Committee Jurisdictions Research Articles

Advocacy versus Certainty: The Dynamics of Committee Jurisdiction Concentration

I present an aggregate-level theory paralleling the theory of market competition to explain the dynamics of committee jurisdiction concentration. The theory states that organized issue constituents and the larger voting public, respectively, make private (i.e., advocacy) and collective (i.e., certainty) demands for policy benefits supplied by committees. I hypothesize that the levels of these competing demands drive two activities changing committee jurisdiction concentrations: "nonlegislative" and "legislative" jurisdiction advances. To test my hypotheses, I use nonlegislative committee hearings and bill referrals over a 15-year period (1979-93) to construct annual, issue-specific. Herfindahl indexes measuring nonlegislative and legislative jurisdiction concentrations. I use PAC contributions and issue salience to measure private and collective demands for policy benefits. Using two OLS regression models, I find that both types of demand influence the two jurisdiction advancement activities. Moreover, nonlegislative jurisdiction advances produce a nonconcentrated jurisdictional arrangement, while legislative jurisdiction advances produce a concentrated jurisdictional arrangement.

An in-depth look at congressional committee jurisdictions surrounding health issues.

Congress plays an important role in shaping U.S. health care policy, and within Congress, committees play the lead policy-making role. To determine the range and extent of committee involvement on health issues, I examine nine health issue categories over a fifteen-year period (1979-1993) to discover how both "legislative" and "nonlegislative" committee jurisdictions differ across three dimensions: congressional chambers, committees within those chambers, and specific health issue categories. Then, to capture differences across a fourth dimension, time, I also calculate annual measures of jurisdiction "concentration" for legislative and nonlegislative jurisdictions. Together, the jurisdiction differences across the four dimensions provide a comprehensive view of congressional committee jurisdiction arrangements surrounding health issues. I find that the differences in jurisdiction across each dimension follow general patterns resulting from institution-specific factors (e.g., rules, norms) and from issue-specific factors (e.g., salience, complexity). Recognizing these dimensions and their respective patterns helps us understand the power that committees exercise over health issues.

Controlling the Floor: Parties as Procedural Coalitions in the House

Theory: Partisan control of House organization is contested by ideological cross-party coalitions that vary in strength with the size of the majority party and its homogeneity, as well as the nature of the issues under consideration. Hypotheses: Key House rules are responsive to changes in the balance of power on the floor, even in the face of majority party opposition. Majority party defectors on votes on key rules are unlikely to be sanctioned unless the party has a strong majority and is relatively unified. Methods: An analysis of rules changes since 1919 pertaining to the discharge process, Rules Committee, and committee jurisdictions, and of the conditions under which majority party members are sanctioned for disloyal behavior. Results: The development since the mid-1970s of majority party control over House rules is a substantial departure from prior experience, and appears to be a precarious state of affairs.

Party Government in the House Reconsidered: A Response to Cox and McCubbins

In their response to our essay, Gary Cox and Mathew McCubbins offer a helpful elaboration on the implications of their partisan model of House institutions. We particularly appreciate their effort to detail the relationship between changing party homogeneity and House rules changes. We nonetheless believe that our findings raise serious questions for Cox and McCubbins' party cartel model, and cast considerable doubt on the notion that the 1920s70s period is aptly characterized as an era of party government. In our rejoinder, we first consider this general issue of whether House institutions are designed to suit majority party interests. We then respond to several specific criticisms made by Cox and McCubbins of our analysis and evidence. Our analysis of House rules changes discloses two central features of institutional development in the 1920s-70s that undermine claims of party government: first, major features of House institutions, such as rules concerning committee jurisdictions, were shaped far more by cross-party and universalistic coalitions than by party-based coalitions; and second, House rules respond more to changes in the ideological balance of forces on the floor (i.e., the relative numbers of liberals and conservatives) than to changes in the preferences of a majority of majority party members. One major claim made by Cox and McCubbins in Legislative Leviathan, and developed in considerable detail in their 1994 Legislative Studies Quarterly essay, is that the majority party usurps the rule-making power of the House and stabilizes House institutions by imposing firm discipline on its members when it comes to votes on important House rules (1993, 2, 278, 1994, 215-23). Cox and McCubbins (1994, 218) assert that the majority party binds its members to support caucus decisions in the House on a variety of key structural matters. They argue that as a result, major rules changes opposed by a majority of majority party members will not take place (1994, 223). Yet we discuss several rules changes that were opposed by a majority of majority party members. In each case, dissidents from the majority party united with minority party members to make the changes.' How does one interpret these changes? Cox and McCubbins' party cartel model, which

