Organizing Staff in the U.S. Senate: The Priority of Individualism in Resource Allocation

Abstract

Funding for legislative staff represents a valuable commodity to legislators. However it is a resource distributed to separate internal organizations. Previous studies show strong correlations between a legislator’s available institutional power and the benefits of having access to more staffing resources. Therefore, all individual legislators, committee chairs, and party leaders face incentives to direct a larger share of the Senate’s budget. However, we argue the Senate approaches staff allocations for each organization by giving attention to the previous workload of the chamber and resources allocated to other offices in the same bill. Using newly collected data on staff resource allocations between 1885 and 2018, we observe that the Senate’s internal organizations do not undermine each other, and that allocation decisions benefit each area separately. Results of a time series model show that increasing allocations for a staff area actually promotes greater allocations for other areas rather than undermining them, and that changes in membership and eras shape how senators collectively choose to allocate staff resources.