Measuring Message Politics in Committee Hearings

• In Event: Legislative Process (Or Lack Thereof)

Abstract

While congressional committee members sometimes hold hearings to collect and transmit specialized information to the floor, they also use hearings as venues to send political messages by framing an issue or a party to the public which I refer to as “grandstanding.” However, we lack clear understanding of when they strategically engage in grandstanding.

I argue that when committee members have limited legislative power they resort to making grandstanding speeches in hearings to please their target audience. Using 12,821 House committee hearing transcripts from the 105th to 114th Congresses and employing a crowd-sourced supervised learning method, I measure a “grandstanding score” for each statement that committee members make. Findings suggest that grandstanding efforts are made more commonly among minority members under a unified government, and non-chair members of powerful committees, and in committees with jurisdiction over policies that the president wields primary power, such as foreign affairs and national security.

These findings suggest that committee members grandstand in hearings not just spontaneously but rather for a more systematic reason: to compensate their lack of ability to affect policy and to verbally appeal to their target audience. In addition, it further implies that grandstanding, which is often considered wasteful, can be a useful political tool for politicians to communicate issue frames to voters or any other external audience and thus can change the electoral climate in favor of themselves and their party.

Author

• Ju Yeon Park, University of Pittsburgh