Katrina F. McNally and Costas Panagopoulos offer us two books that speak to how contemporary elections constrain representation in the United States. The well-documented decline in electoral competition restricts the congressional candidate pool, which then immediately shapes policy outcomes. The subsequent pursuit of reelection limits an official’s ability to represent the truly marginalized by having to balance the needs of disadvantaged groups with perceived public deservingness.

Katrina F. McNally examines why and when certain members of Congress (MCs) set out to formally represent disadvantaged groups in society (e.g., veterans, seniors, women, racial/ethnic minorities) and to carve out specific reputations for such representation. McNally shows that legislative reputations play an enormously important and practical role in MCs getting reelected; that is, they help to explain one’s Washington duties to people at home in a simple and accessible manner. McNally uses a new “advocacy window” theory to explain the wide variation in representation that different disadvantaged groups receive. This novel contribution shows us that representation has both a floor (group population in the district) and a ceiling (hostility to the group by nongroup members). MCs remain highly constrained in their ability to represent the disadvantaged by their need to balance legislative risks and get reelected.

Early on (chapter 1), McNally notes that we lack a unifying theory to explain why some members of Congress seek to build reputations as advocates for certain disadvantaged groups. Indeed, virtually all work in this area focuses on explaining legislators’ choices to support specific demographics (e.g., women, seniors, racial/ethnic minorities). But no scholarship exists that unifies these studies and tells a single story about why these decisions on who to represent are made.

The following chapter introduces McNally’s two key theoretical contributions—the idea that legislators consciously carve out “reputations” and that they must do so within an “advocacy window.” An advocacy window is the extent to which legislators can advocate for a disadvantaged group without harming themselves electorally. This window is bounded by a floor (the size of the disadvantaged group relative to the MC’s overall district) and ceiling (public hostility to the disadvantaged group). The ceiling component is immensely important theoretically, as it explains why not all “disadvantaged” groups are represented equally (i.e., disparities in perceived deservingness).

Chapter 3 explains what a legislative reputation is and why legislators would spend time cultivating one during their career. Legislative reputations also serve a practical role in the congressional career; they can help to explain one’s professional duties to the district without requiring extensive public knowledge of specific policies. McNally proposes a novel measurement scheme to classify each member of Congress (between 1993–2014) that codes members’ profiles in CQ Press’s Politics in America. Depending on how much text in a MC’s profile mentions disadvantaged groups, each member is coded as no advocacy (they don’t care), superficial advocacy (lip service), secondary advocacy (they care a little), or primary advocacy (they care a great deal). The data allows for a new methodology that is sorely needed, supplanting a coding scheme that simply notes whether an issue is mentioned at all in a profile. This methodology is a tremendous improvement upon how we think about the depth of representation.

Chapters 4 and 5 focus on the individual MC’s decision of whether to seek a reputation as an advocate for the disadvantaged in the House and Senate, respectively. McNally finds strong evidence that three main factors shape this decision for US House members: the size of the disadvantaged group relative to the total district, overall district hostility toward the group, and whether or not the MC belongs to said group. For the Senate, however, the strongest pull toward advocacy is the presence of other advocates within the chamber.

Chapter 6 looks at bill sponsorship activities for those MCs already known to be advocates for disadvantaged groups. McNally finds that members balance the potential salience and support/opposition for a bill with how “deserving” the disadvantaged group is perceived to be. Simply, the more broadly deserving the group is, the less risky it is to sponsor legislation that benefits the group.

The final chapter reflects on the much clearer picture we now have regarding which MCs take up the mantle of representing the disadvantaged and, more specifically, sets out to establish formal reputations for servicing the underserved. In short, MCs must balance their desire to represent disadvantaged groups with the prospects of reelection. Ironically, some disadvantaged groups enjoy far greater advantages in the arena of public opinion (e.g., veterans, seniors) than others (i.e., racial/ethnic minorities), which strongly shapes the willingness of MCs to sponsor/cosponsor legislation favorable to the group. McNally’s contribution of the advocacy window, essentially assessing the degree of representational wiggle room available to representatives, helps us to understand the constraints that MCs face in forging their legislative reputations. These findings are suggestive of real action items that could possibly impact the representation of these groups; namely, we must work toward greater descriptive representation in Congress and/or draw district boundaries to concentrate greater group numbers within constituencies.

