Minority Staff and Bill Sponsorship in the U.S. House

Abstract

The salience of race in American politics has attracted scholarly research studying
its impact under different contexts. However, relatively little attention has been given
to the legislative impact of racial and ethnic diversity among congressional staffers.
I argue that having a minority legislative staff is associated with an increase in the
number of legislation relevant to minority rights (minority issue bills) sponsored by the
corresponding legislator. Using an original dataset of minority staffers and minority
issue bills from the 111th Congress to the 115th Congress, I find that members with
senior minority staffers sponsor more bills related to minority issues, conditional on
the member's district's minority population. These findings have important ramifications
for understanding legislative staff representation and organization empirically
and theoretically.

Keywords: Staff Diversity; Bill Sponsorship; Representation