Outsourced Congress: How Congress Relies on Outside Organizational Policy Information

Abstract

In recent decades, in-house policy experience and expertise within Congress has fallen as members of Congress have shifted resources towards constituent-casework, communications and leadership functions and away from personal office or committee policy staff. Headcounts in the legislative support agencies at Congress's disposal have shrunk by over 40 percent since 1979. At the same time, American politics has seen an explosion of activity by policy demanding groups, and privately funded policy research and planning organizations. These organizations are able to serve as auxiliary service bureaus to staffers and members of Congress, strategically providing legislative subsidy in the hopes of affecting policy outcomes.

In this dissertation, I develop a micro-level theory of information processing in Congress, in which individual congressional staffers serve as agents of members tasked with the challenge of learning about policy issues and making recommendations to their bosses in complex information environments. It is these individual staffers, I argue, that mediate the institution's need for policy relevant information and these potential sources of outside subsidy.

Though dedicated public servants, congressional staffers are generally under-resourced, over-stretched, and frequently on the losing end of an information asymmetry with the policy-demanders that they meet and interests they must rely on for legislative subsidy. As a result, staffers serve less as policy or subject matter experts in their own right, and more as gatekeepers or selective aggregators, engaged in a process of search and evaluation of policy expertise produced by outside interests. The implication of this theory is that members of Congress rely on biased sets of information produced by outside, often ideological interests, and selected for them by constrained and bias-prone staffers.

Using original survey data from the 2017 and 2019 Congressional Capacity Surveys, comprising the largest academic survey sample of congressional staff gathered to date, I investigate how congressional staff evaluate privately provisioned, outside policy information depending on the ideological nature of the information source. This work highlights the importance of these ideological networks of outside information purveyors. Finally, I use IRS 990 data from Washington D.C.-based think tanks to map the network of coordination between these subsidy providing organizations that is implied by their interlocking directorates.

This dissertation contributes to a broader understanding of Congress by presenting and testing a micro-level theory of information evaluation within the institution, highlighting the importance of individual staffers and their motivations in the collective functioning of the institution. In doing so, it offers a theoretical bridge between scholars of the political organizations that produce these subsidies, and the scholars of Congress, as an institution which relies on them.