Who Speaks to Whom? Purpose and Bias in Legislative Information Networks

Theoretical models of congressional decision making have demonstrated the relationship between informational asymmetries among members of Congress and the lack of coherence in public policy output. Important institutional solutions to this problem have been proposed, solutions that have stressed the importance of congressional committees as an agent of specialization and a source of information for the Congress a whole. Yet, this work, known as the “information theory of legislative organization, ” tells us relatively little about the dynamics of information dissemination within legislatures or about the individual-level patterns of information consumption exhibited by legislators. To understand fully the ecological ramifications of uncertainty in legislatures and its institutional institutional solution, we first must begin to heighten our knowledge of the informative behavior of individual legislators. This paper argues that a legislator’s search for information is governed by the electoral benefits that such activities might procure. However, in acquiring information, a legislator can regulate information costs through the development and maintenance of legislative information networks. These networks are a product of purposive behavior, although they may be biased by the strength of ties linking members to informants. By examining the microfoundations of information exchange in Congress and how it may lead to information asymmetries, this paper calls into question many of the underlying assumptions of the informational theory o