• American Politics

  • Political Institutions

  • Legislative Politics

  • Policy Process

  • Interest Groups

• Political Methodology

  • Network Analysis

  • Text as Data

  • Machine Learning

The Collaborative Congress:
Reaching Common Ground in a Polarized House
Cambridge University Press 2023

The Collaborative Congress is an in-depth study of how members work together to create policy in a polarized legislature. While the modern Congress is characterized by partisanship and conflict, members frequently look for opportunities to find common ground on substantive policy. This book challenges the conventional narrative of a hopelessly dysfunctional legislature by revealing the widespread use of collaboration for successful policymaking. Drawing on a new dataset of communication between members, social network analysis, and qualitative interviews, chapters demonstrate that nearly every member engages in collaboration across a broad array of issues. The book identifies the strategic and political considerations that influence a member's decision to collaborate and shows that collaborative legislation is more successful at every stage of the policymaking process.

Publications

Cue-Taking in Congress: Interest Group Signals from Dear Colleague Letters
with Janet M. Box-Steffensmeier and Dino P. Christenson
American Journal of Political Science, Vol 63, No. 1, January 2019, pp. 163-180

Why do some pieces of legislation move forward while others languish?  We address this fundamental question by examining the role of interest groups in Congress, specifically the effect of their legislative endorsements in Dear Colleague letters. These letters provide insights into the information that members use to both influence and make policy decisions. We demonstrate that endorsements from particularly well-connected interest groups are a strong cue for members with limited information early in the legislative process and help grow the list of bill cosponsors.  As bills progress, such groups have less direct weight, while legislation supported by a larger number of organizations and a larger number of cosponsors is more likely to pass. Thus, we illuminate the usage of Dear Colleague letters in Congress, demonstrate how members use interest groups in the legislative process, and shed new light on the varying impact of groups on public policy.  

It Takes a Coalition: The Community Impacts of Collaboration
Legislative Studies Quarterly, Vol 46, No. 1, 2021, pp. 11-48

Members of Congress frequently collaborate on policy initiatives, reaching out to colleagues in both parties to find common ground on solutions for the problems faced by their constituents. Using a novel dataset of over 30,000 “Dear Colleague” letters sent by members of the 111th Congress, I use the collaborative relationships that exist in the earliest stages of the policy process to measure the social influence of legislators. I demonstrate that districts represented by members of Congress who are better connected to their colleagues receive a greater share of federal grant money. I argue that this is because collaborative legislators are well-positioned to be influential allies to strategic bureaucrats who want to maintain a broad base of support for their programs in Congress. Thus, devoting resources to building relationships with their colleagues is one way members of Congress can more effectively support the communities they represent.

Governing Through Gridlock: Bill Composition Under Divided Government
State Politics & Policy Quarterly, Vol 23, No. 4, 2023, pp. 396-419

What is the effect of divided government on issue attention in state legislatures? Much of the research on divided government examines how it affects the enactment of significant legislation but does not consider other effects on legislative behavior. In this article, I propose a new theory of the relationship between divided government and legislative activity. Regardless of partisan control, reelection-minded legislators face pressure to deliver benefits to voters, yet divided government can make substantive policy change difficult. As a result of these competing pressures, under divided government legislators increasingly turn their focus to bills that benefit their local constituents, which are seen as easier to enact and allow them to engage in advertising, credit claiming, and position taking. Consistent with this theory, I find that under divided government, legislators introduce bills at the same rate, but the type of legislation introduced shifts away from statewide policy changes and towards district-specific legislation.

Selected Working Papers

Don’t Call it a Protest: Congressional Support for Democratic Norms During the January 6th Insurrection
with Bethany Albertson

Increasing partisan polarization has characterized American politics for decades. But the popular perception – emphasized by media accounts – holds that on Jan. 6, 2021, both Republicans and Democrats in Congress condemned the violent invasion of the U.S. Capitol. We hypothesize that even as the events themselves were unfolding, a marked partisan divide characterized congressional communication. We analyze all 1,861 tweets by members of Congress on Jan. 6 and find that Republicans were significantly more likely to characterize the invasion as a protest grown out of hand while Democrats described it as a violent insurrection. The results strongly indicate that partisan polarization was alive and well on Jan. 6 and may help to account for Republicans’ shift toward normatively positive portrayals of the day in subsequent months.

The Electoral Implications of Bipartisan Collaboration in the U.S. House of Representatives

Contrary to public perceptions, members of Congress routinely work together to craft legislation and other policy initiatives. Yet we have a limited understanding of the electoral implications of these efforts, particularly when members reach across the aisle. There is broad public support for congressional bipartisanship, but partisan voters prefer partisan representation. To reconcile these dynamics, I leverage ten years of congressional communications to identify members who work together and create new measures of collaboration and bipartisanship that capture relationships across a range of policymaking activities. Using two-way fixed effects models, I demonstrate that most members receive a higher vote share when they engage in more bipartisan collaboration, but the marginal benefit of bipartisanship decreases as district partisanship increases. Using CCES data, I attribute this dynamic to higher approval and perceived moderation from out-partisan voters. The results improve our understanding of public support for bipartisan policymaking and effective representation in Congress.

The Role of Race, Ethnicity, and Gender in the Congressional Cosponsorship Network  
with Skyler J. Cranmer, Bruce A. Desmarais, Christopher J. Clark and Vincent G. Moscardelli

Previous research indicates that race, ethnicity, and gender influence legislative behavior in important ways. The bulk of this research, however, focuses on the way these characteristics shape an individual legislator's behavior, making it less clear how they account for relationships between legislators. We study the cosponsorship process in order to understand the race and gender based dynamics underlying the relational component of representation. Using a temporal exponential random graph model, we examine the U.S. House cosponsorship network from 1981 through 2004. We find that Black and Latino members of Congress are at a comparative disadvantage as a result of race-based assortative mixing in the cosponsorship process, yet this disadvantage is mitigated by the electoral pressures that all members face. Members representing districts with significant racial and ethnic minority populations are more likely to support their minority colleagues. We also find that women members do not appear to face a similar disadvantage as a result of their minority status. We argue that these race and gender dynamics in the cosponsorship network are the result of both the inherent tendency towards intra-group homophily in social networks and the electoral connection, which is manifested here as members supporting minority colleagues to broaden their own electoral base of support among minority constituencies. 

The Secret to Senate Holds: Historical Analysis and Quantification of the Impact of Holds  
with Janet M. Box-Steffensmeier and Ross Butters

There are many forms of obstruction in the United States Senate, but some are less public than others.  A Senate Hold is an effective and critical component of the modern Congress.  A senator can place an anonymous hold on any piece of legislation or nomination before the Senate by informing their party leader.  A hold will stop or kill a bill or nomination and may be used to leverage concessions.  This project examines the procedural innovation of the hold by Lyndon B. Johnson in the 1950s.  Our research has uncovered the earliest available data on the use of Senate holds from the archive of Senate leader Lyndon Johnson, which is in contrast to the conventional wisdom, which states that holds began much later in the 1970s.  The record and logic shows that holds developed under Johnson as a way to manage legislation being passed under unanimous consent agreements.  We provide insightful historical information about the development of Senate holds and compare the usage and impact of holds.  The use of holds for the operation of the Senate is important for examining questions of fairness, efficiency and majority/minority rights. 

Working papers available upon request.