Representation Gaps and Recent Presidential Elections

Wendy M. Rahn and Howard Lavine

University of Minnesota

Paper prepared for presentation at the inaugural conference of the Citrin Center: Trust and Populism in the Age of Trump. Institute for Governmental Studies, University of California, Berkeley. May 4, 2008. We thank Jake Appleby and Andrew McGannon for their research assistance.

Abstract

Donald Trump’s unorthodox presidential candidacy and his unexpected Electoral College win set researchers scurrying for potential explanations. These efforts gradually cohered into two master narratives, one emphasizing economic vulnerability and its associated community dysfunctions, and the other, a variety of cultural grievances. While each has its merits, largely overlooked in these accounts are the potential political drivers of Trump’s appeal. We contend that the seeds from which Trump’s eventual victory sprouted were sown in soil increasingly enriched by Americans’ growing disenchantment with the quality of their political representation. To substantiate our claim, we first document the trends in various indicators of representation. We find growing disconnection from people’s own representatives in Congress, increasing misgivings about the ability of the two major parties to represent the American people, and mounting displeasure with the performance of Congress. These indicators, in turn, feed into political discontent about the federal government and public officials more generally. Through a comparison with earlier 21st century presidential elections, we show that Trump uniquely capitalized on this large reservoir of public sentiment to broaden his coalition. In fact, we find that the importance of political discontent rivals that of cultural and economic variables, exposing the limitations of other leading explanations to fully account for the 2016 election result.

Representation and Political Discontent

As befitting a conference honoring the many contributions of an esteemed scholar, we begin with

one of his first. At the heart of the Citrin-Miller (Citrin 1974; Miller 1974) dialogue about the origins of

confidence in government was a dispute about the relative importance of presidential performance versus

that of policy representation. The larger stake in this debate was whether declining levels of political trust

indicated a reaction to specific political authorities or a more significant withdrawal of diffuse support for

the political system. Could confidence be restored with a change in presidential leadership or was the

public’s lack of trust a symptom of much deeper flaws in the U.S. political system? Their conversation

continued with a series of later papers that refined and elaborated the core contentions. For example,

Citrin and Green (1986) discuss the rebound in political trust in the 1980s as attributable to specific

aspects of Ronald Reagan’s character not just approval of his performance as president, and Citrin and

Luks (2001) further added performance of Congress to their model specifications. Miller and Borreli

(1991), on the other hand, show that part of Reagan’s appeal lay in people’s initial satisfaction with the

defense and social welfare policies his administration pursued; in his second term, however, the public

grew increasingly unhappy with the large build-up in military spending and cuts in domestic programs.1

A final victor—policy or performance—was never declared. As noted by Citrin and Stoker (2017)

in their recent review of the trust in government literature, of late the impact of policy (un)responsiveness

on political discontent has not received the kind of attention it did in the original exchange. We aim to

correct this neglect here with a discussion of the ways in which substantive political representation or its

lack thereof affects citizens’ willingness to believe that the federal government acts in their interest. In

doing so, our analysis leads us to a position that is much closer to Miller’s point of view, while also duly

acknowledging that political performance and the public’s “process preferences” (Hibbing and Theiss-

Morse 2005) are also relevant.

Instead of questions of representation as such, of more interest to analysts these days is the

growing partisan divergence in judgments of government’s trustworthiness (e.g, Keele 2005; Hetherington

and Rudolph 2015; Theiss-Morse, Burton, and Wagner 2016), a concern that fits with the discipline’s

overall focus on party polarization as the defining feature of 21st-century American politics. While we

agree that polarization has produced more partisan divergence in all kinds of political sentiment, often

missed in this ever-expanding literature is its effects on the quality of representation that a polarized

system produces. Emblematic of the larger inattention is Hetherington and Rudolph’s (2015) diagnosis of

growing distrust in government. They emphasize the ugliness of the partisan conflict in Congress—

individuals’ dismay about the process of legislative policy-making—and the lack of Congressional

productivity, a performance indicator.

1 Employing a more complex simultaneous equation system, Hetherington (1998) confirms that policy dissatisfaction

undermines trust in government, even with presidential popularity and economic evaluations controlled.

Although scholars disagree about the mechanisms underlying it, there is little dispute that the

Republican and Democratic elites have become more homogenous internally and their centers of gravity

have shifted to the extremes. Elite polarization has fueled ideological sorting in the mass public; the

policy differences between rank-and-file Democrats and Republicans are more sharply delineated than in

the past (Caughey, Dunham, and Warshaw 2018), Hill and Tausanovitch 2015; Levendusky 2009; Zingher

and Flynn 2015), especially among those that are politically active (Abramowitz 2010; Pew 2014).

Partisans also have polarized affectively; partisan identifiers increasingly dislike the opposing party

Mason 2014), and this negative partisanship has resulted in the nationalization of congressional elections

(Abramowitz and Webster 2015; Jacobsen 2015). While some time-series studies have considered

partisan polarization or party conflict in Congress to be sources of public disenchantment with governing

institutions and politicians as a class (e.g., Hetherington and Rudolph 2015; Jones 2015; Oliver and Rahn

2016; Ramirez 2009), little research has considered the effects of polarization on individual-level

sentiments about government trustworthiness beyond noting their increased relationship with party

identification. We believe, however, that elite polarization induces several different kinds of

“representation gaps” (Oliver and Rahn 2106) that contribute to Americans’ views that the federal

government no longer deserves their trust, irrespective of whether or not individuals share the same party

identity as the sitting president or the majority party in Congress.

