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Retesting Committee Composition Hypotheses for the U.S. Congress

Published online by Cambridge University Press:  04 January 2017

Rodolfo Espino  and
Michael M. Franz
Rodolfo Espino
Affiliation:
Department of Political Science, Texas A&M University, College Station, TX 77843. e-mail: espino@polisci.tamu.edu
Michael M. Franz
Affiliation:
Department of Political Science, University of Wisconsin-Madison, Madison, WI 53706. e-mail: mmfranz@polisci.wisc.edu
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Extract

This study replicates and extends Groseclose's (1994) tests of Congressional committee composition hypotheses for the 99th Congress. Alternative hypotheses pit partisan explanations of committee organization against the informational roles committees can play in producing “good” public policy. Other hypotheses explore the likelihood that committees reflect (rather than diverge from) floor preferences. Predictably, empirical tests of such hypotheses have produced no scholarly consensus. Groseclose (1994) enters the debate by using Monte Carlo simulations to test alternative hypotheses of Congressional committee organization, and in so doing, he makes few assumptions (and specifically avoids problematic ones) about the ideological distribution of committee and floor members. For example, difference of means tests, often used to evaluate the significance of floorcommittee divergence, assume that preferences are distributed normally and that the mean scores of a committee and floor are the correct test statistics. Groseclose asserts that the normality assumption is less convincing for small committees and that the median score is more appropriate.

Type
Replications and Extensions
Information
Political Analysis , Volume 12 , Issue 2 , Spring 2004 , pp. 196 - 198
Copyright
Copyright © Society for Political Methodology 2004 

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References

Cox, Gary W., and McCubbins, Matthew D. 1993. Legislative Leviathan: Party Government in the House. Berkeley: University of California Press.Google Scholar
Gilligan, Thomas, and Krehbiel, Keith. 1987. “Collective Decision-Making and Standing Committees: An Informational Rationale for Restrictive Amendment Procedures.” Journal of Law, Economics, and Organization 3: 287–335.Google Scholar
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Groseclose, Tim. 1994. “Testing Committee Composition Hypotheses for the U.S. Congress.” Journal of Politics 56: 440–458.CrossRefGoogle Scholar
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