Racial Diversity and Bill Sponsorship in the House of Representatives

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 congressional staffers. I argue that having a racial diversity staffer will increase the number of minority issue bills sponsored by the corresponding legislator. Using an original dataset of racial diversity staffers and minority issue bills from the 111th Congress to the 115th Congress, I find that members with senior racial minority staffers sponsor more bills related to minority issues, conditional on the member's district's minority population. These findings have important rami fications for understanding racial equality empirically and theoretically.