Representation and the Legislative Enterprise: An Expanded View of Staff Representation

Overview

This article analyzes over 180,000 staff contracts from the U.S. House of Representatives (2005–2019) to reassess long-standing assumptions about how legislators’ race, gender, and partisanship influence the demographic composition of their staff. Using an AI-assisted classification approach, we systematically identify whether each staff member works in the DC or district office, and whether they serve in senior or non-senior positions. This expanded measurement strategy allows us to evaluate staff representation across multiple tiers of the legislative enterprise and uncover how legislators’ hiring patterns vary by organizational level.

AI-Assisted Job Classification

Congressional job titles are extremely inconsistent (e.g., “Counsel,” “Leg. Correspondent,” “District Aide–Veterans”). To create comparable staff categories, we develop an AI-assisted classification system that:

• Trains GPT models using CRS guidance and McCrain (2021)
• Hand-codes an initial training set of 400 titles
• Conducts two human-coded validation rounds (200 titles each)
• Achieves high accuracy:
  • Senior vs. non-senior: 93% / 89.5%
  • DC vs. district: 84.5% / 88.5%

This method provides a transparent, replicable, and scalable approach to staff classification.

Key Findings

1. Gender-based representation is limited and asymmetric

• Female legislators hire more women overall,
• but not more women in senior roles, where decision-making power is concentrated.
• Partisanship matters: Democrats hire significantly more women than Republicans.

2. Race-based representation is stronger and more consistent

• Nonwhite legislators hire substantially more staff of color across senior, DC, and district positions.
• Race-based linkage is stronger than gender-based linkage.

3. Electoral pressures constrain representation

• In competitive districts, nonwhite legislators hire fewer nonwhite staff—suggesting electoral incentives can suppress active representation.

4. Party identity is a powerful force

• Democrats, regardless of race or gender, hire more diverse staff.
• Among Republicans, demographic identity plays a much larger role.