Doctoral Dissertation Research in Political Science: The Relational Nature of Legislating

University Of North Carolina At Chapel Hill, Chapel Hill NC

Investigators

Abstract

Most research on lawmaking focuses on relationship between individual legislators and bills upon which they vote. While this has produced important insights, it largely ignores the potential for interpersonal influence between legislators. In every legislature in the country, bills must be introduced by chamber members, thus, a vote on the bill is both a vote on the merits of the legislation itself and a vote supporting or denying support for an individual. This second dimension of legislating has the potential to show us a great deal about why the representative bodies of this country produce the outcomes we observe. In this project, the investigator seeks to uncover why legislators form the relationships we observe, why some relationships are more important than others, and what rules and constraints in a chamber influence the choice of relational, cooperative partners. The investigator employs a social networks based approach in the analysis. Building on influential work by Granovetter (1973), The investigator observes that weak, bridging ties between clusters of strongly tied legislators produce sizeable increases in legislative influence, while the reinforcement of strong ties does nothing to generate influence. To study the evolution and impact of relationships between legislators on legislation, the investigator takes advantage of institutional differences presented by state legislatures. State legislatures present a great deal of organizational variance which influences how legislators work together and when that cooperation is most effective. By orienting the study around relationships between state legislators, the investigator is able to answer questions about how intentional organizational design can actually influence how well legislators work together. This research is important both normatively and as an extension of the literature on legislative behavior. By understanding that repeated interactions on collective decisions create an environment where relationships form, evolve and shape subsequent behaviors, the project pushes the legislative literature forward building a theory that takes seriously both individual motivations and systematic effects that result from interdependence. Cooperation and collaboration have been recognized as organizational assets and strong individual survival strategies by both economists and sociologists, thus, beginning a study on how these behaviors are manifested by people charged with leadership can reveal how these basic social behaviors are conditioned by accountability, ambition, and sophistication. Normatively, recent legislative sessions have been characterized by polarized leaders consistently obstructing and delaying efforts to accomplish the task of legislating. It has long been noted that public confidence in legislatures is conditioned by the amount of infighting in a chamber, and new evidence indicates that more cooperative chambers are more successful in producing important legislation. Thus, understanding which institutional constraints promote legislative cooperation should interest anyone who cares about representative democracy and the efficiency of our own government.