In recent years, legislators from both parties have drawn attention for their public support or opposition to leading figures within their party, such as Donald Trump and Nancy Pelosi. Yet we know relatively little about the extent to which voters care about members' professed loyalty to party leaders, especially when compared to competing considerations such as members' policy positions. In two national survey experiments, we independently manipulate hypothetical Democratic and Republican legislators' ideological reputations and levels of support for a leading party figure. Through our experiments and a supplemental observational analysis, we find that partisans in the electorate do use information about support for or opposition to leading party figures as a basis for evaluating members of Congress. At the same time, the results reaffirm the importance voters attach to policy and ideological factors and suggest these considerations are not overwhelmed by partisan loyalty considerations.
Members of Congress frequently collaborate on policy initiatives, reaching out to colleagues in both parties to find common ground on solutions for the problems faced by their constituents. Using a novel dataset of over 30,000 “Dear Colleague” letters sent by members of the 111th Congress, I use the collaborative relationships that exist in the earliest stages of the policy process to measure the social influence of legislators. I demonstrate that districts represented by members of Congress who are better connected to their colleagues receive a greater share of federal grant money. I argue that this is because collaborative legislators are well‐positioned to be influential allies to strategic bureaucrats who want to maintain a broad base of support for their programs in Congress. Thus, devoting resources to building relationships with their colleagues is one way members of Congress can more effectively support the communities they represent.
more » « less- NSF-PAR ID:
- 10453898
- Publisher / Repository:
- Wiley-Blackwell
- Date Published:
- Journal Name:
- Legislative Studies Quarterly
- Volume:
- 46
- Issue:
- 1
- ISSN:
- 0362-9805
- Page Range / eLocation ID:
- p. 11-48
- Format(s):
- Medium: X
- Sponsoring Org:
- National Science Foundation
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Abstract Background The National Science Foundation Research Initiation in Engineering Formation (RIEF) program aims to increase research capacity in the field by providing funding for technical engineering faculty to learn to conduct engineering education research through mentorship by an experienced social science researcher. We use collaborative autoethnography to study the tripartite RIEF mentoring relationship between Julie, an experienced engineering education researcher, and two novice education researchers who have backgrounds in biomedical engineering—Paul, a biomedical engineering faculty member and major professor to the second novice, Deepthi, a graduate student. We ground our work in the cognitive apprenticeship model and Eby and colleagues’ mentoring model.
Results Using data from written reflections and interviews, we explored the role of instrumental and psychosocial supports in our mentoring relationship. In particular, we noted how elements of cognitive apprenticeship such as scaffolding and gradual fading of instrumental supports helped Paul and Deepthi learn qualitative research skills that differed drastically from their biomedical engineering research expertise. We initially conceptualized our tripartite relationship as one where Julie mentored Paul and Paul subsequently mentored Deepthi. Ultimately, we realized that this model was unrealistic because Paul did not yet possess the social science research expertise to mentor another novice. As a result, we changed our model so that Julie mentored both Paul and Deepthi directly. While our mentoring relationship was overall very positive, it has included many moments of miscommunication and misunderstanding. We draw on Lent and Lopez’s idea of relation-inferred self-efficacy to explain some of these missed opportunities for communication and understanding.
Conclusions This paper contributes to the literature on engineering education capacity building by studying mentoring as a mechanism to support technically trained researchers in learning to conduct engineering education research. Our initial mentoring model failed to take into account how challenging it is for mentees to make the paradigm shift from technical engineering to social science research and how that would affect Paul’s ability to mentor Deepthi. Our experiences have implications for expanding research capacity because they raise practical and conceptual issues for experienced and novice engineering education researchers to consider as they form mentoring relationships.
