Research
Book:
Melinda N. Ritchie. Backdoor Lawmaking 2023. Oxford University Press.
Members of Congress are valuable advocates for their constituents from the time a law is drafted through its implementation. This book examines how members of Congress use informal channels of communication with federal agencies to go to bat for their constituents. Drawing on an extensive original dataset, Ritchie traces the interactions between members of Congress and federal agencies to illustrate how these communications function as part of a lawmaker's overarching strategy for policymaking. This book sheds light on ways in which Congress continues to serve valuable functions for American democracy, even amidst today’s challenging political environment. Members facing obstacles in the legislative process find ways to advocate for the interests of their constituents by making direct appeals to agencies. Members of Congress don’t merely posture in public on behalf of their constituents. They tenaciously pursue results.
Peer-Reviewed Articles:
Melinda N. Ritchie and Hye Young You. 2021. "Trump and Trade: Protectionist Politics and Redistributive Policy." The Journal of Politics. 83 (2): 800-805.
Do redistributive policies intended to mitigate the costs of trade reduce protectionist backlash? To understand the link between policymaking and the electoral consequences of policy outcomes, we address this question using data on redistributive assistance to workers harmed by trade liberalization. By analyzing the 2016 US presidential primary and general election results, we show these redistributive policy benefits are associated with reduced support for then-presidential candidate, Donald Trump, who ran on an anti-globalization platform. These findings suggest redistributive trade assistance may have a political impact by mitigating support for protectionist platforms and anti-globalization rhetoric of presidential candidates. Our results suggest that the redistributive program we examine in this paper may accomplish one of its objectives: to make trade liberalization more politically palatable. This paper extends findings in the extant literature on anti-incumbency effects to suggest that policy outcomes affect electoral support for candidates with anti-globalization platforms.
Melinda N. Ritchie and Hye Young You. 2021. "Women's Advancement in Politics: Evidence from Congressional Staff." The Journal of Politics. 83(2): 421:438.
We examine gender differences in policy influence and advancement within the congressional office context using US Congress payroll system data between 2001 and 2014. We document how congressional careers share structural features with non-political occupations with gender gaps. We find that women staffers experience slower promotion and less compensation than men at the same rank and that the gender gap is most salient for positions presenting the greatest structural challenges for women. However, these differences are shaped by the salience of gender equality issues within the office, varying by legislators' party and gender and by the roles of other women within the office. Our analysis offers leverage for assessing previous explanations for women's underrepresentation among policymakers, suggesting that electoral factors, supply lag, and institutional inertia do not solely account for gender differences. However, the political context mitigates gender disparity because of the salience of gender equality within the political workplace.
Kenneth Lowande, Melinda N. Ritchie, and Erinn Lauterbach. 2019. "Descriptive and Substantive Representation in Congress: Evidence from 80,000 Congressional Inquiries." American Journal of Political Science. 63(3): 644-659. (Winner of AJPS 2019 Best Article Award)
A vast literature debates the efficacy of descriptive representation in legislatures. Though studies argue it influences how communities are represented through constituency service, they are limited since legislators’ daily casework activities are unobserved. Using Freedom of Information Act (FOIA) requests, we collect over 88,000 records of communication between members of the U.S. Congress and federal agencies during the 108th-113th Congress. We find that women, racial/ethnic minorities, and veterans are more likely to work on behalf of constituents with whom they share identities. Including veterans offers critical leverage in understanding the role of shared experiences. Among legislators with military backgrounds, those with more military service are more likely to work on behalf of veterans. Our findings suggest that shared experiences operate as a critical mechanism for representation, and that causal relationships identified by experimental work have observable implications in the daily work of Congress.
Melinda N. Ritchie and Hye Young You. 2019. "Legislators as Lobbyists." Legislative Studies Quarterly. 44(1): 65-95. (Winner of Jewell-Loewenberg Award)
Public policy is produced by elected and unelected officials and through the interactions of branches of government. We consider how such interactions affect policy implementation and representation. We argue that legislators try to influence bureaucratic decisions through direct communication with federal agencies, and that such contact is effective and has consequences for policy outcomes. We provide empirical evidence of this argument using original data about direct communication between members of Congress and the US Department of Labor (DOL) along with decisions made by the DOL regarding trade and redistributive policies. We find that direct contacts influence DOL decisions, and the agency is more likely to reverse previous decisions when requested to do so by legislators. Our results challenge key assumptions and findings in the previous literature and have important implications for interbranch relations and informal means of control over the implementation of national policy.
Melinda N. Ritchie. (2018) "Back-channel Representation: A Study of the Strategic Communication of Senators with the U.S. Department of Labor." Journal of Politics. 80(1): 240-253.
An underappreciated way members of Congress represent interests is by pursuing policy goals through their communication with the bureaucracy. I argue that the bureaucracy provides an alternative, covert way for cross-pressured legislators, who face diverging pressures from party leaders, interest groups, and subconstituencies, to satisfy conflicting interests. Using original data of senators’ communication with the U.S. Department of Labor from 2005 to 2012 (109th through 112th Congresses), I show that, when faced with cross-pressures from party and constituency, senators strategically choose less visible, backchannel means for pursuing policy goals. These findings provide a new perspective on representation by demonstrating that legislators pursue policy goals outside of the legislative process in an effort to evade accountability.
Paul Testa, Matthew Hibbing, & Melinda Ritchie. (2014) "Orientations Toward Conflict and the Conditional Effects of Political Disagreement." Journal of Politics. 76(3): 770-785.
We examine how differences in individual orientations toward conflict condition the effects of disagreement on political tolerance, knowledge, and participation. Past research, while recognizing the importance of individual-level moderators, has focused primarily on conflict aversion as an explanatory factor. Using three surveys, we show that individuals’ possess distinct positive and negative orientations toward conflict both of which condition the effects of political disagreement. We find that people who are more positively disposed toward conflict experience more of the benefits and bear less of the costs of political disagreement than those with less positive and more negative dispositions. Possessing a positive orientation toward conflict appears to be a precondition for disagreement to produce higher levels of political tolerance and differences in both positive and negative orientations account for large gaps in both political knowledge and participation.
Matthew Hibbing, Melinda Ritchie, & Mary R. Anderson. (2011) "Personality and Political Discussion." Political Behavior. 33(4): 601-624.
Political discussion matters for a wide array of political phenomena such as attitude formation, electoral choice, other forms of participation, levels of political expertise, and tolerance. Thus far, research on the underpinnings of political discussion has focused on political, social, and contextual forces. We expand upon this existing research by examining how individual personality traits influence patterns of political discussion. Drawing on data from two surveys we investigate how personality traits influence the context in which citizens discuss politics, the nature of the relationship between individuals and their discussion partners, and the influence discussion partners have on respondents’ views. We find a number of personality effects and our results highlight the importance of accounting for individual predispositions in the study of political discussion.