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A TECHNIQUE FOR MEASURING LEGISLATIVE INFLUENCE BASED ON A SURVEY INSTRUMENT ADMINISTERED TO CONGRESSIONAL STAFFERS IS PRESENTED. THE INSTRUMENT ELICITS INFORMATIONS ABOUT THE EFFECT OF INDIVIDUAL MEMBERS' PREFERENCES ON THE SUBSTANCE OF SPECIFIC PIECES OF LEGISLATION. THE MEASURE STANDS UP WELL UNDER SYSTEMATIC TESTS OF RELIABILITY AND VALIDITTY, AND IS APPLICABLE TO A WIDE RANGE OF BILLS FOR WHICH PLAUSIBLE ASSUMPTIONS OR REASONABLE INFERENCES ABOUT MEMBER PREFERENCES ARE NOT EASILY MADE.

Participation in committee decision making is an important form of legislative behavior but one we know little about. I develop a model of committee participation and test it using data drawn from staff interviews and records of the House Committee on Education and Labor. The analysis confirms that congressmen are purposive actors, but it also shows that different interests incite participation on different issues and that motivational effects vary in predictable ways across legislative contexts. If members are purposive, however, they also face a variable set of opportunities and constraints that structure their ability to act. Members and especially leaders of the reporting subcommittee, for instance, enjoy advantages in terms of information, staff, and lines of political communication. At the same time, freshman status entails behavioral constraints despite the reputed demise of apprenticeship in legislative life. Understanding such patterns of interest and ability, I conclude, should permit us to illuminate several larger questions regarding decision making and representation in a decentralized Congress.

The view that congressional committees tend to be biased subsets of their parent chambers provides the foundations for a substantial body of theoretical literature on distributive politics and legislative structure. More recent revisionist work suggests that committees composed of preference outliers are in fact rare. We reject the categorical account of preference outliers a priori and elaborate conditions under which committees should be unrepresentative of their parent chambers. We argue that the most widely available and frequently used data—floor roll call votes—are inappropriate to the task of assessing outlier predictions in any form. Finally, we conduct a differentiated set of hypothesis tests within one policy jurisdiction to illustrate the characteristics of evidence and analysis necessary to evaluate alternative theoretical accounts of legislative organization. The appearance of policy-relevant biases in congressional work groups, we conclude, is not so much rare as it is conditional, and we suggest several conditions on which future models of legislative organization should build.

During the congressional fight over the Affordable Care Act (ACA), interest groups spent record sums on television issue advertising in targeted efforts to influence members of Congress, but did the money make any difference? We use the literatures on outside lobbying and legislative behavior to develop two hypotheses about issue advertising's effects on members' voting decisions. We test the hypotheses using population-weighted, station-level advertising data mapped into congressional districts. We find negligible evidence that issue advertising had a causal effect on either House committee or floor votes on the ACA, even applying forgiving statistical standards. Neither do we find evidence when we ignore the endogeneity bias that should inflate advertising's effects, employ alternative measures and specifications, or limit the analysis to legislators for whom the probability of vote change was highest. The results justify skepticism that the millions of advertising dollars spent on the ACA had a net effect on members' voting decisions. In conclusion, we consider several reasons why our hypotheses are not borne out and suggest several avenues for future research.