Retesting Committee Composition Hypotheses for the U.S. Congress

Abstract

This study replicates and extends Groseclose's (1994) tests of Congressional committee composition hypotheses for the 99th Congress. Alternative hypotheses pit partisan explanations of committee organization against the informational roles committees can play in producing “good” public policy. Other hypotheses explore the likelihood that committees reflect (rather than diverge from) floor preferences. Predictably, empirical tests of such hypotheses have produced no scholarly consensus. Groseclose (1994) enters the debate by using Monte Carlo simulations to test alternative hypotheses of Congressional committee organization, and in so doing, he makes few assumptions (and specifically avoids problematic ones) about the ideological distribution of committee and floor members. For example, difference of means tests, often used to evaluate the significance of floorcommittee divergence, assume that preferences are distributed normally and that the mean scores of a committee and floor are the correct test statistics. Groseclose asserts that the normality assumption is less convincing for small committees and that the median score is more appropriate.