Research Interests:
- The United States Congress
- The Federal Bureaucracy
- American Political Institutions
- Legislative Studies
- Gender Politics
- Representation
- Elite Behavior
- Public Policy and Lawmaking
Dissertation:
“Incentives, Punishments, and Oversight: How Legislators Turn Preference into Policy”
- Committee Chair: Dr. Benjamin G. Bishin
- Winner – Carl Albert Dissertation Award, APSA Legislative Studies Section
Abstract: This dissertation explores if, when, and how individual members of Congress work to pursue their policy goals by putting forth effort to introduce new legislation that constrains the downstream actors who are tasked with interpreting, implementing, enforcing, and following the law. Although researchers have identified a variety of policy tools that legislators may use to limit the discretion of downstream political actors throughout the policymaking process, we do not yet have a way to measure this tool usage across policy issue and time. Given the extensive role that bureaucrats and other political actors play in the policymaking process, this limits our understanding of how Congress shapes our national laws and the role it plays in our separation-of-powers system.
Using an original dataset that identifies the presence of a broad range of legislative tools in bills introduced in the U.S. House of Representatives, I offer a new way to measure the tool diversity written into legislation. Applying this measure to 13,770 bills newly introduced from 2005-2012, I provide evidence that institutional factors, such as committee membership and divided government, as well as extra-institutional factors, such a gender (and the intersection of gender with partisanship) play important roles in shaping legislator bill drafting behavior. Specifically, I show that the relationship between individual legislators, their experiences, and their policy goals have important consequences for how policy is made in the United States. These findings provide a new perspective on the role that institutional context and personal experience plays on the policymaking process in Congress.
Publications:
Lowande, Kenneth, Melinda Ritchie, & Erinn Lauterbach. “Descriptive Representation in Congress: Evidence from 80,000 Congressional Inquires.” Available in Early View, American Journal of Political Science. [link]
- Winner, Best Article Award, the American Journal of Political Science, 2019
Newman, Benjamin, Sono Shah, & Erinn Lauterbach. “Who Sees an Hourglass? Assessing Citizens’ Perceptions of Economic Inequality. Research and Politics. [paper]
Selected Research in Progress
- “Signals from the Hill: Policy Content Scores as a Measure of Legislative Constraint” under review
- “Descriptive to Policy Representation: Lawmaking in the U.S. House of Representatives” Preparing for review.
- “How Policy Content Influences Effective Lawmaking” with Craig Volden and Alan Wiseman. Presenting at CEL Conference, June 2022
- “Class in Session? The Effect of Legislators’ Economic Background on Policy Content in Congress” with Benjamin G. Bishin and Thomas Hayes. Presenting at MPSA & APSA 2022
- “Strategies of Control: Members of Congress and Policy Outcomes” with Melinda Ritchie. Presenting at MPSA 2022
Other Writings
“Having the most diverse Congress ever will affect more than just legislation.” (With Kenneth Lowande & Melinda Ritchie). Monkey Cage. [link]