Flexible Estimation of Policy Preferences for Witnesses in Committee Hearings

Abstract

Theoretical expectations regarding the legislative influence of outside agents, such as lobbyists, agency officials or policy experts, often depend on the relationship between legislators' and agents' preferences. Non-elected agents, however, typically will have preferences defined on a dimension that is different from that of elected legislators. I develop a bridging method that accommodates when the agent preference space shifts and rotates relative to the legislator roll-call preference space, and that identifies distances across the two dimensions in meaningful units necessary to test institutional hypotheses. In my application to Medicare hearings, I show that the agent preference space has an orthogonal rotation anchored by a quality-cost latent dimension, and that legislators heavily condition their questioning of agents on preference distance in a way consistent with informational models of lobbying.

Flexible Estimation of Policy Preferences for Witnesses in Committee Hearings

“…In all, across all of the 29 hearings, there are 67 witnesses, 87 committee members, and 669 dyads. The replication package is Esterling and Park (2024).…”