-
5. Networking the Legislators
- University of Michigan Press
- Chapter
- Additional Information
111 chapter 5 Networking the Legislators One thing [I get out of the intergroup meetings] is the ability to know and discuss with colleagues that are out of our delegations and our committees. So it provides you with an opportunity to communicate with colleagues. This is a very big parliament . . . so it is very difficult to meet people. Even a few minutes of discussion can make a connection. . . . It is very important to be able to function as a parliamentarian to have this, to create these personal links. People know you, and you know people, know their agendas, know their character. So, it is very important also in terms of the actual human functioning of the Parliament . (Respondent 60, European Parliament) Legislative member organizations (LMOs) give legislators opportunities to establish relationships with colleagues with whom they would not otherwise share social ties, thereby providing an institutional solution to a collective problem. Such relationships give lawmakers access to information that would be at best costly to acquire or at worst unattainable. We investigate the relational benefits of LMOs in this chapter by providing evidence from our interviews that highlight the groups’ role as arenas for social interactions or indeed as social networks, as many of our respondents in the two case studies call them.1 Hence, this chapter not only confirms our expectations about one of the key functions of LMOs but also demonstrates that legislators both recognize and value this function. We also evaluate one of our key propositions about social relationships established in LMOs—that is, that the majority of them tend to be weak ties. We make this case by examining the extent to which LMOs give legislators opportunities to establish strong ties with each other. Specifically, we consider the frequency of LMO meetings, the proclivity of legislators or representatives of legislative offices to attend these meetings, and the extent to which there is fluidity in the set of participants between meetings. From this investigation, we conclude that the participation of most legislators in 112 bridging the information gap LMO activities is too limited to allow for the establishment of strong ties: LMOs meet too infrequently and most legislators do not attend often enough for the majority of LMO ties to be anything but weak. This weakness is not a disadvantage, however, as our theory emphasizes. First, the creation and maintenance of weak ties is inexpensive, which means that legislators can reap the benefits of LMOs without having to invest substantial resources. Second, weak ties tend to be cross-cutting and therefore give lawmakers access to new information. Our qualitative data thus suggest that LMOs play an important relational role in legislative politics, that lawmakers themselves view this role as a key benefit of LMOs, and that most LMO ties are weak ties. These observations do not, however, establish that the structures of LMO networks are such that the informational benefits our theory outlines are realized. To make this case, we must take two further steps. First, we must test empirically whether LMO networks create social networks that are structured in such a way that they facilitate the efficient diffusion of new information and ideas. We have to show, in other words, that LMOs help establish bridging ties that cut across institutional and social boundaries imposed by party affiliations and committee assignments. We show that this is indeed the case. Second, we must move beyond presenting the potential for the efficient diffusion of information in LMO networks and demonstrate actual informational benefits. We leave this task for chapter 6, in which we provide evidence both for information flow through LMO networks inside the legislature and for the exchange of information with outside actors associated with specific LMOs. In particular, we emphasize the inflow of what we call high-utility information and the efficient diffusion of this information throughout LMO networks. We begin this chapter by examining our qualitative data to demonstrate the relational benefits of LMOs. After establishing that LMOs provide opportunities for lawmakers to build social relationships with each other that often cut across party and committee lines, we move on to investigate LMO network structures using social network analysis tools. We provide a series of social network descriptive statistics for our two legislatures and then empirically test our propositions about the structures of LMO networks. We first illustrate the bridging nature of LMO ties by examining to what extent LMO ties replicate existing social ties. For example, if Legislators A and B are connected to each...