EL OTRO INFIERNO

“It seems like it is easier than ever to get people engaged in the twenty-first century, and the political process

seems more open to citizen input. People power, perhaps, is on the rise.”

- Hahrie Han 2014, p. 3

On March 28, 2012, Congressman Bobby Rush provocatively donned a hooded sweatshirt before the United States House of Representatives. Explaining his actions, Rush told CNBC, “The floor of the House . . . should not ever be disconnected nor distant from the cries of the American people for justice. That’s one of the reasons I wore the hoodie to the floor.”1 _{The hoodie was a symbol for protests held throughout}

the nation as groups expressed outrage over the delayed arrest and later failed convic- tion of George Zimmerman, a neighborhood watchman who killed teenager Trayvon Martin after fearing him to be suspicious. While the death of Trayvon was the impe- tus for this specific protest, the events embodied a larger dissatisfaction over current and historical injustice for African Americans. Rush elaborated, “I’m outraged be- cause this pattern [of black men being racially profiled] has existed in this nation for a long time . . . I wore a hoodie because I wanted to identify with [the demonstrators] and tell them to keep demonstrating, because be it not for them we wouldn’t even be discussing Trayvon Martin.”

1

Collective action is a public form of non-electoral participation that involves multiple participants professing a desire for some policy-related outcome (McAdam and Su, 2002). These events involve familiar protest events like rallies, marches, and demonstrations; and, more conventional participation including petitions, lobbying, and letter-writing campaigns. One virtue of collective action is that it can inform policymakers about their constituency (Gillion, 2013; Kollman, 1998). This informa- tion can enhance responsiveness and is pertinent for public officials wishing to avoid political repercussions on Election Day (Arnold, 1990). Surprisingly, there have been relatively few empirical studies demonstrating the influence of collective action on legislative decision-making (e.g. Gillion, 2013; McAdam and Su, 2002). There is even less focus on how the influence of collective action on legislative behavior varies across the resource levels of diverse participants.

The goal of this project is to examine the moderating effect of resources in the relationship between public opinion and representation. Particularly, I analyze whether legislators are more likely to reflect the interests of higher or lower resourced collective action participants in their roll call voting behavior following collective ac- tion. The theory of legislative bias expects that legislators are more likely to represent the interests of lower resource groups than higher resource collective action partici- pants because they want to represent the interests of groups who care enough about an issue to reward or punish the legislator during the next reelection. For groups faced with less flexible time, little money, inadequate transportation, and other resources pertinent for participation, collective action is more difficult to mobilize. However, when issue salience is high, the desire for action grows more urgent and the ability to participate becomes more likely for infrequent participators. This bias in favor of low resource collective action participants is robust to the measurement of resources, the nature of collective action, the type of legislator, and the characteristics of the group’s organizational capacity, at least according to data for the 102nd, 103rd, and 104th Congresses.

The Data

The data for this dissertation relies heavily on the Dynamics of Collective Action (DCA) database – a compilation of collective action events reported in the New York Times. While comprehensive, the DCA is limited to collective action events reported 1960 to 1995. I used GIS to code the congressional district that overlaps with the collective action events, but the data necessary for this coding was until recently only publicly available beginning 1991 to present. Although I confine the analysis to 1991-1995, extrapolating those results to current legislative behavior may not be appropriate. To be sure, contemporary collective action has taken somewhat of a more online presence, the House of Representatives is now more ethnically and racially diverse, the electoral participation of racial and ethnic groups is beginning to comport with that of white voters, and the election of the nation’s first black president has lead some to coin the nation “post-racial” implying that racial discrimination is no longer significant. These trends could have implications for the relationship between resources, collective action, and representation.

Even more, the DCA is limited in its geographical scope. The New York Times is biased towards events occurring in major cities like New York, California, and Washington, DC. If we are interested in the influence of collective action on congressional behavior, then the scope of the analysis must be on the events to which legislators are likely to respond. To be clear, a legislator is North Carolina is less likely to respond to a protest in Times Square than if the event occurred at the State’s Capitol building and a regional newspaper is more likely than the New York Times to cover the North Carolina event. In an attempt to expose the extent of the data’s limitations, with the help of undergraduate research assistants, I created a dataset of collective action events that occurred in 2012 and were covered in the newspaper with the largest circulation in the 20 largest United States metropolitan areas.