Shirking in the Contemporary Congress: A Reappraisal

Abstract

This paper replicates the findings that appeared in the article “Severing the Electoral Connection: Shirking in the Contemporary Congress,” published in theAmerican Journal of Political Science(44:316–325), in which Lawrence Rothenberg and Mitchell Sanders incorporated a new research design and, contrary to all previous studies, found evidence of ideological shirking in the U.S. House of Representatives. We investigate the robustness of their results by reestimating their model with Congress-specific fixed effects and find that their results no longer hold.