Measuring the Effects of Information Preference in U.S. State Legislatures.

In order to understand the way in which individuals make decisions, we not only need to know characteristics about the individuals but also about the information that they value and receive. In the realm of legislative politics, the weight that representatives place on the value of information - from personal sources such as their own experience and legislative staff, collegial sources, and "expert" sources such as lobbyists, the media, and others - can often affect the ways in which legislators proceed with making decisions with regard to policy. While this area of study is important for scholars of politics interested in fully understanding the ways in which representatives make decisions regarding policy, the study of representatives' information valuation has gone largely unexplored by empirical study. In a similar vein, the power that information gathering has in the legislative arena versus the consideration of the peculiar political environment that legislators are espoused in has not garnered sufficient attention in academic literature. Utilizing the cross-sectional 2002 State Legislative Survey (Carey et al, 2002), which surveys individual state legislators about various factors related to their jobs including their perceived importance of different sources of information, this paper examines fluctuations in and support for varying types of information with regard to representatives' decision making. The results show that information is a highly important factor in the individual legislator's decision making process when compared to the political context in which legislator's make decisions. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]