Sharing Expertise: Social Scientists Before Congress 1946-2016

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Abstract

Congressional hearings are an important avenue through which social scientists influence the political process, however quantitative data on their representation has been lacking. We used web-scraping to gather data on the rates at which sociologists, economists, political scientists, psychologists, and anthropologists appeared before congressional hearings from 1946-2016, finding they were present at some 91,827 hearings, and were 879,032 different witnesses. We present and summarize these data in an effort to provide an empirical background against which theorizing on the causes and consequences of such representation can proceed. We show that economists are far better represented before congress than other social scientists, partly as a function of their greater representation in industry and government positions. We find that think tanks are increasingly influential, and that political scientists in particular have gained much more representation through think tanks. Sociology’s representation before congress has declined considerably beginning in the 1980s.

Authors

• Thomas V. Maher, Purdue University

• Charles F. Seguin, Penn State

• Andrew Davis, North Carolina State University

• Yongjun Zhang, University of Arizona