Daniel Gillion’s (2016) theory of discursive governance contends that “the path to ameliorating these [racial] inequalities begin[s] with politicians’ willingness to engage in a conversation” (14). Floor speeches play an essential role in allowing leadership to assess the mood of the rank-and-file, send signals to administrative agencies and the courts about legislative intent, and take positions and claim credit in service of their reelection goals (Fenno 1978; Mayhew 1974). Legislative speechmaking allows members to effectively communicate to other elites, particularly interest groups, that a member is credibly committed to the interests of that group (Ray 2018). Additionally, a legislator’s speechmaking behavior is tied to their representation (home) style (Hill and Hurley 2002, 219–20).It is clear that Black representatives see a great deal of value in their role in shaping the discourse surrounding issues that directly impact communities that share their identity. It is also clear that Black lawmakers utilize spaces, such as committee processes, to promote Black interest through deliberative means. However, it is less clear exactly how Black representatives speak about and for Black interests when provided the opportunity. This article seeks to build on Mansbridge’s idea of “horizontal communication” and Gillion’s theory of discursive governance to uncover trends in how Black legislators use collective action to discuss, define, and prioritize issues on their agenda. Does the way in which the Congressional Black Caucus (CBC) defines and communicates their agenda actually convey one that is fragmented? Or, do they view issues that plague Black Americans to be interconnected, multidimensional, and complex?We work to expand the empirical exploration into the representation of marginalized interest in political institutions by drawing on an underutilized methodological approach—social network analysis (SNA)—to uncover and examine the nature of the CBC’s collective expressed agenda. To accomplish this, we employ a qualitative application of SNA to perform a textual analysis of ninety-nine CBC special order hour speeches delivered from the 111th to the 114th Congress. We examine the content and context of efforts taken by the CBC to establish lines of communication designed to identify, define, and promote problems in the Black community onto the larger institutional agenda. This discourse is both a window into the nature of the complex problems that make up their collective expressed agenda in the House and a means to clarify complex issues by organizing shared attributes at the core of these problems.Discourse, debate, negotiation, and rhetoric are all terms that scholars use to describe, analyze, and understand legislative speech and discussion. While the terms have historically been used interchangeably, the definition of each usually possesses key commonalities. At its core, discourse is speech that politicians use to provides explanations for—or critiques of—government policies or behaviors in order to create a narrative or shared understanding of those actions (Gillion 2016; Mansbridge and Martin 2015; Gutmann and Thompson 1998). Discourse need not be tied to tangible outcomes, such as bills being passed, though that is often the case. Rather, the intellectual debate and narrative created around a policy is sufficient on its own as an important step in the process of representation (Mansbridge and Martin 2015; Gillion 2016; Mucciaroni and Quirk 2006). Additionally, discourse is subject to, and bound by, “institutional conditions that facilitate successful political negotiation” (Mansbridge and Martin 2015, 1).Seminal scholarship on the representation and advancement of Black interests in legislative bodies emphasizes the role that descriptive representatives play in shaping discourse surrounding group-specific issues. Throughout her classic exploration of the impacts of descriptive representation, Jane Mansbridge (1999, 628) asserted that the presence of representatives who share identities with marginalized groups “enhances the substantive representation of interests by improving the quality of deliberation.” However, scholars tend to treat legislative speech as purely symbolic gesturing rather than a form of substantive representation (Hill and Hurley 2002; Proksch and Slapin 2012). As a result, many of the studies of Black representation lean on other forms of legislative behaviors that are seen as more tangible measures of substantive representation despite the fact that most, too, routinely fall on deaf ears.1 Hanna Pitkin (1967) finds a great deal of substantive value in lawmakers “acting for” their constituents.A narrow, outcome-based view of substantive representation leaves little space for agenda-setting behavior at either the individual or collective level. National and group-interest caucuses—like the Congressional Black Caucus—typically operate in two spaces: agenda setting—promoting issues