Capitol Investments: The Marketability of Political Skills

Chapter 3 Methodology: Data and Variables

Chapter 3 Methodology: Data and Variables In chapter 2, we described the basic elements of our theory and how Becker’s (1993) work on human capital can be applied to politics—in particular, legislative politics.When we say that our analysis draws on Becker’s theory of human capital, we are referring to the proposition that investments in the production of human capital are made in anticipation of returns (assumption 3) and to three important attendant hypotheses: (1) investments diminish over the life cycle, (2) on-the-job training enhances skills and earnings, and (3) general training is less subsidized by employers. Taken together, these theoretical propositions provide a framework for analyzing the postelective employment of politicians as a function of their behavior in of‹ce. Here we address methodological questions relating to the data collection and the formulation of our variables: in particular, the survey design, the representativeness of our sample, the independent and dependent variables analyzed , and the incorporation of the latter into our model of politicians’ human capital. Our discussion of the conceptualization and analytic operationalization of the variables will be brief at this point, but will be more extensive later when the individual variables are subjected to analysis. In this chapter, we only alert the reader about what to expect in terms of the measures used to re›ect important concepts within the analysis. At the risk of appearing repetitive, we begin by returning to our discussion of the more important elements of the survey design. We do so because this information is relevant to methodological issues surrounding the representativeness of our pool of former legislators. Data: Survey of Former Legislators Our analysis is based on a mail survey of 229 former members of the U.S. Congress between September and December 2004. Three waves of mailings 46 were employed in obtaining these interviews, with a respectable return rate of 45 percent. The return rate appears even higher if we take into account the fact that several respondents currently serve in high-pro‹le political positions, making them predictably reluctant to answer surveys of this nature. Our survey respondents were drawn from an original list of 546 former U.S. senators and representatives who were members of a nonpro‹t organization, the U.S. Association of Former Members of Congress, as of January 2004. Thirty-three former legislators were expunged from this list due to death. The survey probed such issues as pre- and postcongressional salaries, jobs held after leaving Congress, skills acquired while in Congress, the value of various congressional experiences (for example, committee assignments) in obtaining postelective employment, and legislator satisfaction with postelective employment opportunities. This information provides a rich and multifaceted view of the career decisions of legislators during and after congressional service. All the same, the signi‹cance of our ‹ndings depends on the representativeness of our sample; if it is not representative of the broader universe of members of Congress, biases could result in faulty inferences. Then we would be unable to generalize our ‹ndings to all former members of Congress.A potentially damaging bias is the possibility that our sample is composed of unduly satis‹ed legislators. Since the U.S. Association of Former Members of Congress has among its many civic goals the objective of promoting the image of Congress—in one way or another, deservedly or not—sampling such a membership list might produce respondents with unusually positive, retrospective views of how the institution contributed to their postelective of‹ce successes; indeed, membership in the association might be construed as revelation of just how valuable those legislative experiences really were to them. Thus, conclusions about the value of congressional service might be biased because members of the association had positive experiences in launching their postelective careers. Consequently, we need to look for differences between the characteristics of legislators in our sample and the universe of former members of Congress that might produce biased conclusions. Therefore , we assess the extent to which our sample is composed of respondents who might be unduly positive about their congressional service a priori.1 Methodology • 47 1. As would be expected, we have eliminated dead ex-legislators from our mail survey; their characteristics , such as years of service, thus do not ‹gure into comparisons of sample parameters. However, we have no cost-effective way of identifying all the legislators who died after leaving of‹ce from readily available computerized biographical directories. Therefore, in this case, it is likely that the estimation of this...