Jeremy Gelman describes his year working in Congress as “almost anthropological.”
From his perch within a Senate office as an American Political Science Association fellow in 2017, he got a firsthand look at how Congress operates, or sometimes falls short of functioning altogether.
That experience spawned nearly a decade of research for Gelman, now an associate professor of political science at the University of Nevada, Reno. The down-to-the-minute precision of his boss’ calendar led him to wonder what other members do all day. It’s a topic he’s currently researching based on archived schedules.
And it’s allowed him to reflect on some of the trends he observed while on the Hill, many of which have only intensified. Social media has been a particular area of interest for Gelman, who with Steven Lloyd Wilson of Brandeis University, devised a system to quantify the partisanship of lawmakers’ posts.
The takeaways of his work have been consistent: Congress appears to be getting more partisan and power is increasingly consolidated in the hands of leadership. Both have an impact on lawmaking.
“You have these very, very partisan processes that are designed behind closed doors, and then you get these very large bills often, or very orchestrated outcomes on the floor. Which means there’s a lot less dynamism for average members to take advantage of,” Gelman said in a recent interview.
This interview is part of a conversation series with researchers who study Congress and its changes over time. It has been edited and condensed for clarity.
Q: Tell me about your current research.
A: I’m studying how members of Congress spend their time. When I ask people, “What do you think your member of Congress does all day,” it’s just this silence. People have no idea, or they say, “Well, they just meet with lobbyists.”
It involves archival research, looking at schedules, and also doing interviews about how day-to-day life has changed over 40 or 50 years.
We’re still working through the first tranche, but so far it’s incredibly diverse in what they do. Some definitely work a lot harder than others. There are very few committee hearings now, but if you go back to the ’70s and ’80s, that defined their day.
Q: Does Congress need more committee hearings now to keep themselves busy and away from all the politicking?
A: We know the committees are doing less and less because they’re less powerful than they used to be. So much of career advancement is now through the party system, and there are fewer outlets to become really influential in Washington, D.C., that are absent from that.
Under the committee system, through the seniority system, it used to be that it didn’t matter how good of a team player you were for the Democrats or the Republicans, as long as you were there for a really long time, you understood how you became influential.
I doubt the committee system as it once was in the ’70s is coming back for lots and lots of reasons, but if you want to lower the partisan temperature, there need to be ways for people to be influential that don’t involve being very partisan.
Q: You study Congress, but you also had a chance to see it for yourself.
A: The American Political Science Association has a long-standing fellowship, going back to the 1950s, that brings political scientists to D.C. for a year to see how it works.
I worked for Sen. Jack Reed, and I was there in 2017 when Republicans were in unified government the last time. I was there for the Obamacare attempted repeal, and I was there for the Neil Gorsuch debate, watching a lot of norms and even rules get changed in real time, [like the Senate nixing the filibuster for Supreme Court nominees]. I remember talking to the legislative director and saying, “I’m a political scientist — I have to go sit in the chamber and watch this. I’ll be back in an hour.” I was in the gallery and it was totally full, because people understood how important it was.
Q: Another one of your recent papers is about the “sometimes untraceable origins of policy ideas.”
A: We now have sophisticated enough software and machine-learning algorithms where we can put in sections of bills, which are sort of the building blocks of legislation, and trace them back to their origins.
I did that with some landmark laws just to get a sense of who’s writing this stuff, and I found a few things. Most ideas are pretty new. A lot of things don’t sit around for a decade or something — members know something is going to happen, and so they act on it. And then a lot of these bills have some pretty diverse origins, and members who don’t get credit for legislating much are in them.
But finally, and this has been true for Congress forever, some of these policies are written behind closed doors at the end and just show up in the final draft. It used to be it was done in the room with the conference committee. Now it’s done in a different way, where the party leadership takes ideas from either themselves or other members and adds them.
In the bills I look at, about 15 percent of sections can’t be traced to any other previously introduced bill, either that term, or going back all the way to 1993. So who do we think are the good legislators who can navigate this process? As political scientists we’re really interested in that, but some of it requires an in-depth, qualitative understanding — going through and saying, “Well, who wrote this section?”
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