Self-Selection Reconsidered: House Committee Assignment Requests and Constituency Characteristics

Abstract

Distributive theory is perhaps the dominant paradigm for understanding committee organization and behavior in Congress. Central to distributive theory is the assertion that members will self-select to committees based on constituency related concerns; however, few studies have tested this assumption and those that have focus primarily on the behavior of House Democrats. We use committee request data from both Democratic and Republican members, combined with district-level census data, to determine whether committee requests are empirically related to district-level characteristics. Our findings suggest mixed support for the self-selection hypothesis. While there is some support for the self-selection hypothesis, members’ requests for committee assignments often are not related to district-level characteristics. In addition, we examine the degree to which the party committees-on-committees accommodate requests, finding that the degree of accommodation has been overestimated by previous studies.