Majority Party, Standing Committees, and Evidence for Indirect Control

Abstract

The majority party leadership has different goals for different committees. As such, they tailor a variety of control mechanisms to match different committees. When a committee is considered “highly important” to the majority party leadership, the leadership employs an intra-party assignment strategy: assigning members who are ideologically similar to the party caucus (per conventional wisdom). This direct control mechanism consequently produces an unconditionally low level of committee bias. For “medium importance” committees, however, the majority party leadership employs an inter-party assignment strategy to exert indirect control: utilizing the presence of minority party members to constrain their own party delegations in a way that serves the party in general. As such, the bias of these committees inevitably depends on the ideological distribution of the minority party committee delegations. This ultimately suggests that the majority party leadership adopts multiple and flexible strategies to deal with committee assignments and committee activities in general.