Partisanship and Seniority in Legislative Committee Assignments: California After Reapportionment

Abstract

in the organization of any legislative session. Assignment patterns which result in particular committee compositions can determine legislative policy outputs and may protect or frustrate the demands of outside interests. They can also have an internal effect on the legislature by enhancing leadership control and providing a means for allocating rewards and punishments to individual legislators. The two major types of assignment criteria, as practiced by American legislatures, are partisanship and seniority. Both houses of Congress rely on a combination of these two methods.' Political party lines are consistently followed in that all standing committee chairmen, and a majority of the members of each committee, represent the house-wide majority party in that session. At the same time, relative seniority on a congressional committee automatically determines which majority party member obtains the chairmanship, and also provides a means of ranking all other members of the committee within the two party groups. Partisanship and seniority separately or in combination appear also to be the principal factors in the committee assignment decisions of most state legislative chambers, although they are used less consistently than in Congress.2 This paper compares the committee assignment criteria of partisanship and seniority as to their effect on leadership control and stability in a legislature. We assume that both standards permit legislative leaders to use committee assignments as member rewards and punishments, but that they differ in the extent of flexibility afforded the leaders. Specifically, we hypothesize the following: