Dual Experiences—Tenure and Networks in the House of Representatives

Abstract

In this article, I argue that members of Congress are strategic in who they hire and how they decide to assign certain legislative portfolios. Using a novel dataset of all House of Representatives staffers for the 114th Congress, including each staffer’s legislative portfolio and career history, I test whether issue assignments are the result of longer aide tenure on the Hill (as the staffing literature suggests), experience working in multiple member offices, or both. I find that members systematically assign legislative responsibilities viewed as more policy-laden and prestigious to legislative aides who have been employed by multiple member offices, even when holding constant the number of years served on the Hill. These results suggest that members value those staffers who are most likely to be able to plug into their extended networks of contacts in order to cultivate information sources and coalitions for policy advancement. Members value this ability even a staffer’s than, more years of experience working on the Hill. This article deepens our understanding of the staffer characteristics that members value in the legislative context and provides insight into the importance of broad networks in managing policy priorities on a member’s behalf.

Notes

1 Kizzia, Tom. 2010. “Obama's likely new staff chief was known as '101st senator.'” Anchorage Daily News. June 15, 2015. Available at https://www.mcclatchydc.com/news/politics-government/article24595465.html.

2 ‘Legislative staffers’ or ‘policy aides’ are those that have official legislative responsibilities/issues assigned as outlined in the Congressional Directory database used in this paper. Most commonly, these are those that hold the title of Legislative Assistant, though often Legislative Directors, Legislative Correspondents, and even Chiefs of Staff are assigned policy responsibilities. See Table A.1 in the Appendix for a breakdown of the titles most commonly responsible for policy management.

3 McCrain (2018) finds that the best-connected staffers ultimately become more valuable in terms of revenue generated for their lobbying firms after leaving Congress. Also see LaPira and Thomas (2017) for an in-depth look at the revolving door phenomenon and its impact on policy outcomes. I posit a similar argument in that a staffer’s increased connectedness is valuable to members while they are in Congress.

4 This average is calculated from the author’s staffer database referenced in the following section.

5 It is important to note that members do not try to advance policy on all, or even many, issues. Whether because of district demands or needs, personal policy interests, or committee assignments, members are typically focused on a few areas where they attempt to carve out a legislative reputation. Members cannot be, and are not expected to be, experts on all legislative issues. However, every representative “engages in public policy formation” (Salisbury and Shepsle 1981b, 565) and at a minimum, is responsible for devoting some level of attention to policy issues across the chamber. Additionally, many issues have a direct constituent service component, such as Social Security requests from constituents looking for claim assistance from their elected representative. Thus, lawmakers recognize that in order to best serve their reelection and constituent service interests, they must commit some level of staff attention to the legislative happenings across many issue areas to remain adequately responsive. In either case, I argue that members will greatly value more networked staffers to handle their policy portfolios.

6 During the time of collecting staffers by office, former Speaker John Boehner’s (R-OH) seat was vacated by his resignation. Thus, there were no staff members associated with his vacated district’s office.

7 After the substantive binning of issues, 184 issues had less than 10 House aides assigned to their coverage, and nearly half of the issues—such as the Boy Scouts and the U.S. Census Bureau—had a single aide assigned to their coverage.

8 Deering and Smith (1997) extended the schema generated by interviews of freshmen members of the 92nd Congress as toward their committee preferences. Fenno (1973) constructed similar interviews in classifying member motivations for joining particular congressional committees.

9 The dependent variable is whether an individual staffer is assigned the legislative issue area, coded 1 if yes, 0 if not.

10 All average marginal effects are estimated in Stata. It should be noted that average marginal effects differ from marginal effects at the means. In the latter, the mean value of each independent variable is used to generate marginal effects given the logistic coefficients from a model. Average marginal effects, by contrast, rely on the observed data to generate marginal effects for each individual observation, the mean of which is the average marginal effect.

11 It should be noted that there are likely staffer-level characteristics that make a subset of staffers stay on Capitol Hill for longer tenures or more likely to move become more often from office to office, thereby affecting the likelihood of being assigned certain policy portfolios. Such characteristics are unmeasured and therefore potentially confounders.

12 I wanted to explore the possibility that a member serving on the committee of jurisdiction over an issue area in question is likely to attract longer-serving and/or more networked staff by virtue of their own seniority and position. To do so, I ran duplicate logistic regression models, including an indicator for whether or not the aide’s member-boss served on the committee. Figure A.1 in the Appendix shows figures on the average marginal effects for each legislative responsibility. The results and average marginal effects across the two models—with and without the member-committee indicator—are strikingly similar across each of the 34 models and issue areas.