Representation and Household Risk Exposure

This project defines a concept, "attention to quality," and proposes that legislative attention to quality is a dependent variable that political science can use to evaluate the content of representation the political system offers, specifically to trace a means by which politics may influence household exposure to financial risk and possibly income inequality. Upstream of regulation or other formal policy solutions, attention to quality is observable consideration of the possibility that a good poses risk, or fails to shield consumers from risk, due to features of its own design. The project studies congressional attention to quality for three privately-vended, middle-class goods with the capacity to impact household risk exposure: health insurance, home loans, and prescription drugs. It also examines attention to quality in risk-modulating pieces of the welfare-state, taking Medicare as an example. The project explicitly contrasts attention to quality with attention to access for each good.