Outlying Committees in the Statehouse: An Examination of the Prevalence of Committee Outliers in State Legislatures

Abstract

Informational and partisan theories of legislative organization predict that most committees will be representative of their parent chamber and most committee delegations representative of their parent caucus. Unfortunately, despite the universalistic claims of these theories, the preponderance of evidence comes from only one chamber of one legislature: the U. S. House of Representatives. If informational and partisan theories are generalizable beyond the Congress, outlying committees should be rare in state legislatures as well as in the House of Representatives. We use a variety of measures of member preferences (e.g., roll call measures, surveys, constituency characteristics) and simple difference of means tests to explore the generalizability of these theories by examining the prevalence of committee outliers in the lower houses of a sample of 12 states. Consistent with expectations, outlying committees are rare in the state legislatures we sample, especially among important control committees. This provides evidence that informational and partisan models of legislative organization are applicable beyond the U. S. Congress.Although students of the Congress have long acknowledged the importance of committees for processing legislative workloads, their precise institutional roles have been hotly debated. Traditionally, most scholars have viewed committees as integral cogs in a highly decentralized, highly distributive institution. Under this view, committees are not "mini-legislatures," but often preference outliers with predilections at odds with those of the full chamber. This traditional distributive view of committees has recently come under intense criticism from two related theoretical perspectives: informational and partisan models. Both of these argue that collective concerns-either of the floor or of the majority The authors are indebted to

Legislative Organization Theory and Committee Preference Outliers in State Senates

“…That is, how many committees (or party delegations on committees) are significantly different in their makeup than the parent chamber (or the party delegation in the parent chamber)? While this line of research has been plagued with numerous methodological conflicts, 3 emerging consensus is that committee outliers are the exception rather than the rule, a conclusion that undermines the distributive perspective (Krehbiel 1990(Krehbiel , 1991(Krehbiel , 1994Gilligan and Krehbiel 1990;Groseclose 1994;Maltzman 1995;Adler and Lapinski 1997;Overby and Kazee 2000;Overby, Kazee, and Prince 2004;Battista 2004). Indeed, recent studies have even shifted the focus from counting the relatively few existing committee outliers to accounting for the conditions under which outliers develop.…”

“…6 Consequently, Overby and Kazee (2000) turned to the state legislatures to expand the empirical basis of this line of study. Not only do the states provide more cases to study than Congress, but these cases also occur in a greater range of political, institutional, and cultural contexts.…”

“…with unbiased policy and political information (Krehbiel 1990(Krehbiel , 1991Gilligan and Krehbiel 1990) ? We extend these studies by providing additional evidence of the role of legislative committees in the states, using data from state senates rather than from the lower houses that have been studied in most previous work (Overby and Kazee 2000;Overby, Kazee, and Prince 2004;Battista 2004). 1 Because senates tend to be smaller than lower chambers and follow the lead of their lower chambers that originate much legislation, they may have less need for unbiased, representative committees to serve as information conduits (Rogers 1998).…”

Committee autonomy in parliamentary systems – coalition logic or congressional rationales?

“…A rich body of literature is available on the US Congress and US state legislatures (see, e.g. Hall & Grofman, 1990;Hamm, Hedlund, & Post, 2011;Krehbiel, 1993;Overby & Kazee, 2000;Shepsle & Weingast, 1981). Research on committee assignments outside the US initially focused primarily on the European Parliament (e.g.…”

Improving the Harvest of State Legislative Research

“…Given their importance in the policymaking process, it is particularly important to understand how state legislative committee decisions are made and whose preferences these decisions reflect. Overby and Kazee (2000) and Aldrich and Battista (2002) have begun to test these theories in the states, studying the extent to which state legislative committees are representative of their parent chambers. It would be valuable to pursue this line of research more fully, with a continued effort to understand the conditions across the states that encourage differences in committee formation and behavior.…”