Preference Outliers Research Articles

Europe as a global regulator? The limits of EU influence in international food safety standards

ABSTRACTThe European Union (EU) is often depicted as global regulatory power. This contribution contends that this depiction, while not unfounded, is misleading. It aims to clarify under what conditions the EU converts its regulatory capability into influence. Specifically, it seeks to resolve the puzzle of the EU's poor performance in the setting of global food safety standards within the Codex Alimentarius Commission. The argument is deceptively simple. The EU's limited influence is due to it being a preference outlier. In a context where standards can be agreed by voting, the stringency of the EU's regulations, rather than being a source of influence, is a liability. This extreme case demonstrates that the EU's ability to exercise international influence is affected by the constellation of preferences and the distribution of power. This contribution, therefore, contributes to the emerging literature that contends that the EU's international effectiveness can be understood only with explicit reference to the international context within which it is operating.

Standing Committee Assignments in the German Bundestag – Who Gets What in Within-Party Negotiations?

Standing committees play a vital role in the policy-making process of modern parliaments. This study investigates the assignment criteria of standing committee members in the 17th Bundestag by applying congressional theories of legislative organisation to the German case. The statistical analysis shows that MPs often join the same committees that they have been members of in prior legislative periods. While prior occupation/education and affiliation to interest groups only partially explain the distribution, interviews with whips and secretaries in Berlin show that regional factions and the political reputation of the MP play a major role in the assignment process. Parties monitor carefully whether committees are staffed with preference outliers during the assignment process while partisan considerations are hardly evident. This is strong evidence for the claim of informational theory of legislative organisation which highlights the information-processing character of committees.

Due North? Do American Theories of Legislative Committees Apply to Canada?

Several theories of legislative organisation have been proposed to explain committee selection in American legislatures, but do these theories travel outside the United States? This paper tests whether these theories apply to data from the Canadian House of Commons. It was found that the distributive and partisan models of legislative organisation explain committee composition in Canada. In many cases, committees in the House of Commons are made up of preference outliers. As predicted by partisan models, it was also found that the governing party stacks committees with its members, but this is conditional upon the strength of the governing party.

The Industrial Organization of International Bureaucracies: National Chiefdoms within International Organizations

This paper presents a transaction cost-based theory of informal spheres of national influence. It is based on the assumption that sometimes diversity of interests among states, instead of impeding control, creates gains from exchange in terms of controlling different aspects of the international organization’s output. Drawing on distributive models of Congress, which show that rather than trading votes in an explicit market, legislators exchange property rights over their most preferred policy jurisdictions, it is argued that states sustain complex political exchanges by granting one another agenda control over their most preferred subdivisions within the international organization. As a result, these organizations exhibit informal spheres of national influence. The theory has two implications that the paper evaluates. First, member states grant one another agenda control over their most preferred subdivisions. Therefore, we would expect national chiefdoms to be controlled by preference outliers with strong interests in the subdivision’s policy. Second, since the existence of multiple dimensions and issues is a precondition for states to reap gains from political exchange, single-dimensional international organization provide fewer opportunities for these deals. Therefore, single-dimensional international organizations should be less likely to develop national chiefdoms than organizations that comprise multiple policy areas. The findings have important implications for the literature on international organization and Principal-Agent models in particular.

Políticas públicas e a descentralização legislativa da Assembleia Constituinte Brasileira, 1987-1988

Este artigo avalia a influência da descentralização dos trabalhos constituintes na formação da Constituição de 1988. Observamos que o plenário foi menos crucial para a agenda constituinte do que diversos autores apregoam. A inclusão de políticas públicas na Constituição ocorreu, sobretudo, na fase das comissões, sob a égide das lideranças progressistas, tendo sido aprofundado na negociação em plenário. O texto mostra, portanto, como preference outliers na etapa das comissões constituintes determinaram boa parte da Constituição aprovada no fim de 1988.

The role of procedural commitment in informational theories of legislative organization

Contrary to codified procedures, almost all informational theories of legislative organization assume that the House floor commits to a special rule for floor consideration prior to a committee proposal. Employing Gilligan and Krehbiel’s (1989b) theoretical framework, we demonstrate that whether or not to assume this procedural commitment has a profound impact on our understanding of how the floor can structure the committee’s incentives to reveal information. In particular, we find that several of Krehbiel’s (1991) primary hypotheses, particularly that regarding preference outliers, generally do not hold without procedural commitment. Underscoring the key role of procedural commitment in informational theories, our results not only open up important avenues through which to construct a more defensible foundation for informational theory but also offer the hope of reconciling discrepancies between theoretical predictions and empirical regularities.

