How Interest Groups Polarize Elected Officials

Do interest groups use information to polarize elected officials? Conventional wisdom holds that legislative committees transcend partisan bickering and promote evidence-based policymaking. But there remain gaps in the literature and in our understanding of how and whether committees are able to meet this ideal In this project, I propose a research framework to uncover the “hidden hallways” of information exchange in Parliament. I scrape a large, unstructured, and dynamic corpus of committee transcripts and interest group submissions. Using Big Data tools (e.g. Machine Learning, Natural Language Processing, dynamic network analysis), I augment this corpus with federal lobbying records. My goal is to generate new knowledge about how legislators of different parties build lobbying networks, and how these networks change over time and across issue areas. Specifically, I test whether co-partisan legislators who share a connection to semantically similar interest groups are more likely to share additional affiliations, relative to non-co-partisans with connections to semantically dissimilar interest groups.

Faculty Supervisor:

Mark Pickup

Student:

Partner:

University of Michigan

Discipline:

Sociology

Sector:

Education

University:

Simon Fraser University

Program: