Representing Prestige and Debt: How Local Attributes Influence Saliency and Ideology in Higher Education Discourse

Do constituency characteristics influence how legislators engage with higher education policy? This study uses transformer-based models to analyze a novel dataset of U.S. Congressional floor speeches (2010–2023), investigating how district-level conditions—including median age, prestigious university presence, educational attainment, and median income—shape the saliency of higher education and the ideological positions legislators adopt on specific issues. By focusing on discourse surrounding student loan forgiveness, the study examines the relationship between constituency attributes and legislators’ positions on this salient yet polarizing policy. Transformer models are applied to construct measures of saliency—the extent to which legislators prioritize higher education—and ideological stance within specific policy contexts. The analysis also controls for key legislator-level factors, including educational background, party affiliation, government status, and age. Results indicate that constituency conditions significantly influence both the emphasis legislators place on higher education and their ideological framing of policy solutions, reflecting localized pressures and electoral incentives. By combining computational text analysis with constituency-level data, this research advances our understanding of how local conditions shape federal policy articulation. The findings provide new insights into political representation, discourse dynamics, and the intersection of higher education policymaking with constituency-driven responsiveness in an increasingly polarized U.S. context.