Self‐selection or Socialization? A Dynamic Analysis of Committee Member Preferences

Theories on committee power assert that legislators self‐select to committees and therefore have preferences regarding the policy issues under the committees' jurisdictions that differ from the preferences of noncommittee members. I argue that preference outliers may be shaped both by processes of self‐selection and by endogenous processes within committees. Contrary to previous examinations of committee member preferences, the study utilizes a dynamic approach to examine the development of preferences over time in order to separate self‐selection from endogenous processes. Analyzing the development in the spending preferences of 859 Danish local politicians over three different election periods, I find that politicians increasingly prefer spending on their committees' jurisdictions over time, but their preferences do not change to the same extent on policy issues beyond their committees' jurisdictions. The findings point to the importance of endogenous processes in committees. Hence, committees may be outliers for very different reasons than those proposed by mainstream theory.

The Effects of Measurement and Methods Decisions on Committee Preference Outlier Results

Studies of outlying committee preferences have been conducted with different preference measures and methodological approaches and have generated conflicting results. To assess the effects of these study design differences, I use multiple methodological approaches to examine committee-floor differences with jurisdiction-specific interest group data during a longer time period than earlier studies. After comparing results across methods, I compare them to past findings using the same method but different preference measures. I find that differences in preference measures largely explain previous contradictory results. Additionally, outlying tendencies exist among all committees expected to be outliers under conditional claims of the distributive theory.

The Messenger Game

We challenge the generally accepted ally principle in legislative politics that a preference outlier committee will distort information to the legislative floor. If interest groups (or other third parties) are rational, they will withhold the most precise information for fear of committee misrepresentation. As a result, even preference outlier committees could be disciplined by their own ignorance not to distort the lobbyist message, as they are uncertain whether lying pays for the current situation or not. Our result calls into question the theoretical foundation of the influential preference outlier debate in legislative politics.

The Composition of the College of Commissioners

Recent theoretical studies question the view that the European Commission is a preference outlier. This paper addresses this question by discussing the composition of the European College of Commissioners and by focusing on the appointment process. The analysis is based on a data set that contains biographical information for all Commissioners since 1958. The analysis highlights the importance of Commissioners' party affiliation and their previous political positions. Multivariate regression analysis shows that smaller member states have tended to send more high-ranking politicians to the College of Commissioners than have larger member states. However, party affiliation has not become more important as an appointment criterion. What has changed with time has been not the party link but the calibre of positions held by Commissioners before they are appointed to the College.

Committee Outliers and Mandate Divides in the Russian State Duma, 1994-2003

Studies of mixed-member systems have addressed whether the use of two sets of electoral rules creates a divergent patterns of legislative behavior. Few of these studies focus on committees, which is surprising given the fact that the debate in the U.S. Congress literature is framed around distributional theories. Distributional theories posit that due to the need to win election in local districts, members will self-select on to particular committees and will be preference outliers. If such pressures exist in mixed systems, they should only exist for those legislators elected in local districts, and not those elected in proportional representation elections. Through a statistical analysis of the budget committee of the Russian Duma, this article shows that evidence of a mandate divide was rather limited. The variation in evidence of the mandate divide appears to be caused by two factors: the percentage of single-member district legislators on the committee and the level of party cohesion.

Estimating the Value of Proposal Power

This paper investigates the role of proposal power in the allocation of transportation projects across U.S. congressional districts in 1991 and 1998. The evidence supports the key qualitative prediction of legislative bargaining models: members with proposal power -- those sitting on the transportation authorization committee -- secure more project spending for their districts than do other representatives. Support for the quantitative restrictions on the value of proposal power is more mixed. I then empirically address several alternative models of legislative behavior, including partisan models, informational roles for committees, models with appropriations committees, and theories of committees as preference outliers.

Legislative Organization Theory and Committee Preference Outliers in State Senates

AbstractRecently, several studies of Congress and the state legislatures have found evidence to support the information theory of legislative organization, that is, that legislatures develop committees whose characteristics reflect those of the parent body so as to acquire unbiased policy and political information. However, most of these studies have been conducted on the lower, larger legislative chambers. Senates, as smaller bodies that often follow the lead of legislation originating in their lower chambers, may have less need for unbiased information, perhaps allowing those bodies to develop more outlying, unrepresentative committees. We test this hypothesis in 42 state senates and find that unrepresentative committees also tend to be the exception in these upper chambers. Furthermore, as shown in previous studies of state house committees, the frequency of committee outliers in state senates appears to be idiosyncratic, with cultural, political, and institutional variables being unable to account for their observed patterns. While results support the information theory of legislative organization, evidence of outliers among party delegations on committees in these senates provides some support for the party-dominant theory.

