Publications

Books

Good public policy in a democracy relies on efficient and accurate information flows between individuals with firsthand, substantive expertise and elected legislators. While legislators are tasked with the job of making and passing policy, they are politicians and not substantive experts. To make well-informed policy, they must rely on the expertise of others. Hearings on the Hill argues that partisanship and close competition for control of government shape the information that legislators collect, providing opportunities for party leaders and interest groups to control information flows and influence policy. It reveals how legislators strategically use committees, a central institution of Congress, and their hearings for information acquisition and dissemination, ultimately impacting policy development in American democracy. Marshaling extensive new data on hearings and witnesses from 1960 to 2018, this book offers the first comprehensive analysis of how partisan incentives determine how and from whom members of Congress seek information.

Articles

We propose WIBA, a novel framework and suite of methods that enable the comprehensive understanding of "What Is Being Argued" across contexts. Our approach develops a comprehensive framework that detects: (a) the existence, (b) the topic, and (c) the stance of an argument, correctly accounting for the logical dependence among the three tasks. Our algorithm leverages the fine-tuning and prompt-engineering of Large Language Models. We evaluate our approach and show that it performs well in all the three capabilities. First, we develop and release an Argument Detection model that can classify a piece of text as an argument with an F1 score between 79% and 86% on three different benchmark datasets. Second, we release a language model that can identify the topic being argued in a sentence, be it implicit or explicit, with an average similarity score of 71%, outperforming current naive methods by nearly 40%. Finally, we develop a method for Argument Stance Classification, and evaluate the capability of our approach, showing it achieves a classification F1 score between 71% and 78% across three diverse benchmark datasets. Our evaluation demonstrates that WIBA allows the comprehensive understanding of What Is Being Argued in large corpora across diverse contexts, which is of core interest to many applications in linguistics, communication, and social and computer science. To facilitate accessibility to the advancements outlined in this work, we release WIBA as a free open access platform.
Theoretical expectations regarding communication patterns between legislators and outside agents, such as lobbyists, agency officials, or policy experts, often depend on the relationship between legislators’ and agents’ preferences. However, legislators and nonelected outside agents evaluate the merits of policies using distinct criteria and considerations. We develop a measurement method that flexibly estimates the policy preferences for a class of outside agents—witnesses in committee hearings—separate from that of legislators’ and compute their preference distance across the two dimensions. In our application to Medicare hearings, we find that legislators in the U.S. Congress heavily condition their questioning of witnesses on preference distance, showing that legislators tend to seek policy information from like-minded experts in committee hearings. We do not find this result using a conventional measurement placing both actors on one dimension. The contrast in results lends support for the construct validity of our proposed preference measures.
Several theories of policy change posit that the politics of defining and prioritizing problems differs from the politics of devising and selecting solutions. The former involves simplifying through heuristics like indicators and ideology while the latter incorporates policy analysis and expertise to a greater degree. By employing two large datasets of U.S. congressional hearings to analyze policymakers' behavior of sending political messages, which we call “grandstanding,” we offer two findings. First, consistent with our hypotheses, grandstanding is more prevalent when committees are focused on new and emerging problems than when committees examine proposed alternatives or the implementation of existing policies. Second, the cognitive dynamics of problem solving and the incentives to grandstand vary depending on policy issues considered in hearings. Our analysis helps put dissatisfaction with contemporary U.S. policymaking in context: a rise in “messaging politics” derives at least in part from an increased focus on contesting the problem space in agenda-setting venues.
Members of Congress often use committee hearings as venues for political grandstanding. What we do not know is if members who engage in this behavior are electorally rewarded. Using a dataset of 12,820 House committee hearing transcripts from the 105th to 114th Congresses, I nd that an increase in a member's grandstanding tendency in a given Congress leads to an increased vote share in the following election. The effect is stronger when voters are potentially more exposed to grandstanding. To further investigate the causal path, I test mechanisms through which voters reward members' grandstanding e orts using the Cooperative Congressional Election Study (CCES) panel survey data. The results show that the effect of grandstanding tends to work through persuading non-supporters rather than mobilizing turnout of supporters. An additional analysis shows that PAC donors and voters react differently to members' grandstanding behavior, providing members with incentives to represent these two groups differently.
How are politicians informed and who do politicians seek information from? The role of information has been at the center for research on legislative organizations but there is a lack of systematic empirical work on the information that Congress seeks to acquire and consider. To examine the information flow between Congress and external groups, we construct the most comprehensive dataset to date on 74,082 congressional committee hearings and 755,540 witnesses spanning 1960-2018. We show descriptive patterns of how witness composition varies across time and committee, and how different types of witnesses provide varying levels of analytical information. We develop theoretical expectations for why committees may invite different types of witnesses based on committee intent, inter-branch relations, and congressional capacity. Our empirical evidence shows how certain institutional conditions can affect how much committees turn to outsiders for information and from whom they seek information.
While congressional committee members sometimes hold hearings to collect and transmit specialized information to the floor, they also use hearings as venues to send political messages by framing an issue or a party to the public which I refer to as “grandstanding.” However, we lack clear understanding of when they strategically engage in grandstanding. I argue that when committee members have limited legislative power they resort to making grandstanding speeches in hearings to please their target audience. Using 12,820 House committee hearing transcripts from the 105th to 114th Congresses and employing a crowd-sourced supervised learning method, I measure a “grandstanding score” for each statement that committee members make. Findings suggest that grandstanding efforts are made more commonly among minority members under a unified government, and non-chair members of powerful committees, and in committees with jurisdiction over policies that the president wields primary power, such as foreign affairs and national security.
While US Congress assigns only the members of a majority party to committee chairs, some state legislatures and other legislative bodies using a proportional representation system also consider members of a minority party for the position to promote a bipartisan policy making practice. Although previous literature investigates the effects of bipartisan rules and practices exploiting such institutional variations, the informational benefit of having a minority partisan committee chair has not been explored. By extending a recent study exploring conditions under which information transmission from agents to a principal is improved, this research note theoretically examines the effect of the committee chair’s majority partisan status on information acquisition and transmission via committee hearings. Findings suggest that under some conditions, the floor can informationally benefit more from having a chair representing a minority party in the chamber with opposite bias call a hearing than with a chair representing a majority party.
It has been controversial whether incumbents are punished more for a bad economy than they are rewarded for a good economy due to mixed results from previous studies on one or handful number of countries. This paper makes an empirical contribution to this lingering question by conducting extensive tests on whether this asymmetry hypothesis is a cross-nationally generalizable phenomenon using all currently available modules of the Comparative Study of Electoral Systems survey from 122 elections in 42 representative democracies between 1996 and 2016, as well as macro-economic indicators and individual-level economic perception. In general, this paper finds little support for the asymmetry hypothesis; although the evidence of such asymmetric economic voting is found in some subpopulations using certain economic indicators, these conditional effects are largely inconsistent, suggesting that it is still safe to assume a linear relationship between economic conditions and support for the incumbent.
In principle, committees hold hearings to gather and provide information to their principals, but some hearings are characterized as political showcases. This article investigates conditions that moderate committee members' incentives to hold an informative hearing by presenting a game-theoretic model and a lab experiment. Specifically, it studies when committees hold hearings and which types of hearing they hold by varying policy preferences of committee members and the principal and political gains from posturing. Findings provide new insights to how preferences and power distribution affect individuals' incentives to be informed when they make decisions as members of a committee in many contexts.


