Congressional Staff and the Extended Party Network in the U.S. House of Representatives

Standard accounts of congressional behavior treat legislators as individuals whose actions are the result of the interaction of member-specific characteristics and institutional factors. However, members of Congress do not act alone but instead depend on professional staffers who are intimately involved in every aspect of the institution. In this paper, we use a novel dataset of comprehensive longitudinal employment records from the House of Representatives to show that Congressional staff — whose careers often cross multiple offices — help disseminate legislative expertise within parties and develop and reinforce the voting patterns of legislators. Specifically, results from a series of heteroskedastic Bayesian spatial autoregressive models indicate that legislators who exchange important staff members across congresses are more similar in their legislative effectiveness and voting patterns than we would otherwise expect. These findings suggest that staff play a key role in Congress and in the “extended party networks” of the contemporary era. Authors are listed in alphabetical order. We thank John Aldrich, Andy Bernard, Chris DeSante, Matthew Green, Mat McCubbins, Jon Rogowski, Dave Rohde, Betsy Sinclair, and participants in the Dartmouth Interdisciplinary Networks Research Group and PIPC Program’s 20 anniversary conference at Duke University for helpful comments. We are also grateful for generous financial support from the Weidenbaum Center on the Economy, Government, and Public Policy at Washington University in St. Louis and for excellent research assistance from Taylor Malmsheimer, Regan Plekenpol, Rebecca Rodriguez, Marina Shkuratov, and David Wylie.