Abstract
Westefield (1974) asserts that powerful congressional leaders expand the number of committee seats to create sources of leverage with rank-and-file members. We challenge his interpretation and provide a more rigorous test of his theory. A committee-specific examination of committee-size decisions corroborates Shepsle's (1978) findings. However, a speaker-by-speaker analysis confirms our expectation that Shepsle's findings obscure significant differences between recent House speakers. We argue that committee-size decisions of majority party leaders are shaped more by the changing political conditions they face than by their efforts to gain compliance from rank-and-file members.
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