onto the institutional agenda—and agenda maintenance—keeping issues on the legislative agenda (Hammond, Mulhollan, and Stevens 1985; Stevens, Mulhollan, and Rundquist 1981). A major responsibility of the caucus must be to take on an active role in organizing and defining issues shared among members and their communities that are otherwise inadequately communicated by out-group representatives (Mansbridge 1999; Fenno 1978). Given the Black Caucus’s role as agenda setters in the halls of Congress, we argue that legislative speeches have palpable impacts on the legislative process, and thus should be viewed and studied alongside other formal modes of representationMansbridge’s (1999) work highlights an important aspect of Black representatives’ engagement in “horizontal communication”—that is, communication that takes place among the governing elites, with the aim to promote, define, and solve policy problems experienced by the Black community. Horizontal communication, according to Mansbridge (1999), differs from vertical lines of communication that emerge from contacts between constituencies and their representatives and shape legislative behaviors such as bill sponsorships, cosponsorship, and voting tendencies (Swain 1993; Whitby 2000; Tate 2001, 2003, 2014; Pinney and Serra 2002; Rocca and Sanchez 2008; Broockman 2013). While both modes of communication are essential to the representation of Black interests, tendencies in the scholarly examination of Black legislative behavior suggests the discipline has invested far more into the understanding of the latter than the former.As Daniel Gillion (2016) contends, “a dialogue on race that takes place in government draws attention to racial inequality on the political agenda and informs governmental officials and the American public alike of the continuing inequities that persist” (19). When politicians discuss race it has the potential to shape political processes, institutional agendas, policy outcomes, and the public response to questions centered on racial inequality in America (Gillion 2016). Discourse is particularly important for Black lawmakers who are subject to interpersonal and structural marginalization in other phases of the legislative process (Hawkesworth 2003; Griffin and Keane 2011; Frisch and Kelly 2006). Floor speeches provide Black lawmakers with an outlet to circumvent access and interpersonal barriers that exist and become a platform to articulate to the broader institution the Black condition that is free from attempts to silence or marginalize their voices.Often, Black lawmakers are able to shape discourse toward Black interests in other phases of the legislative process. As Ellis and Wilson (2013) reveal: “The odds that hearings addressed minority interest policy issues were nearly three times greater when African-American, compared to white representatives, chaired committee hearings” (1214). Michael Minta (2011) asserts that minority lawmakers “play an instrumental role in ensuring that federal officials as well as fellow congresspersons are enforcing civil rights laws as well as implementing policies that benefit the poor” (124). Katrina Gamble (2007) posits that this increased activity at the committee level suggests Black members “have stronger preference intensities towards black interest bills than do white legislators,” and these differences in preferences “translate into significant differences in the representation of policies that disproportionately affect black communities” (435).Discourse provides Black lawmakers the opportunity to take part in attention-shifting behaviors—an activity Jones and Baumgartner (2005) call “issue intrusion.” Discourse becomes a tool for the CBC to promote and pursue the interests of Black America and work to challenge dominant images that engulf potentially racialized policy areas. Political discourse assists in defining policy interests in a way that highlights the breadth and complexity of the organization’s agenda while providing structure and organization to such a complex collective set of issues. This collective effort to bring issues of race to the forefront of discussions in political institutions—through issue promotion and problem definition—facilitates their roles as agenda setters, information brokers, and coalition builders (Stevens, Mulhollan, and Rundquist 1981; Hammond, Mulhollan, and Stevens 1985; Vega 1993). It is crucial that those interested in expanding the understanding of Black representation consider the contexts surrounding how Black politicians talk about race.The debate concerning how a Black-interest agenda should look (what issues should take priority, how broad should the agenda be, etc.) and how the agenda should be pursued (pragmatic or militant, racialized or deracialized, etc.) is one that has been at the forefront of much of the scholarship, criticism, and intrigue surrounding the Congressional Black Caucus (Barnett 1977; Canon 1995; Smith 1996; Johnson and