Personal Relationships and Legislative Negotiation in the U.S. Congress

• In Event: Accounting for Success and Effectiveness in Legislatures

Abstract

Do personal relationships among and between representatives and senators affect legislative collaboration, legislative negotiations, and legislative success in the contemporary Congress?

Contemporary scholarship points to a number of factors that may affect the success of legislative negotiations and deal making including: the degree of policy agreement between the parties and among key players, the incentives (or disincentives) for partisan conflict, levels of intra-party factionalism, the strategic efforts of party and coalitional leaders, the issue-specific context and the nature of status quo policies, the separated powers structure of the constitutional policymaking process, and more. Notably absent from this list are the personal and professional relationships that exist among key members of Congress. However, both media and insider accounts of how deals are made in Congress invariably focus on the importance of personal relationships between key members.

The goal of this project is to assess when and under what conditions the relationships developed among members of Congress can help or hinder legislative collaboration, legislative negotiations, and legislative success. To do so, our projects draws on a multi-method approach combining in-depth interviews with members of Congress, senators, and legislative staff, with data collected on the interactions between and among members of Congress that are believed to, or expected to, help establish personal relationships among lawmakers.

For quantitative data on the interpersonal interactions of legislators we focus on two sources of data. First, we gather and analyze data on official trips abroad by members of the House and Senate. These trips, called CODELs, can provide opportunities for members to spend unstructured time together and many members and staffers remark that effective personal and professional relationships between lawmakers often form on these trips. Second, the Bipartisan Policy Center has implemented a program known as the American Congressional Exchange Program in which members take turns visiting each other in their home districts. The members selected are in different parties and spend a considerable amount of time with each other outside of Washington, D.C. The program’s goals include building “trust, relationships, and friendship” among members from different regions and different party affiliations.

Using these data, first, we can determine if participation in CODELS or the American Congressional Exchange Program predicts more cross-partisan collaboration (via cosponsorship or other indicators), more legislative success (via measures like Legislative Effectiveness Scores or traditional indicators of advancing policy proposals in the legislative process), or more bipartisan behavior on roll call votes among participating lawmaking. Second, analysis our data using a unit of analysis of dyadic pairs of members within each chamber of Congress, we can ascertain whether the presence of a pair of members on a CODEL or as part of an American Congressional Exchange Program visit predicts more collaborative behavior than would otherwise be expected. For example, do such interactions between a pair subsequently predict more joint cosponsorships or more similar voting records than otherwise expected?

We couple these quantitative analyses with interviews with representatives, senators, and staff. Because we are focused on not only uncovering patterns in observable behavior, but the motivations and mechanisms underlying those patterns of behavior, interviews are crucial to our study. These interviews will be aimed at understanding how actors on Capitol Hill understand the role interpersonal relationships play in legislative politics, negotiations, and policymaking, and how these relationships form (or do not).

Altogether, our analyses will provide insight into the role that relationships play in legislating in Washington, DC, and can shed some light on whether or not efforts to improve the personal relationships among individuals elected to the House and Senate might improve deal-making and legislative success in Congress.

Authors

• James M. Curry, University of Utah

• Jason M. Roberts, University of North Carolina, Chapel Hill