When Do Politicians Grandstand? Measuring Message Politics in Committee Hearings

Abstract

While congressional committee members sometimes hold hearings to collect and transmit specialized information to the floor, they also use hearings as venues to send political messages by framing an issue or a party to the public which I refer to as "grandstanding." However, we lack clear understanding of when they strategically engage in grandstanding. I argue that when committee members have limited legislative power they resort to making grandstanding speeches in hearings to please their target audience. Using 12,820 House committee hearing transcripts from the 105 th to 114 th Congresses and employing a crowd-sourced supervised learning method, I measure a "grandstanding score" for each statement that committee members make. Findings suggest that grandstanding efforts are made more commonly among minority members under a unified government, and non-chair members of powerful committees, and in committees with jurisdiction over policies that the president wields primary power, such as foreign affairs and national security.

Congressional oversight and electoral accountability

“…A third theoretical approach, with which this paper is most closely aligned, explicitly considers the political and electoral side of congressional oversight decisions. Scholars have shown that some members value oversight hearings primarily as opportunities to make well-publicized political statements aimed at important constituent groups (Park 2020). Congressional investigations of the president or other executive branch officials, particularly ones launched within the House, are often calculated attempts by the majority party to tarnish the reputation of a president from the opposite party (Kriner and Schickler 2016a, 2016b; Lee 2009; Lee 2013; Lowande and Peck 2016).…”

Committee chair’s majority partisan status and its effect on information transmission via hearings

“…This research note not only extends the informational models of committees and the scholarship examining the effect of introducing bipartisan rules to the legislative procedures as discussed above, but it also contributes to the following strands of literature. First, it contributes to the previous works studying various factors affecting the extent of information transmission in committee hearingssuch as committee types (DeGregorio, 1992;Evans, 1991;Park, 2019), policy preferences of committee members and the floor pivot, the political salience of the issue (Park, 2017) and chair's seniority and ideological extremism (Kasniunas, 2011) by introducing a new explanatory factor: the chair's majority partisan status.…”

“…Second, her model incorporates electoral incentives of committee members to use hearings for political grandstanding which was absent in the existent informational models but considered one of the major goals that members pursue during hearings in empirical congressional studies (De Gregorio, 1992;Huitt, 1954;Park, 2019). Thus, each member can choose to commit their resources to either information-seeking or grandstanding or even to a mixture of them if one has enough resources to allocate to both, and these decisions are symbolized to choosing witnesses of different types: an informative one and a political one.…”

Flexible Estimation of Policy Preferences for Witnesses in Committee Hearings

“…My primary outcome of interest is the count of legislators' falsifiable sentences, or statements that engage the witness in informational, epistemic discourse (Esterling, 2011). demonstrates that information-seeking falsifiable questioning is consistent with policy-making "workhorse" behavior, in contrast to non-falsifiable opinion or anecdotal questioning that is consistent with grandstanding "showhorse" behavior (Park, 2021).…”

“…Alternatively, legislators may wish to grandstand by "grilling" witnesses with whom they disagree (Park, 2021). If either of these non-informational explanations are true, then legislators' behavior regarding falsifiable sentences should be similar to their behavior regarding non-falsifiable opinion and anecdotal sentences, that is, those questions and statements that do not engage in policy epistemic discourse .…”