Book contents
- Frontmatter
- Dedication
- Contents
- Figures
- Tables
- Acknowledgments
- 1 Members of Congress Are Politicians, Not Experts
- 2 Committee Hearings and Information Provision in Congress
- 3 Who Testifies in Congress? New Data on Congressional Hearings and Witnesses
- 4 Not All Information Is Equal
- 5 When Committees Seek Out Information for Policy Development
- 6 How Control of Government Shapes Information Exchange
- 7 Congressional Capacity and the Search for Specialized Information
- 8 Conclusion
- Appendix A
- References
- Index
3 - Who Testifies in Congress? New Data on Congressional Hearings and Witnesses
Published online by Cambridge University Press: 21 November 2024
- Frontmatter
- Dedication
- Contents
- Figures
- Tables
- Acknowledgments
- 1 Members of Congress Are Politicians, Not Experts
- 2 Committee Hearings and Information Provision in Congress
- 3 Who Testifies in Congress? New Data on Congressional Hearings and Witnesses
- 4 Not All Information Is Equal
- 5 When Committees Seek Out Information for Policy Development
- 6 How Control of Government Shapes Information Exchange
- 7 Congressional Capacity and the Search for Specialized Information
- 8 Conclusion
- Appendix A
- References
- Index
Summary
This chapter introduces a novel dataset encompassing 731,810 witnesses across 74,077 House, Senate, and Joint standing committee hearings held between 1961 and 2018. The dataset includes comprehensive details such as witness names, organizational affiliations, hearing summaries, committee titles, dates, and bill numbers discussed. The chapter describes the meticulous construction process, emphasizing the extraction of key variables focusing on witness affiliations, affiliation type, and gender. With eighteen categorized affiliation types and nine broader parent categories, this classification captures the diverse spectrum of external groups represented in congressional hearings. The chapter also provides rich descriptive statistics on hearings and witness over time and across committees.
- Type
- Chapter
- Information
- Hearings on the HillThe Politics of Informing Congress, pp. 29 - 52Publisher: Cambridge University PressPrint publication year: 2024