Committees in legislatures: A property rights perspective

Without the imposition of some institutional structure, a legislature is a non-exclusive resource, and legislators will have a tendency to overuse the resource and reduce its productivity. The committee system is a method for granting property rights over the legislature's agenda by subdividing the agenda and assigning each committee rights over a portion of the agenda. Just as common grazing ground could be more productive if it were subdivided and assigned to individual owners, the legislature is more productive if access to the agenda is subdivided and assigned to committees.Ownership rights to committee assignments are allocated based on seniority because this makes the rights more secure and therefore more valuable to their owners. In the United States Congress, the seniority rule replaced a system in which assignments were made at the discretion of party leaders. In the former system, legislators needed to expend effort to retain their assignments, which diminished their ability to use their assignments productively. Because individuals can use resources more productively if they do not have to be concerned about protecting their ownership interest, the seniority system enables the legislature to be more productive in producing legislation.     

The incumbency dilemma and rent extraction by legislators

An incumbent is able to shirk or otherwise obtain rents based on his tenure of office because more senior representatives are better able to advance their legislative agendas than are more junior members. The realization of incumbent rents implies that an electoral prisoners' dilemma occurs at the level of voters across electoral districts. Pivotal voters in each district would benefit if all incumbents were replaced by challengers with similar legislative programs because the cost of incumbent rents can be avoided, but each benefits if his representative has more seniority than those from other districts.     

Committee jurisdiction, congressional behavior and policy outcomes

The literature on congressional committees has largely overlooked the impact of jurisdictional fights on policy proposals and outcomes. This paper develops a theory of how legislators balance the benefits of expanded committee jurisdiction against preferred policy outcomes. It shows why (a) senior members, and junior members in safe seats, are most likely to challenge a committee’s jurisdiction; (b) policy proposals may be initiated off the proposer’s ideal point for jurisdictional gains; (c) policy outcomes will generally be more moderate with jurisdictional fights than without these turf wars. We empirically investigate these results examining proposed Internet intellectual property protection legislation in the 106th Congress.     

Gaining new insights by going local: determinants of coalition formation in mixed democratic polities

We develop a simple spatial model suggesting that Members of Parliament strive for the inclusion of the head of state’s party in coalitions formed in mixed democratic polities, and that parliamentary parties try to assemble coalitions that minimize the ideological distance to the head of state. We identify the German local level of government as functionally equivalent to a parliamentary setting, such that the directly elected mayor has competencies similar to a president in a mixed national polity. Our findings show that the party affiliation of the head of state is a key factor considered by party members in the legislature when forming coalitions: coalitions in the legislature are more likely to form if they include the party of the head of the executive branch. Furthermore, the policy preferences of the head of the executive branch matter for the legislators’ behavior in the coalition formation process: the smaller the ideological distance between the position of a coalition and the position of the head of state, the more likely a coalition is to be formed.     

Distant friends and nearby enemies: The politics of legislative coalition formation

It is usually thought that a coalition leader in a legislature will construct coalitions of legislators who are ‘close’ to each other in the policy space. However, if there is some ‘status quo’ or other reversion point that will hold if the coalition leader fails to construct a winning coalition, a counter-intuitive result about the nature of these coalitions emerges: the coalition leader may be forced to construct a coalition which includes legislators who are ‘distant’ from him and which excludes legislators who are ‘close’ to him.     

It's coming from inside the House (of Commons): Agenda control,accountability, and interest group lobbying in majoritarian parliaments

In majoritarian parliaments, the executive branch typically enjoys an informational advantage over the legislature. In theory, legislators can reduce this asymmetry with information from interest groups. In practice, the government is almost always better informed than the legislature. This article develops a model whereby a politician's access to outside information depends not just on her parliamentary power but on the diffusion of legislative agenda control among political parties—for example, during minority government. Using a new panel data set of 41,619 lobbying communications, it finds interest groups are more likely to communicate with government frontbenchers than with opposition or backbench members. This gap diminishes as agenda control diffuses to opposition parties. It also finds evidence of partisan clustering in lobbying networks during majority government. Strong legislative parties weaken accountability by restricting access to outside information, but this is conditional on the governing party's control over the agenda.     

The political costs of tax increases and expenditure reductions: Evidence from state legislative turnover

This paper estimates the political costs of increasing taxes and cutting expenditures for members of a legislature. It is found that both costs are individually significant, but that they are not significantly different. This coincides with the first order condition for maximization of the probability of reelection. Republican legislatures have a higher political cost for taxes, thus the party's relative bias toward smaller government is founded in stronger constituent preferences against taxes, not for lower spending. Additionally, by being ideologically conservative, Republicans lower the political costs of taxes, while by being more liberal, Democrats lower the cost of cutting expenditures.     

