Setting the Committee Agenda: Measuring Speaker Influence in Congressional Hearings

Abstract

Congressional committees play a pivotal role in the policymaking process, but scholars have paid little attention to the content of committee deliberations. As a result, we know little about which representatives are most influential in committee hearings or the downstream implications of influential committee participation. Using a framework proposed by Nguyen et al., we outline a new measure of speaker influence in Congressional hearings, which focuses on speaker ability to control the topic of conversation in hearings. After validating our measure, we apply it to study patterns of legislative productivity and agenda control. We find that majority party members, committee chairs, and senior members consistently control the topic of conversation. We further show that influential participation predicts legislative productivity even after controlling for individual and institutional characteristics, which should encourage scholars to rethink the role of committee hearings in accounts of Congressional agenda-setting.