Melinda N. Ritchie’s research while affiliated with University of California, Riverside and other places

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' service activities are unobserved. Using Freedom of Information Act (FOIA) requests, we collected 88,000 records of communication between members of the U.S. Congress and federal agencies during the 108th–113th Congresses. These legislative interventions allow us to examine members' “follow‐through” with policy implementation. 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 leverage in understanding the role of political cleavages and shared experiences. Our findings suggest that shared experiences operate as a critical mechanism for representation, that a lack of political consensus is not necessary for substantive representation, and that the causal relationships identified by experimental work have observable implications in the daily work of Congress.

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 U.S. 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.

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 US 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, back-channel 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.