The Representation and Policy Consequences of Legislative Time Allocation Decisions

Board Of Regents, Nshe, Obo University Of Nevada, Reno, Reno NV

Investigators

Abstract

How legislators spend their time is an important factor that shapes congressional operations, legislative outcomes, and representation. Although researchers and the public have some sense of lawmakers’ daily activities, the details and significance of their scheduling choices are unknown. This project will study how legislators allocate their time and the consequences these decisions have on representation and policymaking. Using former legislators’ archived daily schedules, the research will catalog what they do while working. The PI will connect these data to their legislative and political outputs, such as bill co-sponsorships and vote share at the local level. The project findings will show how legislative, technological, social, and political changes affect how elected officials prioritize problems, represent their constituents, and work together. The results will educate citizens about how their elected representatives work on their behalf and advance research in this field by integrating difficult to study concepts, like effort, into theories of representation and lawmaking. This project studies legislators’ time allocation decisions, and their consequences, by creating a new database that catalogues 50 former members’ daily activities from their archived schedules. It will include over 200,000 scheduled activities spanning the 1970s through the 2010s, and be supplemented with qualitative, interview-based data from the schedulers who created these documents and the members who used them. These data will be combined with existing data sources on congressional activity and output to test novel theories about how lawmakers spend their time, as well as extant theories concerning legislative effort, the importance of interpersonal interactions, and the role of access in lawmaking. The database will be made publicly available to facilitate further research on how legislators’ scheduling priorities affect representation, agenda-setting, and policymaking outcomes. This award reflects NSF's statutory mission and has been deemed worthy of support through evaluation using the Foundation's intellectual merit and broader impacts review criteria.