Increasing polarization, we argue in the next section, contributes to failures of political

representation in at least three ways. We then document trends in these representation gaps, and show

that they are important determinants of trust in government regardless of people’s partisanship or

ideology. We then update Hetherington’s (1999) analysis using 21st-century elections, showing that trust in

government shapes support for presidential candidates in three out of the last four elections, even

controlling extensively for many rival explanations. In the most recent election, in fact, the impact of trust

in government is particularly large, rivaling or exceeding those of cultural values, outgroup attitudes,

political predispositions, or economic factors. Trump’s appeal may have been unique, but not in the ways

that most scholars think.

Our focus on political representation across electoral contests enables us to construct a counter-

narrative to the other leading explanations for Trump’s successful insurgency. In the wake of his

unexpected victory, scholars and commentators produced numerous accounts of how an unconventional

candidate with no political experience managed to dispatch more than a dozen Republican opponents—

most with deep government experience—and subsequently win the White House. These accounts include

the growing urban-rural divide (Lee 2018), Trump’s unique appeal at a time of surging populist sentiment

(Oliver and Rahn 2016), the rise of authoritarianism as a basis of political sorting (Feldman, Lavine and

Velez 2017; Johnston), the threat of demographic change (Major, Blodorn and Blascovich 2017),

opposition to immigration (Tesler 2015), economic vulnerability (Autor, Dorn, Hansen and Majlesi 2017;

Kolko 2016), white identity (Jardina 2018; Sides, Tesler and Vavreck 2018), status threat (Gidron and

Hall 2017; Mutz 2018) and racial resentment (Schaffner et al. 2016; Tesler 2016).

This research has come to be organized around two dominant storylines, one emphasizing

economic vulnerability and its associated community dysfunctions, and the other, a variety of cultural

grievances.2 The former focuses on structural economic changes (e.g., globalization, technology) that have

decreased the wages and job security among (largely) whites without a college education, a group Trump

carried by a larger margin than any Republican since 1980 (Pew 2016). As an example, while the U.S.

economy produced approximately nine million jobs since the recession, both wage and job growth declined

in nonmetropolitan areas, a region dominated by Trump supporters3 (Achuthan 2016; a related analysis

demonstrates the connection between the uneven distribution of job losses during the financial crisis and

voting for populist candidate in Europe; see Algan et al. 2017). As Eduardo Porter noted in a post-

election New York Times article, “less-educated white voters had a solid economic rationale for voting

against the status quo—nearly all the gains from the economic recovery have passed them by.” A recent

analysis by Autor et al. (2017) directly links trade competition from China to support for Trump, finding

that county-level change in trade exposure produced a two percentage point shift toward him (see Table

6). Finally, an analysis of 125,000 Gallup respondents extends the economic narrative to associated social

ills, as greater Trump support corresponded with living in communities with worse health outcomes, lower

social mobility, less social capital, greater reliance on social security income and less reliance on capital

income (Rothwell and Diego-Rosell 2016).

The second narrative highlights the myriad ways in which cultural grievances and resentments

stoked support for Trump, either conditional on or independent of economic deprivation (Inglehart and

Norris 2018; Sides, Tesler and Vavreck 2018). This thesis contends that people who feel culturally isolated

from dominant groups in society tend to view that distance through an oppositional lens, and are thereby

attracted to (right-wing) anti-establishment parties and candidates. One prominent component of the

cultural backlash thesis is the concept of status threat, defined as an individual’s perceived position in a

hierarchy of social prestige (Weber 1918). Several authors have argued that the rise of post-materialist

values and the specter of demographic change present a status threat to those of traditionally dominant

groups, including whites, men, and those who identify as Christian (Gidron and Hall 2017; Mutz 2018). As

Mutz (2018) notes, individuals derive psychological benefit from perceiving themselves as part of

dominant groups, and when that dominance is threatened, defensive reactions ensue in an effort to

2 As many scholars have noted, these two classes of explanations are not mutually exclusive, and may well be interactive (e.g., Algan, Guriev, Pappaioannou and Passari 2017; Gidron and Hall 2017). 3 In fact, according to Lakshman Achuthan of the Economic Cycle Research Institute, blacks, Hispanics and Asians

have more jobs now than they did at the November 2007 high-water mark, while job gains among white have been

negligible. https://ecriprod.s3.amazonaws.com/downloads/1611USCO_Essentials_EXCERPT.pdf

reestablish lost feelings of self-worth (e.g., Wilkins and Kaiser 2014). Mutz (2018) finds that various

indicators of status threat (e.g., perceiving whites, men and Christians as more discriminated against than

non-whites, women, and Muslims, respectively) were robust predictors of support for Trump. In a similar

vein, Sides et al. (2018) find that the strength of whites’ social identity with their racial group (e.g., “how

important is being white to your identity?”) outperformed racial resentment, related cultural grievances

and a host of economic variables as a basis of electoral judgment in 2016.

We do not dispute the merit of these alternative narratives. After all, assembling a winning

coalition means appealing to more groups than your opponent; the economically and culturally “left

behind” were undoubtedly part of Trump’s successful formula. However, overlooked in the scholarly

analyses that garner the most media attention is another group, the politically disempowered. Its members,

we show, were as critical, if not more critical, than those emphasized in other accounts.

