Conference Committee Proposal Rights and Policy Outcomes in the States

Conference Committee Structure and Majority Party Bias in U.S. States

“…Increases in interparty heterogeneity widen differences between conference delegation and majority party medians, consistent with the notion that interchamber differences stimulate moderate behavior. When parties are farther apart, conference delegations must be sufficiently broad to forge compromise and attract a larger coalition within the chamber for approving the conference report (Ryan 2014). Conversely, rises in intraparty heterogeneity within the majority party corresponds to conference delegations more similar to the majority party.…”

“…My findings indicate that the presence of minority appointer rights in the chamber widens the difference between conference delegation and majority party medians, pushing the average conference delegation away from the majority party towards the chamber median. These results highlight how majority parties are limited when institutional designs favor the minority party (Ryan 2014).…”

“…Second, I account for the level of professionalism in the state legislature. There is likely a direct correlation between the professionalism of the legislature and the partisanship of legislators, whereby highly professionalized legislatures likely have legislators with stable partisan preferences (Battista and Richman 2011;Fiorina 1999;Ryan 2014). I capture each state's professionalism with the Squire Index (Squire 2017), which is a weighted combination of salary, days in session, and staff per legislator relative to members of Congress.…”

“…I overcome this static condition by switching the unit of analysis from the national legislature to state legislatures. Conference rules vary substantially on the sub-national level, yet few scholars have explored how differences in conference rules affect state-level legislatures (Emrich 2022a;Ryan 2014). Overall, scholars' understanding of conference committees in state legislatures is largely speculative, despite nearly every state using conference committees to resolve bicameral differences (Gross 1980).…”

“…Conference appointer rules differ across states and within state legislative chambers, providing important variation to investigate how majority leaderships may be limited by institutional features. In contrast to earlier work (Gross 1980;1983;Lauth 1990;Ryan 2014) that focuses on a few states or a single year, I use an original data set encompassing all state-level conference delegations from 2005 to 2016 across 41 states to analyze the degree to which conference delegations reflect systematic majority party bias. 4 I find that on average, conference delegations do not exhibit a pro-majority slant.…”