Political Grandstanding in the Senate

• In Event: Legislator Messaging and Communications

Abstract

We often observe that lawmakers make impressive political statements in their public speeches and become media darlings. As lawmakers gained highly diversified venues to publicize their statements these days, there is a stronger incentive to make such statements. A recent study analyzing the U.S. House representatives’ speaking patterns observed in public committee hearings show that they tend to engage in such messaging activities when they have less legislative power to move their bills forward to compensate for their lack of legislative achievements and still gain voters’ support. We analyze senators’ speaking patterns by constructing a measurement capturing the level of senators’ messaging efforts using Senate committee hearing transcripts from 105th to 115th Congresses. We find that the relationship between their legislative power and messaging efforts is weaker than in the House because individual senators tend to command more influence over legislative processes than their colleagues in the House and that senators tend to make less political statements than House representatives in general. We further show electoral gains for these messaging activities of senators.

Authors

• Ju Yeon Park, Ohio State University

• Sean M. Theriault, University of Texas at Austin