The Persistence and Proliferation of Congressional Caucuses

While congressional member organizations (e.g., caucuses) in the U.S.
Congress are frequently trivialized by political punditry, they have been
proliferating over the past 30 years, ever since then-Speaker Newt Gin-
grich changed House rules to de-fund them. If caucuses are nothing more
than performative posturing, why do so many persist, with dozens of new
groups being formed each congress? We theorize that caucus ”birth” is
driven primarily by constituent interests and advocacy groups, while cau-
cus persistence is a function of groups’ effectiveness at connecting legisla-
tors who would be otherwise disconnected from one another. This paper
explores the persistence and proliferation of these campus clubs using a
novel data set comprised of the universe of individual caucus memberships
1993 – 2020. We statistically model caucus characteristics associated with
group survival, which include group size and bipartisan support. We use
quantitative and qualitative evidence from interviews to assess the extent
to which the explosion of caucuses on Capitol Hill has been driven by
advocacy groups. A richer understanding of this pervasive congressional
institution contributes to understanding the many ways that members of
Congress interact with one another. This understanding helps ultimately
to explain the parameters of congressional dysfunction.

Hi, I’m Molly Izer. I’m an undergraduate in the Schar school, majoring in government and international politics. And the title of my presentation is the persistence and proliferation of congressional caucuses.
And my mentor on this project is Dr. Victor also in the Schar school. So the point of this project and the research origin stems from a very important to 2013 study that was published by Dr.
Victor as well as her coauthor, Dr. Neils Ringa of the university of Wisconsin in the 2013 study. It was the first time they demonstrated a longitudinal study, which means over time on informal networks in the house of representatives.
Since the 2013 study of there have been massive changes and the ideological administrative and legislative norms governing the house of representatives and as such, it’s important to conduct a further longitudinal study on topic with our expanded dataset and in taking into account, the continuous changes that Congress simply put Congress has changing.
And so should our understanding. So this project in particular, explicitly focuses on the reasons that drive the birth and persistence of congressional member organizations also known as caucuses.
And it’s part of a larger project that explains the importance of informal networks and legislative institutions and how informal connections act as driving forces instead of large deliberative body.
Essentially, we, we hypothesize that congressional member organizations are part of the reason that people are able to coordinate collective action across the term, a broad coalition.
There are 435 members of the house of representatives, meaning one singular member. Isn’t very powerful, but when they’re in groups, they hold a little bit more power.
So a congressional member organization, essentially a way to do that, it’s almost like a informal club that members of Congress can rally around.
And there are some pretty interesting examples of types of caucuses. They range anywhere from the congressional voting caucus to the coalition for autism research to climate change related things.
There are over 700 documented caucuses that we have in Dr. Baker’s data sets and make been continuously growing. So just to emphasize the point that we need to continue to study them over a long period of time, I’m quick a picture of speaker of the house, Newt Gingrich, former speaker of the house, flipping grudge.
And he’s infamous for having changed the rules a while ago on how caucuses operate and what their administrative statuses can be.
And that’s another example of why it’s important to continue to send them over time, to see if changes to the institutions that Gover in informal networks will actually change anything about what they do or why they exist.
So the aims of this research are threefold. The first is that we aim to further understand what drives the birth of congressional member organizations and why they continue over time.
An important thing to understand about the house of representatives is that in the house, the term limits are only two years, meaning every two years, every single member has to go through reelection processes.
And while it can be to you as a voter, it’s even more tedious when you’re actually a member of the house or of their staffers, because it means you have to essentially rebuild your entire coalition every two years.
So it’s important to understand why it is that members continue to engage in certain parts. If it’s going to add on additional work on top of their already very busy schedules, we also want to map connections and social networks within the house of representatives.
And we want to track those networks in relation to broader data on legislative activity and institutional opera, opera realization. This is really important too, because we have to consider not only how institutions bind members of Congress, but also how outside forces informal networks can have a monumental impact on them.
And finally, we want to clarify, emphasize the value of informal institutions and legislative bodies and what benefits they pose to the legislative process as a whole.
So we use two different types of data. It’s really hard to look at informal networks through a solely empirical lens, which is why this year we had to integrate the qualitative data process.
So first to explain the qualitative data process, our qualitative data consists of hours of interview transcripts from various staffers in the house of representatives.
And that includes lobbyists and independent advocates who may engage with them. These were conducted via zoom, and we’re using the transcripts by coding them in NVivo, which they qualitative did software for our quantitative data.
We’re using an original data set, but Dr. Victor created and has kept since the hundred and third Congress, the hundred third Congress heard it in 1993.
And it goes all the way through the 117, which is the current Congress we’re in. Now that will end in November.
So essentially the data records, the party caucus and leadership positions that every single member of Congress occupies at any given time, the master file consists of over 6,000 data points and is managed largely largely in our, and that’s how we manage all of our quantitative and empirical analysis.
So we have many different hypotheses that are staked out in different phrasing so that we can use empirical tests to test each one of them individually.
But our general hypotheses are that caucus birth is driven primarily by constituent interests and then advocacy groups while Congress persistence, meaning keeps going over time is a function of how effective the group is connecting people who would otherwise not really meet each other or interact at all.
So our preliminary findings are a little bit limited because we’re still going through the writing process, but we do have a couple of really interesting visualizations here.
So this first one up here is, um, a one, a one party caucus members. And as we can see, they have increased by party at disproportionate rates with Democrats on average, joining more one party groups than Republicans.
In addition to the sheer number of congressional caucuses has continuously increased up until the 116 Congress. We’re not entirely sure if the, uh, the gap in increasing after 116 Congress is due to the COVID-19 pandemic or because of the January six insurrection we’ve gathered qualitative data that suggests both either or neither of them finally moving forward with this project.
So obviously we’re going to continue the writing process. And Dr. Richter is working on a larger book apart of which this will be integrated into it a little bit, but this paper in itself was accepted to the American political science association annual conference, which this year will take place in the beautiful city of Montreal.
So we’re excited to keep moving forward and continued to report our findings.