by Alison Craig & Annelise Russell
Lawmakers swim in a constant flood of information—reports from think tanks, pitches from lobbyists, pleas from constituents, memos from agencies—you name it. It’s a tidal wave of policy talk, and it hits every single day. To keep from going under and still stay focused on what matters most to them, members of Congress have to become expert navigators, developing savvy strategies to cut through the noise and zero in on their priorities.
One key strategy is investing in information filtering through media sources. Instead of drowning in data, members often pay news outlets and media companies to help them filter, summarize, and contextualize the complex policy and political environment. These media expenditures are not insignificant; our research found that members of the U.S. House of Representatives spend tens of thousands of dollars annually on media subscriptions and reference materials.
But who spends the most? In our article, we explored how a member’s experience in Congress shapes their spending on information resources. Based on the data (see Figure 1), we assume a negative correlation between the institutional experience of members and their spending on information filtering through the media. Specifically, we hypothesized that freshman members of the House are more likely to rely on and invest more money in media resources. Lacking the deep institutional knowledge, established networks, and experienced staff of their senior colleagues, freshman members typically face a steeper learning curve in navigating the complex information environment.
Figure 1. Distribution of member spending on publications and reference material by seniority.
To test our hypothesis, we looked at the official record of expenditures (the Statement of Disbursements) for U.S. House members in 2019 and 2021. We identified members’ expenditures on publications and reference material which included subscriptions to national news outlets (like the New York Times), local papers, and pricey policy monitoring services (like Politico Pro or Bloomberg’s BGov) that track legislation and political developments in real-time (see breakdown of publications expenditures in Figure 2). We built regression models that examined the relationship between a member’s total expenditures on publications/reference material and whether or not they were in their first term, while controlling for other personal and institutional factors that may influence members’ spending patterns.
Figure 2. Publications expenditures by category and vendor.
Our analysis confirmed our hypothesis: being a freshman was the strongest predictor of higher spending on media resources. We found that first-term members of the House spent about 94% more on publications and reference material than their experienced colleagues in 2019, and 169% more in 2021. This translates to an average increase of $7,000 to $10,000 per year invested in information filtering (see Figure 3).
Figure 3. Predicted money spent on publications and reference materials.
When we tracked members who were freshmen in 2019 into their second term in 2021, we observed that, once reelected and having gained more experience and institutional knowledge, their spending on media resources dropped significantly (by an average of $10,513), as they seem less reliant on external tools and resources to filter information.
Our work highlights how crucial (and costly) information processing is to lawmaking in Congress, especially for freshman members. In a world where information is cheap but filtering is expensive, new members appear willing to pay a premium to make sense of it all.
Read the original article in Policy Studies Journal:
Craig, Alison and Annelise Russell. 2025. “Information is Cheap, but Filtering is Costly: Congressional Investment in Reference Resources.” Policy Studies Journal 53(1): 159–170. https://doi.org/10.1111/psj.12561.
About the Authors
Alison Craig is an assistant professor in the Department of Government at the University of Texas at Austin. Her research focuses on improving our understanding of the day-to-day functioning of the United States Congress, with an emphasis on the relationships between members and the challenges of policymaking in the modern legislature. Alison earned her Ph.D. from The Ohio State University and has a B.S. in political science from the University of Oregon. Prior to graduate school, she spent eleven years working for members of Congress on Capitol Hill and in her home state of Oregon. In that time she filled various roles, from communications to casework, with most of her work as a legislative assistant handling domestic policy issues and as a field representative working with local governments and opinion leaders.
Annelise Russell is an Associate Professor of Public Policy at the University of Kentucky. She is also a faculty associate of the U.S. Policy Agendas Project and a member of the Comparative Agendas Project. Her research focuses on questions about how policymakers communicate their agendas and the role of the media, particularly social media, in the political process. Her work centers around congressional decision-making and communication, including an active research agenda in the intersection of social media and political institutions. She received a Ph.D. in Government from the University of Texas at Austin, and she also holds bachelor’s degrees in political science and journalism from the University of Oklahoma.
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