Congressional Staff, Constituent Representation, and Legislative Behavior

Session Submission Type: Full Paper Panel

Session Description

In its first week, the 116th Congress created the Select Committee on the Modernization of Congress, which is in part charged with considering how staff contribute to representation and legislative processes. And in recent years political scientists have shown renewed attention to the crucial roles legislative staff play on behalf of members, committees, and leaders in Congress. These papers build on this emerging political priority and research agenda by investigating the causes and consequences of changes in legislative staff resources, staffers’ informational processing capabilities, and legislative decision making. The panel includes a diverse set of of participants by rank, affiliation, identity, and substantive focus, linked by the common theme of leveraging data on congressional staff to investigate how legislators and their enterprises seek out, produce, search for, filter, and use policy relevant information on behalf of elected members of Congress. The authors introduce exciting new data sources using a variety of qualitative and quantitative methods and experimental and observational designs to make important contributions to our understanding of how congressional staff impact constituent representation and legislative behavior.

Sub Unit

• DIVISION 22: Legislative Studies

Individual Presentations

• Moneyed Interests, Information, and Policy Action in Congress: An Experiment - Lee Drutman, New America; Alexander Charles Furnas, University of Michigan; Alexander Warren Hertel-Fernandez, Columbia University; Kevin R. Kosar, R Street Institute

• Addressing Invisibility: Gender and Race Affinity Groups on Capitol Hill - Kelly Dittmar, Rutgers University-Camden

• Unpacking the Black Box of Congressional Representation - Geoffrey Lancaster Henderson, University of California, Santa Barbara; Alexander Warren Hertel-Fernandez, Columbia University; Matto Mildenberger, University of California Santa Barbara; Leah Stokes, UCSB

• Determinants of Congressional Staff Turnover Intention - Hanna Brant, University of Missouri

Chair

• Adam Michael Dynes Brigham Young University

Discussants

• Kris Miler University of Maryland, College Park

• Nicholas Carnes Duke University