Secret 1996; Singh 1998; Gillespie 2010b; Owens 2011; Tate 2014). Early in their existence, the dominant perception of the CBC agenda was that it was narrow, racialized, and conflict-inducing (Swain 1993; Singh 1998; Tate 2003, 2014). This observation routinely leads those interested in the representation of Black interests to infer that the Black Caucus has abandoned, at least in part, the pursuit of Black advancement.While previous efforts succeeded in identifying the issues that individual lawmakers communicate to their constituency, they fall just short in addressing a more interesting and, potentially, more important question: How do members perceive the issues that they choose to promote? Moreover, we lack a general understanding as to how problems on an agenda are related to one another. Rather than questioning how Black representatives come to prioritize issues on their agenda, we look to build upon previous efforts to explore Black political representation by analyzing how Black representatives engage in the process of problem definition—or the process of characterizing the nature of issues according to their underlying attributes—to better understand how they construct the issues that they devote their attention to.Problem definition plays an essential role in influencing agenda setting and policy solution adoption (Rochefort and Cobb 1994; Baumgartner and Jones 1993, 2002; Jones and Baumgartner 2005; Workman, Shafran, and Bark 2017, among others). The ways in which problems are defined also provides policy actors the means to broaden or constrict the scope of conflict in order to build interest in problems that persist for Black America (Schattschneider 1975; Workman, Shafran, and Bark 2017). Policymakers rely on elite discourse to construct a “policy image”—the tonal and empirical understanding of problems and solutions—in order to drive decision-making (Baumgartner and Jones 1993; Schneider and Ingram 1993). In Congress, elected officials compete to shape the dominant policy image for the institution in an effort to influence the broader agenda. Speechmaking becomes a vital mode for doing this agenda setting and image maintenance. Members and groups—like the CBC—seek to influence policy change by becoming a source of policy-relevant information and attempt to shape emotive evaluations of a particular policy based on their understanding of the issue and its impacted group. To explore the nature of issues on the CBC agenda, we test three propositions.We begin with the fundamental assumption that, like many problems in the policy environment, Black interests are complex. By complex, we mean that issues that plague the Black community comprise multiple attributes that all lend a significant hand in creating the problem. For example, a simple definition of the health disparities experienced in the Black community could be that Black Americans are simply not as healthy as other groups. Therefore, the solution would be simple: be healthier. This simple explanation, however, ignores inequalities in access to healthcare facilities, discriminatory care practices, genetic predispositions, and any other attributes that shape the decaying healthcare condition for many Black Americans. Issue complexity is a concept that is most commonly explored in policy process literature (Baumgartner and Jones 1993, 2002, 2015; Jones and Baumgartner 2005; May, Sapotichne, and Workman 2006; Workman, Shafran, and Bark 2017; Workman, Jones, and Jochim 2009; May 1992; Rochefort and Cobb 1994; Dunlop 2017). Baumgartner and Jones (2015) contend, in attempting to solve complex policy problems: “The more one focuses on the myriad dimensions of the issue, the more information one gathers, the more one understands the multidimensional character of the issue, and the more one might be tempted to create a range of public policy programs designed to address different elements of it” (60).Like health care, many of the issues on the CBC agenda are complicated and not easily definable. Not only are problems complex, but they are also interconnected. For example, poverty in Black constituencies goes well beyond job creation—it can be traced to inequality in educational opportunities, a lack of development of communities and infrastructure, the availability of affordable childcare, access to cost-saving and preventative healthcare services, systematic inequalities in policing and punishment, and a number of other conditions that can easily be attributed to economic struggles in Black communities (Ogbu 1979; Shapiro 2004; Fleming 1985; Holmes 2000; Holmes et al. 2008; Kent and Jacobs 2005).The complexity and interconnectedness of Black interests is not lost on those lawmakers charged with representing Black interests; they understand the complexity of problems in the Black community, and how the nature of Black interests complicates their ability to achieve wholesale policy change. For this very reason, the CBC devotes a considerable amount