Assessing Policy Learning and Attention in Congressional Committees

• In Event: Committee Dynamics in the U.S.

Abstract

Members of Congress vary considerably in their attention to and expertise in various policy and issue areas. Some members develop a deep understanding of particular policy areas, engaging with expert witnesses and often being relied on by their peers for their knowledge. Other members focus more on their representational role, progressive ambition, and electoral prospects, eschewing the effort necessary for deep issue knowledge. While observers of Congress have long recognized the differences in members’ inclination towards policy learning and expertise, individual-level measures of policy interest or attention have yet to be developed.

In this manuscript, we begin to develop such measures. Using a combination of human coding, and supervised and unsupervised text classification techniques, we examine Congressional committee testimony in the House of Representatives from 1990-2015. We classify each statement made by a member of Congress within committee as being focused on policy learning or not, utilizing the validity claims-falsifiable statements coding scheme of Esterling (2007). We then aggregate this sentence level coding to the member-committee-session level, providing us with a measure of individual-level policy learning within committees. We leverage a variety of techniques to validate our measure, and demonstrate its relationship to other composite measures of legislative behavior like DW NOMINATE scores and legislative effectiveness scores. We also examine between-member and within-member changes in policy learning. Our results show that individual members’ attention to policy learning within committee has indeed declined over time, and that the macro-level patterns of declining Congressional capacity are mirrored in declining policy attention by members. Finally, we explore the predictors of policy learning in committee and show that electoral challenges decrease members’ attention to policy learning within committees.

Authors

• Nathaniel A Birkhead, Kansas State University

• Kevin M. Esterling, University of California, Riverside

• Justin Kirkland, University of Virginia

• Joseph Gerard Amoroso, University of Virginia

• Harrison James Weeks, University of Virginia