In what ways are people politically dispossessed in modern American politics? To this question we

now turn.

Representation Gaps

Gap I: U.S. Representatives

Despite the growing divide among the most committed mass partisans, the public is still largely

centrist. Yet, voters often face polarized choices at the ballot box, forced to choose between two relatively

extreme candidates for the House and Senate (Ansolabehere et al. 2001; Bafumi and Herron 2010;

Burden 2004; Carson and Williamson 2018; Hall, forthcoming; Fiorina 2016) and the Presidency (Bartels

2016). Policy divergence between contenders for office actually may make voters less responsive to the

ideological positions of the candidates because partisans become even more motivated to support their

party’s candidate regardless of his or her platform (Johnston, Lavine and Federico 2017; Rogowski 2016;

Tausanovitch and Warshaw 2016). It may also reduce turnout, especially among the less political

sophisticated (Rogowksi 2014). Because of the nationalization of congressional elections that elite

polarization has prompted, all politics is no longer local (Fiorina 2016). The “personal vote” incumbent

members of Congress used to enjoy from their own locally focused efforts has shrunk considerably

(Jacobsen 2015), and with it the incentives for MCs to cultivate a reputation that is independent of the

national party’s policy priorities. Ideological conflict among political elites, therefore, may reduce the

ability of the electorate to hold representatives accountable for their actions once in office (Hopkins 2018).

For these and other reasons,4 extremists may remain in office despite being “out of step” with many of

their constituents.

4 Lee (2017) argues that increased competition for majority party control of Congress has changed the focus of the

parties’ strategies from winning individual contests in states and districts to maximizing the prospects for control of the institution, thereby nationalizing what once were more candidate-centered contests. Bonica and Cox (2017) find that this growing party-centeredness has reduced the electoral penalty that ideological moderates face when voting with their respective parties in Congress instead of their district preferences. Extremism in Congress may also be related to the dependence of Members on campaign donors (Bafumi and Herron 2010), especially donors from outside the district (Barber 2016; Baker 2016).

This growing disconnect between generally moderate citizens and their increasingly immoderate

elected representatives is an underappreciated source of individuals’ feelings of elite unresponsiveness.5

The “failure to converge” (Bartels 2016) by extremist candidates means that the distance between them

and the “average” voter in their respective constituencies has grown (Bafumi and Herron 2010; Fiorina

2016), one type of “representation gap” in which populism can take root. As Mudde and Kaltwasser

explain, “under certain circumstances, the sovereign people can feel that they are not being (well)

represented by the elites in power, and, accordingly, they will criticize—and even rebel against—the

political establishment” (p. 10; see also Oliver and Rahn 2016). This, they note, can “set the stage for a

populist struggle to ‘give government back to the people” (p. 10).

Of course, some extremist candidates are electorally successful precisely because their average

constituent is further from the national median voter (Caron and Williamson 2018). Nevertheless, most

congressional incumbents are distant not only from their constituency’s median voter, but even from their

own partisans in the same constituency (Bafumi and Herron 2010). In any case, while some rabid co-

partisans may applaud their representatives whose ideological positioning or voting behavior designates

them as partisan warriors (Harbridge and Malhotra 2011), out-partisans, independents, and even weak

partisans will find their own policy views incongruent with the way their members of Congress vote,

undermining their confidence in the quality of representation they receive. Furthermore, the stronger the

association between an individual member and their respective political party, the more constituents may

perceive that his or her priorities lie with the national party agenda or ideologically aligned interest

groups rather than with the concerns of people back home.

Gap II: Congress as a Representative Institution

The performance of Congress is central to Americans’ feelings about the federal government

(Hibbing and Theiss-Morse 1995). At the individual level, evaluations of Congress are more important to

overall political trust than are evaluations of the President (Hetherington 1998; Citrin and Luks 2001).6 In

time series studies, approval of Congress dominates that of presidential approval in driving the public’s

confidence or lack thereof in the federal government and its occupants (Hetherington and Rudolph 2015).

Esteem for Congress, in turn, is influenced by process concerns (Hibbing and Theiss-Morse 2002) about

legislative policymaking—the conflict, the bickering, and the gridlock. Jones (2015) and Ramirez (2009)

find that high levels of partisan conflict--measured as percentage of party unity votes, lowers confidence in

the legislative branch, in part because polarization has affected the capacity to do its job in a variety of

5 In fact, Hibbing and Theiss-Morse (2005) thoroughly reject the notion that citizens are critical of government

because of policy considerations, even though their own analysis (Table 3.1) shows that policy distance has a stronger effect than process preferences for evaluations of the political system, the federal government, Congress and the President! 6 In fact, Hetherington (1998) shows that evaluations of the presidential are much likely to be the consequences of

political discontent than its cause.

ways (Barber and McCarty 2015). Bipartisanship, on the other hand, increases approval for Congress as

an institution (Harbridge and Malhotra 2011).

But political substance also weighs on the public’s mind. In a later paper, Ramirez (2015)

demonstrates that when congressional policymaking is out of step with the public’s policy mood, either “too

liberal” or “too conservative” given people’s policy preferences, the electorate responds by lowering its

estimation of the institution (see also McDermott and Jones 2010). In fact, he shows that the cumulative

effects of policy divergence outweigh those of partisan conflict. Both in turn matter more to approval of

Congress than economic performance. People’s ideological distance from the majority party may be

especially consequential to people’s dissatisfaction with the outcomes of congressional policymaking. (Jones

and McDermott 2010; see also Jones 2013 on the ACA in particular).

