Interpersonal Relationships and Legislative Collaboration in Congress

• Published date: 01 May 2023
• Author: James M. Curry,Jason M. Roberts
• Date: 01 May 2023
• DOI: http://doi.org/10.1111/lsq.12381

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LEGISLATIVE STUDIES QUARTERLY, 48, 2, May 2023

DOI: 10.1111/lsq.12381

JAMES M. CURRY

University of Utah

JASON M. ROBERTS

University of North Carolina at Chapel Hill

Interpersonal Relationships and

Legislative Collaboration in Congress

Do interpersonal relationships among and between representatives and

senators affect legislative collaboration in the contemporary Congress? The

extant literature on Congress suggests interpersonal dimensions of life on

Capitol Hill should play a minimal role in the legislative process. However,

research in other fields, including psychology, finds that relationships are

crucially important within organizations. In addition, many contemporary

accounts of congressional deal- making highlight the role of personal rela-

tionships. Drawing on interviews with high- level congressional staff, and data

on CODEL trips taken by members of Congress, we show that interpersonal

relationships help promote collaboration across the aisle. These findings have

implications for how we understand the contours of conflict and cooperation

on Capitol Hill.

The passage of the Affordable Care Act (ACA) in 2010

was the signature domestic policy achievement for congressional

Democrats and President Obama in the 111th Congress. Its passage

secured a long sought after policy goal for many Democrats, but

the process was long and arduous. The bill received no Republican

support in either the House or the Senate. Democrats alone had

to provide the votes necessary for passage— a task that was greatly

complicated by the death of Senator Ted Kennedy (D– MA), which

ended the Democrats’ filibuster- proof majority in the Senate.

In many ways, passage of this bill is a prime example of

the partisan polarization that drives much of modern politics.

Republicans refused to provide any support for the bill in spite of

the fact that many of the components of the bill had originated

in conservative think tanks. At the same time, Democrats were

resolute in their desire to pass the bill and used every procedural

weapon in their arsenal to overcome Republican resistance and

secure their desired outcome.

© 2022 Washington University in St. Louis.

334 James M.Curry and Jason M. Roberts

Yet a Politico story1 on how the House was able to pass

the ACA led with the following line: “The fate of health care

reform may have turned on a single relationship.” The story

went on to describe the key role that Rep. Mike Doyle (D– PA)

played in an intra- party struggle between the House leader-

ship, the Obama administration, and allies of Rep. Bart Stupak

(D– MI) over abortion language, which had threatened to sink

the bill as it neared final passage. As one member involved

in the negotiations, Rep. Steve Driehaus (D– OH) stated, “So

much of what gets done here gets done because of personal

relationships.”

This relationship narrative is commonly recited by D.C.

insiders, but has received limited attention in recent political

science scholarship. We think there at least two reasons for that

lack of attention. First, relationships are not easily observed or

quantitatively measured. We do not readily know which mem-

bers have relationships or with whom, nor how strong these rela-

tionships may be. Second, the idea that members would choose

which policies to support or oppose based on a relationship is

at odds with predominant scholarly thinking about legislative

behavior, which focuses instead on the influence of partisanship

(e.g., Lee 2009; Theriault 2008), ideology (e.g., McCarty, Poole,

and Rosenthal 2006; Poole and Rosenthal 1985), and constitu-

ency (e.g., Bishin 2009; Fiorina 1989). Nevertheless, scholarship

on legislator networks and cue- taking (Box- Steffensmeier, Ryan,

and Sokhey 2015; Fong 2019; Fowler 2006; Ringe, Victor, and

Carman 2013), information processing (Curry 2015; Krehbiel

1992), and about the importance of Capitol Hill norms (Hanges

et al. 2019) provide a foundation for understanding a role for

relationships.

We assess the role that relationships— personal and

professional— play in legislative collaborations on Capitol Hill. To

do so, we take three steps. First, we developed very general ex-

pectations for how relationships and collaboration may interact

on Capitol Hill, drawing from scholarship in organizational psy-

chology, especially that which focuses on relationships in the work-

place, as well as from political science. Second, we conducted 21

in- depth interviews with high- level congressional staff to explore

these dynamics in the setting of Capitol Hill. These interviews

yielded important, and testable, insights about how relationships

335

Interpersonal Relationships and Legislative

Collaboration in Congress

may influence legislative collaboration. In particular, they pointed

to congressional delegation (CODEL) travel as factor that is per-

ceived as very important on Capitol Hill as both an indicator of

who gets along with whom, and which members of Congress are

likely to have more and stronger relationships. Moreover, these

interviews helped us identify a new indicator of substantive col-

laboration among two or more legislators: original cosponorship

of legisation.

Third, we built on the interview findings and conducted quan-

titative analyses aimed at a broad test of the relationship between

travel and members’ propensities to collaborate, especially across

the aisle. These analyses draw on an original data set of which

members traveled, and which traveled together, as part of official

CODELs from 1994 through 2020. Because the interviews found

that travel carried such a heavy connotation around relationship

building, we employ it as a key indicator to predict both individ-

ual members’ propensities to collaborate on legislation across the

aisle, and on the likelihoods that dyadic pairs of members who

traveled together also collaborated together. In these analyses, we

also take several steps to partially address selection bias concerns,

as it is clear that members’ propensities to travel, and to engage in

bipartisan collaborations in the first place, are likely endogenous

in many ways.

Our findings provide new evidence that relationship build-

ing on Capitol Hill can aid collaboration, including bipartisan

collaboration, among members of Congress. In an era of intense

partisan conflict, our results suggest that efforts to promote rela-

tionship building may spur increased cooperation and bipartisan

legislating in Washington.

Interpersonal Relationships

The extant literature in both psychology and political science

underscore why and how relationships can matter within organi-

zations, including in politics. Combined, these strands of research

suggest that relationships— personal or professional— can aid col-

laborative efforts. These findings, in turn, have implications for

how we might understand how relationships matter on Capitol

Hill relative to other forces that legislative scholars typically as-

sociate with collaboration.