Do legislators’ words match their deeds? We contribute to the promise-keeping literature by introducing “attention consistency” as a measure of representation, theorizing conditions that should produce more consistency between public messaging and behavior in office, and testing whether legislators’ public attention to federal agencies in constituent newsletters corresponds to their private engagement with those agencies. We find strong evidence of attention consistency in cross-sectional and within-member analyses in the volume of legislators’ attention. Robustness checks evaluating the distribution of legislator attention yield similar results. Legislators who publicly emphasize an agency engage more with that agency behind the scenes. We find no evidence that ideological distance from an agency conditions the consistency of legislators’ public and private attention to it. Similarly, while members of relevant oversight committees make more requests of agencies they oversee, we find no evidence that oversight membership conditions the consistency of legislators’ public and private attention to it. Our analyses show that legislators’ interests, as expressed in their attention to that agency in their newsletters, matter as much as institutional roles in shaping legislators’ behind-the-scenes interactions with federal agencies.
Words and Deeds: Do Legislators' Public Messages Reflect Their Behind-the-Scenes Work with Federal Agencies?