Gap III: The Political Parties as Representational Linkages

Strikingly, given their centrality to the operations of representative democracy, very few studies of

trust in government consider Americans’ views of the major political parties, taken together or the party

system as a whole, as sources of public disenchantment.7 After all, political parties are the “primary

representative agents between citizens and the state” (Dalton, Farrell, and McAllister 2011; Caramani

2017); they are the “central players in the representational process” (Budge et al. 2012). To use Kay

Lawson’s (1980) term, they are “linkage” mechanisms that aggregate voters’ concerns into political choices.

It is worth considering, therefore, their role in political discontent apart from people’s views of the public

officials who run under their labels.

In contrast to their virtual absence in the American literature, scholars of European politics, perhaps

because of the considerable geographic variation in types of party systems, have devoted considerable

attention to the representative functions of political parties (e.g., Budge et al. 2012; Dalton, Farrell, and

McAllister 2011). Several studies have explored the relationship between whether and how well parties

perform in these roles and citizens’ expressions of overall support for the political regime or satisfaction

with the way democracy works (e.g., André and Depauw 2017; Curini, Jou and Memoli 2012; Dahlberg

and Holmberg 2014; Mayne and Hakhverdian 2017). Ideological congruence in terms of parties’ policy

positions (Brandenburg and Johns 2014) or in congruence with expressed party agendas (Spoon and

Klüver 2014) contribute positively to citizens’ levels of satisfaction.

While it is well known that polarization has resulted in out-partisans disparaging the opposing

party to a great degree, what is less appreciated is that many partisans’ views of their own party also

have declined over time, especially for Democrats, albeit at a much slower pace (Groenendyk 2018).

7 Notable exceptions are Dennis and Owen (2001), Miller (1974), and Miller and Listhaug (1990). Ironically, in these

two articles, Miller’s concern was that the major parties were too similar on the major issues of the day. Our concern, instead, is that they are now too divergent.

While polarization may make some partisans even more enthusiastic, for others, their party’s extremism

will be disquieting as they realize that their preferred party no longer represents their own views well8 or

they become frustrated with their party leaders’ intransigence or inability to get things done. Declining

support for both major parties could be the result of their failure to accomplish “their democratic functions

of linking citizens to government and of effectively representing and aggregating people’s interests.

Major established parties may come to be perceived as unresponsive, as being increasingly detached

from their electoral bases and from the population in general, and as partly responsible for the

inadequate functioning of the political process” (Bélanger 2004, p. 1057).

In sum, members of the public may experience three distinct types of “representation gaps” with

respect to the overall responsiveness of the federal government to their preferences and concerns, all of

which would be expected to increase under conditions of increasing party extremism. In the following

section, we discuss our measures of these gaps and present their trends over the last four presidential

elections.

Data and Measures

We draw our data from the 2004, 2008, 2012, and 2016 ANES time-series studies. The first and

third elections involve Republican and Democratic incumbents who were respectively reelected; the second

and fourth involve open elections with outgoing two-term Republican and Democratic presidents. Thus, our

coverage is politically balanced. All analyses are weighted and variables have been recoded to unit

range in our regressions models. Unless otherwise noted, higher scores indicate greater dissatisfaction or

more conservative/Republican attitudes depending on the nature of the variable.

Representation Gaps

We derive our first representation gap measure from a question included in the post-election

survey in all four years: How good a job would you say U.S. Representative >PRELOADED HOUSE

INCUMBENT NAME< does of keeping in touch with the people in your district -- does [he/she] do a VERY

GOOD job, FAIRLY GOOD, FAIRLY POOR, or a VERY POOR job of keeping in touch with the people in this

district? Of course, “keeping in touch” could mean a variety of things to respondents, not all of which are

related to policy representation (e.g., Steffensmeier, Kimball, Meinke, and Tate 2003). We believe,

however, that our question is closer to a measure of representation than the more commonly employed

question about approval of the incumbent’s job performance. Moreover, studies of vote choice in House

8 For example, in the 2016 ANES, Republicans’ (strong and weak identifiers) average self-placement on the 7-point (recoded 0 to 1) ideology question was .70, roughly the same location where everyone, on average, perceived the Republican Party to be. In contrast, average Democrats placed themselves at about .39, but the sample average placement of the Democrat party was a more liberal .29. Independents (includes leaners), of course, were the modest moderate, their average at the ideological midpoint, and thus were equally distant from the parties’ perceived ideological positions.

elections indicate that voters weigh spatial proximity to their Representatives in reaching their decisions

(Adams et al. 2016; Ansolabehere and Jones 2010; Canes-Wrone, Brady, and Cogan 2002; Nyhan et al.

2012; Shor and Rogowski 2016),9 suggesting that substantive representation is important to them.

Additionally, voters appear to punish their incumbent MCs for being too party loyal (which is related to the

latter’s ideological extremism; Carson, Kroger, Lebo and Young 2010). Of course, shared partisanship

also plays a role, independently of policy congruence (Tausanovitch and Warshaw 2016; Ansolabehere

and Jones 2010).

We use the familiar question about Congressional job approval to measure the second of our

representation gaps. The measure is not ideal, as it does not direct respondents to think specifically about

Congress as a representative body. Nevertheless, McDermott and Jones (2010) have demonstrated that

policy proximity drives approval of the institution (even more than shared partisanship), and on the

strength of their analyses as well as others that link approval of Congress directly to trust in government,

we use it here.