Party Strength,the Personal Vote,and Government Spending

“Strong” political parties within legislatures are one possible solution to the problem of inefficient universalism, a norm under which all legislators seek large projects for their districts that are paid for out of a common pool. We demonstrate that even if parties have no role in the legislature, their role in elections can be sufficient to reduce spending. If parties in the electorate are strong, then legislators will demand less distributive spending because of a decreased incentive to secure a “personal vote” via local projects. We estimate that spending in states with strong party organizations is at least 4% smaller than in states where parties are weak. We also find evidence that strong party states receive less federal aid than states with weak organizations, and we theorize that this is because members of Congress from strong party states feel less compelled to secure aid than members from weak party states.     

Representation beyond people: Lobbying access of umbrella associations to legislatures and the media

Lobbying access to policy discussions determines how political interests are voiced and potentially exert influence. This article addresses whether access to the national legislature and the media favors umbrella organizations, which represent interests of their member groups. It theorizes that the role of umbrellas goes beyond signaling a large individual membership or constituency of people, but that umbrellas are distinct in transmitting interests from other organizations. This function is expected to be valuable in exchanges with legislators who seek efficiency, input legitimacy, and policy implementation, but less valuable in the media arena. Using a new data set on lobbying by 286 groups on 12 issues in the United Kingdom and Germany, the article serves support for this theory: Umbrellas enjoy higher legislative access, but lower media access than groups without member organizations, irrespective of their individual membership or claimed constituency. The findings have implications for how we understand and study political representation.     

Policymaking in Multiparty Presidential Regimes: A Comparison between Brazil and Ecuador

This paper explores why two countries with similar electoral, partisan, and presidential institutions, have produced significantly different policy outcomes in Latin America. Brazil and Ecuador are conventionally known as having highly fragmented party systems, where legislators have great incentives to cultivate a personal vote. Presidents are perceived to be strong and to make large use of government resources in order to advance their agenda. Yet, policies in Brazil are more likely to respond to shocks and to be more stable over time than policies in Ecuador, where policies remain vulnerable to political changes and realignments. We argue that this variation is explained by the different nature of political coalitions formed in each country. We identify three factors that increase the executive's ability to craft governing coalitions in congress: the availability of valuable coalition currencies, the influence of long‐term political horizons, and the extent to which political transactions are credibly and effectively enforced.     

The Declining Value of Revolving-Door Lobbyists: Evidence from the American States

‘‘Revolving-door” lobbyists are individuals who transition from governmental positions into lobbying for private entities. Such lobbyists thrive on the insider connections and political knowledge that they developed while in government. These assets afford former lawmakers more access to and influence over incumbent lawmakers. The value of their connections and knowledge, however, is contingent on former colleagues remaining within the legislature. As new legislators enter the assembly, the connections and knowledge of former members expire and lose value. Whereas increases in turnover or assembly size generate more former lawmakers who might lobby, such increases negatively affect former members’ value as lobbyists. Interest groups accordingly hire fewer former legislators to lobby. Other factors, such as longer cooling-off periods or increased legislative staff resources, produce slight or no substantive effects on rates of revolving. Legislative characteristics mostly determine rates of revolving for former lawmakers.     

Interest Group Competition and Coalition Formation

This article investigates how interest group competition, a state of conflicting policy preferences stemming from how organizational memberships are defined, can resolve into conflict or cooperation. The strategic choices of competing lobbyists are modeled as the results of a trade-off between the need to represent members and please legislators, and the additional advocacy resources they hope to gain by agreeing to form coalitions with their competitors rather than fight them in resource-draining conflicts. Hypotheses derived from the model are tested with data from interviews with lobbyists on six issues taken up by the U.S. Congress from 1999 to 2002. The results suggest that while group members do have some limited power to constrain the policy positions taken on issues by their lobbyists, it is primarily the pressures from legislators and competitor groups that push lobbyists into collectively supporting coalition positions different from those desired by their members.     

Do female legislators benefit from incumbency advantage? Incumbent renomination in a flexible-list PR system

This study investigates whether female legislators, just like their male colleagues, also benefit from incumbency advantage in the form of privileged access to candidate selection. This is done by examining whether female and male MPs receive the same reward for equivalent political performance when renomination decisions are made by political parties. Political performance is conceptualised in terms of incumbents’ popularity among voters, readiness to vote along the party line and legislative activity. An original dataset comprising 1032 observations on Czech legislators elected between 1996 and 2017 is used in the analysis. The results suggests that well-performing female MPs are just as likely as their male colleagues to secure a favourable renomination outcome. This result should not, however, be interpreted as evidence of gender-neutral access to re-election and political seniority as past research clearly indicates that female MPs need to work harder than men to produce the same political output.     

