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Congress when deciding whether or not to grant requests for face-to-face meetings with
individuals representing corporate interests. Even when controlling for a prior history of
campaign contributions, constituency was the strongest factor associated with gaining
access to members of Congress. In order to determine the nature of any variations in
access decisions, I replicate their experiment using as subjects, college students and
nonstudent, administrative professionals who do not have any congressional
experience. This sample selection enables an assessment of variation in decision-
making between student- and nonstudent subjects, as well as a comparison of decision-
making between congressional (Chin, Bond and Geva 2000) and non-congressional
subjects. In addition, I assess the effect of role experience on decision making by
exposing some of the student subjects to a semester-long legislative simulation in which
they assumed the roles of actual members of Congress.
I find that there is no difference in the behavior of students and nonstudents as
subjects in the experiment; furthermore, their behavior is similar to that of the
congressional subjects reported in Chin, Bond and Geva (2000). Yet, students who
gained role experience through participation in the legislative simulation also became
more sensitive to the PAC decision cue, a finding that contrasts sharply with that of the
congressional subjects.
Literature Review
According to Kinder and Palfrey (1993, 1), “Experimentation should be part of the
political scientist's everyday empirical repertoire.” Many political science experiments
address questions of voting behavior, such as media effects on opinion and voting
behavior (see Ansolabehere, et. al 1994; Ansolabehere and Iyengar 1994; Behr and
Convention