Publications
***Click the title to activate the link to the paper***
“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
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 by Park (2017), 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.
“Punishing without rewards? A comprehensive examination of the asymmetry in economic voting” 2019. Electoral Studies.
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.
“A Lab Experiment on Committee Hearings: Preferences, Power and a Quest for Information” 2017. Legislative Studies Quarterly.
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.
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 Reveal Information and When? A Theory of Production of an Informative Policy Outcome" with Myunghoon Kang (Bilkent University) (Under R&R)
Whether the principal can extract necessary information about the incumbent agent from a policy outcome (the consumption-side) to make an informed decision has been widely studied, but agents' incentives to provide a more informative policy outcome (the production-side) has been understudied. We develop a stylized model about the production-side with two innovative features: both the incumbent and the challenger can manipulate the informativeness of a policy outcome, and each agent can allocate its resources between revealing information and directly improving its quality. We find that only a disadvantaged agent invests in information revelation, but it does so only if its disadvantage is sufficiently large; otherwise, it invests in improving its quality directly or in both activities.
"Testing Conditional Effects of a Moderator in Deliberation: A Lab Experiment"
Recent findings show that deliberation outcomes can be vulnerable to manipulations by moderators. However, what makes moderators influential over deliberation outcomes and how to minimize the chance of manipulation have not been investigated yet. To address this issue, this paper presents a lab experiment which examines the conditional effect of a moderator’s perceived expertise on his potential to persuade participants of deliberation. Subjects are asked to deliberate on whether to expand the subsidized jobs program of New York State or not. The result suggests that participants are more susceptible to a moderator’s influence when they perceive him as having expertise on the policy than not. They also tend to assume that a moderator would be more knowledgeable on the issue than themselves due to his leading position in the discourse. However, such a perception does not strengthen his persuasive message while his self-claimed expertise does. This paper contributes not only to deliberative democracy but also provides a broader implication to studies on leadership effects in legislative committees.
Works in Progress
"The Changing Role of Committee Hearings in the Era of Polarization and Party Government"
(Funded by the British Academy Leverhulme 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
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.
"Inversed Representation: Top Down Issue Framing through Twitter"
This project studies whether politicians communicate the framing of an issue to the public via Twitter. I have collected tweets of 600K Twitter users from 2016 until now and the tweets of U.S. congressmen from 2008. Using the Twitter data and supervised-learning method, I measure the moral and emotional dimensions of individual tweets on each of the five most controversial issues (e.g. gun control, immigration, abortion, climate change and gay marriage). This study examines whether and how the average moral and emotional dimensions on each issue based on the Democrat and Republican politicians’ tweets, respectively, has changed over time during the period covered in the data and see if these changes are adopted by the liberal and conservative Twitter users’ discourse on each issue.
"Better Targeted Messages for Get-Out-the-Vote Campaigns" with Chris Dawes (NYU) and John Kuk (U of Oklahoma)
We study whether minority voters (e.g. female voters, racial minority and naturalized citizens) tend to respond to different GOTV messages than other main stream voters. Based on our preliminary finding that men are more likely to be motivated by civic duty while women are more interested in practicing their voting rights, we argue that voters whose voting rights have been obtained through a harder process historically or personally are more likely to be motivated to turnout when prompted with a campaign message emphasizing the importance of exercising their voting right than others and test the argument through a survey experiment in the 2019 local election in New Jersey as a pilot study and in the 2020 presidential election at a larger scale.
"Comity in the Senate" with Sean Theriault (UT-Austin)
Abstract TBA
***Click the title to activate the link to the paper***
“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
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 by Park (2017), 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.
“Punishing without rewards? A comprehensive examination of the asymmetry in economic voting” 2019. Electoral Studies.
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.
“A Lab Experiment on Committee Hearings: Preferences, Power and a Quest for Information” 2017. Legislative Studies Quarterly.
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.
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 Reveal Information and When? A Theory of Production of an Informative Policy Outcome" with Myunghoon Kang (Bilkent University) (Under R&R)
Whether the principal can extract necessary information about the incumbent agent from a policy outcome (the consumption-side) to make an informed decision has been widely studied, but agents' incentives to provide a more informative policy outcome (the production-side) has been understudied. We develop a stylized model about the production-side with two innovative features: both the incumbent and the challenger can manipulate the informativeness of a policy outcome, and each agent can allocate its resources between revealing information and directly improving its quality. We find that only a disadvantaged agent invests in information revelation, but it does so only if its disadvantage is sufficiently large; otherwise, it invests in improving its quality directly or in both activities.
"Testing Conditional Effects of a Moderator in Deliberation: A Lab Experiment"
Recent findings show that deliberation outcomes can be vulnerable to manipulations by moderators. However, what makes moderators influential over deliberation outcomes and how to minimize the chance of manipulation have not been investigated yet. To address this issue, this paper presents a lab experiment which examines the conditional effect of a moderator’s perceived expertise on his potential to persuade participants of deliberation. Subjects are asked to deliberate on whether to expand the subsidized jobs program of New York State or not. The result suggests that participants are more susceptible to a moderator’s influence when they perceive him as having expertise on the policy than not. They also tend to assume that a moderator would be more knowledgeable on the issue than themselves due to his leading position in the discourse. However, such a perception does not strengthen his persuasive message while his self-claimed expertise does. This paper contributes not only to deliberative democracy but also provides a broader implication to studies on leadership effects in legislative committees.
Works in Progress
"The Changing Role of Committee Hearings in the Era of Polarization and Party Government"
(Funded by the British Academy Leverhulme 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
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.
"Inversed Representation: Top Down Issue Framing through Twitter"
This project studies whether politicians communicate the framing of an issue to the public via Twitter. I have collected tweets of 600K Twitter users from 2016 until now and the tweets of U.S. congressmen from 2008. Using the Twitter data and supervised-learning method, I measure the moral and emotional dimensions of individual tweets on each of the five most controversial issues (e.g. gun control, immigration, abortion, climate change and gay marriage). This study examines whether and how the average moral and emotional dimensions on each issue based on the Democrat and Republican politicians’ tweets, respectively, has changed over time during the period covered in the data and see if these changes are adopted by the liberal and conservative Twitter users’ discourse on each issue.
"Better Targeted Messages for Get-Out-the-Vote Campaigns" with Chris Dawes (NYU) and John Kuk (U of Oklahoma)
We study whether minority voters (e.g. female voters, racial minority and naturalized citizens) tend to respond to different GOTV messages than other main stream voters. Based on our preliminary finding that men are more likely to be motivated by civic duty while women are more interested in practicing their voting rights, we argue that voters whose voting rights have been obtained through a harder process historically or personally are more likely to be motivated to turnout when prompted with a campaign message emphasizing the importance of exercising their voting right than others and test the argument through a survey experiment in the 2019 local election in New Jersey as a pilot study and in the 2020 presidential election at a larger scale.
"Comity in the Senate" with Sean Theriault (UT-Austin)
Abstract TBA
