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This essay discusses the history and ethics of academics' intervention in the legislative process. Academics, and even our professional associations, have explicitly worked to change legislative operations through advocacy and consulting. I argue that subjecting such interventions to the research process to evaluate their effects makes them more ethical and transparent. Research is monitored and guided by professional associations, institutional review boards, and journals in ways that advocacy and consulting are not. If academics are already intervening in legislative processes, such efforts will be more fruitful if conducted as part of a research program. This program, which I call "evidence-based legislating," aims to improve the evaluation of legislative processes just as the movement for evidence-based policymaking reshaped academics' and lawmakers' approach to policy evaluation.

AbstractGroup discussion of legislation is a defining feature of parliaments and legislatures. However, there is little evidence that these conferences influence legislators' policy positions or the disposition of legislation. This article examines how, and to what extent, group discussion influences policy coalitions. It reports results from two field experiments in which state legislators spoke about randomly selected bills in a bipartisan caucus. Chosen bills received twice as much support from caucus members as unselected bills. Estimated effects are similar in magnitude within and across party lines. Discussion did not appear to affect bill‐level outcomes such as bill content or bill passage, but power limitations make studying such policy‐level outcomes infeasible. Qualitative data from the experiments suggest that reputation and reciprocity are key mechanisms underlying influence, but that partisan voters and media are obstacles to bipartisanship in a contemporary American legislature.

Cue-taking is thought to be influential because legislators seek information from like-minded, trusted policy experts. Unfortunately for researchers, this self-selection process complicates efforts to separate the causal effects of cues from the tendency of legislators to communicate with similar peers. Prior causally-oriented research has estimated cues' effects in exogenous networks, but not in the naturally-occurring communication networks that legislators themselves choose to form. This study examines cue-taking with two legislative field experiments, with over 2,000 observations in total, that model the diffusion of a randomly-assigned information treatment across an endogenous legislative network. Experimental results reinforce findings from classic interview-based studies of self-selected communication networks by Matthews and Stimson (1975) and Kingdon (1973): cue-taking influences a large percentage of policy positions and occurs late in the policymaking process. I also contribute to the literature by showing that on average cues complement, rather than substitute for, policy information from other sources of expertise within the legislature.

Theories of legislative committees, lobbying, and cue‐taking assume information affects legislators' support for policy alternatives. However, there is little direct, empirical evidence to support this foundational assumption about legislative behavior. This article reports results from a field experiment in which state legislators were randomly assigned to receive policy research about pending proposals. Results show that policy information increased aggregate cosponsorship by 60% above baseline rates. For one bill covered critically, information diminished cosponsorship and roll‐call voting support. Results are broadly consistent with information signaling models' predictions about the importance of information to position taking.

It is common in regression discontinuity analysis to control for third- or fifth-degree polynomials of the assignment variable. Such models can overfit, leading to causal inferences that are substantively implausible and that arbitrarily attribute variation to the high-degree polynomial or the discontinuity. This paper examines two recent studies that make use of regression discontinuity to discuss evident practical problems with these estimates and how they interact with pathologies of the current system of scientific publication. First, we discuss a recent study that estimates the effect on air pollution and life expectancy of a coal-heating policy in China. The reported effects, based on a third-degree polynomial, are statistically significant but substantively dubious, and are sensitive to model choice. This study is indicative of a category of policy analyses where strong claims are based on weak data and methodologies which permit the researcher wide latitude in presenting estimated treatment effects. We then replicate a procedure from Green et al., in which regression discontinuity is used to recover estimated treatment effects relative to an experimental benchmark, to illustrate one practical problem with the regression discontinuity estimates in the coal-heating paper: high-degree polynomials yield noisy estimates of treatment effects that do not accurately convey uncertainty. We recommend that (a) researchers consider the problems which may result from controlling for higher-order polynomials; and (b) that journals recognize that quantitative analyses of policy issues are often inconclusive and relax the implicit rule under which statistical significance is a condition for publication.

AbstractThis study evaluates the turnout effects of direct mail sent in advance of the 2014 New Hampshire Senate election. Registered Republican women were sent up to 10 mailings from a conservative advocacy group that encouraged participation in the upcoming election. We find that mail raises turnout, but no gains are achieved beyond five mailers. This finding is shown to be consistent with other experiments that have sent large quantities of mail. We interpret these results in light of marketing research on repetitive messaging.

AbstractIt is widely thought that lobbyists exert influence over legislators' policy positions and, as a result, over policy outcomes. One mechanism of influence is the provision of policy expertise. Yet, there is little credible empirical evidence that lobbyists' expertise influences legislative outcomes. Across four experiments fielded with three lobbyists in two state legislatures that examine two public measures of legislators' positions, we find no evidence that lobbyists' expertise influences legislators' policy positions. We do find, in contrast, that the same policy expertise treatment is influential when provided by a legislative staffer. We conclude that policy information can influence legislators' positions, but that legislators are cautious when that information is provided by lobbyists.

Recent work on US policymaking argues that responsiveness to public opinion is distorted by money, in that the preferences of the rich matter much more than those of lower-income Americans. A second distortion—partisan biases in responsiveness—has been less well studied and is often ignored or downplayed in the literature on affluent influence. We are the first to evaluate, in tandem, these two potential distortions in representation. We do so using 49 Senate roll-call votes from 2001 to 2015. We find that affluent influence is overstated and itself contingent on partisanship—party trumps the purse when senators have to take sides. The poor get what they want more often from Democrats. The rich get what they want more often from Republicans, but only if Republican constituents side with the rich. Thus, partisanship induces, shapes, and constrains affluent influence.