Bridging the Information Gap: Legislative Member Organizations as Social Networks in the United States and the European Union

4. Building the Case: Legislative Member Organizations in the European Parliament and the U.S. Congress

75 chapter 4 Building the Case: Legislative Member Organizations in the European Parliament and the U.S. Congress This chapter introduces two legislatures whose legislative member organizations (LMOs) we analyze as case studies to investigate their role in legislative politics. Our two cases are intergroups in the European Parliament and congressional member organizations (CMOs), usually referred to as caucuses , in the U.S. Congress.1 We use these cases in three empirical chapters to evaluate in detail our theoretical propositions about the value of LMOs for the establishment of relationships between legislators and the diffusion of policy-relevant information in legislative politics. Our two cases lend themselves to a comparative research design because they share core institutional structures, such as party-based politics and active standing committee systems, but provide for variation when it comes to a number of features of interest. Indeed, we observe this variation in particular with two of the three variables identified in the cross-national analysis in chapter 3 as explaining the presence of LMOs in industrialized liberal democracies: the electoral system by which representatives are selected and the number of parties. Members of Congress are selected using a single-member district plurality electoral system; as a result and as one would expect, there are only two legislative parties. Members of the European Parliament, in contrast, are elected using proportional representation systems across the 27 EU member states2 and sit in seven transnational party groups. Some variation exists with regard to the third explanatory variable (the size of the legislature) since the EP (with its 736 members)3 is quite a bit larger than Congress (with 435 members). Both chambers are larger than the average legislature we consider in chapter 3, however. Nonetheless , these systematic differences allow us not only to confirm that our 76 bridging the information gap key propositions about the role of LMOs in legislative politics hold across legislatures but also to fine-tune our findings and provide nuanced insights into the existence and operation of LMOs. To briefly restate our argument, we propose that LMOs allow legislators to establish internal information networks based on policy priorities that transcend the boundaries imposed by partisanship, opposing ideology, and committee jurisdictions. These networks are composed mainly of weak, bridging ties between legislators and their offices (Granovetter 1973, 1974). Information flows more efficiently through these networks because much of the information circulating in a social network composed of strong ties tends to be redundant as a consequence of the frequent interactions between network members. LMO ties transcend closely tied social circles that would otherwise be isolated from each other because they span structural holes in the legislative network by cutting across party and committee lines (Burt 1992, 2000, 2004). Hence, LMO ties help to efficiently diffuse socially distant ideas and information that are relevant to legislators’ policy choices, thereby helping to mitigate the informational collective action dilemma prevalent in legislative politics, where a great demand for political and policy information is met with an insufficient supply. One of the key characteristics of LMOs that allows them to play this role is their voluntary nature—legislators can join (or depart) at will. This reality entails that LMO networks are endogenous from the point of view of individual legislators, since ties are formed as a result of their voluntary participation in one or more LMOs. It also means that the issue scope of LMOs is open because legislators can set up LMOs on any issue they consider to be a policy priority. Finally, the voluntary nature of LMOs makes participation cheap for two reasons. First, voluntary membership means that most LMO ties are weak ties, as participation in LMOs for most legislators is too limited to provide for the establishment of strong ones. Weak ties are cheap, however , because creating and maintaining them does not require much effort. Second, LMOs are low-cost for most participants because voluntary participation means that members are invited to free-ride on the informational benefits LMOs offer. The costs associated with establishing and running LMOs are borne by legislators who have a strong enough personal stake in the LMO’s issue to voluntarily expend some of their limited resources and/ or by outside advocacy organizations that support an LMO’s cause. The relationships between LMOs and outside advocates are quite exten- Building the Case 77 sive, and we highlight two aspects of outsiders’ involvement in LMO systems : the privileged...