The Causes and Consequences of Lawmaking Effectiveness in Congress (Pre-Recorded)

Session Submission Type: In-Person Full Paper Panel

Session Description

Chair: Alan E. Wiseman, Vanderbilt University

Discussant: Laurel Harbridge-Yong, Northwestern University

Discussant: Molly Reynolds, Brookings Institution

Paper: Fundraising and Legislating in the U.S. Congress (Danielle Thomsen, UC-Irvine)
This paper explores representational tradeoffs between dialing for dollars and passing legislation. I draw on primary and general election fundraising totals for all U.S. House members from 1980 to 2020 to examine whether the top fundraisers are also the most effective lawmakers or whether one of these roles ultimately gives. The variation in campaign receipts is notable, with some rank-and-file members raising tens of millions of dollars and others raising hundreds of thousands, and fundraising success is not simply a reflection of electoral vulnerability. The data are merged with Volden and Wiseman’s (2014) Legislative Effectiveness Scores (LES) and Stewart and Woon’s (2017) data on committee assignments to capture legislative productivity within and across committees. I find that members who excel at fundraising have lower LES scores, on average, and they underperform their colleagues who sit on the same committees. The top fundraisers are also more likely to secure a seat on a power committee than those who raise less, which offers a partial explanation for their lower averages, but the within-committee effects remain. I leverage additional within-member variation over time to show how the pressure to fundraise impacts legislative effectiveness.

Paper: Drawing Better Lawmakers: Redistricting Institutions and Legislative Performance (Geoffrey Lorenz, University of Nebraska)
Several states have adopted independent redistricting commissions (IRCs) to counteract gerrymandering and declining electoral competitiveness, but evidence of their effectiveness is mixed. I investigate the legislative consequences of this electoral reform. Examining data on the U.S. House between 1980 and 2016, I find an association between being elected from an IRC-drawn district and legislative effectiveness (c.f., Volden and Wiseman, 2014), though I cannot decisively rule out selection effects. While these differences do not appear to be due to IRC-instituted changes in district composition, they do differ by the legislator’s incumbency status when their state adopted its IRC; while members originally elected by IRC-drawn districts exhibit substantially more effectiveness, incumbents representing non-competitive districts whose states switch to IRCs exhibit lower legislative effectiveness. This suggests that for such incumbents, IRCs make trade-offs between campaigning and lawmaking efforts more salient.

Paper: How Policy Content Influences Effective Lawmaking (Erinn Lauterbach, University of Virginia; Craig Volden, University of Virginia; and Alan E. Wiseman, Vanderbilt University)
Do effective lawmakers write substantially different bills than do ineffective lawmakers? And, if so, how does the nature of the bills’ policy content influence their paths forward into law? In this paper, we combine Lauterbach’s (2020) measures of policy content with Volden and Wiseman’s (2014) Legislative Effectiveness Scores. We assess whether the policy content of legislation differs across members of Congress – effective vs. ineffective lawmakers, chairs vs. rank-and-file members, policy specialists vs. generalists, partisans vs. bipartisan lawmakers – in meaningful ways. We then examine the extent to which policy content coupled with bill sponsors’ approaches to lawmaking and institutional positions helps to explain which bills are more successful at each stage of the lawmaking process – from action in committee, to passing the House, to becoming law.

Paper: Communicating Effectiveness: Legislative Success as Constituent Communication (Nicholas Howard, Auburn University; and Annelise Russell, University of Kentucky)
Senators’ social media habits are instrumental in shaping the individual narratives coming out of Congress. These narratives frame a political reputation signaling policy prowess and political power, and this research expands that reputation-defining behavior to consider how legislative effectiveness maps onto senators’ political brand for the public. Using a unique dataset of senators’ official tweets, we construct a typology of senators’ communication strategies across policy and partisan politics to analyze the patterns of rhetoric they use on Twitter to amplify their agendas. We use this typology to assess whether effective lawmakers adopt a unique style of constituent communication and build a political brand that capitalizes on their lawmaking experience. Senators have a new, public-facing agenda on social media where their political influence extends beyond legislation, and this research explores the nature of that communication.

Sub Unit

• Division 22: Legislative Studies

Individual Presentations

• Fundraising and Legislating in the U.S. Congress - Danielle Thomsen, University of California, Irvine

• Drawing Better Lawmakers: Redistricting Institutions and Legislative Performance - Geoffrey M. Lorenz, University of Nebraska, Lincoln

• How Policy Content Influences Effective Lawmaking - Erinn K Lauterbach, University of Virginia; Craig Volden, University of Virginia; Alan E. Wiseman, Vanderbilt University

• Communicating Effectiveness: Legislative Success as Constituent Communication - Nicholas Howard, Auburn University at Montgomery; Annelise Russell, University of Kentucky

Chair

• Alan E. Wiseman Vanderbilt University

Discussants

• Laurel Harbridge-Yong Northwestern University

• Molly Reynolds Brookings Institution