An Interview With Prof. Sean Westwood

Editor’s Note: On Friday January 17, 2025, Associate Editor of The Review Jason Zhu (TDR) sat down with Dartmouth College Associate Professor of Government Sean Westwood (SW) to discuss his 2014 book, The Impression of Influence: Legislator Communication, Representation, and Democratic Accountability and to examine how credit-claiming behaviors among legislators have affected public perception and the broader dynamics of polarization in American politics over the past decade. Sean Westwood is an Associate Professor in the Department of Government at Dartmouth and director of the Polarization Research Lab.

TDR: Thank you Professor Westwood for your time. Your book talked about the idea of credit claiming among legislatures, and how they often use their constituents’ lack of knowledge about spending to try to frame their role in bringing in monetary support for constituents. Do you see this as a form of manipulation that should be avoided? 

SW: I think it’s a manipulation of the truth. Americans don’t understand how the appropriations process functions, and politicians are exploiting that. They are getting credit for things that they should not. The American public is not able to check that behavior. But more importantly, the media aren’t checking that behavior either. Essentially, politicians have found a gap in the system where they can exploit the expenditures of the federal government to gain a personal connection with voters. So Americans are essentially left to interpret information with inadequate context or understanding. Some people think that it’s actually a good thing because it’s telling people what the government is doing, but I’m pretty cynical about that perspective because I think that we should not reward people for ignorance. 

TDR: You said constituents lack detailed preferences on how the government should spend money. Can voters decide on their position of a policy beyond partisanship?

SW: Voters can certainly make principled decisions on policy. The problem with budgetary issues is that the amount of money involved is so massive that voters don’t have a very good understanding of it. A voter isn’t going to be able to meaningfully evaluate the difference between a million or a hundred million or a billion dollars. Voters who have policy preferences still manifest them, but I think they’re less equipped to understand the budgetary and procedural implications of those policy preferences. 

TDR: Your work focuses on understanding where partisan biases originate, so what do you think is the main cause of polarization over the past 10 years?

SW: It has just gotten worse. Ideological preferences have not changed all that much. But what has changed is the extent to which we don’t trust, don’t like and are unwilling to engage with the other side. 

So polarization is now less about ideology and much more about social constraint, much more about negative traits that are being imputed on other sides and tribalistic loyalty that we ascribe to our own party. So, in terms of policy, America today is pretty comparable to where it was 15, 20 years ago. But hatred has just grown so dramatically that it’s hard to have policy conversations across the aisle.

TDR: You talked about this idea of “personal vote” as an opportunity to cultivate a personal relationship with constituents beyond partisanship, do you think it is still relevant or realistic in polarized modern politics? 

SW: It’s certainly harder for voters to establish a personal vote, especially in states that are solidly in control of a single party. But it is still possible. In New Hampshire in the last election, voters in a single congressional district voted for a Republican governor and a Democratic representative. So it is possible to build a connection with your voters, but it’s really now only reasonable for that to happen in states that are very close in terms of voter registration. It used to be the case that a personal vote would be enough to keep someone like Democratic Senator John Tester in office in a red state like Montana. It’s no longer sufficiently powerful to do that. 

TDR: How has the rise of social media, especially in the Trump era, changed the way legislators advertise their role in spending to their constituents? 

SW: It’s been a lot easier. It used to be the case that if you wanted to communicate what you had accomplished, you had to write a press release and the news would cover that press release, but today you could just send that same press release out to all of your followers on social media which then magnifies it. So it is much easier now to reach your voters directly, and legislators are taking advantage of that. We’re also still seeing the same kind of behavior that we identified in the book. Representatives will vote against legislation and then claim credit for when the effects of the legislation materialize. Lauren Boebert famously did that in Colorado. It will likely happen with disaster recovery in California. The behaviors and pathologies that we documented in the book are just now more prevalent in the world of social media because of widespread low-cost interactions. 

TDR: You almost counterintuitively mentioned the more a lawmakers claim credit for certain policies, the less likely they are to be one of the main engineers of major policies. Why is that? 

SW: The individuals who do offer those bills tend to be very powerful and tend to come from relatively safe districts or states. So they’re not necessarily going to need to advertise towards swing voters. If you’re the senator from California and you’re a Democrat, you’re gonna win reelection. You don’t need to pull Republicans to your side. But if you’re from a swing state, you may need to announce that expenditure to all of your constituents so you can pull independents and those across the aisle to support you. So the incentives are mixed. Those who are in power don’t need credit claiming in order to win, and those who are not in power need to signal that they have value to individuals on both parties and therefore need credit claiming.

TDR: Thank you for your insight Professor Westwood. For our final question, what is one thing that is most different about US politics over the past decade? 

SW: How irrelevant civility has become. So it used to be the case that just because you were a senator from the Democratic Party it didn’t instantly mean that you hated the senator from the Republican Party. There were long histories in DC where senators and representatives of both parties lived with one another, where they would break bread with one another. Now it is much harder to identify those kinds of close relationships across the aisle because partisan conflicts have become so intense and so personal, and we’ve lost the ability to see the other side as rational human beings who disagree and just kind of imagine them as the worst caricature that we could construct.