The ANES in 2004, 2008, and 2016 included a question as part the Comparative Studies of

Election Systems (CSES) modules that is especially well-suited to measuring the representation gap with

respect to the political parties: Would you say that any of the parties in the United States represents your

views reasonably well? To our knowledge, no one has used this particular question to assess the origins of

general political discontent.

Following Bélanger (2004) and Miller and Listhaug (1990), we constructed a second measure of

antiparty sentiment that is the sum of the respondent’s feeling thermometer rating (reversed) of the

Democrat and Republican parties, corrected for his or her “charitability” in the use of the scale.10

We display the levels of our representation measures across the four elections in Table 1. The

table also includes an additional measure of antipartyism, asked only in the 2016 ANES: In your view, do

Republican and Democratic parties do an adequate job of representing the American people, or do they do

such a poor job that a third major party is need? We do not use this question in our multivariate analyses

because of its unavailability in earlier years. However, for the purpose of documenting trends, we include

it and use Gallup surveys taken in the fall of the other election periods to fill in the blanks.

--Table 1 here--

The message of Table 1 is quite clear. Every indicator increases, sometimes substantially, between

2004 and 2016. In most cases, these feelings of elite unresponsiveness were already high by 2012,

indicating that large fractions of the American public were displeased with the quality of political

9 Although, as noted, their ability to do so may be hampered when the candidates are extremely far apart from

each other ideologically. 10 That is, in our multivariate analyses we correct for the systematic measurement error that runs through the feeling

thermometers (Green 1998) by subtracting from the summed parties thermometer measure the respondent’s average feeling thermometer rating (reversed scored) of six groups--whites, blacks, labor unions, big business, poor people and rich people.

representation they were receiving long before Trump arrived on the scene (see also Rahn 2018). In

hindsight, Trump’s “surprising” candidacy (also that of Bernie Sanders) looks much less remarkable. What

would have been far stranger, in fact, is if no political entrepreneur emerged to exploit the opportunity

presented by the political mood of the electorate.

Dependent Variables

Political Discontent. Our multivariate analyses, presented next, focuses on two dependent

variables. The first is an overall measure of political discontent, constructed from four workhorse ANES

trust in government questions as well one of the external efficacy items.11

How much time do you think you can trust the government in Washington to do what is right [make decisions in a fair way]?

Would you say the government is pretty much run by a few big interests looking out for themselves or that is run for the benefit of all the people?

Do you that people in government waste a lot of the money we pay in taxes, waste some of it, or don’t waste very much of it?

Do you think quite a few people running the government are crooked, not very many are, or do you think hardly any of them are crooked [How many people running the government are corrupt?]

I don’t think public officials care [much] what people like me think.

We submitted these five items to a factor analysis, and computed factor scores that we rescaled

to unit range. In each year, only one principal component was extracted with loadings generally in excess

of .6 for all items.

Comparative Candidate Evaluations. We subtracted the Democratic candidate’s feeling

thermometer rating from the Republican’s rating.

Control Variables.

Every specification includes age, sex, education and race, seven-point party and ideological

identification, strength of partisanship, and ideological extremism (self-rated extremely liberal and

extremely conservative respondents were coded 1 and moderates, 0) as control variables. Additionally

we include a measure of authoritarianism built from the four child-rearing questions. We reluctantly use

egocentric retrospective family financial situation [Are you and your family (much, somewhat) better off,

(much, somewhat) worse off, or about the same than you were a year ago] to have an indicator of purely

11 Complicating the construction of our index were several question-wording variations used in the 2008, 2012, and

2016 ANES, some of which were split-halved. In 2008 and 2012, ANES tried a new version of the trust in government question that was split-balloted. It slightly changed the question wording and included a specific “never” response option rather than respondents having to volunteer one. In 2016, the standard wording was retained, but “never” was included as a response option. In 2012 and 2016, the word “corrupt” replaced the word “crooked” in the question--How many people running the government are crooked—and the number of response options increased from three to five. And in 2008 and 2012, the word “much” was removed from the standard external efficacy question, I don’t think public officials care much what people like me think, for half the sample. We treated the new split-halved questions as equivalent to the standard questions in order to preserve cases. For this reason, the means of the political discontent scale are not directly comparable across elections.

economic evaluations.12 We would have preferred measures of egocentric economic insecurity and

positional inequality, as well as more sociotropic items about economic mobility, to give the economic

narrative a proper test. Unfortunately only the 2016 ANES has some questions that are more germane to

the economic narrative, and so thus we lack the ability to properly compare across elections. In a related

paper (Rahn and Lavine 2017), however, we show that egocentric financial worry and sociotropic

skepticism about the “America Dream,” the latter measured with two new items in the 2016 ANES,

independently influenced political discontent. The latter also had a significant impact on support for

Trump, though one less important than political discontent. We note this finding because we believe that

previous analyses pitting cultural vs. economic explanations (e.g., Inglehart and Norris 2017; Mutz 2018;

Sides, Tesler and Vavreck 2018) have used very poor measures of the latter, biasing the outcome of the

supposed “test” in favor of the former.

Other variables.

In the comparative candidate evaluations models, we add two predispositions, racial resentment

and moral traditionalism, and a question about immigration levels--Do you think the number of immigrants

from foreign countries who are permitted to come to the United States to live should be increased (a lot, a

little), decreased (a lot or little) or left the same as now—to represent the cultural narrative.

