How Do Committee Assignments Facilitate Majority Party Power? Evidence from a Randomized Experiment in the Arkansas State Legislature
40 Pages Posted: 16 Aug 2012
Date Written: August 16, 2012
Abstract
We use a natural experiment in Arkansas’ state legislature to reexamine how the committee assignment process facilitates legislative party power. In contrast to the view that parties use committee assignments as significant carrots and sticks to enforce party discipline, we find that the rewards legislators reap from winning their preferred assignments appear meager and that party discipline prevails at typical levels in Arkansas despite that parties do not control assignments there. However, in contrast to other legislatures, disloyal legislators tend to fill powerful committees in Arkansas, suggesting that parties do stack powerful committees with loyalists in legislatures where they can.
Keywords: Legislative committees
Suggested Citation: Suggested Citation
Do you have negative results from your research you’d like to share?
Recommended Papers
-
By James J. Heckman and James M. Snyder
-
The Hunt for Party Discipline in Congress
By Nolan Mccarty, Keith T. Poole, ...
-
By Keith T. Poole and Howard Rosenthal
-
On Measuring Partisanship in Roll Call Voting: The U.S. House of Representatives, 1877-1999
By Gary W. Cox and Keith T. Poole
-
The Geometry of Multidimensional Quadratic Utility in Models of Parliamentary Roll Call Voting
-
Agenda Power in the Japanese House of Representatives
By Gary W. Cox, Mikitaka Masuyama, ...
-
Congressional Party Defection in American History
By Timothy P. Nokken and Keith T. Poole