LAUSR

A vast literature debates the efficacy of descriptive representation in legislatures. Though studies argue it influences how communities are represented through constituency service, they are limited since legislators’ service activities are unobserved. Using Freedom of Information Act (FOIA) requests, we collected 88,000 records of communication between members of the U.S. Congress and federal agencies during the 108th–113th Congresses. These legislative interventions allow us to examine members’ “follow-through” with policy implementation. We find that women, racial/ethnic minorities, and veterans are more likely to work on behalf of constituents with whom they share identities. Including veterans offers leverage in understanding the role of political cleavages and shared experiences. Our findings suggest that shared experiences operate as a critical mechanism for representation, that a lack of political consensus is not necessary for substantive representation, and that the causal relationships identified by experimental work have observable implications in the daily work of Congress. Replication Materials: The data and materials required to verify the computational reproducibility of the results, procedures and analyses in this article are available on the American Journal of Political Science Dataverse within the Harvard Dataverse Network, at: https://doi.org/10.7910/DVN/VJLVYU. Well-intentioned laws may exacerbate political inequality if implemented in ways that fail to aid the citizens they are intended to protect. Yet, studies of representation focus on how constituents are represented through the creation of law, overlooking its execution. Accounts of federal agencies’ stalled implementation of the Civil Rights Act, mismanagement of workplace rights violations, and falsification of veterans’ health care records demonstrate how cracks in the ideals of democratic representation can spread through policy implementation—precariously beyond the public purview. Demands made by elected officials are an important means of remedy. Scholars know little about how descriptive representation impacts legislative interventions with agencies on behalf of protected groups. This overlooked venue of Kenneth Lowande is Assistant Professor, Department of Political Science, University of Michigan, 6658 Haven Hall, 505 South State Street, Ann Arbor, MI 48109 ([email protected]). Melinda Ritchie is Assistant Professor, Department of Political Science, University of California, Riverside, 900 University Avenue, Riverside, CA 92521 ([email protected]). Erinn Lauterbach is Ph.D. Candidate, Department of Political Science, University of California, Riverside, 900 University Avenue, Riverside, CA 92521 ([email protected]). A previous version of this article was presented at the 2017 annual meeting of the Midwest Political Science Association, Chicago. We thank Ben Bishin, Daniel Butler, Jason Coronel, Jason MacDonald, Jennifer Merolla, Ben Newman, and Sono Shah for helpful comments and suggestions. Special thanks to CW5 Jeffrey Freelove, USA, Ret. representation is particularly important given the extensive role of federal agencies in policymaking and a history of agencies’ neglecting groups of citizens they were entrusted to protect (Minta 2009, 2011). We shed light on this phenomenon by examining whether members of Congress advocate on behalf of protected classes of citizens by communicating directly with the federal bureaucracy. This analysis is the first of its kind, possible only by obtaining and constructing a unique data set of over 88,000 congressional contacts assembled from a series of Freedom of Information Act (FOIA) requests. These data allow us to consider whether descriptively representative members of Congress (e.g., racial and ethnic minorities, women, and veterans) advocate for underrepresented communities by intervening with federal agencies American Journal of Political Science, Vol. 63, No. 3, July 2019, Pp. 644–659 C ©2019, Midwest Political Science Association DOI: 10.1111/ajps.12443