Electoral and Financial Effects of Changes in Committee Power: The Gramm‐Rudman‐Hollings Budget Reform, the Tax Reform Act of 1986, and the Money Committees in the House

Most rational choice theories of legislatures locate the source of committee power in the restrictive procedural rules that enforce committee jurisdictions. However, there is no empirical support for this claim; further, there is little evidence for the natural implication that membership on more powerful committees confers electoral benefits. I address these puzzles by exploiting the occurrence of major budget and tax reforms in the mid‐eighties; these reforms provide a natural experiment for measuring the electoral and financial consequences of changes in committee power. I show that the procedural rule changes, instituted by the Gramm‐Rudman‐Hollings budget reform, caused an increase in campaign contributions to members of the Budget Committee and led to a reduction in the vote share of members of the Appropriations Committee. This heretofore unrecognized effect, of the Gramm‐Rudman‐Hollings budget reform on the welfare of members of the House, rivals that of a more widely recognized “policy shock,” th...

Intensive Care: How Congress Shapes Health Policy, Edited by Norman J. Ornstein and Thomas E. Mann

The devastating and politically consequential defeat of President Clinton's comprehensive health plan in Congress has unleashed a torrent of speculation over who or what killed reform. One class of explanation deals with the institutional arrangements by which policy is made in the United States and, more specifically, with the rules and organization of Congress. This volume weighs the importance of Congress in the failure to enact health reform by examining more broadly how Congress shapes health policy--on matters ranging from ambitious plans to achieve universal health insurance coverage to annual appropriations for public health agencies. Part One examines how Congress has organized and equipped itself to make health policy. Individual chapters consider how committee jurisdictions, budgeting procedures, information, and oversight influence health policymaking. Part Two uses recent health policy episodes--the 1988-89 adoption and repeal of Medicare catastrophic coverage and the 1993-94 failure to pass national health reform--to generalize about how process shapes policy. This book is a product of the Renewing Congress Project, a joint undertaking of the Brookings Institution and the American Enterprise Institute. The contributors include C. Lawrence Evans, College of William and Mary; Mark Nadel, General Accounting Office; Julie Rovner, freelance health policy writer; and Allen Schick and Joseph White, Brookings. Copublished with the American Enterprise Institute

Senate Committees and Turf: Do Jurisdictions Matter?

Committee membership is valuable to members of Congress for many reasons, not the least of which is the ability to exercise disproportionate influence over policies falling within the committee's jurisdiction. Yet at times these jurisdictions are violated. Given that a member values distinct committee jurisdictions, will he or she be more likely to oppose a bill brought to a vote by a violation of jurisdictional norms? In this article, I un dertake an investigation of the politics surrounding the Senate's extension of Daylight-Saving Time in order to shed light on this question. The empirical analysis shows that while members of the committee that lost jurisdiction are affected by the jurisdictional violation, other members are not.

