scholarly journals An electoral calculus? Dual incentives and committee assignment in the UK’s mixed-member legislatures

2018 ◽  
Vol 29 (4) ◽  
pp. 507-529 ◽  
Author(s):  
Ed Gareth Poole
Keyword(s):  
Committee Assignment

scholarly journals Careerism, Committee Assignments, and the Electoral Connection

1996 ◽  
Vol 90 (1) ◽  
pp. 21-33 ◽  
Author(s):  
Jonathan N. Katz ◽  
Brian R. Sala
Keyword(s):  
Property Rights ◽  
Electoral System ◽  
Electoral Connection ◽  
Electoral Incentives ◽  
Before And After ◽  
Committee Assignment ◽  
Committee Assignments

Most scholars agree that members of Congress are strongly motivated by their desire for reelection. This assumption implies that members of Congress adopt institutions, rules, and norms of behavior in part to serve their electoral interests. Direct tests of the electoral connection are rare, however, because significant, exogenous changes in the electoral environment are difficult to identify. We develop and test an electoral rationale for the norm of committee assignment “property rights.” We examine committee tenure patterns before and after a major, exogenous change in the electoral system—the states' rapid adoption of Australian ballot laws in the early 1890s. The ballot changes, we argue, induced new “personal vote” electoral incentives, which contributed to the adoption of “modern” congressional institutions such as property rights to committee assignments. We demonstrate a marked increase in assignment stability after 1892, by which time a majority of states had put the new ballot laws into force, and earlier than previous studies have suggested.

The Organizing of the European Parliament: Committees, Specialization and Co-ordination

1995 ◽  
Vol 25 (2) ◽  
pp. 219-243 ◽  
Author(s):  
Shaun Bowler ◽  
David M. Farrell
Keyword(s):  
European Parliament ◽  
Committee Assignment ◽  
Controlling Behaviour

This article addresses the issue of specialization and committee formation in the European Parliament in the light of the largely US-centred debates on these issues. Clear evidence is found of specialization of behaviour, both with regard to committee assignment and the use of parliamentary questions. This is also accompanied by a trend towards a greater role for the party groups in co-ordinating and controlling behaviour across these specializations.

The Committee Assignment Process and the Conditional Nature of Committee Bias

1990 ◽  
Vol 84 (4) ◽  
pp. 1149-1166 ◽  
Author(s):  
Richard L. Hall ◽  
Bernard Grofman
Keyword(s):  
Work Groups ◽  
A Priori ◽  
Distributive Politics ◽  
Roll Call ◽  
Legislative Organization ◽  
Substantial Body ◽  
Theoretical Literature ◽  
Congressional Committees ◽  
Committee Assignment ◽  
Legislative Structure

The view that congressional committees tend to be biased subsets of their parent chambers provides the foundations for a substantial body of theoretical literature on distributive politics and legislative structure. More recent revisionist work suggests that committees composed of preference outliers are in fact rare. We reject the categorical account of preference outliers a priori and elaborate conditions under which committees should be unrepresentative of their parent chambers. We argue that the most widely available and frequently used data—floor roll call votes—are inappropriate to the task of assessing outlier predictions in any form. Finally, we conduct a differentiated set of hypothesis tests within one policy jurisdiction to illustrate the characteristics of evidence and analysis necessary to evaluate alternative theoretical accounts of legislative organization. The appearance of policy-relevant biases in congressional work groups, we conclude, is not so much rare as it is conditional, and we suggest several conditions on which future models of legislative organization should build.

scholarly journals Do Better Committee Assignments Meaningfully Benefit Legislators? Evidence from a Randomized Experiment in the Arkansas State Legislature

2015 ◽  
Vol 2 (2) ◽  
pp. 152-163 ◽  
Author(s):  
David E. Broockman ◽  
Daniel M. Butler
Keyword(s):  
Natural Experiment ◽  
State Legislature ◽  
Legislative Politics ◽  
Randomized Experiment ◽  
Legislative Organization ◽  
Party Discipline ◽  
Committee Assignment ◽  
Committee Assignments ◽  
Existing Data

AbstractA large literature argues that the committee assignment process plays an important role in shaping legislative politics because some committees provide legislators with substantial benefits. However, evaluating the degree to which legislators benefit from winning their preferred assignments has been challenging with existing data. This paper sheds light on the benefits legislators accrue from winning their preferred committee assignments by exploiting rules in Arkansas’ state legislature, where legislators select their own committee assignments in a randomized order. The natural experiment indicates that legislators reap at most limited rewards from winning their preferred assignments. These results potentially raise questions about the robustness of widely held assumptions in literatures on party discipline and legislative organization.

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