Biased Ministers, Inefficiency, and Control in Distributive Policies

The literature asserts that legislators are unlikely to adopt inefficient policies unanimously. Yet the systematic and unanimous increase in quantities of Total Allowable Catch, under the auspices of the Common Fisheries Policy (CFP), is inefficient by internationally recognized standards. This article develops a game of distributive politics to explain this puzzle. The game is based on the assumption that specialized Council formations are composed of preference outliers and behave like `runway institutions'. The article shows how, over a period of 16 years, ministers were significantly less concerned with environmental protection, were more supportive of (agri-)fishery issues, and were more right-wing than their governments. The article also tests the conservationist preferences of the European Commission. Finally, we map these preferences into the policy output of the CFP and show how the Council deals with problems created by its own decisions and by national implementation through the restraining of national authorities and delegation to the Commission.

Minimizing the Risks of Delegation: Multiple Referral in the German Bundesrat

preference outliers. This article establishes that committee assign? ment procedures in the German up? per house, the Bundesrat yield com? mittees that do not always reflect the chamber's partisan preferences. This non-American setting provides lever? age on a central question in legisla? tive studies: how can a chamber ensure responsive lawmaking when delegating to unrepresentative com? mittees? I argue that Bundesrat pro? cedures, including multiple referral, equal reporting rights, and a selfselection referral process, minimize the risks of delegation. A spatial model illustrates how the Bundesrat

Soft consensus and network dynamics in group decision making

We propose a dynamical network model for consensus reaching in group decision making. The model combines the minimization of a soft measure of collective dissensus and an individual inertial mechanism which emulates opinion changing aversion. Both components of the dynamics are nonlinear. The collective consensual trend corresponds to a process of anisotropic diffusion among the various individual preference structures. The anisotropy is designed so as to outline and enhance the natural group segmentation into homogeneous preference subgroups (weak consensus). The individual inertial mechanism, on the other hand, opposes changes from the original preferences and provides an appropriate framework to deal with preference outliers. We examine in detail the simple case in which each decision maker must choose between only two alternatives. Finally we comment on the possibility of incorporating in the dynamics a form of transitivity constraint regarding the group segmentation. ©1999 John Wiley & Sons, Inc.

The committee outlier debate: A review and a reexamination of some of the evidence

An ongoing and controversial topic of congressional scholars is the question “Are committees ‘preference outliers’ vis-a-vis their parent chamber?” Despite numerous research efforts showing isolated cases of outlying committees, little evidence shows a systematic tendency for committees to be unrepresentative of their legislature. A paper which comes close to being an exception is Weingast and Marshall's (1988) analysis of “the industrial organization of Congress,” which reports evidence of many and very strongly outlying committees. However, the apparently strong evidence is due more to the authors' incorrectly executed methods than to a general tendency for committees to be outliers. In this note I review the state of the committee-outlier debate and also show that Weingast and Marshall's empirical results cannot be replicated. I accordingly provide the correct results once their statistical tests are properly executed.

Testing Committee Composition Hypotheses for the U.S. Congress

Tests of theories of the composition of congressional committees are often problematic. Among the problems are presumed normality of the data, presumed cardinal meaning of the data, and the use of a mean score of committee preference when the corresponding theory only contains implications for the median score. This essay introduces a testing method that avoids these problems. It tests five hypotheses: (1) committees are preference outliers, (2) Democrats stack their slots on committees with liberal outliers, (3) Republicans stack their slots with conservative outliers, (4) committees are representative of the whole House, and (5) Democratic contingents on committees are representative of the whole Democratic caucus. Strong support, however, cannot be found for any of the hypotheses. The preference outlier hypothesis receives the most support, but even here the evidence is mixed.

Comparing Committee and Floor Preferences

We propose a statistical model which permits us to test whether congressional committees are preference outliers. Unlike previous tests, our model acknowledges that each representative's policy preferences are unique and that a comparison of committee and floor preferences must account for this heterogeneity. We apply our model to the House of Representatives over the period 1951 to 1984 and identify many more committee outliers than previous research.

Committee Power, Structure-Induced Equilibria, and Roll Call Votes

Using the concept of structure-induced equilibrium, this essay develops a simple behavioral model of roll call voting. The main results are (1) If some committees are outliers relative to the legislature as a whole-that is, if the median ideal point of the committee members is different from the median ideal point of the whole legislature-then roll call data are likely to be artificially unidimensional. This is because outlier committees will often exercise their gatekeeping power, so that the set of bills on which roll calls are taken will not be a random sample of all possible bills, but instead there will be important selection bias. (2) The unidimensional bias generally persists even as the dimensionality of the policy space becomes large; in fact, when the number of outlier committees is large, the bias may actually increase as the number of policy dimensions increases, both in absolute and relative terms. (3) Even if committees are preference outliers, it may be impossible to discover this fact by looking only at roll call votes. That is, the roll call data might indicate that committees are representative samples of the full legislature even when they are not. This is again the result of a selection bias: the roll calls that would distinguish certain committee members from other legislators never occur.