Multivariate Results

Political Discontent

Table 2 displays our results from a regression analysis of our political discontent index on the

representation gap measures and the control variables. As expected, partisans are more trusting when

their party controls the White House, except in 2008 when Democrats and Republicans did not differ net

of the other variables in the model. Ideological self-identification, however, only matters in the two most

recent elections, perhaps a reflection of increased social and political sorting. Strong partisans have

somewhat higher regard for the political establishment than pure independents (see also Hooghe and Oser

2017) though the effects are small and, in one case (again 2008), not significant. In contrast, ideologues

tend to be more distrustful, a finding reminiscent of Miller’s (1974) earlier concern that policy extremists

were especially dissatisfied with the centrist choices on offer at the time. The effects of extremity are

sizeable only in 2004, however, arguably a time of more centrist policymaking compared to the present.

Personal economic grievances diminish confidence in government in every year except, interestingly, given

the recession, in 2008. This may reflect that the full brunt of the recession, in terms of levels of

unemployment and plunging home values, was not fully realized in fall 2008. The effects of

authoritarianism seems specific to Obama’s presence on the ballot, indicating that the presence of an

12 We deliberately exclude job approval of the incumbent President as a control variable because it is likely endogenous to some degree with our dependent variables, and we did not wish to obscure the impact of the variables that are of more concern to us theoretically. We did run the models with approval in the specifications and our principle conclusions are unaltered. See the Appendix for these results.

African-American candidate activated these tendencies (see Hetherington and Weiler 2009 on 2008 in

particular).

--Table 2 here--

Turning now to the variables of interest, we note that disapproval of Congress, as expected given

others’ research, has a large effect on individuals’ more general impressions of government—the strongest

of any of our measures--and its impact is roughly stable across the four elections. Other representation

gaps, nevertheless, exert an independent influence on perceptions of government trustworthiness. For

example, constituents’ displeasure with their own MCs fails to matter in 2004, but its coefficient rises

noticeably by 2008, and nearly doubles in size by 2016. Media coverage of political polarization

ramped up considerably between 2004 and 2012, according to Klar and Krupnikov (2016), perhaps

raising awareness among voters of their own representative’s views. Another possibility is that challengers

were perhaps more eager to paint their incumbent opponents as out of step with the district as partisan

conflict increased.

We are especially interested in the behavior of our two novel measures of anti-party sentiment. In

the three elections in which the specific party representation question is available, its coefficient is positive

and, in 2004 and 2008, its impact rivals or exceeds that of party identification. Individuals’ beliefs that

the parties don’t represent them very well also are more than partisan indifference as they have

noticeable effects even when strength of partisanship is controlled.

The impact of the second indicator of antipartyism, a more diffuse “plague-on-both-your-houses”

measure, is positive and strong in the two most recent elections, absent in 2008, and unexpectedly,

negative in 2004. It may be that this measure is more sensitive to levels of partisan conflict, and, therefore

reflects process preferences (Hibbing and Theiss-Morse 2005) to a greater degree than the question

about party representation. Perhaps anti-partisans appreciated the brief interlude of party unity

occasioned by 9/11 or the legislative productivity of Bush’s first term more than those who had a higher

tolerance for political conflict. If so, it comes as no surprise that they would find the gridlock and partisan

warfare of the Obama era especially repugnant. It is also possible that by 2016, antipartyism more fully

mediates representational concerns about the political parties, therefore accounting for its especially large

role in the most recent elections.

In any case, the fact that we find that our two party-centric measures independently contribute to

political discontent in the 21st century indicates that lack of support for the political system is deeper than

displeasure with the current occupants of political institutions or simply a lack of attachment to any party.

A recent Pew (2018) study, for example, found that 61% of Americans think significant changes are

needed to “the fundamental design and structure of American government.” And Gallup polls indicate

that levels of patriotism have declined by nearly 20 points between 2003 and 2016. Even discounting the

post-9/11 bump, patriotism fell from 61% in 2005 to 52% in 2016, led by young people, the generation

who came of age in the most partisan era since the Gilded Age. Political disaffection may have

metastasized to such a degree that the political community itself is now fragile.

Comparative Candidate Evaluations

Individuals’ trust in government has significant social and political consequences: for political

preferences (Hetherington 2005; Hetherington and Rudolph 2015); for whether people choose to comply

with the law (Marien and Hooge 2011); for trust in strangers (Brehm and Rahn 1997; Sønderskov and

Dinesen 2016); and for whether and how we choose to participate in politics (Hooghe and Marien 2013).

It also has well-documented effects on voters’ choices (Hetherington 1999; Hooghe, Marien, and Pauwels

2011, Bélanger 2017) and support for populist parties and candidates in the Trump mold (Akkerman,

Zaslove and Spruyt 2017; Hooghe and Dassonneville 2016; Bowler et al. 2017; Inglehart and Norris

2017; Oliver and Rahn 2016; Rooduijn 2017).

Here we extend this last line of research through an examination of the effects of political

discontent on comparative candidate evaluations in our four elections. Following Hetherington (1998.

1999), we expect that distrust of government will lower evaluations of the sitting incumbent or for the

candidate of the departing president’s party. The signs on the coefficients on our distrust index, therefore,

should be negative in 2004 and 2008 and positive in 2012 and 2016. We are interested in comparing

the impact of distrust of government across these elections. And within elections, we wish to assess its

magnitude relative to other predispositions that have been the focus of recent research generally and in

the 2016 election specifically, namely racial resentment, moral traditionalism and views on immigration.

