Publications
***Click the title to activate the link to the paper***
"How Are Politicians Informed? Witnesses and Information Provision in Congress" with Pamela Ban and Hye Young You (Forthcoming at APSR)
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.
“When Do Politicians Grandstand? Measuring Message Politics in Committee Hearings” 2021. Journal of Politics.
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.
“Committee Chair’s Majority Partisan Status and Its Effect on Information Transmission via Hearings” 2019. The Journal of Legislative Studies
“Punishing without rewards? A comprehensive examination of the asymmetry in economic voting” 2019. Electoral Studies.
“A Lab Experiment on Committee Hearings: Preferences, Power and a Quest for Information” 2017. Legislative Studies Quarterly.
Working Papers
"Electoral Rewards for Political Grandstanding in Congressional Committee Hearings" (Under Review)
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.
"Who Wants to Rock the Boat? Partisan Competition and Manipulation of Information" with Myunghoon Kang (R&R at PSRM)
"Grandstanding under Different Hearing Contexts" with Jonathan Lewallen and Sean Theriault (Under Review)
"The Impact of Income-Partisan Dealignment on Economic Voting" (Under Review)
"Testing Conditional Effects of a Moderator in Deliberation: A Lab Experiment"
Works in Progress
[Book] "Invitation to Congress: Congressional Hearings, Witness Testimonies, and Strategic Communication" with Pamela Ban (UCSD) and Hye Young You (NYU)
[Book] "Grandstanding in Hearings: An Electoral Strategy"
"The Changing Role of Committee Hearings in the Era of Polarization and Party Government"
(Funded by the British Academy Leverhulme Grant & Center for Effective Lawmaking Grant)
Legislative committees are considered at the heart of policy-making processes. One of the key roles that committees play is to collect and transmit policy-relevant information to their parent chamber. Theoretical literature on legislative processes has focused on this informational role of committees. However, in the United States, as Congress went through major institutional changes over the recent decades such as polarization inducing legislative gridlock and the transition from committee government to party government, whether the informational role of committees in legislative procedures has changed is in question. Using hearing transcripts from 1960 to 2018 and crowd-sourced supervised-learning text analytic methods, this project proposes to test whether committee members’ information-seeking efforts have decreased over time and identify which of the two institutional changes drove this change and to what extent. The results will yield critical insights for understanding the effects of institutional changes to the functioning of representative democracy.
"Measuring Concepts in Text: Using Supervised Learning to Estimate Continuous Latent Traits in Individual Texts" with Jacob Montgomery (WashU)
This study explores how to best measure a latent trait in textual data using crowd-sourced supervised learning and the ensemble Bayesian model averaging which combines multiple learners by assigning weight to each to optimize performance. Using the original dataset on Senate confirmation hearings from the 105th to 115th Congresses, we measure the negativity of committee members’ questioning tones to showcase necessary validation steps that are important for justifying modeling choices as well as improving the model’s prediction performance but often ignored by researchers utilizing the supervised learning method. Furthermore, we compare our results to other supervised and unsupervised learning models commonly used in political science literature and show that our model outperforms the others.
"Flexible Two-Dimensional Policy Preferences for Lobbyists, Experts and Other Outside Agents in Committee Hearings" with Kevin Esterling (UC Riverside)
Recent studies have measured the preferences of legislators and non-elected agents, such as lobbyists, agency officials or policy experts, on one dimensional common space. Outside agents,} however, typically have preferences defined on a dimension that is different from that of legislators. We develop a measurement method that accommodates \textcolor{blue}{this difference flexibly by placing agent preferences and legislator roll-call preferences on two dimensional common space,} and that identifies distances across the two dimensions in units necessary to test institutional hypotheses. In our application to Medicare hearings, we show that the agent preference space \textcolor{blue}{recovered from our proposed measurement method is almost orthogonal to the one-dimensional measurement. Using our new measurement, we find} that legislators heavily condition their questioning of agents on preference distance in a way consistent with ``cheap talk'' informational models of strategic lobbying, \textcolor{blue}{which is not found when the conventional measurement is used. The result provides construct validity for the proposed measurement method.
