The Effects of Congressional Staff Networks in the US House of Representatives

Abstract

Standard accounts of legislative behavior typically neglect the activities of professional staff, who are treated as extensions of the elected officials they serve. However, staff appear to have substantial independent effects on observed levels of legislator productivity and policy preferences. In this paper, we use a novel dataset of comprehensive longitudinal employment records from the U.S. House of Representatives to estimate the effects of Congressional staff on legislative behavior. Specifically, results from a series of heteroskedastic Bayesian spatial autoregressive models indicate that members of Congress who exchange important staff members across congresses are more similar in their legislative effectiveness and voting patterns than we would otherwise expect. These findings suggest that scholars should reconsider the role of staff in the legislative process.

It Takes a Coalition: The Community Impacts of Collaboration

“…If the relationship between social influence and money allocated to that district is not a function of a member’s connections but instead some form of spurious correlation, then the social influence of a district’s representative in the 110th Congress may predict grant allocations in the 111th, even when the district changes hands. To test this, I estimate models using the social influence score of a district’s representative in the 110th Congress to confirm that the theoretical expectation of a null result matches the observed relationship (Montgomery and Nyhan 2017; Sekhon 2009).…”

Do More Professionalized Legislatures Discriminate Less? The Role of Staffers in Constituency Service

“…We contribute to a growing literature on the importance of staffers in the legislative enterprise (Hertel-Fernandez et al, 2018; McCrain, 2018; Montgomery & Nyhan, 2017; Pertschuk, 2017) by studying staffers in state legislatures and their role in constituency service. Early research theorized the importance of staffers in increasing legislative capacity in Congress (DeGregorio, 1995; Fox & Hammond, 1977; Salisbury & Shepsle, 1981), but it is only recently that the field has studied the importance of staffers in state legislatures (Weissert & Weissert, 2000).…”

Statistical Inference for Multilayer Networks in Political Science

“…Another example can be found within the broad set of related research agendas on policy-making at different levels of political organization. In these policy networks, information transmission between political actors occurs through a variety of channels (Leifeld and Schneider 2012;Heaney 2014;Montgomery and Nyhan 2017), and tend to have complementary effects on whether influence is successful (Böhmelt 2010).…”