We regressed candidate evaluations on these variables and our control variables, and we present

the results in Table 3.

--Table 3 here--

As expected, political discontent generally favors challengers, except, oddly, Barack Obama in

2008. Any number of reasons may account for this anomaly: dominance of the economy as a campaign

issue, his novelty as the first African-American presidential candidate, the absence of an incumbent on the

ballot, even perhaps the distraction of Sarah Palin as the vice-presidential pick (Elis, Hillygus, and Nie

2010). Much telling for our argument, however, is the outsize role political discontent plays in shaping

support for Trump. Its coefficient is more than 50% larger than in 2004 and it more than doubles in size

from 2012. This despite including in the specification racial resentment and moral traditionalism. Even more

striking is that its relative size exceeds that of those variables by 27% and 52%, respectively.

The cross-election comparison highlights also the unique role of immigration preferences. They are

strong and large in 2016, but irrelevant in prior elections. It is necessary to interpret the effects with care,

however. The variance in immigration attitudes has increased over time as Democrats and liberals have

move sharply to the left whereas the opinions of Republicans have been, by comparison, stable (Waldman

2018). This increased dispersion has the potential to produce a larger coefficient. Moreover, given that

the movement in preferences has been one-sided (the same is true of racial resentment, by the way, see

Tesler 2016; Wood 2017), “cultural backlash” acquires a completely different meaning. Rather than

resistance by groups left behind, perhaps it is a counter-strike by the “anywheres” to protect from the

populist threat their economic and cultural hegemony over the “somewheres” (Goodhart 2017). In any

case, immigration emerges as something distinct about 2016, no doubt due to Trump’s politicization of it.

Concluding Comments

We cannot comprehend Trump’s victory without understanding the distinctly political roots from

which it sprouted, roots undeniably tied to the failure of the two major parties--and the politicians, activists,

and donors who carry their water--to perform their representative functions. At the moment, “the two-

party system is trapped in a doom loop” (Drutman 2017, 2018) from which escape seems unlikely absent

an exogenous shock whose nature is unforeseeable or a return to one-party dominance (Lee 2017; Citrin

and Stoker 2018). This doom loop propelled an anti-politician to the highest political office in the country,

stimulating considerable handwringing and dismay among the chattering classes who, just like their

counterparts historically, have a strong distaste for populist uprisings because of the threat they pose to

their status. In a representative democracy, however, the people can and will use the ballot box in an

attempt to redeem their sovereignty from political elites who have usurped it. Many times they fail, but

the right campaign, the right person and the right context occasionally combust to ignite the right moment

(Oliver and Rahn 2016). Our cross-election analysis demonstrates that when forces align, as they did in

2016, expect the unexpected.

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Table 1: Representation Gaps: 2004, 2008, 2012, 2016

% MC Does Not Keep in Touch with District 13

Parties Not Represent14

Parties Do Poor Job/Need Third Party15

Congressional Disapproval16

Average Antipartyism17

2004

35.8 26.2 40.018 26.4 .44

2008

38.0 35.2 47.019 48.6 .47

2012

40.2 NA 46.020 53.3 .52

2016

40.5 42.5 55.321 / 5722 52.0 .54

13 ANES, post-election: How good a job would you say U.S. Representative >PRELOADED HOUSE INCUMBENT NAME< does of keeping in touch with the people in your district -- does [he/she] do a VERY GOOD job, FAIRLY GOOD, FAIRLY POOR, or a VERY POOR job of keeping in touch with the people in this district? % Fairly Poor or Very Poor 14 ANES, post-election: Would you say that any of the parties in the United States represent your views reasonably well? % No 15 ANES, post-election: In your view, do the Republican and Democratic parties do an adequate job of representing the American people, or do they do such a poor job that a major third party is needed? % Third party needed 16 ANES, pre-election: Do you approve or disapprove of the way the U.S. Congress is handling its job? % Strongly Disapprove 17 Sum of Democratic + Republican Feeling Thermometers, reversed coded and scored 0 to 1 so that high values indicate more dislike of both parties. 18 Gallup, 10/2003 19 Gallup, 10/2008 20 Gallup, 09/2012 21 ANES, 2016 post 22 Gallup, 09/2016

Table 2: Regression of Generalized Political Discontent on Representation Gaps

2004 2008 2012 2016

MC not Keep in Touch 0.015 0.049 0.068 0.080 (0.025) (0.017)*** (0.008)*** (0.011)***

Parties Don’t Represent 0.087 0.062 NA 0.035 (0.018)*** (0.011)*** (0.006)***

Antipartyism -0.110 0.008 0.064 0.091 (0.053)* (0.040) (0.021)** (0.029)***

Congressional Disapproval 0.131 0.137 0.146 0.148 (0.022)** (0.014)*** (0.008)*** (0.010)***

Party Identification -0.088 -0.021 0.046 0.078 (0.027)** (0.018) (0.009)*** (0.012)***

Strength of Partisanship -0.049 -0.024 -0.038 -0.018 (0.024)* (0.016) (0.007)*** (0.009)*

Ideology -0.033 0.002 0.041 0.073 (0.042) (0.026) (0.013)*** (0.018)***

Ideological Extremism 0.089 0.040 -0.004 0.022 (0.025)*** (0.016)* (0.008) (0.010)*