Working Papers

Congress often relies on bureaucrats’ information for policy production. However,scholars lack an empirical understanding of what drives information sharing between bureaucrats and legislators. We argue that the partisan alignment between a bureaucrat and legislator determines the amount and type of information transmitted. Using new comprehensive data on bureaucratic witnesses in committee hearings, as well as a new measure of the informational content of testimonies, we show that less analytical information is transmitted between a bureaucrat and legislator pair when the legislator is a presidential out-partisan than a co-partisan, and that this effect is heightened when the bureaucrat is a political appointee. At the aggregate hearing level, the collective amount of analytical information from bureaucrats is lower under divided government than unified government but is offset by the analytical information from non-bureaucratic witnesses. These dynamics provide a nuanced understanding of the information transmission between bureaucrats and Congress.
Supervised learning has become a staple in social science research for quantifying abstract concepts within textual data. However, a survey of recent studies reveals inconsistencies in reporting practices and validation standards. To tackle this issue, we introduce a framework that delineates the process of converting text into a quantitative measure, highlighting critical reporting decisions at each stage. We emphasize the importance of clear and comprehensive validation in the process, allowing readers to critically assess both the methodology and the derived measure. To showcase our framework, we develop and validate a measure assessing the tone of questions directed at nominees during US Senate confirmation hearings. This study contributes to the growing literature promoting transparency in the application of machine learning methods.
How can we utilize state-of-the-art NLP tools to better understand legislative deliberation? Committee hearings are a core feature of any legislature, and they offer an institutional setting which promotes the exchange of arguments and reasoning that directly impact and shape legislation. We apply What Is Being Argued (WIBA), which is an argument extraction and analysis framework that we previously developed, to U.S. Congressional committee hearings from 2005 to 2023 (109th to 117th Congresses). Then, we further expand WIBA by introducing new ways to quantify various dynamics of democratic deliberation. Specifically, these extensions present a variety of summary statistics capturing how deliberative or controversial a discourse was, as well as useful visualizations to the WIBA output that aid analyzing arguments made during the legislative deliberation. Our application reveals potential biases in the committee system, and how political parties control the flow of information in ‘hot topic’ hearings.
In representative democracy, it is crucial to include the perspectives of those governed in policy making. To analyze representation, research often links public policy preferences with legislators’ stances through surveys and votes. However, the scholarship lacks effective methods to gauge if substantive policy ideas of the public gain lawmakers’ attention. This study combines Reddit discussions on policy issues with U.S. House of Representatives’ hearing transcripts from 2005-2022 to develop an innovative LLM-driven argument detection and stance classification framework called WIBA (“What is Being Argued”). By applying WIBA, we visualize the overlap of arguments, identifying which communities of interest are represented or overlooked in legislative deliberations and how the pattern of representation varies across partisan and non-partisan policy issues. Our proposed approach shifts the focus from organized interests to the arguments themselves, providing a deeper understanding of democratic representation at the argument level.




Works in Progress