U. S. Congressman as Enterprise

Salisbury, Robert H.; Shepsle, Kenneth A.

doi:10.2307/439385

Cited by 104 publications

(52 citation statements)

References 8 publications

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“…1 Take, for instance, complaints during the 1980s that the Equal Employment Opportunity Commission (EEOC) was ineffective in managing cases of workplace civil rights violations (Minta 2011, 54) or the more recent findings that medical records had been falsified at Veterans Affairs (VA), compromising the health care of thousands of citizens. Scholars have long recognized that behavior attributed to legislators (e.g., bill introductions, cosponsorships) is influenced by their staff (Salisbury and Shepsle 1981). The dependence on legislator intervention is concerning given that modern legislators face an increasingly large set of demands for their attention but a limited set of resources to work with (Curry 2015), and participation in policy implementation and oversight is considered particularly costly with little to gain electorally (Hall and Miler 2008;McCubbins and Schwartz 1984).…”

Section: Descriptive and Substantive Representation In Congressmentioning

confidence: 99%

Descriptive and Substantive Representation in Congress: Evidence from 80,000 Congressional Inquiries

Lowande

Ritchie

Lauterbach

2019

American J Political Sci

118

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A vast literature debates the efficacy of descriptive representation in legislatures. Though studies argue it influences how communities are represented through constituency service, they are limited since legislators' service activities are unobserved. Using Freedom of Information Act (FOIA) requests, we collected 88,000 records of communication between members of the U.S. Congress and federal agencies during the 108th-113th Congresses. These legislative interventions allow us to examine members' "follow-through" with policy implementation. We find that women, racial/ethnic minorities, and veterans are more likely to work on behalf of constituents with whom they share identities. Including veterans offers leverage in understanding the role of political cleavages and shared experiences. Our findings suggest that shared experiences operate as a critical mechanism for representation, that a lack of political consensus is not necessary for substantive representation, and that the causal relationships identified by experimental work have observable implications in the daily work of Congress.

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Section: Descriptive and Substantive Representation In Congressmentioning

confidence: 99%

Descriptive and Substantive Representation in Congress: Evidence from 80,000 Congressional Inquiries

Lowande

Ritchie

Lauterbach

2019

American J Political Sci

118

View full text Add to dashboard Cite

show abstract

“…Due to these close working relationships, staffers are thought to make excellent informants of legislators' behavior. For more elaboration on this point seeDeGregorio (1988),Hall (1987),Salisbury and Shepsle (1981). 6 I attribute the absence of precise references to agendas and alternatives(Kingdon 1984) to the open-ended nature of the questions and the unit of analysis in this study—hearing activity over an entire session of Congress.at OAKLAND UNIV on June 1, 2015 prq.sagepub.com Downloaded from…”

mentioning

confidence: 96%

Leadership Approaches in Congressional Committee Hearings

DeGregorio

1992

Western Political Quarterly

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ecent Senate hearings on American involvement in the Per--~~ sian Gulf provide a vivid example of the role congressional hearings can play in waging interbranch warfare over such salient issues as whether the United States achieves international objectives through political negotiation or military force. As the chair of the Senate Arms Services Committee, Sam Nunn (D-GA) filed in witness after witness to support his personal position that the administration was misguided in sending troops to the region (Broder 1990;Krauthammer 1990). In these hearings, Sam Nunn profoundly affected the public debate over the U.S. role in the controversy by deciding first to hold hearings and second to stack the early testimony in favor of his own point of view. Such assertive behavior on the part of committee chairs has important implications for national policymaking. Such instances alert us that Congress can be a formidable check on the president. Of course if Senator Nunn's behavior is not typical of committee leaders this conclusion would be unfounded.With evidence provided by high-ranking congressional staffers and selected subcommittee chairs we inventory committee leadership styles at the period of public review. The new finding that behavioral differences in managing agendas and testimony do not cluster around acknowledged differences among committees offers an interesting puzzle suggesting productive lines of further inquiry. THEORETICAL BACKGROUNDCase studies abound with spectacular accounts of how will, wit, and circumstance conspire to produce policies and their champions on Capitol Hill (Reid 1980; Fleming 1986). Almost entirely absent are inquiries into the massive number of initiatives that die at the hands of congressional committees (Davidson and Hardy 1987).

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“…Within the U.S. House of Representatives, congressional offices are 440 (including nonvoting delegates) small, functionally identical, public organizations with a set of policy and procedural outputs (Hedlund, 1984;Salisbury and Shepsle, 1981). This enables a large N statistical study of innovation adoption.…”

Section: Datamentioning

confidence: 99%

Explaining the Diffusion of Web-Based Communication Technology among Congressional Offices: A Natural Experiment using State Delegations

2009

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Do legislators learn to use new communication technologies from each other? Using data from the official homepages of members of the U.S. House of Representatives, we test whether web-based communication technology diffuses through congressional state delegations. We use a natural experimental design that exploits ignorable state boundaries to distinguish between causal diffusion processes and spatial heterogeneity. Using nonlinear conditional autoregressive models for the statistical test, we find that web communication technology practices are weakly driven by communication within state delegations, and with the effect slightly more pronounced among Democrats than among Republicans.

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U. S. Congressman as Enterprise

Cited by 104 publications

References 8 publications

Descriptive and Substantive Representation in Congress: Evidence from 80,000 Congressional Inquiries

Descriptive and Substantive Representation in Congress: Evidence from 80,000 Congressional Inquiries

Leadership Approaches in Congressional Committee Hearings

Explaining the Diffusion of Web-Based Communication Technology among Congressional Offices: A Natural Experiment using State Delegations

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