First Come, First Serve? Seed Interests and Their Influence within Congressional Committees

• In Event: Money and Politics

Abstract

Legislators have sets of first or “seed” donors that had supported them when their electoral odds were lowest (i.e. during their first open seat primaries). From the donors’ standpoint, donors contribute to such candidates based on vetting them based on their commitment to the donor’s policy demands and perceived competence. In fact, donors undergo a costly vetting process to find candidates that would “champion” their policy preferences in Congress (Bawn et al 2023). But how well do these champions legislate on behalf of their seed donors? This paper seeks to investigate whether legislators participate more actively in the legislative process when the issue at stake is related to their seed donors. I look at hearing transcripts from the 102nd Congress to the 115th Congress House committee meetings to see whether seed interests are represented in legislators’ committee activities. Specifically, I use supervised and unsupervised learning methods to find clusters in speech and compare that to legislators’ identified seed donors. I also extract variables such as hearing participation and speech frequencies from the transcripts to find correlations between participation and whether the topic was related to their seed donors. I find that candidates advocate harder for seed interests than bandwagoning interests throughout their whole careers.

Author

• Ayoung Chun, University of California, Los Angeles