Emily Cottle Ommundsen’s research while affiliated with University of Mississippi and other places

Members of Congress run for office with a variety of goals they hope to achieve if elected. How members go about achieving these goals is constrained by numerous institutional factors. Yet there exist two areas in which members are afforded broad discretion: the allocation of their time and budget. In this paper, I assess the personal qualities and institutional circumstances that motivate members' budgetary decisions, and take an important step further to evaluate the consequences of such choices. I find that members who spend a greater proportion of their budget are more effective lawmakers than those who do not spend their full budgets. Further, I demonstrate that members who invest more in legislative staff have the highest rates of legislative productivity. Members make strategic choices in how they divide their budget. This paper demonstrates that investing in skilled staff is a wise strategy for members desiring legislative success.

In addition to interest in undergraduate research, political science increasingly recognizes the value of civically engaged research for various educational, professional, and civic outcomes. With limited time and steep tradeoffs, instructors must find ways to cleverly combine undergraduate research experiences with the broader normative civic-education responsibilities of political science and higher education. This article presents a course design that allows instructors to leverage their classroom for both civic education and undergraduate research without the need for previously developed community partnerships that are common to most engaged research and learning. Our approach brings together undergraduate research and community engagement through course design.

How do members of Congress build public support for legislation? Many argue it is through the framing of the legislative process or carefully curated explanations that appeal to their constituents’ preferences. Some suggest the key to members of Congress building public support for legislation is appealing to bipartisanship—signaling to the public that legislation was crafted through compromise and is liked by members on both sides of the aisle. Given the hyper-partisan era that presently exists, however, these bipartisan appeals are unlikely to occur in a vacuum. The minority party has incentives to engage in counter framing to undermine support for legislation. We demonstrate that the benefits awarded to members by engaging in bipartisan appeals are overstated. By engaging in counter messaging, members in the minority party can undermine the legislative accomplishments of their opponents, as well as approval for the legislature. Minority-party members, however, must be careful in how they counter message: partisan, rather than non-partisan, messages actually increase support for the legislature’s majority party while decreasing support for the minority party.

Congressional staff have often been called the “invisible force” behind members of Congress, earning themselves the title of “unelected lawmakers.” In this paper, I explore the link between United States Senate committees' level of productivity and the experience of their staff. Utilizing publicly reported data on Senate staff experience and a new measure of committee productivity I find that a committee's average years of staff experience is a significant predictor of committee legislative effectiveness. I find, however, that greater levels of staff experience only increase committee effectiveness when assessing the experience of senior or high‐ranking staff. As non‐senior staff experience increases, however, committees become less effective. These findings suggest that when making hiring decisions, Senate chairs and ranking members should prioritize years of experience in their senior staff while foregoing experienced general and administrative staff in order to achieve greater levels of committee productivity.