"Inversed Representation: Top Down Issue Framing through Twitter"
"Topic Models for Short Text" with David Liao (U of Essex)
"Bureaucrats in Congress: Strategic Information Sharing in Policymaking" with Pamela Ban and Hye Young You
There exists a canonical power balance in policymaking between Congress and the bureaucracy. The amount and quality of information about the costs and consequences of policy implementation has been theorized to be an important factor in determining who has more of a policymaking advantage on any given piece of legislation: Congress or the bureaucracy. Given the critical role that information plays, how do bureaucrats and Congress control the information flow between them? Bureaucrat testimony in committee hearings is a frequent, important way through which Congress conducts oversight and acquires policy-relevant information. We use committee hearing transcripts to analyze information sharing between Congress and the bureaucracy across all U.S. House and Senate committees from 1997 to 2020. Using our new measurement of analytical testimony that bureaucrats provide to congressional committees, we examine who from the bureaucracy testifies in committee hearings and how much information is provided to Congress, and the quality of information provided. We demonstrate that there are three factors that affect the information flow: the types of hearings, the preference alignment between Congress and the bureaucracy, and the amount of uncertainty regarding the cost or consequences of a legislation’s implementation. These factors work to influence both the amount of information that Congress requests from bureaucrats and the quality of information that bureaucrats choose to provide.
"Identity of Information: Diversity in Witnesses in Congressional Hearings and Representation" with Pamela Ban and Hye Young You (Funded by American University and the Hewlett Foundation)
Information is one of Congress’ most important needs during policymaking. Interest groups, bureaucrats, and other individuals seek to influence legislators through the provision of information, including testifying as witnesses in congressional hearings. The extent to which diverse voices are represented in the information transfer from external groups to Congress is a critical question in debates on representation. What is the diversity of witnesses invited to Congress, and what affects the presence and engagement with minority witnesses? Using a new dataset with demographic information of all congressional witnesses from 1960-2020, we investigate how representational factors in Congress drive members of committees to both invite and deliberate with a witness pool that is more diverse in terms of race, gender, and geography. Further, we use a natural experiment stemming from Congress’ shift to virtual hearings during the covid-19 pandemic to evaluate the effects of political networks and transportation costs on the geographic and economic diversity of witnesses. Findings will shine a spotlight not only on what affects the presence of diverse witnesses in information provision to Congress, but also on what drives Congress’ engagement with these diverse witnesses during policymaking.
"Grandstanding in the Senate" with Sean Theriault (UT-Austin)
"Comity in the Senate" with Sean Theriault (UT-Austin)
***Click the title to activate the link to the paper***
"How Are Politicians Informed? Witnesses and Information Provision in Congress" with Pamela Ban and Hye Young You (Forthcoming at APSR)
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.
“When Do Politicians Grandstand? Measuring Message Politics in Committee Hearings” 2021. Journal of Politics.
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.
“Committee Chair’s Majority Partisan Status and Its Effect on Information Transmission via Hearings” 2019. The Journal of Legislative Studies
“Punishing without rewards? A comprehensive examination of the asymmetry in economic voting” 2019. Electoral Studies.
“A Lab Experiment on Committee Hearings: Preferences, Power and a Quest for Information” 2017. Legislative Studies Quarterly.
Working Papers
"Electoral Rewards for Political Grandstanding in Congressional Committee Hearings" (Under Review)
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.
"Who Wants to Rock the Boat? Partisan Competition and Manipulation of Information" with Myunghoon Kang (R&R at PSRM)
"Grandstanding under Different Hearing Contexts" with Jonathan Lewallen and Sean Theriault (Under Review)
"The Impact of Income-Partisan Dealignment on Economic Voting" (Under Review)
"Testing Conditional Effects of a Moderator in Deliberation: A Lab Experiment"
Works in Progress
[Book] "Invitation to Congress: Congressional Hearings, Witness Testimonies, and Strategic Communication" with Pamela Ban (UCSD) and Hye Young You (NYU)
[Book] "Grandstanding in Hearings: An Electoral Strategy"
"The Changing Role of Committee Hearings in the Era of Polarization and Party Government"
(Funded by the British Academy Leverhulme Grant & Center for Effective Lawmaking Grant)
Legislative committees are considered at the heart of policy-making processes. One of the key roles that committees play is to collect and transmit policy-relevant information to their parent chamber. Theoretical literature on legislative processes has focused on this informational role of committees. However, in the United States, as Congress went through major institutional changes over the recent decades such as polarization inducing legislative gridlock and the transition from committee government to party government, whether the informational role of committees in legislative procedures has changed is in question. Using hearing transcripts from 1960 to 2018 and crowd-sourced supervised-learning text analytic methods, this project proposes to test whether committee members’ information-seeking efforts have decreased over time and identify which of the two institutional changes drove this change and to what extent. The results will yield critical insights for understanding the effects of institutional changes to the functioning of representative democracy.