I also had the pleasure to review a new work by Costas Panagopoulos. Panagopoulos documents a decline in quality congressional challengers between 1972 and 2018 and finds evidence that the dip in challenger quality maps almost perfectly onto the fall in electoral competitiveness. Surprisingly, many of the “usual suspects” offered up as likely explanations for the changing landscape (e.g., term limits, the rising costs of campaigns) end up contributing very little to the decline in candidate quality. This work assembles an impressive decades-long log of challengers in congressional races and is able to explain why so many of them today lack political experience.

In the first two chapters, Panagopoulos spends some time defining what it means to be a “quality” challenger and unpacking what we already know about when and why experienced candidates emerge to challenge incumbents. In short, quality challengers possess previous elected office experience and have become increasingly rare in congressional elections across both major political parties.

Chapter 3 focuses on the main theoretical contributions and testable hypotheses. In a way, this chapter works to unite some of the previously disparate findings outlined previously. Simply, things that (1) lower one’s probability of winning, (2) lower the benefits of holding office, or (3) increase campaign costs should be associated with fewer quality challengers emerging.

The following chapter addresses the potential role of money in explaining the decline in challenger quality. Namely, campaigns are universally more expensive to run (and win) than in decades past, and incumbents have a significant fundraising advantage over challengers. In 2016, only about 15% of challengers were able to match the spending levels of incumbent candidates.

Panagopoulos subsequently unpacks why quality challengers perform better against incumbents than candidates lacking previous elected office experience. Using campaign advertising data, he finds that there is substantively little difference in how high- versus low-quality challengers present themselves to the public through advertising. So, surprisingly, the electoral advantage of high-quality challengers does not appear to be attributable to them simply being “better campaigners” than low-quality challengers.

Chapter 6 looks at whether the enacting of state legislative term limits contributes to challenger quality. Under term limits, experienced state legislators are forced out from office and may then decide to run for higher office. There is some limited evidence here that term limits are associated with more competitive congressional elections. However, the effect sizes are not large and are inconsistent state to state.

In chapter 7, Panagopoulos finds that between 1972 and 2018, 10 states saw a significant decline in the average proportion of challengers that are high quality. However, none of the proposed independent variables (professionalism, term limits, and party competition) influence overall challenger quality, leading Panagopoulos to propose a shift in methodology that moves the analysis to the district level in the next chapter.

Chapter 8 contains the primary models for the project. Here, the dependent variable denotes whether or not a quality challenger emerged within a specific district in a given year. The independent variables include a host of institutional and contextual factors such as electoral competition, candidate spending, and the presence of state legislative term limits. There is one main finding that holds strong, across all years and both political parties: Declining electoral competitiveness is associated with lower challenger quality.

The final pair of chapters are an effective debrief on what we’ve learned. Chapter 9 addresses whether challenger quality is declining because incumbents are simply getting stronger, and finds that the incumbency advantage (and its tendency to “scare off” quality challengers) has not changed significantly since the 1970s. Chapter 10 offers several key takeaways from the project. Namely, challenger quality has declined since the 1970s in US congressional elections, and none of the “usual suspects” (e.g., term limits, campaign spending, incumbency advantage) appear to blame. Rather, declining electoral competitiveness explains basically all the changes to challenger quality.

This is an immensely important project. It comes as close as we can get in the social sciences to offering definitive proof that, yes, experienced candidates are harder to come by in congressional elections. The presence of a quality challenger is associated with a tighter race, which, in turn, is more interesting and engaging for the voting public. Declining electoral competitiveness scares off quality challengers, which perpetuates the problem of uncompetitive elections. In sum, the types of people that run for office have changed over the last 50 years and, perhaps unsurprisingly, the way that Congress is able to do business (when it is able to do business at all) has also changed. These findings have potentially profound implications for how American democracy will function in the future. While the solution seems simple (bust up party monopolies where they exist), change from the inside seems highly unlikely. Incumbent legislators that benefit from the current electoral dysfunction are the same ones charged with reforming it.

Reflecting on these works it seems that the very same electoral competition that expands the congressional candidate pool places heavy constraints on MCs’ willingness to take up the “good fight” and represent the marginalized. It is important for incoming MCs to have previously experienced politics in some form, as it likely makes them better at negotiating, legislating, and representing. And we now know that high electoral competition makes such experienced candidates more likely to emerge. Yet, ironically, cutthroat electoral pressure demands that MCs monitor public hostility to disadvantaged groups and, in some cases, deprive those groups of much needed representation. When it comes to competition, our mindset is that more is always better. However, these findings left me wondering if perhaps there is a parabolic relationship between electoral competition and quality representation, where it is unacceptably unresponsive at extreme lows and irresponsibly exclusive at extreme highs.