2021 Theses Bachelor's

Congressional Roommates: How Living Together Impacts Legislative Collaboration

Siegal, Alex Victor

In the recent past, several groups of members of Congress have chosen to live together as roommates in shared part-time homes. In this undergraduate honors thesis, I investigate whether these residential relationships have an impact on the lawmakers’ rates of collaboration with one another. Theoretically, roommates will collaborate with one another more because of greater proximity, mutual self-interest, and altruism. This paper tracks two case studies qualitatively and quantitatively, using news coverage, research interviews with former members of Congress, probit regression analysis, and a difference-in-differences quasi-experiment to find significant support for a substantial “roommate effect” independent of a range of controls including ideology and party.