Prescriptive Committee Seats in Congress

Abstract

This research updates earlier work done on the phenomenon of prescriptive committee seats in the U.S. House of Representatives, and extends the investigation to the control of committee seats by state delegations in the U.S. Senate. The theoretical underpinning of the phenomenon also is updated to reflect the literature on congressional informal groups that has grown up since the phenomenon of state party delegation prescriptive committee seats first was identified. Here the incidence of the phenomenon is found to be strong and broadly similar in both houses during the period 1947-1988, although important interchamber differences were found to emerge along several dimensions.