Looking for a smoking gun: Committee jurisdictions and congressional voting decisions

The nature of jurisdictional boundaries of committees in the House of Representatives has received little scholarly attention. Recently, however, LaRue and Rothenberg (1992) focused specifically on this topic and concluded that for some legislators — namely, those involved in a jurisdictional dispute — jurisdictional issues were an important influence, above and beyond policy preferences, in determining votes. I expand on their analysis in an attempt to discover whether members who are not involved in such a dispute also seek to protect jurisdictional property rights. I find that these non-involved members werenot affected by the jurisdictional considerations.

Gulf troop exposure to chemical arms charged

U.S. troops were exposed to harmful levels of chemical and, possibly, biological warfare agents during the Persian War, and such exposures may have contributed to some of the Gulf War syndrome problems now reported by thousands of veterans, contends a Senate committee report released last week. But muddling an already confused picture, military and intelligence agencies continue to insist they have no physical or intelligence information to support Iraqi use of these weapons during the war. In releasing the report at a hearing before the banking committee, which he chairs, Sen. Donald W. Riegle Jr. (D.Mich.) noted that the weapons allegedly deployed by Iraq may have been produced from dual-use chemicals and technology, and from biological materials sold by U.S. firms under legal Commerce Department export licenses. However, biological weapons were never detected during the war, and the only confirmed detection of chemical agents was by Czech troops. Riegle is using his committee's jurisdiction ...

Committees in the U.S. Congress, 1947-1992: v.1: Committee jurisdictions and member rosters

Committees in the U.S. Congress, 1947-1992: v.1: Committee jurisdictions and member rosters

The Nature of Congressional Committee Jurisdictions

Jurisdictions are the defining characteristics of committee systems, and they are central in any discussions about the U. S. Congress; yet we know little about them. Where do committee property rights come from? Are they rigid? Are they flexible? I introduce a distinction between statutory jurisdictions (which are written in the House and Senate Rules) and common law jurisdictions (which emerge through bill referral precedents). Turf is gained through common law advances, not through formal rules changes (like the “reforms” passed by the House in 1946, 1974, and 1980). Jurisdictional change is ongoing and incremental. The analysis draws on an examination of hearings held by the House Commerce Committee from 1947 through 1990.

Individual Incentives and Institutional Imperatives: Committee Jurisdiction and Long-Term Health Care

This paper focuses on the degree to which a legislator's institutional position accounts for his or her willingness to punish violations of norms. The case comes from the 100th Congress, where Rep. Claude Pepper proposed a rule that would have forced consideration of a long-term health care bill without first going through the committees of jurisdiction and without following normal discharge procedures. Empirical analysis of the floor vote on the rule suggests that members were not guided in their vote by the fact that procedural norms had been violated but rather voted based on personal preferences. In particular, the analysis demonstrates that those members expected to be most likely to punish the violation did not do so.

A simple test of the thesis that committee jurisdictions shape corporate PAC contributions

The results presented in the previous section tend to confirm the hypothesis that committee assignments shape the pattern of corporate PAC contributions. This note corroborates existing research on corporate PACs at a significantly lower level of aggregation than the samples on which existing research has been conducted. Further, because a nonparametric test was used (rather than the more standard regressional analysis), these results should increase our confidence that the essential institutions of government affect, and engender responses by, economic agents.

Federal Spending and the Selection of Committee Assignments in the U.S. House of Representatives

It has long been assumed that, as a general rule, powerful members of Congress are able to distort federal spending patterns to the benefit of their own constituencies. As evidence of this belief, several studies have revealed correlations between the committee jurisdictions of representatives and the types and amounts of federal outlays spent in their districts. More recent analyses, however, have revealed that committee assignments are not the causal factors in this relationship. In this paper I attempt to reconcile these seemingly contradictory results by reversing the causal direction in the relationship. I propose that, to some extent, the geographic distribution of federal spending mandates the committee assignments of U.S. representatives. This iecruitmerzt hiypothesis explains the correlation between the two variables as well as scholars' inability to discover causation in the previously assumed direction. Data for the 92nd, 93rd, and 94th Congresses are analyzed and lend validity to the hypothesis.

