This chapter highlights the role media play in political accountability. If Fox News’ entry and presence can shape candidate and member perceptions about what districts want (as we saw in Chapters 3 and 4), can Fox News also shape how responsive representatives are to constituents’ policy preferences? This responsiveness to the district – also known as dyadic representation – is the subject of our examinations in Chapter 5. To test this question, we quantify the degree to which representatives’ voting behavior diverges from what it should be (if they were faithfully following district public opinion). Here we find, once again, that Fox News increases the tendency for Democratic members in marginal districts to “move rightward” in response to rising Fox News availability in the district. In this analysis, our measures reflect the tendency for Democrats in right leaning districts to err on the conservative side of the median voter in their district, and that tendency gets worse as district-level availability of Fox News increases.

Presidential primaries have a simple purpose: they are the elections to select a party’s presidential candidate for the general election. But they are often much more than that. In some states, they also serve as the first step in a series of steps that political parties use to handle other assorted types of business.

When voters go to the polls during a primary election, they are not voting for a presidential candidate. Instead, they may be helping to choose representatives to attend the party’s national nominating convention, a meeting where the actual presidential candidate is chosen. Or they may be choosing representatives to attend local conventions, like a county convention or a state convention, who will in turn go on to choose the representatives to attend the national convention. Or voters may be choosing representatives who will later meet to help choose presidential electors, the individuals who formally elect the next president and vice president.