Biasing Their Bosses: Staff Ideology and Information Distortion in Congress

• In Event: Interest Group Preferences and Party Agendas

Abstract

As the size and scope of information processing institutions within Congress have declined in recent decades, the gap between Congress’s informational needs and its internal provisioning generates opportunities for interest groups, think tanks and other outside organizations to offer policy relevant legislative subsidies. In this paper, I introduce a motivated reasoning theory of legislative information search in which staffers act as critical gatekeepers, selecting from a wide array potential outside sources of information subsidy. As prior research on political decision-making suggests, these decisions are likely to be subject to common cognitive biases and are shaped by factors such as staffer’s prior attitudes, ideological and partisan attachments, and institutional incentives. I test expectations derived from this framework using original survey data from the 2017 Congressional Capacity Survey and an experiment embedded in the 2019 Congressional Capacity Survey. I find strong evidence that 1) rather than simply selecting sources that are attitudinally aligned with their bosses, staffers’ own attitudes shape how they evaluate and use information, 2) staffers trust and use attitudinally aligned information sources at far higher rates than attitude incongruent sources, 3) moderate staffers are more likely to use internal non-partisan sources, and 4) there is considerable asymmetry between the negative effect of ideological extremism on trust and use of internal sources conservatives and liberals.

Author

• Alexander Charles Furnas, University of Michigan