Campaign Expenditures and Political Competition

THE theory of public choice emphasizes the role of economic assumptions in the mechanisms which generate political choices.1 In a recent contribution to this literature, Stigler has suggested that the "all-or-nothing" characterization of political competition is both unappealing and unrealistic. He is sympathetic to a basic similarity between political and economic competition, where, like the latter, the products of a political process (public policy) can be construed as ranging continuously from failure to success.2 Stigler notes that there has been a tendency to label (incorrectly) the winning of 51 per cent of legislative seats a victory and 49 per cent a defeat and argues that the success of a political party is "more or less," not all-or-none. Thus, the importance of a continuous characterization of political outcomes is that it reduces the apparent fundamental differences which have exacerbated the extent of the analogy between economic and political competition.3

Committees from the Leadership Perspective

Party leaders and committee leaders in the United States Congress, while sometimes adversaries, are more often collaborators in the legislative process. Much congressional research has centered upon committee structure and operations; another extensive focus of study has been party leadership. Unfortunately, we have only a rudimentary knowledge about the range of possible relationships between party leaders and committee leaders. This paper explores several alternative, if not supplementary, mechanisms for strengthening the party leadership and committee structure in the House of Representatives. First, it outlines some developments taking place in the House Democratic Caucus during the opening months of the 93rd Congress—1973 to 1974. Second, the paper speculates on the implications of creating two new supracommittees—a Committee on the Budget and a Committee on the Agenda—adding the party leadership and bringing about a wholesale consolidation of the remaining House committees. Neither House nor Senate committee structure and jurisdiction can be analyzed in a vacuum: what affects committee powers will obviously have an effect on party leadership. It does not follow, however, that relationships between party leaders and committee leaders are a zero sum game in which the gains of one are necessarily the losses of the other. On the contrary, it may be possible to strengthen party leadership, to enhance the organization and the effectiveness of the committees and, ultimately, to increase the overall powers of the Congress.

House-Senate Relationships: Comity and Conflict

Although equal in power, the national House and Senate differ in more ways than they are similar. They differ in size, rules and procedures, policy biases, customs and traditions, terms of office, constitutional responsibilities, constituencies and in numerous other ways. Moreover, each chamber is jealous of its powers and prerogatives and generally suspicious of the other body. Despite their differences, the two houses must still work together if policy recommendations are to be enacted into law. Two principal legislative devices serve to join senators and representatives together on matters of common concern: conference committees and joint committees. In this analysis, two important aspects of conference procedure are explored: the conferee selection process and the question of who wins in conference, the House or the Senate. Joint committees, although used since the First Congress, are viewed negatively by many members. Given both the variety and uses of joint committees, it is worth identifying some of the factors which facilitate their creation. Finally, two principal suggestions are offered to better facilitate interhouse cooperation—more contact between respective party leaders of each house and the development of parallel committee jurisdictions. Of course, the goal of interhouse cooperation needs to be balanced against the requirement that each house present and defend different and conflicting points of view on the issues of the day.

Congressional Handling of Water Resources

In the 89th Congress, 1289 legislative measures, more than 5% of the total number introduced, were concerned with water resources. The United States Congress, patterned on experience in Great Britain, embodies the theory of the separation of powers expressed in the United States Constitution. To handle the heavy legislative work load, proposed legislation is considered first in committee before debate on the floor. The committees thus have great power in shaping the nature of legislation. Under the present committee structure many factors other than water resources have been given predominance. As a result, under the rules of the Senate and House of Representatives governing referral of bills, water resources measures were referred to 11 committees in the Senate and 13 committees in the House of Representatives. Although there are some instances where inconsistent policies have evolved in water resources programs because the legislation emanated from different committees, there are others where committees have cut across jurisdictional lines to propose legislation that provides uniform policies applicable to all Federal programs. The authors do not suggest a more rational basis for assigning committee jurisdiction over water resources matters.