Dan Thompson

In collaboration with Chloe Lim.

Countless social scientists have spent their careers theorizing about and empirically teasing out the returns members of Congress receive for their efforts at policy making. These returns come in the form of pet projects, campaign donations, and future income. But, these payments are partly a means to an end—they allow members to raise their profile at home. Does this work? Do members who serve in more important roles receive more media attention? Our project marries techniques from computational social science with traditional research designs for drawing causal inferences to answer this question directly.