An empirical analysis of what drives members of the House of Representatives to cultivate a reputation as a disadvantaged-group advocate is found in Chapter 4. These analyses use an original dataset of the members of the 103rd, 105th, 108th, 110th, and 113th Congresses (ranging from 1993 to 2015). Findings demonstrate that the greater the size of a disadvantaged group within their district, the more likely a member of Congress is to form a reputation as group advocate. Higher levels of district hostility toward a group reduces the odds that a member will be a group advocate, particularly for groups that are generally considered to be less deserving of government assistance. The results of this chapter also demonstrate that descriptive representatives, those who are themselves a member of that disadvantaged group, tend to be more likely to capitalize on a wider advocacy window to increase the level of representation that they offer than nondescriptive representatives.

The quantitative analysis in Chapter 5 demonstrates a number of important differences in the factors most strongly influencing a senator’s decision to form a reputation as a disadvantaged-group advocate relative to a member of the House. Chief among these distinctions is the diminished impact of the size of a disadvantaged group within the state. Senators are not likely to choose to build a reputation as a group advocate for any but the groups considered to be the most highly deserving of government assistance. This chapter also introduces and tests three additional hypotheses reflecting the unique institutional characteristics of the Senate, finding that the larger the number of group advocates present within a given Congress, the more likely it is that another senator will also be willing to incorporate advocacy on behalf of that group into their own reputation.

Chapter 2 situates this project in the broader congressional representation literature and highlights the contributions that this project offers: a focus on legislative reputation, meaning the extent to which members have cultivated an image for working on behalf of particular groups, a systematic study of legislators’ decisions to cultivate reputations for working on behalf of disadvantaged groups as a whole, and an analysis shedding light on why some members choose to represent the disadvantaged, rather than simply focusing on how many do not. It offers a definition of what it means to be a disadvantaged group and presents a new categorization scheme based on the extent to which the group is generally perceived to be deserving of government assistance. This chapter introduces the advocacy window as the centerpiece of a new theory of representation explaining which members of Congress are likely to craft a reputation for representing a disadvantaged group, and why. The advocacy window showcases the amount of leeway members have in deciding what level of representation to offer a given disadvantaged group, after taking into account group affect and group size.

“Crowd Involvements and Attachments,” analyzes and classifies group affect and other forms of thinking together, such as Heraclitean flows of group thought, sensation, and experience made available through new structures of collective feeling. The chapter counters arguments about the role of the leader with the proposition that the crowd may behave as an assemblage governed by an attractor, figured by characters such as James Wait, aboard the Narcissus, or Stevie in The Secret Agent. The function of Bloom for the crowd in “Cyclops” speaks to the crowd’s management of its anxieties and their effects. The chapter explores the interpenetration of public and private spaces in Sean O’Casey’s plays to understand crowds’ precise attachments to and exercise of design over the histories and semiotics of the metropolis, testing whether and in what manner they gain the sense of a shared life and act as a performative mass body.