House-Senate Conference Committees: A Comparative-State Perspective

Abstract

At the congressional level, the question, who wins in House-Senate conferences? has been answered. Almost all the evidence indicates that Senate conferees win more often than House conferees. This paper focuses on the question, Who wins in state legislative conference committees? I begin by briefly reviewing the explanations of why Senate conferees tend to win more often in congressional conference committees. Analyzing conference-committee behavior in ten state legislatures, I show that, as in the case of the United States Congress, conferees from the upper chambers of state legislatures tend to win more often than those from the lower chambers. Of the numerous explanations previously developed to explain this trend, that of Strom and Rundquist appears to conform best with the general tendencies within the states. Two partisanship variables, however, are shown to be related to specific inter-state variations from the general principles laid down by Strom and Rundquist's hypothesis.