Book contents
- Frontmatter
- Contents
- THE AMERICAN CONGRESS READER
- PART I THE AMERICAN CONGRESS: MODERN TRENDS
- PART II REPRESENTATION AND LAWMAKING IN CONGRESS: THE CONSTITUTIONAL AND HISTORICAL CONTEXT
- PART III CONGRESSIONAL ELECTIONS AND POLICY ALIGNMENTS
- PART IV MEMBERS, GOALS, RESOURCES, AND STRATEGIES
- PART V PARTIES AND LEADERS
- PART VI THE STANDING COMMITTEES
- PART VII THE RULES OF THE LEGISLATIVE GAME
- PART VIII THE FLOOR AND VOTING
- PART IX CONGRESS AND THE PRESIDENT
- PART X CONGRESS AND THE COURTS
- PART XI CONGRESS, LOBBYISTS, AND INTEREST GROUPS
- PART XII CONGRESS AND BUDGET POLITICS
- PART XIII FURTHER READINGS ON CONGRESSIONAL POLITICS
- 40 Introduction to the Spatial Theory of Legislating
- 41 The Institutional Foundations of Committee Power
- References
42 - The Return to Equilibrium
Controlling Legislative Agendas, The
Published online by Cambridge University Press: 05 June 2012
- Frontmatter
- Contents
- THE AMERICAN CONGRESS READER
- PART I THE AMERICAN CONGRESS: MODERN TRENDS
- PART II REPRESENTATION AND LAWMAKING IN CONGRESS: THE CONSTITUTIONAL AND HISTORICAL CONTEXT
- PART III CONGRESSIONAL ELECTIONS AND POLICY ALIGNMENTS
- PART IV MEMBERS, GOALS, RESOURCES, AND STRATEGIES
- PART V PARTIES AND LEADERS
- PART VI THE STANDING COMMITTEES
- PART VII THE RULES OF THE LEGISLATIVE GAME
- PART VIII THE FLOOR AND VOTING
- PART IX CONGRESS AND THE PRESIDENT
- PART X CONGRESS AND THE COURTS
- PART XI CONGRESS, LOBBYISTS, AND INTEREST GROUPS
- PART XII CONGRESS AND BUDGET POLITICS
- PART XIII FURTHER READINGS ON CONGRESSIONAL POLITICS
- 40 Introduction to the Spatial Theory of Legislating
- 41 The Institutional Foundations of Committee Power
- References
Summary
Gaining a stable, predictable outcome in a legislature operating under majority rule is not guaranteed. Strom reviews the agenda-setting mechanisms and other processes that limit amendments and narrow the range of possible outcomes. Important features of Congress, particularly in the House of Representatives, limit the range of options considered and often bias outcomes. Among other things, Strom questions the conclusions of Shepsle and Weingast in the previous selection about the effectiveness of conference committees as a source of committee power.
The spatial theory of simple majority rule in a multidimensional issue space implies that the chaotic disequilibrium situations are a common occurrence. This creates an empirical puzzle because in most real-world decision-making situations, neither chaos nor disequilibrium is frequently observed. Although there may be some unperceived chaotic and disequilibrium situations, decision-making institutions like Congress do not usually appear to wander randomly through issue spaces, nor are decisions, once made, easily overturned. Experimental outcomes in largely unstructured cases also do not appear to be randomly scattered across the issue space. This lack of agreement between theory and practice has led to attempts to explain why there is so much stability in real-world decision processes. Short of assuming that all decisions are made in a unidimensional space in which Black's theorem produces an equilibrium at the median, three kinds of answers to this question are possible. (1) One singles out a set of decision makers and gives them special powers to manipulate the agenda of the legislative process.
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- Information
- The American Congress Reader , pp. 460 - 468Publisher: Cambridge University PressPrint publication year: 2008