Prior scholarship has alluded to the importance of biography and other differentiating characteristics between candidates that are reflected in divergent electoral support from their voters. However, recent trends in partisanship and nationalization of congressional elections have led many to believe that these differences are no longer meaningful to voters or elites. In this dissertation, I argue for the continued importance of one aspect of the constituent relationship that has gone previously unstudied: the lived local roots in their districts that members of Congress often (but do not always) share with their constituents. I argue that the shared local identity that emerges from these mutual roots strengthens these legislators’ constituent relationships, and as a result improve legislators’ electoral dynamics in their districts.

This project has multiple theoretical and empirical aims: first, to disentangle the concept of local district roots from related but ultimately distinct concepts like the incumbency advantage, “home styles”, and the personal vote; second, to use originally-collected biographical data from nearly 3,000 members of Congress to more precisely specify what district roots are, and to capture the full breadth of benefits they provide both legislators and constituents; and finally, to use advanced quantitative methods to demonstrate the significant positive effects that district roots continue to have on the quality and durability of a legislator’s relationship with their constituents.

I first demonstrate in Chapter 3 that when legislators have deep local roots in their district, they are uniquely suited to cross-cut partisanship and outperform their party's presidential nominee in their district. In Chapter 4, I demonstrate that deeply rooted legislators have broader, more supportive constituencies than similarly-situated legislators without District route, and that as a result they outperformed expectations in both the primary and general election stages. Finally, in Chapter 5, I show that in part because they are so influential the legislator-constituent relationship, district roots also have a significant effect on legislators’ campaign spending activity. Deeply-rooted legislators require significantly less campaign spending to achieve results comparable to otherwise-similar legislators without deep local roots; and when they do spend, they do so at much higher proportions within the geographic confines of their districts. All three sets of results demonstrate that district roots are not only an important component of many legislators’ relationships with their constituents, but are also positive conditioners of their electoral dynamics in the district. I close in Chapter 6 by summarizing my results, and by laying out several noteworthy implications that these findings have on future research in congressional elections and representation. I also make a broader case for why, in many circumstances, deep local roots in the district are a normatively desirable component of congressional representation.