters. Legislators are also more likely to support the preferences of racial and ethnic minority, low-income and grassroots protesting groups than they are to represent better-resourced protesters. This argument emerges from a formal theory and is empirically tested using legislative roll-call vote data from the 102nd through the 104th US Congresses and data on civil rights, minority issues and civil liberties issue area protests reported in the New York Times. This counterintuitive result enhances understanding of inequalities in representation. It demonstrates that under certain conditions, political representation favors disadvantaged populations.

Keywords

protestcollective actioninequalityrace and ethnic politicslegislative behaviorrepresentation
Type
Article
Information
British Journal of Political Science , Volume 52 , Issue 1 , January 2022 , pp. 259 - 279
Copyright
Copyright © The Author(s), 2020. Published by Cambridge University Press

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