Signaling influence in the U.S. Congress

What does it mean to have influence in a legislature? There has been a considerable academic effort to explore many of the aspects of legislative behavior that cause some members to be more successful than others, but relatively little quantitative work has been brought to bear on exactly what influence itself entails. Using a recently developed measure called Covoting Network Centrality, I describe and test a concept known as Signaling Influence, which conceptualizes influence as the way in which influential members' votes signal their colleagues on how they themselves should vote. I put this concept to a variety of tests, with the U.S. House of Representatives as the case. First, I examine how the measure of Covoting Network Centrality compares to similar extant measures of congressional influence. Second, I consider the impact of institutional reform on how members exert influence on one another. Finally, I explore whether members demonstrate different levels of influence on procedural votes as compared to votes on final passage of a bill. I find that centrality is effective at capturing the influence of party leaders, reformers, and ideologues across a wide variety of model specifications, time periods, and legislative contexts.