15:30 - 17:45
Thursday-Panel
Chair/s:
Tara Slough
Discussant/s:
Barbara Vis
Meeting Room D

Shira Cohen
Decision Analysis – The Prophet Muhammad: A Multi-Method Approach

Markus Tepe, Fabian Paetzel
Social Identity in Bargaining over the Allocation of a Windfall Profit. An Experimental Analysis

Luca Bellodi
Bureaucrats, Politicians, and the Strategic Use of Information

Tara Slough
Oversight, Inequality, and Capacity

Nicolò Fraccaroli
Credit Shocks and Populism
Bureaucrats, Politicians, and the Strategic Use of Information
Luca Bellodi
Bocconi University

The political control of the bureaucracy remains a classical topic in political science. However, little is known about the reverse of this relationship: bureaucracies influencing politicians. I conceptualise bureaucratic influence on legislators as the extent to which legislators use the information produced by agencies in the legislative process. Building on cheap talk models of strategic communication, I argue that legislators will make greater use of bureaucratic information when ideologically close to agencies. Agency independence, operating as a credibility-enhancing mechanism, can nonetheless mitigate the effect of ideological distance. I introduce a new measurement strategy to estimate legislators’ use of bureaucratic information which employs natural language processing techniques and syntactic parsing. I apply this method to a corpus of 6.8 million speeches given by US congresspersons in forty years of floor and committee speeches. A series of two-way fixed effects specifications reveal that, on average, the use of bureaucratic information decreases with legislator-agency ideological distance, but the effect is weaker for more independent agencies.