From Celebrity To Politician:An Assessment Of Legislative Performance In The U.S. House Of Representatives

This paper focuses on a special group in the US House of Representatives,namely House members who were actors or athletes before coming to congress.They differ from traditional representatives in that they had no prior political experience in lower offices.However,they are capable of defeating politically seasoned rivals in congressional races mostly because of their wide name recognition.Since World War II,television and other mass media channels develop rapidly and election campaigns become more dominated by individual candidates than by political parties.Hence,numerous celebrities have leveraged their good looks and charms to attract voters and win a position in the US government.The rise of celebrity politicians has led to a heated debate on whether they are qualified for political office and competent to handle political issues.However,extant researches pay more attention to the celebrities' tactics to attract supporters and win elections.Scholarly researches on the celebrities' performance in political office are rather limited.This paper selected twelve celebrity House members in the post-World War ? era for a case study.Adopting the methods commonly used in the studies of the congressmen's legislative performance,this author evaluated the performance of celebrity representatives based on a series of objective measures,covering their seniority,legislative activism,legislative focus and ideology,and legislative consequence.To find patterns about their legislative performance,this study collected and analysed vast data.Findings show that actor-turned and athlete-turned House members overall performed worse than traditional representatives did,whether from the perspective of seniority or from that of legislative consequence.On the one hand,celebrity representative's length of service in congress was shorter,which reflects that they had lower seniority in committees,sat on less powerful committees and held less positional power.On the other hand,celebrity representatives showed lower legislative efficiency and accomplishments,and had fewer laws under their names,which reveals that they faced difficulty in translating their legislative agendas into law.Therefore,this research provides evidence that celebrities generally do not make successful lawmakers,although having achieved remarkable success in the entertainment industry.In addition,in terms of legislative activism,this paper finds that,contrary to expectations,celebrity representatives do not display a preference for high-publicity work,but rather they are actively involved in making legislations,which is a hard and challenge job.Although introducing fewer bills than their peers during their first term,celebrity representatives gradually introduce more bills than the average level of the whole chamber,as they accumulate more political experience.In the meantime,celebrity representatives keep a low profile by making limited speeches on the floor.In terms of legislative focus,they concentrate more on sports and entertainment issues and make a great accomplishment in this area.As for their ideology,celebrity representatives do not embrace more extreme ideology as expected.On the contrary,they generally take milder ideological positions.With the election of Donald Trump,actor-turned and athlete-turned politicians will probably play a bigger role in the political arena in the US.This paper is conducive to a better understanding of celebrity representatives,especially their political performance.Different from previous researches,this paper makes a great contribution by compiling a full list of amateur celebrity members of the US House of Representatives in the post-World War II era and by collecting vast quantitative data.Therefore,it is capable of offering a data-based and objective evaluation of celebrity representatives and giving a preliminary answer to the question of whether celebrities make good politicians.