How Transfer Networks Incorporating Seniority Reveal Committee Prestige
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Abstract:
Building upon a venerable literature (Bullock and Sprague, 1969; Munger, 1988; Groseclose and Stewart, 1998), I argue that the seniority of members transferring off of standing committees reveals important information about the relative prestige of those committees. In response, I introduce a measure from network and computer science, called PageRank (Brin and Page, 1998), which can incorporate information on seniority while measuring committee prestige. I then demonstrate that the prestige of a legislator’s committee portfolio predicts the political action committee (PAC) contributions she receives for the next campaign cycle.
