We study whether, how and why U.S. Congress members engage in vote trading activities. By tracking roll calls votes within bills across five legislatures and politicians’ personal connections made during the school years, we first document a robust correlation between Congress persons’ propensity to conform to the voting behavior of his/her alumni connections. We then compare it to the propensity to conform to other relevant social networks (such as the party and the network of representatives from the same state); and we show it depends on the how salient the bill is to the congressperson’s legislative agenda. Finally, we study the extent to which vote trading contributes to the la congressperson’s e effectiveness and legislative career. To this goal we introduce a network representation of vote favors to account for direct and indirect that we call the Logrolling Graph. We show that logrolling is more bene ficial to congressperson’s
career than e ffectiveness.