Congratulations to Professor Leah Stokes and Professor Matto Mildenberger who, along with a co-author received the Patrick J. Fett Award for Best Paper on the Scientific Study of Congress and the Presidency. Congratulations to both for their paper entitled "Legislative Staff and Representation in Congress."


The citation from the award committee says:
Congressional members are highly dependent on their staff for making policy decisions, yet we know little about the extent to which staffers have accurate perceptions of constituency preferences.  Hertel-Fernandez, Mildenberger, and Stokes offer an original survey of staffers in order to address this question. The survey not only offers direct observational evidence, but also two embedded experiments that consider interest group influence.  The results suggest that staffers systematically misestimate their constituents’ preferences in ways that favor powerful interest groups.  These findings cause us to reconsider the factors that influence democratic responsiveness.