The Informational Theory of Legislative Committees: An Experimental Analysis

Abstract

We experimentally investigate the informational theory of legislative committees (Gilligan and Krehbiel 1989). Two committee members provide policy-relevant information to a legislature under alternative legislative rules. Under the open rule, the legislature is free to make any decision; under the closed rule, the legislature chooses between a member’s proposal and a status quo. We find that even in the presence of biases, the committee members improve the legislature’s decision by providing useful information. We obtain evidence for two additional predictions: the outlier principle, according to which more extreme biases reduce the extent of information transmission; and the distributional principle, according to which the open rule is more distributionally efficient than the closed rule. When biases are less extreme, we find that the distributional principle dominates the restrictive-rule principle, according to which the closed rule is more informationally efficient. Overall, our findings provide experimental support for Gilligan and Krehbiel’s informational theory.

An Evaluation of Effectiveness of Oversight Committees: A Case of City of Johannesburg, Section 79 Committees

“…"Based on the theory, if policy outcomes are highly uncertain, such as in periods of rapid social and economic change, committees tend to be granted much power to gather information" (Wang, 2013). Lawmakers are unaware of important variables that have an impact on policy outcomes and legislative committees can assist by providing data or information on the variables (Battaglini et al, 2016). "The greater are the different views between the committee preferences the less information the committee will be able to deliver successfully" (Groseclose and King, 2000).…”

Social Groups and the Effectiveness of Protests

“…The theoretical framework presented here is inspired by Battaglini [2016], but, contrary to this work, it is designed to be implementable in an experiment with a …nite number of players. 8 From an empirical point of view, information aggregation with protests has not been extensively studied because it is di¢ cult to conclusively establish a causal e¤ect of the size of public activism on politician beliefs and policy choices with …eld data. Laboratory experiments allow us to control for otherwise unobserved private signals: this is the reason why we have chosen this tool to test the predictions of our model.…”

“…In addition to the works cited above, our paper is related to two other strands of 7 8 In Battaglini [2016] it is assumed that the number of voters is a realization from a Poisson distribution with mean n. This implies that the number of players is with positive probability arbitrarily large independently from its expected value. In the model presented below we assume there are n + 1 players, where n is a …nite number.…”

“…The representations of the strategies in (4) and (8) allow to characterize an equilibrium in terms of two real numbers and simple cut-o¤ strategies:…”

“…The following lemma is useful to complete the argument: Proof. Let be the threshold associated to according to (8). Assume …rst 1.…”