of time and effort into understanding the problems that plague Black Americans. Since its inception in the 1970s, the caucus has formalized its presence over time by organizing into taskforces and working groups composed of members with either direct interests or advantageous committee placements in relevant policy areas. These groups serve as policy laboratories and sources of information gathering and dissemination. In the 114th Congress, Rep. Donald Payne (D-NJ) commented on how the multiplicity and interconnected nature of health care to related issue areas complicates problem-solving:There are numerous factors that contribute to the health disparities throughout New Jersey’s 10th Congressional District and throughout our Nation as well—poverty, environmental threats, inadequate access to health care, and educational inequities. These are such interconnected issues that a piecemeal plan to fixing the problem will not work. A comprehensive approach—one that focuses on providing access to quality care for all, creating good jobs that provide a decent living, and increasing educational opportunities for low-income communities—is only one way to eliminate the health disparities once and for all.Issue complexity raises inherent barriers for those seeking to realize substantive policy change. This is especially evident in the pursuit of Black interests for several reasons. First, complex issues come with increased information costs, as individuals and policymaking institutions must devote time and resources to acquiring enough information to understand problems and select appropriate solutions (Baumgartner and Jones 2015). This complexity is at the center of tensions both within the caucus as well as in the scholarly community, as Black elected officials navigate this balancing act of deciding how to advocate for the advancement of Black communities. Second, complex issues also come with inherent decision costs, as lawmakers and scholars, alike, routinely mull over the best pathway to solving Black interest policy problems.Does “successful” representation allow for these conditions to be chipped away through incremental advances, or is all lost in the absence of large-scale policy change (Barnett 1977; Singh 1998; Owens 2011)? Should solutions have broad, national impacts, or should they have targeted impacts for their specific constituencies? Should proposals have distinct racial appeals, or should they adopt a more color-blind approach (Canon 1995; Gillespie 2010b)? Should Black lawmakers directly challenge the institutions that create the conditions, or should they seek a more pragmatic, measured approach to legislative behavior (Swain 1993; Canon 1995; Singh 1998; Tate 2014)? As Congressman Payne acknowledges, complex problems require complex solutions. In this instance, complexity comes not just in the comprehensiveness of solutions but also in the broad range of ideological and diplomatic approaches to seeking out policy change.If many of the issues facing Congress are “poorly structured,” the issues facing minority populations are as complex as they come. An honest attempt at problem-solving in Black interest areas means understanding that remedies may call on multifaceted solutions that tackle the interwoven nature of those problems. We expect the efforts to define issues according to their multiple characteristics to highlight (1) an agenda composed of a complex of issues that are (2) intertwined by shared attributes. This process is visualized in figure 1.Policy domains are generally thought of as distinct “established areas of policy that give meaning to common problems and have integrative properties” (May, Sapotichne, and Workman 2006, 382). This notion can be seen in some of the more prominent examinations of Black legislative behavior. Whitby (2000) examined the impacts of race and constituency on the prospects of civil rights legislation. Swain’s Black Faces, Black Interests (1993) used interest groups scores in conjunction with her own constructed measures to measure legislative behaviors related to civil rights and education. Bratton and Haynie (1999) defined Black-interest bills as those that explicitly work to “decrease racial discrimination or alleviate the effects of such discrimination, and those that are intended to improve the socioeconomic status of African-Americans” (664), while leaving women’s issues, education, welfare policy, health care, children’s issues, and government spending as separate categories.Like these foundational studies, many studies rest on an implied assumption of mutual exclusivity: an inherent inference that the behaviors in one issue area are not influenced by considerations of other policy problems. Others rest on the assumption that these behaviors in one area are wholly and completely indistinguishable from the same behaviors in other issue areas (e.g., aggregated NOMINATE scores). Issue interconnectivity creates very real problems when attempting to discuss