Committee Assignments and the Cost of Party Loyalty

Abstract

This article empirically investigates the relationship between the value of a representative's committee seats and his or her loyalty in voting with party leaders in the immediate past. We further investigate whether the reelection costs of voting with party leaders-and against constituentsmatters, compared to the value of committee seats. We first construct proxies for loyalty in voting, the re-election costs of party loyalty, and the value of members' committee assignments. We then estimate both continuous and discrete dependent variable models, controlling for leadership and tenure. Our results are twofold. First, we find a strong and positive relationship between loyalty and value of committee assignments. Second, we find a weaker, though still positive relationship between our measure of the electoral costs of loyalty and value of committee assignments. These results imply that there is some degree of signaling and/or exchange between party leaders and the rank-and-file membership to allocate parliamentary rights. We discuss some implications of these findings for theories of legislative organization and the legislator shirking literature.