Publications
***Click the title to activate the link to the paper***
"Electoral Rewards for Political Grandstanding" 2023. The Proceedings of National Academy of Sciences.
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? Witnesses and Information Provision in Congress" with Pamela Ban and Hye Young You. 2022. American Political Science Review.
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
[Book] "Invitation to Congress: Congressional Hearings, Witness Testimonies, and Strategic Communication" with Pamela Ban (UCSD) and Hye Young You (NYU). Under Review at CUP.
"Grandstanding and Deliberation in Congressional Committees" with Jonathan Lewallen and Sean Theriault (Under R&R)
"Bureaucrats in Congress: Strategic Information Sharing in Policymaking" with Pamela Ban and Hye Young You (Under review)
"Flexible Two-Dimensional Policy Preferences for Lobbyists, Experts and Other Outside Agents in Committee Hearings" with Kevin Esterling (UC Riverside)
"Partisan Competition and Information Revelation" with Myunghoon Kang
"Validating the Text-to-measure Pipeline: A Procedure-based Approach to Creating Measures of Latent
Concepts with Supervised Machine Learning" with Jacob Montgomery (WashU)
"Why Do Political Elites Use Moral Rhetoric?" with Taegyoon Kim (Northwestern University)
"The Impact of Income-Partisan Dealignment on Economic Voting"
Works in Progress
[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.
"Inversed Representation: Top Down Issue Framing through Twitter"
"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)
"Messaging 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***
"Electoral Rewards for Political Grandstanding" 2023. The Proceedings of National Academy of Sciences.
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? Witnesses and Information Provision in Congress" with Pamela Ban and Hye Young You. 2022. American Political Science Review.
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
[Book] "Invitation to Congress: Congressional Hearings, Witness Testimonies, and Strategic Communication" with Pamela Ban (UCSD) and Hye Young You (NYU). Under Review at CUP.
"Grandstanding and Deliberation in Congressional Committees" with Jonathan Lewallen and Sean Theriault (Under R&R)
"Bureaucrats in Congress: Strategic Information Sharing in Policymaking" with Pamela Ban and Hye Young You (Under review)
"Flexible Two-Dimensional Policy Preferences for Lobbyists, Experts and Other Outside Agents in Committee Hearings" with Kevin Esterling (UC Riverside)
"Partisan Competition and Information Revelation" with Myunghoon Kang
"Validating the Text-to-measure Pipeline: A Procedure-based Approach to Creating Measures of Latent
Concepts with Supervised Machine Learning" with Jacob Montgomery (WashU)
"Why Do Political Elites Use Moral Rhetoric?" with Taegyoon Kim (Northwestern University)
"The Impact of Income-Partisan Dealignment on Economic Voting"
Works in Progress
[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.
"Inversed Representation: Top Down Issue Framing through Twitter"
"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)
"Messaging in the Senate" with Sean Theriault (UT-Austin)
"Comity in the Senate" with Sean Theriault (UT-Austin)
