1 / 28

The Social and Political Utility of Congressional Caucus Networks

The Social and Political Utility of Congressional Caucus Networks. Jennifer Nicoll Victor University of Pittsburgh From a book manuscript, Bridging the Information Gap: The Social and Political Power of Legislative Member Organizations

norah
Download Presentation

The Social and Political Utility of Congressional Caucus Networks

An Image/Link below is provided (as is) to download presentation Download Policy: Content on the Website is provided to you AS IS for your information and personal use and may not be sold / licensed / shared on other websites without getting consent from its author. Content is provided to you AS IS for your information and personal use only. Download presentation by click this link. While downloading, if for some reason you are not able to download a presentation, the publisher may have deleted the file from their server. During download, if you can't get a presentation, the file might be deleted by the publisher.

E N D

Presentation Transcript


  1. The Social and Political Utility of Congressional Caucus Networks Jennifer Nicoll Victor University of Pittsburgh From a book manuscript, Bridging the Information Gap: The Social and Political Power of Legislative Member Organizations By Nils Ringe and Jennifer N. Victor, with Christopher Carman APSA 2011 Seattle, Washington

  2. Argument • Do parties and committees satisfy legislators informational needs? • No. Legislators have an insatiable need for information. • Parties and Committees are institutionally constrained. • Legislative caucuses fill this void. • Caucuses provide weak-tie relationships and high utility information, at little cost.

  3. Theoretical Perspective • Legislators need information. Sources: • Committees, parties, CRS, CBO, lobbyists. • Parties and committees are constrained: • Membership is obligatory (parties & comtes) • Homogenous ideology (parties) • Narrow issue space (committees) • Caucuses are voluntary and unrestricted.

  4. How Do Caucuses Connect and Benefit Legislators? • Caucuses provide a network of weak ties between MCs. • Caucuses facilitate the flow of high utility information between legislative enterprises.

  5. Caucuses Build (Weak) Relationships • Weak ties (Granovetter 1973) • Bridge structural holes (Feld 1981; Burt 2000) • Inexpensive to create and maintain • A voluntary institution that creates weak, inexpensive relationships and information in Congress is highly valuable to MCs.

  6. Expectations • Caucuses help (weak) relationships develop. • Caucuses are inexpensive to create and maintain. • Caucuses provide valuable information to its members. • Caucuses make it likely for legislative “brokers” to arise.

  7. What we already know about Caucuses • Caucuses are sources of information (Fiellin 1962; Stevens, et al. 1974, 1981; Hammond 1998; Hammon, et al. 1985) • Caucuses help coordinate legislative activity (Loomis 1981; Hammond, et al 1983; Miller 1990; Vega 1993; Ainsworth and Akins 1997; Victor and Ringe 2009). • Caucuses develop relationships with outside groups (Ainsworth and Akins 1997; McCormick and Mitchell 2007).

  8. Data • Caucus memberships (109th-111th Congresses, 2005-2010) • Source: Congressional Yellowbook • Usual suspects: • NOMINATE, state, cd, committee assignments, gender, terms served, electoral percentage, leadership, ethniticy • Legislative productivty • 44 Interviews (May 2009 - June2010)

  9. Descriptive Data: who joins?

  10. Member-by-Member Caucus Networks

  11. Caucus-by-Caucus Networks

  12. Caucuses 1994-2010

  13. Largest Caucuses, 111th Congress

  14. The caucus network will be “tighter” than the committee network. Testing Expectations

  15. CaucusNetwork Committee Network Density = 0.75 Density = 0.21 LEGEND Democrats Republicans (Node size indicates seniority) Caucuses vs. Committees, 111th Congress

  16. Caucuses Committees Caucuses vs. Committees

  17. Caucuses create weak and bridging ties. Testing Expectations

  18. Weak & Bridging Ties • Caucus meetings and events are irregular (interview data); committees meet often. • Burt’s “constraint” (1992). Expect: • the constraint scores of caucus members will be statistically significantly lower than for legislators who are not members of any caucus. • Compare the constraint scores of caucus members to what their constraint scores would be if they were not members of any caucus; again, the expectation is that caucus membership decreases individual legislators’ constraint scores.

  19. Bridging Ties Evidence • Count all “institutional ties” between every pair in our sample for all Congresses in which they served (going back to 89th Congress 1965). • Only 5 MCs who join no caucuses, therefore no statistical difference in the constraint score between these 5 and all others. • Caucus members do have lower constraint scores than they would if they were not in any caucuses (p=0.01).

  20. Caucuses provide opportunity for “brokerage.” Testing Expectations

  21. ERGM Analysis • Exponential Random Graph Models • Explicitly model interdependence in the networks. • 1-mode projection of data, NxN affiliation matrices of caucus membership, and committee membership; dichotomized. • Expect a term for “betweenness centrality” to be positive and significant and greater in the caucus network than the committee network. • Controls: party, state, gender, leadership, NOMINATE, Black, seniority, electoral %.

  22. Testable Implications: Legislative Productivity • If our network theory of caucuses is correct, we should observe a positive relationship between a legislator’s structural position in the caucus network and her legislative productivity. • Data: # bills sponsored, # sponsored that pass House, # sponsored that become law.

  23. Conclusions • Caucus play an important, but indirect, role in lawmaking. • Caucuses provide a venue for building relationships and passing along information. • These voluntary institutions solve an information-based collective action problem that committees and parties cannot.

  24. Conclusions • Caucuses are cheap, and therefore flexible. Not constrained by institutional rules. • Caucus ties are cross-cutting and allow for social bridges between legislators. • [Not shown here] caucuses help connect legislator to outsiders who feed the groups with highly useful information.

More Related