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
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The Social and Political Utility of Congressional Caucus Networks
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The Social and Political Utility of Congressional Caucus Networks
Jennifer Nicoll VictorUniversity 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 2011Seattle, Washington
ArgumentDo 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.
Theoretical PerspectiveLegislators 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.
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.
Caucuses Build (Weak) RelationshipsWeak 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.
ExpectationsCaucuses 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.
What we already know about CaucusesCaucuses 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).
◦ 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.
Bridging Ties EvidenceCount 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).
TESTING EXPECTATIONS
Caucuses provide opportunity for “brokerage.”
ERGM AnalysisExponential 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.
Testable Implications: Legislative ProductivityIf 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.
ConclusionsCaucus 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.
ConclusionsCaucuses 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.