Congressional Policy Making: A Test of a Theory

Abstract

I N GROUPS CHARGED with making collective decisions, two basic processes operate: each individual member must make a decision and these decisions must be aggregated by some process or mechanism to yield a collective decision. Clearly both the means of aggregation (i.e., the decision rule) and individual decisions can affect the specific collective decision made. In turn this makes it necessary in explaining the making of particular collective decisions that we account for why sets of individual decisions were made as well as showing how these decisions were aggregated. This can be a difficult task when the group is small, where the decision rule is simple and straightforward, and where interpersonal authority relationships do not exist. But for large groups with complex decision rules and interpersonal authority relationships, many extremely complex problems exist in trying to explain the making of particular collective decisions. This is all the more serious in that many of the collective decisions and organizations of interest to political scientists are of the latter type. The U. S. Congress is one such organization. Its relatively large size and complex internal decision making process make the task