The Social and Political Utility of Congressional Caucus Networks

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

14. Largest Caucuses, 111th Congress

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

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

17. Caucuses Committees Caucuses vs. Committees

18. Caucuses create weak and bridging ties. Testing Expectations

19. 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.

20. 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).

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

22. 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 %.

24. 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.

27. 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.

28. 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.