Graduation Year

2026

Document Type

Dissertation

Degree

Ph.D.

Degree Name

Doctor of Philosophy (Ph.D.)

Degree Granting Department

School of Interdisciplinary Global Studies

Major Professor

Margarethe Kusenbach, Ph.D.

Co-Major Professor

J. Edwin Benton, Ph.D.

Committee Member

Elizabeth Strom, Ph.D.

Committee Member

Benjamin Melusky, Ph.D.

Keywords

constitutive representation, emotional labor, portable homestyle

Abstract

This dissertation examines how political representation is performed and sustained in the Florida Legislature. Rather than treating representation primarily as votes, bills, or policy outcomes, it approaches it as interactional work through which legislators remain believable, accessible, and authoritative across overlapping audiences. Grounded in an interpretivist epistemology and Goffman’s dramaturgy, the study develops an ethnographic account of representation through three analytic anchors: Fenno’s homestyle, Lamont’s boundary work, and Hochschild’s emotional labor. Methodologically, the project draws on ~100 days of participant observation during the 2025 legislative season, hundreds of pages of fieldnotes, and semi-structured interviews with ten Florida legislators. The findings show, first, that legislators carry district-rooted identity into the Capitol through portable homestyle, using local stories, place-based shorthand, and embodied cues to make themselves legible as credible representatives. Second, legislators convert that credibility into governable access through boundary work, sorting people, claims, and encounters in ways that regulate proximity, standing, and responsiveness in a porous Capitol environment. Third, credibility is sustained through emotional labor as legislators manage warmth, attentiveness, restraint, and composure across dense interactional demands, often at the cost of fatigue and burnout. Taken together, the dissertation argues that representation is not only expressed through policy positions but assembled through recurring interactional labor. By bringing ethnographic attention to a major state legislature, the study extends scholarship on representation beyond formal outputs and shows that representative institutions depend in part on the fragile craft of credibility.

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