Do the elected American political institutions, namely Congress and the presidency, aggregate preferences in a manner consistent with liberal democratic ideals? This question touches on numerous theoretical debates about representation and the role of elections, and to answer it we scale observed roll call votes from the 109th and 110th Congresses, presidential support scores, and survey items asked of American voters. This exercise locates Senators, Representatives, the president, and voters in a single policy space, and with this space we show that the median American voter was very well represented by Senate and House chamber medians after the 2006 midterm elections. In contrast, the median American voter immediately prior to these elections was not well represented. This suggests that elections are instrumental in fostering what liberal democratic theory would label a fair aggregation of voter preferences. We also assess whether median voters across the fifty states are represented in Congress and whether elections within Congressional Districts fairly aggregate preferences, and we show that there are distortions in representation associated with party politics at the state and Congressional District levels.

We consider a fundamental question about the elected American political institutions: do they work? By this we mean, do these institutions, namely the Congress and presidency in conjunction with the electoral rules that collectively generate Senators, Representatives, and a president, aggregate citizen preferences in a manner consistent with liberal democratic ideals?

Political institutions serve many functions beyond preference aggregation; for example, they socialize the individuals who staff them. Nonetheless, our assessment of elected American institutions focuses on preference aggregation because of the role that this concept plays in democratic theory. To be precise, the liberal view of democracy holds that individuals are the cornerstones of polities and that institutions should be designed so that they aggregate preferences in a way that is both “fair and efficient” (Miller 2002, p. 290). Evaluating a set of democratic institutions therefore necessitates studying how the institutions aggregate preferences and in particular whether the products of an aggregation process fairly reflect the inputs to it.

Any given set of democratic institutions may aggregate preferences fairly i.e., the associated aggregation process yields an outcome that reflects an appropriately designated representative constituent—or it may fail to do so—i.e., the aggregation process leads to distortion between its outcome and a representative constituent. Thus, to discern whether the elected American political institutions fairly aggregate preferences, we must address the question, who precisely is represented by these institutions and, importantly, is this individual representative of Americans writ large? As we argue later in our discussion of Congress and to a more limited extent the presidency, a fair institutional preference aggregation process is one in which institutional output—in our case, the median member of the United States Senate and the median member of the United States House—closely corresponds to the median American voter. We argue, then, that if the median American voter is represented in Congress, elected American political institutions work.

We recognize, of course, that there are a variety of criteria that one could use to assess if a set of institutions works, i.e., do the institutions protect citizens from external threats, and we also recognize that there are many forms of representation (Pitkin 1967). Our interest here is substantive representation where a collection of citizens organized into a single constituency is said to be substantively represented by an elected official if this individual either adopts or simply acts upon policy preferences that are roughly similar to those of his or her constituents. One can also conceptualize of representation as flowing from the descriptive characteristics of elected officials, e.g., gender and race. Substantive and descriptive dimensions of representation are not necessarily mutually exclusive (but see Epstein et al. (2007)), and we have chosen to focus on the former in light of its role in motivating the creation of democratic institutions.

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