Governing Institutions
Partisan Appeals to Bipartisanship
Colin Case & Emily Cottle Ommundsen
Political Behavior, forthcoming
Abstract:
How do members of Congress build public support for legislation? Many argue it is through the framing of the legislative process or carefully curated explanations that appeal to their constituents' preferences. Some suggest the key to members of Congress building public support for legislation is appealing to bipartisanship -- signaling to the public that legislation was crafted through compromise and is liked by members on both sides of the aisle. Given the hyper-partisan era that presently exists, however, these bipartisan appeals are unlikely to occur in a vacuum. The minority party has incentives to engage in counter framing to undermine support for legislation. We demonstrate that the benefits awarded to members by engaging in bipartisan appeals are overstated. By engaging in counter messaging, members in the minority party can undermine the legislative accomplishments of their opponents, as well as approval for the legislature. Minority-party members, however, must be careful in how they counter message: partisan, rather than non-partisan, messages actually increase support for the legislature's majority party while decreasing support for the minority party.
How Does the Rising Number of Women in the U.S. Congress Change Deliberation? Evidence from House Committee Hearings
Pamela Ban et al.
Quarterly Journal of Political Science, Summer 2022, Pages 355-387
Abstract:
The rising number of women in Congress changes deliberation. Using committee hearing transcripts from 1995 to 2017, we analyze how the gender composition of committees affects group dynamics in committee hearings. While we find limited evidence that increasing proportions of women affects women's participation, we find that discussion norms within committees change significantly in the presence of more women. Namely, interruptions decrease when there are more women on the committee; with higher proportions of women, men are less likely to interrupt others. Furthermore, committee members are more likely to engage and stay on the same topics in the presence of more women, suggesting a shift in norms toward more in-depth exchange. Overall, our results show that increasing the proportion of women changes discussion dynamics within Congress by shifting norms away from interruptions and one-sided talk in committees, thereby shifting group norms that govern decision-making during an important policy-making stage.
Friendly Lobbying under Time Pressure
Emiel Awad & Clement Minaudier
American Journal of Political Science, forthcoming
Abstract:
Lobbyists often target legislators who are aligned with them rather than opponents. The choice of whom to lobby affects both what information becomes available to legislators and how much influence special interest groups exert on policies. However, the conditions under which aligned legislators are targeted are not well understood. We investigate how the pressure to conclude policies quickly affects the strategic decision of whom to lobby. We derive conditions on the cost of delaying policies and on the distribution of legislators' preferences for lobbyists to prefer targeting allies. We show that the use of allied intermediaries has important implications for the duration of policymaking and the quality of policies. Counterintuitively, an increase in time pressure can increase the duration of policymaking and a longer duration does not always lead to better informed policies.
The Crisis in Local Newspapers and Organizational Wrongdoing: The Role of Community Social Connectedness
Tony Jaehyun Choi & Mike Valente
Organization Science, forthcoming
Abstract:
Drawing on institutional anomie theory, we examine how the crisis in local newspapers has induced organizational wrongdoings in local communities. We argue that, because local newspapers are the primary source of accountability journalism in local communities, their decline leads to an anomic state that increases the scale of organizational wrongdoing. We also investigate whether institutional complementarity helps overcome the anomic state: Due to functional similarity, community social connectedness compensates for the scarcity of local newspapers. Our analysis of U.S. metropolitan areas for the period of 2007-2015 reveals that the positive relationship between local newspaper scarcity and the scale of organizational wrongdoing is not present in all communities but does appear when a community lacks community social connectedness. We also find that this moderating role of community social connectedness is observed only for internal organizational wrongdoings that are less visible to the public than external ones.
Take (Her) to the Limit: Term Limits do Not Diminish Women's Overperformance in Legislative Office
Mirya Holman & Anna Mitchell Mahoney
Legislative Studies Quarterly, forthcoming
Abstract:
Women in political office outperform men in legislative activity and constituent services. Scholars have identified two potential explanations for this overperformance: women are higher quality candidates when they run for office and women face elevated voter expectations to win elections. We use the presence of term limits to examine how these two justifications for women's overperformance produce downstream effects. While designed to strike a blow to entrenched systems of power, term limits reduce the time that legislators spend on constituent service and legislative output, including bill sponsorship, votes, and committee work. We use the effects of term limits as a tool for understanding the two paths to women's overperformance, using data on over 6000 legislators serving in term-limited states. We find more evidence for the quality candidate hypothesis than the voter expectations hypothesis. While term limits degrade men's performance in office, women officeholders continue to overperform even under this institutional constraint. Our findings that women's overperformance is more likely due to their higher quality have implications for efforts to increase the representativeness of political bodies, the quality of representation in state legislatures, and the gendered consequences of institutional reforms.
Beyond Pan-Ethnicity: Responsiveness of Elected Officials to Asian American Subgroups
Yat To Yeung
American Politics Research, forthcoming
Abstract:
Are American elected officials equally responsive to all Asian subgroups? Asian American is one of the major racial/ethnic groups in the United States and is currently the fastest-growing racial group. However, studies on the representation of Asian Americans are limited. Studies also commonly view Asian Americans as a single, homogenous group and omit the heterogeneity within this unique population. I argue that to understand any racial/ethnic group better, we should look into the ethnic subgroups and examine them as separate populations. I conducted an audit experiment in this study and sent emails to more than 2000 state legislators, manipulating senders' names to represent different Asian subgroups. I find that none of the subgroups received a lower response rate than white constituents, regardless of the officials' racial group and partisan affiliation. However, Korean constituents were less likely to receive a friendly response than white and Vietnamese constituents. The results also show that Latino and Black legislators were less friendly in their emails and less responsive than their Asian and white counterparts. This study sheds light on the heterogeneity of racial/ethnic groups, which scholars have routinely overlooked.