and examine behaviors rooted in alleviating many problems on the CBC agenda—problems that are, by their very nature, unable to be contained in singular categories. For example, how would one categorize the CBC’s interest in “ending the school to prison pipeline”? As researchers, we are often pushed (forced) to make firm decisions in the categorization of political phenomena. However, a number of empirical implications arise if and when one hypothetically choses “education” over, say, “criminal justice,” or vice versa. How, if at all, would our evaluations change if scholars collectively decided to say “both”?There are some advantages to portraying issues in a way that highlights their “fuzziness.” By highlighting the multiplicity of Black interests, Black lawmakers could shift attention away from the more contentious, racialized, and narrow aspects of the issues they seek to bring attention to—dimensions that frequently lead to inactivity—and toward different dimensions that may be more “palatable” to decision makers. In decision-making institutions, attention is often directed at only one aspect or dimension, while others are suppressed or ignored (Baumgartner and Jones 2002, 21). Some contend that early cohorts of Black lawmakers adopted narrow definitions of policy problems, allowing key decision makers to paint their concerns as ideologically radical, racially contentious, and out of touch with the broader concerns of the nation (Singh 1998). As a result, the concerns of Blacks were largely ignored by Congress and leadership within the institution (Singh 1998; Tate 2014; Swain 1993). However, as Baumgartner and Jones (2002, 21) point out, embracing the complexity of Black interests and communicating that complexity to the institution could work to their advantage in seeking more favorable outcomes in their proposals:As a practical matter, most decision makers pay attention to only a few of the underlying dimensions. At times, however, they may be forced to pay greater attention to one of the elements that they had been ignoring, as when dimensions force themselves onto the agenda because of a crisis or because of the actions of another decision maker. When this occurs, people can change their views on the issue even without changing their minds on the underlying dimension of choice; they simply give greater weight to a dimension that they had been previously ignoring. (emphasis added)The complexity of Black interests has implications on how related bills navigate the legislative process. Traditionally, institutional features—like committees and bureaucratic agencies—help preserve this delineation of policy interests. Increasingly, institutional reform and issue multidimensionality are creating what some call a jurisdictional battlefield by “shaping the interplay between interests and issues” where lines between policy domains are becoming increasingly, and intentionally, blurred (May, Sapotichne, and Workman 2006, 399; see also Baumgartner and Jones 1993; Evans 1999; Baumgartner, Jones, and MacLeod 2000; King 2008; Adler and Wilkerson 2011). These jurisdictional battles often result in increased bill sponsorships from within the committee in an effort to “capture” the issue and expand their jurisdiction (King 2008). Additionally, committees may preempt these jurisdictional battles with hearings in broad topic areas, providing avenues for Black committee members to take a more active role in defining—or redefining—policy problems.Adopting definitions that span traditional policy domains could also result in related bills being referred to and considered by multiple committees—allowing them opportunities to circumvent the institutional marginalization and “othering” that continues to plague the halls of Congress (Hawkesworth 2003; Frisch and Kelly 2006; Rocca, Sanchez, and Morin 2011; Griffin and Keane 2011). Reaching multiple committees could result in a bill landing in committees with higher concentrations of Black lawmakers or, better, with control over the committee and leverage to bring attention to these proposals (Ellis and Wilson 2013).We expect to find that when CBC members define issues according to their underlying attributes, their efforts will reveal the interconnectivity of these issues that makes it virtually impossible to distinguish one traditional policy domain (e.g., education, health care, civil rights, macroeconomics, labor, social welfare, etc.) from another. As CBC members work to clarify the nature of interests on their agenda, their efforts will reveal more of a cluster of seemingly distinct policy domains.Due to the nature of Black issues, the process of promoting policy areas of interest on the larger agenda is an arduous one complicated by competing individual, district, and political motivations, an institutional resistance to change in racialized policy areas, and an ever-evolving political atmosphere (Swain 1993; Canon 1995, 1999, 2005; Whitby 2000; Tate 2001, 2003, 