The distribution of honoraria income in the U.S. Congress: Who gets rents in legislatures and why?

The major conclusion to be drawn from this analysis is that low-cost suppliers of political favors receive the highest honoraria incomes. There is no evidence that being a lawyer, acquiring a large number of committee assignments, receiving high ratings by labor unions, representing a safe district, or introducing numerous legislative bills, increases one's honoraria income in any significant way. The wider dispersal of power reduces the effects of seniority, and membership on the Finance Committee, in determining institutional power in the Senate; hence, these variables are only significantly related to honoraria income in the House. The smaller the number of suppliers in the Senate, relative to the House, means that senators obtain higher prices for their services. As a result, business groups are more willing to pay extra — a price premium — to assure that no shirking occurs.While the distribution of honoraria has caused considerable concern and given rise to cynical explanations as to who gets them and why (see, for example, McChesney, 1987), this analysis suggests a less pejorative but empirically valid conclusion: business, and therefore honoraria, gravitate to those who can supply political favors at a lower cost than other legislators, just as low-cost suppliers gain a greater proportion of the sales in the market than those who supply the same service but at a higher price.     

Women on the Sidelines: Women's Representation on Committees in Latin American Legislatures

This article explores how new groups can be marginalized after they gain representation in the legislature. We use data from six Latin American legislatures to examine the effect of institutional and political factors on how traditionally dominant male political leaders distribute scarce political resources—committee assignments—to female newcomers. In general, we find that women tend to be isolated on women's issues and social issues committees and kept off of power and economics/foreign affairs committees as the percentage of legislators who are women increases, when party leaders or chamber presidents control committee assignments, and when the structure of the committee system provides a specific committee to deal with women's issues. Thus, to achieve full incorporation into the legislative arena, newcomers must do more than just win seats. They must change the institutions that allow the traditionally dominant group to hoard scarce political resources .     

Human capital,committee power and legislative outcomes

This paper presents a model in which legislators use informational asymmetries to engage in rent-seeking behavior. Previous work in the informational and distributive traditions could not explain deviations from the median preference without reference to “committee power”. Integration of these forces demonstrated that legislative outcomes need not correspond to the median preference regardless of the extent to which committee power is present in a legislature. While deviations from the median preference are consistent with committee power, recent empirical evidence suggests that observed deviations in Congress are in fact caused by human capital differentials rather than committee power.     

Roll Calls, Party Labels, and Elections

We develop a model of legislative policymaking in which individuallegislators are concerned with both policy and reelection. Legislators'preferences are private information, and they have two meansof communicating their preferences to voters. First, they eachhave a "party label" that credibly identifies an interval withinwhich their ideal points must lie. Second, their roll call votesmay convey additional information about their preferences. Eachlegislator must therefore tailor his or her votes to his orher district in order to forestall a reelection challenge fromthe opposing party. In equilibrium, nonsincere voting recordswill occur mostly in moderate districts, where extreme incumbentsare vulnerable to challenges from relatively centrist candidates.In those districts, the most extreme legislators may even chooseto vote sincerely and retire rather than compile a moderatevoting record. Thus, both roll call scores and candidate typeswill be responsive to district type. An empirical test of shiftsin roll call scores of retiring House members in moderate districtsconfirms these findings.     

Valence,Elections, and Legislative Institutions

To the degree that voters care about competence, expertise, and other valence characteristics of their representatives and political parties care about winning elections, parties have an incentive to signal that their legislators have such characteristics. We construct a model of parties, motivated by both reelection and by policy, that attempt to signal individual incumbents' valences to voters through the assignment of these members to positions of authority. The model illustrates how electorally motivated party leaders will have an incentive to promote less competent incumbents than they would if voters did not make inferences from promotion decisions. We derive the model's empirical implications and test them with original data on the careers of Chilean senators serving between 1998 and 2013. In support of the model's insights, we find that promotion to a leadership position is an effective signal to voters only if the promoted incumbent has extreme views relative to the party.     

Party Government in Presidential Democracies: Extending Cartel Theory Beyond the U.S. Congress

Cartel Theory (and partisan theory more generally) expertly explains the functioning of the U.S. Congress. However, as a theory originally developed to study a single legislature where the institutional context differs greatly from that found in other presidential democracies, its applicability to these democracies has been questioned. Between one extreme represented by the United States (where legislators control their own political future) and the other represented by centralized party systems (where the national party leadership controls legislators' future) exists an intermediate group of democracies where subparty bosses are the key actors, controlling the future of subsets of a party's legislative delegation. We analyze one of these intermediate democracies, Argentina, and demonstrate the general applicability of Cartel Theory to an institutional context that differs notably from that found in the United States. We highlight how the theory can be adapted to a political system where subparty bosses, not individual legislators, are the most relevant political actors .