My research focuses on the political economy of information and expertise in American policymaking, with an emphasis on how inequalities in interest representation and information production and dissemination impact elite behavior. In my work, I argue that funding the production of aligned policy-relevant information is a potent and often overlooked strategy used by powerful interest groups, and that the information evaluation and selection processes of political elites serve to exacerbate representational biases within American political institutions. My research has largely focused on this in the context of congressional policymaking While outside sources essentially provide subsidies for aligned legislators in the form of useful information, this relationship is two-sided; both the organization offering the subsidy and the legislator or her staff accepting it (or not) must participate in the transaction. As a result, my research attends to the organized interests that serve as sources of information, the staffers in Congress that act as information processors, and the members and institutional contexts that create the incentives shaping these staffers’ interactions.
Interest Groups, Lobbying and Ideology
Gaining Access Without Buying It: Campaign Contributions, Allies, and Lobbying on Capitol Hill (with Richard Hall and Robert Van Houweling) [working paper]
Critics of Congress often allege that members sell access to their office for campaign contributions, staining the practice of representation and shaping policy in ways that are difficult to detect. We hypothesize that contributions affect access via a different mechanism. They serve as costly signals of group-legislator policy agreement on which lobbyist credibility depends. For these signals to be informative, what matters is their cost to the sender, not their value to the receiver. The relationship between money and access should thus decrease with the size of the group’s PAC, not the size of the member’s campaign. We analyse observational data with over 7,000 observations on lobbyist-legislator contacts, showing robust relationships consistent with our claim, and one ancillary test suggests that the relationships are causal.
Congressional Staffing, Legislative Capacity, and Political Elites
Congressional Capacity Surveys
In the fall of 2017 I fielded the 2017 Congressional Capacity Survey as part of a larger joint New America and R Street project on Congressional Capacity. This survey sought to find out more about the backgrounds, career paths, policy views, and job experiences of congressional staffers. (with Timothy LaPira, Lee Drutman, Alex Hertel-Fernandez and Kevin Kosar)
In early Summer 2019, I fielded the 2019 Congressional Capacity Survey (with Timothy LaPira) which extends and expands on the 2017 Congressional Capacity Survey. The 2019 CCS surveyed Washington, DC-based congressional staffers to measure their professional backgrounds, career paths, policy views, technical knowledge, substantive expertise, and job experiences. The survey focuses is on the human beings who do the daily work of Congress – staff who work for members of Congress – and on the procedures and organizational structures that allow them to do their work in the most effective and democratically responsive ways.
I have ongoing projects using data from these surveys investigating partisan and ideological selection in information usage and trust, ideological diversity among members' staffs, cue-taking and legislative effectiveness, and how staffer issue knowledge effects information use patterns.
Biasing Their Bosses: Staff Ideology and the Distortion of Information in Congress [working paper]
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 staffers' 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.
The People Think What I Think: False Consensus and Elite Misperception of Public Opinion (with Tim LaPira) [Working Paper] [slides]
Political elites must know and rely faithfully on the public will to be democratically responsive. Recent work on elite perceptions of public opinion shows that reelection-motivated politicians systematically misperceive the opinions of their constituents to be more conservative than they are. We extend this work to a larger and broader set of unelected political elites such as lobbyists, civil servants, journalists, and the like, and report alternative empirical findings. These unelected elites hold similarly inaccurate perceptions about public opinion, though not in a single ideological direction. We find this elite population exhibits egocentrism bias, rather than partisan confirmation bias, as their perceptions about others’ opinions systematically correspond to their own policy preferences. Thus we document a remarkably consistent false consensus effect among unelected political elites, which holds across subsamples by party, occupation, professional relevance of party affiliation, and selective exposure to party-aligned information sources
Methodological Research
Text reuse and Paraphrase Detection with Semantical Smith-Waterman Local Alignment [working paper]
Coordination among political elites is an issue of substantive interest across political science. This paper details a new method for detecting text reuse and paraphrasing in political texts, a critical measurement task in leveraging new text data to observe patterns of coordination. The method proposed is an extension of the Smith-Waterman local alignment algorithm with semantically aware mismatch penalties. This modification enables detection of instances of text reuse in which words are changed to semantically similar alternatives to new contexts or disguise the source of the text. This method is applied to a corpus of tweets sent by Members of Congress and their electoral challengers during the 2016 election cycle.
Estimating Bill Proposal and Status Quo Locations Using Position-Taking Data (with Jesse Crosson and Geoff Lorenz) [please email for working paper]
Generation of point estimates for bill proposals and status quo locations has long proven a difficult impediment to the study of policymaking. Indeed, while the legislators’ ideal points and a roll call vote’s cut-point are well-identified using existing methods, identification of proposal and status quo locations is fragile and relies crucially upon the curvature of the legislators’ assumed utility functions. In this study, we develop an original dataset of 1,000 bill proposal and status quo point estimates from the 110th to the 114th Congress, by jointly scaling cosponsorship, roll call, and interest group position-taking data. Importantly, because interest groups in our data take public positions on bills before they ever receive a roll call vote, our data set includes point estimates for a large number of bills that never receive a roll call vote, permitting comparison between bills that do and do not advance through Congress. After introducing our methodology, we demonstrate how these data and the underlying methodology can contribute to study of a wide variety of topics in legislative politics, including partisan agenda-setting and members’ bill sponsorship strategies.
Using Model Legislation to Estimate Ideology Scores for State Legislators (with Charles Shipan) [working paper]
Legislator ideal points can be estimated by applying dimensionality reduction techniques to the high dimensional space defined by legislators’ roll call votes to find the latent ideological dimension that best explains voting behavior. Critically, the ideal points of these legislators must be estimated in a common latent space so that their scores are comparable. Practically, this means that legislators must have expressed their preferences (voted) on comparable or identical items (bills). We leverage a new set of common observations across states to address this need. We use a dataset of 153,582 unique bills across 321 state legislative sessions to identify new bridging observations and estimate ideal points for state legislators in three states to demonstrate this pooling approach. We use bill-to-bill similarity scores calculated with the Smith-Waterman local-alignment algorithm to identify a set of ideal bridge observations: bills introduced in multiple state houses in nearly identical form. In practice these bridge bills are often model legislation drawn from a variety of sources including ALEC, ALICE and the Council of State Governments. The directly comparable bills we use provide an opportunity to observe state legislators expressing their preferences in a truly comparable form. This enables us to calculate all state legislators’ ideal points within one common space, by pooling the voting matrices of multiple states into one large matrix and linking them with these bridge bills.