Egocentric Economic Worse 0.075 -0.016 0.057 0.118 (0.026)*** (0.020) (0.008)*** (0.013)***

Authoritarianism 0.032 0.082 0.024 0.018 (0.028) (0.027)*** (0.009)** (0.011) Constant 0.559 0.482 0.560 0.365 R2 0.213 0 .130 0.198 0.133

N 652 1289 4297 3009

Model includes age, education, sex, race and ethnicity. All variables except age coded 0-1 *** p > .001 ** p < .01 * p < .05, two-tailed

Table 3: Regression Analysis of Comparative Candidate Evaluations

2004

2008 2012 2016

Political Discontent -0.124 -0.031 0.080 0.193 (0.028)*** (0.019) (0.016)*** (0.018)***

Racial Resentment 0.089 0.199 0.124 0.152 (0.027)** (0.017)*** (0.012)*** (0.015)***

Decrease Immigration 0.026 0.022 0.014 0.127 (0.024) (0.014) (0.010) (0.013)***

Moral Traditionalism 0.121 0.094 0.156 0.126 (0.028)*** (0.017)*** (0.013)*** (0.018)***

Authoritarianism 0.032 -0.007 -0.006 -0.004 (0.021) (0.020) (0.009) (0.012)

Party Identification 0.468 0.269 0.425 0.397

(0.020)*** (0.013)*** (0.010)*** (0.012)***

Ideology 0.061 0.111 0.169 0.124 (0.033) (0.020)*** (0.014)*** (0.019)***

Egocentric Economic Worse -0.108 -0.003 0.081 0.094 (0.020)*** (0.014) (0.008)*** (0.013)***

Constant 0.192 -0.136 0.052 -0.074

R2 0.644 0.550 0.668 0.687

N 931 1837 4881 3338

Model includes age, education, sex, race and ethnicity, strength of partisanship, and ideological extremism. All variables coded 0-1 except age. *** p > .001 ** p < .01 * p < .05, two-tailed

Appendix Tables

Table 2a: Regression of Generalized Political Discontent on Representation Gaps with Presidential

Approval

2004 2008 2012 2016

MC not Keep in Touch 0.015 0.045 0.067 0.078 (0.025) (0.017)** (0.008)*** (0.011)***

Parties Don’t Represent 0.087 0.064 NA 0.033 (0.018)*** (0.011)*** (0.006)***

Antipartyism -0.110 0.007 0.047 0.046 (0.053)* (0.040) (0.020)* (0.028)

Congressional Disapproval 0.131 0.133 0.136 0.130 (0.022)** (0.014)*** (0.008)*** (0.010)***

Party Identification -0.088 0.008 -0.024* 0.000 (0.027)** (0.018) (0.011) (0.012)

Strength of Partisanship -0.049 -0.016 -0.031 -0.012 (0.024)* (0.016) (0.007)*** (0.009)

Ideology -0.033 0.019 0.014 0.020 (0.042) (0.026) (0.013) (0.018)

Ideological Extremism 0.089 0.045 -0.006 0.032

(0.025)*** (0.016)** (0.008) (0.010)***

Egocentric Economic Worse 0.075 -0.033 0.035 0.086 (0.026)*** (0.021) (0.008)*** (0.013)***

Authoritarianism 0.032 0.089 0.017 0.002 (0.028) (0.027)*** (0.009) (0.011)

Incumbent Disapproval 0.101 0.063 0.106*** 0.143*** (0.026)*** (0.017)*** (0.009) (0.010) Constant 0.559 0.495 0.498 0.410 R2 0.213 0 .140 0.223 0.276

N 642 1268 4266 2994

Model includes age, education, sex, race and ethnicity. All variables coded 0-1 except age. *** p < .001 ** p < .01 * p < .05, two-tailed

Table 3a: Regression Analysis of Comparative Candidate Evaluations with Presidential Approval

2004

2008 2012 2016

Political Discontent -0.011 -0.002 -0.018 0.072 (0.022) (0.019) (0.013) (0.016)***

Racial Resentment 0.049 0.190 0.068 0.078 (0.021)* (0.017)*** (0.010)*** (0.015)***

Decrease Immigration 0.006 0.028 0.001 0.127 (0.024) (0.014)* (0.010) (0.013)***

Moral Traditionalism 0.090 0.075 0.082 0.074 (0.022)*** (0.017)*** (0.011)*** (0.016)***

Authoritarianism 0.013 -0.016 -0.006 -0.007 (0.016) (0.020) (0.008) (0.010)

Party Identification 0.217 0.207 0.219 0.258

(0.019)*** (0.014)*** (0.009)*** (0.012)***

Ideology 0.018 0.084 0.107 0.070 (0.026) (0.020)*** (0.012)*** (0.017)***

Egocentric Economic Worse -0.028 0.008 0.012 0.094 (0.020) (0.014) (0.007) (0.013)***

Incumbent Disapproval -0.373 -0.137 0.370 0.311 (0.015)*** (0.012)*** (0.008)*** (0.010)***

Constant 0.518 0.189 -0.010 0.061

R2 0.792 0.580 0.776 0.757

N 932 1786 4951 3338

Model includes age, education, sex, race and ethnicity, strength of partisanship, and ideological extremism. All variables coded 0-1 *** p < .001 ** p < .01 * p < .05, two-tailed