"Measuring Concepts in Text: Using Supervised Learning to Estimate Continuous Latent Traits in Individual Texts" with Jacob Montgomery (WashU)
This study explores how to best measure a latent trait in textual data using crowd-sourced supervised learning and the ensemble Bayesian model averaging which combines multiple learners by assigning weight to each to optimize performance. Using the original dataset on Senate confirmation hearings from the 105th to 115th Congresses, we measure the negativity of committee members’ questioning tones to showcase necessary validation steps that are important for justifying modeling choices as well as improving the model’s prediction performance but often ignored by researchers utilizing the supervised learning method. Furthermore, we compare our results to other supervised and unsupervised learning models commonly used in political science literature and show that our model outperforms the others.
"Flexible Two-Dimensional Policy Preferences for Lobbyists, Experts and Other Outside Agents in Committee Hearings" with Kevin Esterling (UC Riverside)
Recent studies have measured the preferences of legislators and non-elected agents, such as lobbyists, agency officials or policy experts, on one dimensional common space. Outside agents,} however, typically have preferences defined on a dimension that is different from that of legislators. We develop a measurement method that accommodates \textcolor{blue}{this difference flexibly by placing agent preferences and legislator roll-call preferences on two dimensional common space,} and that identifies distances across the two dimensions in units necessary to test institutional hypotheses. In our application to Medicare hearings, we show that the agent preference space \textcolor{blue}{recovered from our proposed measurement method is almost orthogonal to the one-dimensional measurement. Using our new measurement, we find} that legislators heavily condition their questioning of agents on preference distance in a way consistent with ``cheap talk'' informational models of strategic lobbying, \textcolor{blue}{which is not found when the conventional measurement is used. The result provides construct validity for the proposed measurement method.
"Inversed Representation: Top Down Issue Framing through Twitter"
"Topic Models for Short Text" with David Liao (U of Essex)
"Bureaucrats in Congress: Strategic Information Sharing in Policymaking" with Pamela Ban and Hye Young You
There exists a canonical power balance in policymaking between Congress and the bureaucracy. The amount and quality of information about the costs and consequences of policy implementation has been theorized to be an important factor in determining who has more of a policymaking advantage on any given piece of legislation: Congress or the bureaucracy. Given the critical role that information plays, how do bureaucrats and Congress control the information flow between them? Bureaucrat testimony in committee hearings is a frequent, important way through which Congress conducts oversight and acquires policy-relevant information. We use committee hearing transcripts to analyze information sharing between Congress and the bureaucracy across all U.S. House and Senate committees from 1997 to 2020. Using our new measurement of analytical testimony that bureaucrats provide to congressional committees, we examine who from the bureaucracy testifies in committee hearings and how much information is provided to Congress, and the quality of information provided. We demonstrate that there are three factors that affect the information flow: the types of hearings, the preference alignment between Congress and the bureaucracy, and the amount of uncertainty regarding the cost or consequences of a legislation’s implementation. These factors work to influence both the amount of information that Congress requests from bureaucrats and the quality of information that bureaucrats choose to provide.
"Identity of Information: Diversity in Witnesses in Congressional Hearings and Representation" with Pamela Ban and Hye Young You (Funded by American University and the Hewlett Foundation)
Information is one of Congress’ most important needs during policymaking. Interest groups, bureaucrats, and other individuals seek to influence legislators through the provision of information, including testifying as witnesses in congressional hearings. The extent to which diverse voices are represented in the information transfer from external groups to Congress is a critical question in debates on representation. What is the diversity of witnesses invited to Congress, and what affects the presence and engagement with minority witnesses? Using a new dataset with demographic information of all congressional witnesses from 1960-2020, we investigate how representational factors in Congress drive members of committees to both invite and deliberate with a witness pool that is more diverse in terms of race, gender, and geography. Further, we use a natural experiment stemming from Congress’ shift to virtual hearings during the covid-19 pandemic to evaluate the effects of political networks and transportation costs on the geographic and economic diversity of witnesses. Findings will shine a spotlight not only on what affects the presence of diverse witnesses in information provision to Congress, but also on what drives Congress’ engagement with these diverse witnesses during policymaking.
"Grandstanding in the Senate" with Sean Theriault (UT-Austin)
"Comity in the Senate" with Sean Theriault (UT-Austin)
