Staff Ideology, Motivated Reasoning, and Information Distortion in Congress

• In Event: Agents In the Politics Industry

Abstract

The central representational duties of Congress require acquiring and assessing widely dispersed information. In this paper, I present a theory of congressional information processing in which staffers act as information gate-keepers whose own ideological preferences shape the picture of the world they present to their bosses. I present the first systematic empirical test of three competing perspectives on congressional staffer behavior: staffers as faithful agents, staffers as independent agents and staffers as motivated reasoners. I adjudicate between these perspectives 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) this relationship is more pronounced among more ideologically extreme staffers, 4) there is considerable asymmetry in the relationship between ideological extremism and evaluations of internal sources for conservatives and liberals, 5) at least some of these effects appear to be driven by cognitive biases rather than strategic action intended to advance staffer's positions. Together, these results show substantial support for the proposition that staffers act as largely independent agents, exercising considerable leeway to present a biased selection of information to their bosses.

Author

• Alexander Charles Furnas, University of Michigan