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How Are Politicians Informed? Witnesses and Information Provision in Congress

Published online by Cambridge University Press:  16 May 2022

PAMELA BAN Open the ORCID record for PAMELA BAN [Opens in a new window] ,
JU YEON PARK Open the ORCID record for JU YEON PARK [Opens in a new window]  and
HYE YOUNG YOU Open the ORCID record for HYE YOUNG YOU [Opens in a new window]
PAMELA BAN*
Affiliation:
University of California, San Diego, United States
JU YEON PARK*
Affiliation:
University of Essex, United Kingdom
HYE YOUNG YOU*
Affiliation:
New York University, United States
*
Pamela Ban, Assistant Professor, Department of Political Science, University of California, San Diego, United States, pmban@ucsd.edu.
Ju Yeon Park, Lecturer, Department of Government, University of Essex, United Kingdom, jp20761@essex.ac.uk.
Hye Young You, Assistant Professor, Wilf Family Department of Politics, New York University, United States, hyou@nyu.edu.
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Abstract

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, interbranch relations, and congressional capacity. Our empirical evidence shows how committees’ partisan considerations can affect how much committees turn to outsiders for information and from whom they seek information.

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Type
Research Article
Information
American Political Science Review , Volume 117 , Issue 1 , February 2023 , pp. 122 - 139
Copyright
© The Author(s), 2022. Published by Cambridge University Press on behalf of the American Political Science Association

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https://doi.org/10.7910/DVN/TKRHZU
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