Video Research Workshops

Bureaucrats in Congress: The Politics of Interbranch Information Sharing

Abstract: Congress often relies on bureaucrats for policy-relevant information for policy production. However, the scholarship lacks empirical understanding of what drives information sharing between bureaucrats and legislators. We argue that partisan alignment between the two drives the amount and type of information transmitted between the two branches. Using the most comprehensive data yet on agency affiliation, appointment type, and agency-level characteristics of each bureaucrat who testified in congressional committee hearings, as well as a new measure of informational content present in witness testimonies, we show that bureaucrats provide less analytical information under divided government. Further, we examine bureaucrat-legislator pair-level interactions in committee hearings and show that bureaucrats provide less analytical information to legislators who are presidential out-partisans than legislators who are presidential co-partisans even after controlling for legislators’ questioning styles, and that this behavior is heightened among bureaucrats who are political appointees. These dynamics highlight strategic information transmission between bureaucrats and members of Congress.

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Guest Speaker: Julia Park

Ju Yeon (Julia) Park received her Ph.D. in Politics from New York University in 2015. She is now an assistant professor of political science at The Ohio State University, and a faculty affiliate at the Center for Effective Lawmaking. Prior to joining OSU, she was an assistant professor at the University of Essex in the United Kingdom.

She is a congressional scholar and a data scientist. One line of her research examines the public speeches of members of Congress and their representational styles. For this study, she looks at lawmakers’ behavior in committee hearings and introduced a new measure called the “grandstanding score” that captures the intensity of political messages conveyed in members’ statements in these hearings. Her research provides new insights into when legislators are likely to grandstand and what they gain from doing so.

Her research also extends to an examination of the sources of information that Congress relies on to make laws. To investigate this, she collected the most comprehensive data set on witnesses who have testified in committee hearings over the past six decades. Her co-authored paper on this topic won the 2022 CQ Press Award, and her book manuscript, “Hearings on the Hill: The Politics of Informing Congress,” is forthcoming at Cambridge University Press.

Her works appeared in the Proceedings of National Academy of Sciences (PNAS), American Political Science Review, Journal of Politics, Legislative Studies Quarterly, Electoral Studies, and Journal of Legislative Studies.

Automated Analysis of YouTube and TikTok Using Text and Image Data

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Guest Speaker: Dr. Kaiping Chen

Dr. Kaiping Chen (PhD, Stanford University) is an Assistant Professor in Computational Communication at the University of Wisconsin-Madison, Department of Life Sciences Communication. She is also a faculty affiliate at the Department of Political Science, the Data Science Institute, and the Institute for Diversity Science. Her work uses data science and machine learning methods as well as interviews to study to what extent digital media and technologies hold politicians accountable for public well-being and how deliberative designs improve the quality of civic dialogues and mitigate misinformation and misperception. Her work was published in flagship journals across disciplines, including PNAS, American Political Science Review, Journal of Communication, Journal of Computer-Mediated Communication, Public Opinion Quarterly, Computational Communication Research, Political Communication, and others. Dr. Chen is the recipient of the AEJMC Lillian Lodge Kopenhaver Early Career Woman Scholar Award. Dr. Chen is also a civic engagement practitioner, with her continued passion to help local governments and communities in U.S. and China implement and analyze innovative practices of engaging and responding to communities.

Look Who’s Talking: Examining Floor Speech Patterns in the Congressional Record (1995-2016)

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Guest Speaker: Nathan Kelly

Nathan Kelly is professor of political science at the University of Tennessee and is currently a visiting professor in political science and the Hesburgh Program in Public Service at the University of Notre Dame. His research focuses on institutions, inequality, and democracy in the U.S. and cross-nationally. He has authored or co-authored three books and numerous journal articles appearing in outlets such as the American Journal of Political Science, The Journal of Politics, Political Analysis, Comparative Political Studies, and the American Sociological Review. His latest book, Hijacking the Agenda: Economic Power and Political Influence, won the Gladys M. Kammerer Award from the American Political Science Association. He has been a visiting scholar at the Russell Sage Foundation and a Carnegie Corporation Fellow.