2014; Singh 1998; Gillespie 2010b). Early criticism of the Congressional Black Caucus raised concerns that a narrow, racially focused agenda limited the potential for them to achieve substantive legislative victories (Swain 1993; Singh 1998). This criticism resulted in the caucus moving toward more of a “dual agenda,” where the organization promotes both race-specific issues and universal problems rooted in socioeconomic struggles faced across all racial groups.On one hand, congressional districts are rapidly changing. Redistricting in the 2000s has altered district compositions, likely also altering the aims of those seeking to satisfy the electoral motivation commonly associated with elected officials. In addition, Black mobility, rapid suburbanization, and gentrification have drastically altered the political landscape and district demands for the foreseeable future (Rogers 2018; McGowen 2018). On the other hand, the members themselves are changing. In his early work on the CBC, Canon (1995) argued that new generations of members would steer their preferences and pursuits away from contentious “politics of difference” and toward what he called “policies of commonality”—a more pragmatic agenda that centers on universal and deracialized policy solutions to solve problems that also plague Black communities. The freshmen representatives that Canon highlighted in his Black Caucus research—the class of 1993—are now the old guard. According to Gillespie (2010b, 2012), many of the new generations of Black lawmakers are Ivy League–educated (compared to the products of Historically Black Colleges and Universities), suburban (rather than urban) raised, and socialized in the age of modern technology and inclusivity (in comparison to those brought up in the contentiousness of the Civil Rights era). This evolution could have dramatic impacts on the collective pursuits of the organization.Tate (2014) finds that as new cohorts of CBC membership move toward a more progressive, pragmatic approach to lawmaking—resulting increasingly in policy pursuits that are rooted more in universal benefits and less in radicalism and racialized differences—the cohesiveness that the CBC is widely known for slowly begins to deteriorate (Gile and Jones 1995; Pinney and Serra 1999, 2002). However, the Black Caucus has certainly not abandoned race-centered policy proposals altogether. As CBC members work to define issues on their agenda, we expect those efforts to provide at least some insight into the broader nature of the agenda. More specifically, we argue, the shared attributes will reveal an inherent duality in their legislative pursuits—one aspect where issues can be defined in more contexts and another branch of economic issues. Like many Black organizations over the past century, the CBC has worked to strike a balance between advocating for race-centered policies and seeking to advance a more “hidden agenda” rooted in universal policies that “deal not only with race, but with the class dimension” (Hamilton and Hamilton 1992, 435). We expect the public discourse to reflect such a balance and, potentially, tension.Over the past two decades, the Congressional Black Caucus has engaged in a messaging campaign designed to reshape images of problems that plague the Black community and the nation. To examine the Congressional Black Caucus’s collective effort to use discourse to shape constructs around Black interests, we use a qualitative form of social network analysis to explore the contents of ninety-nine “special order” speeches delivered on the floor of the U.S. House of Representatives from the 111th through the 114th Congresses (2009–16). We acquired official transcripts of each speech delivered during our time period of study directly from the Congressional Record. CBC special order speeches represent a consensus-driven, collective effort to identify, construct, and promote issues onto a legislative agenda.First, the special order speeches are delivered as a collective as opposed to those delivered by individual lawmakers—with many of the more recent speeches calling on the presence of a half-dozen or more of the CBC members working in tandem within the one-hour time allotment. In fact, there are a number of occasions where individual members of the Black Caucus will deliver an individual floor speech and, in the same legislative session, return later to join the collective efforts of the caucus in delivering their speech of the day. These speeches are delivered not only as a collective unit but also on behalf of the caucus (as opposed to individual members). This is an important distinction, considering the fact that the organization’s bylaws forbid its members from speaking for the caucus without prior authorization. This is a privilege typically reserved for the CBC chairperson. This means when members gather during CBC special order speeches, they are doing so at the behest of the organization with the intent of relaying to the institu