This dissertation explores if, when, and how individual members of Congress work to pursue their policy goals by putting forth effort to introduce new legislation that constrains the downstream actors who are tasked with interpreting, implementing, enforcing, and following the law. Although researchers have identified a variety of policy tools that legislators may use to limit the discretion of downstream political actors throughout the policymaking process, we do not yet have a way to measure this tool usage across policy issue and time. Given the extensive role that bureaucrats and other political actors play in the policymaking process, this limits our understanding of how Congress shapes our national laws and the role it plays in our separation-of-powers system.

Using an original dataset that identifies the presence of a broad range of legislative tools in bills introduced in the U.S. House of Representatives, I offer a new way to measure the tool diversity (which I call \textit{legislative incentivization}) written into legislation. Applying this measure to 13,770 bills newly introduced in the U.S. House of Representatives from 2005-2012, I provide evidence that institutional factors, such as committee membership and divided government, as well as extra-institutional factors, such as gender (and the intersection of gender with partisanship) play important roles in shaping legislator bill drafting behavior. Specifically, I show that the relationship between individual legislators, their experiences, and their policy goals have important consequences for how policy is made in the United States. These findings provide a new perspective on the role that institutional context and personal experience plays on the policymaking process in Congress.

Among the main tenets of American democracy are liberty, popular sovereignty, and equality. While each has seen expansion over the course of American history, the recent growth in economic inequality could threaten each of these core democratic features. As political equality is a prerequisite central to each of these values, I investigate the question: where does political inequality come from? In order to research the sources of political inequality, I examine the nature of inequality in each of three aspects of the American governmental system: institutions (e.g. Congress), individuals (e.g. voters), and the

interaction between the two (e.g. responsiveness).

At its founding, the American government was set up to be a republican democracy. In this light, I focus on the role of representation in the U.S. political system and the degree

to which certain groups receive higher levels of responsiveness, defined as the level of correspondence between constituency preferences and a legislator's behavior (e.g. Miller and

Stokes 1963; Achen 1978), and other groups do not. Because modern democratic theory assumes the continued responsiveness of the government to all citizens (considered as

political equals) my primary focus is to examine the degree to which this equal responsiveness is broken, which can be a source of political inequality (Dahl 1971). The argument that I make throughout the dissertation is that economic inequality greatly affects

political inequality. While this thesis may not seem novel, recent studies that have uncovered evidence of unequal governmental responsiveness have been unable to provide an account

of why this occurs (Gilens 2005; Bartels 2008).

In the dissertation I explore three questions. First, how pervasive is political inequality? In order to answer this question I examine the behavior of members of Congress and the degree to which they respond to different economic classes. As Congress is the

main body designed to represent the people's voice, I focus intensely on this institution.

The second question, which focuses on the role of the people, is: Does the public view inequality as a problem? In researching this question, I will examine individual preferences

from the mass public in order to understand people's attitudes toward inequality. Individual indifference to economic inequality and an inability to hold elected officials accountable could be a main source of political inequality. Finally, I examine the interaction between individual (and group) preferences and political institutions and ask the question: What accounts for legislator bias toward different groups? To this end, I examine the influences

on legislator behavior such as member personal wealth, party, competitiveness, constituent preference (majority and subconstituency), constituent participatory factors (e.g. voting,

volunteering, donating, etc.), and political knowledge.

Over the past half-century, students of democratic representation have investigated the extent to which elected officials act as their constituents prefer. Less attention has been paid to the fact that in addition to popular sovereignty, however, modern republican democracy is characterized by the values of liberty and equality. Democratic theorists suggest that these latter values should prevail in cases of conflict when the issue in question speaks to citizens’ fundamental rights, as is the case with gay marriage. We examine this question of representation and responsiveness with respect to gay marriage, an issue of importance to the gay community—a small and intense group that struggles to achieve policy success. We find that neither majoritarian nor capture-based theories of representation fully account for the lack of elected official responsiveness to this particular constituent interest group. Instead, our evidence supports the theory of subconstituency politics. Consequently, we find little reason for optimism that legislation supporting gay marriage is likely to pass both because gay marriage is opposed by a competing subconstituency, Evangelical Christians, who are intense and larger in number and because the systemic design inhibits the ability of minority groups to succeed legislatively in the face of comparable minority opposition.

Democratic theory presumes that individuals will coalesce around shared goals and work collectively to advance the interests of the group. However, scholars have observed a divergence between many Americans’ economic interests and their political attitudes and behavior. I offer identity as a potential explanation for this phenomenon. Research in political science demonstrates the central role of identity to politics, yet we know very little about the extent that Americans form a psychological attachment to their class and how that class identity informs their political attitudes and behavior. We might expect class identity to lead individuals to consider their class when forming political attitudes and increase the likelihood that classes act collectively to advance their economic interests. However, the limited evidence of this in American politics suggests that Americans either do not hold meaningful identities based in class or if they do those identities are not salient to their political behavior. In Chapter 2, I examine the level of Americans’ class identity using an original survey to gauge the extent that respondents have a psychological attachment to their class. I find that many Americans have strong class identities, with the strength of the attachment increasing alongside class position. In Chapter 3, I employ an original vote choice experiment to assess whether class identity informs Americans’ vote choice. I find that class identity influences the vote choice for those in the working class with strong class identities but has little influence on the vote choice of middle and upper class Americans. Finally, in Chapter 4, I examine the extent that Americans rely on identities based in party and race in lieu of their class identity, by further analyzing the results of the vote choice experiment. I find strong evidence that Americans are more likely to rely on their racial and partisan identities to inform their vote choice, rather than their class identity. The findings here indicate that the disjuncture between Americans’ political behavior and their economic interests is in part a function of the limited role of class identity in informing their political attitudes and behavior.