This chapter outlines our book’s contributions to understanding how partisan incentives drive the information-seeking behavior of Congress and its committees. Moreover, it underscores the challenge legislators face in balancing their political roles with the need for expert insights. In this final chapter, we relate our arguments and findings to recent challenges Congress has faced in seeking information in its partisan environment. We propose new lines of research that build on our data and work in our book and emphasize the connections to long-standing issues in American democracy. Our book, empirical evidence, and accompanying analyses promote a new understanding of the dynamics underlying the acquisition and dissemination of information in Congress and, we hope, will stimulate further inquiry into the role of information in shaping public policy in a democracy.

Aristotle valued small associations more than today’s liberals: he considered villages, fraternal organizations and guilds to be civic friendships in their own right. He criticized utopian theories such as Plato’s Republic for quixotically attempting to destroy associations. In liberal democracies, associations formed to tackle causes reproduce some of the advantages of the small polis: in such associations, each member acts in view of his fellow citizens, and thus is influenced by the moral suasion of the group. Each perceives the influence he exercises, seeing the local impact of his power and taking ownership of incremental social change. Rethinking associations as civic friendships runs up against the problem of involuntary associations with their “solidarity and hostility.” Michael Walzer would correct liberalism’s deracinating tendencies by incentivizing us to remain in our involuntary identity groups. But his plan to channel government benefits through such groups would compromise the groups he means to help. To break the stranglehold of the bad associations—lobbies—to clear space for good associations, Congressional reforms are needed.