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Committee chair’s majority partisan status and its effect on information transmission via hearings
Abstract
While US Congress assigns only the members of a majority party to committee chairs, some state legislatures and other legislative bodies using a proportional representation system also consider members of a minority party for the position to promote a bipartisan policy making practice. Although previous literature investigates the effects of bipartisan rules and practices exploiting such institutional variations, the informational benefit of having a minority partisan committee chair has not been explored. By extending a recent study exploring conditions under which information transmission from agents to a principal is improved, this research note theoretically examines the effect of the committee chair’s majority partisan status on information acquisition and transmission via committee hearings. Findings suggest that under some conditions, the floor can informationally benefit more from having a chair representing a minority party in the chamber with opposite bias call a hearing than with a chair representing a majority party.
Abstracts
US foreign policy observers have noted a decline in the frequency of expert witnesses appearing before congressional committees, while congressional scholars have documented changes in committee practices that have led to fewer and shorter hearings. These trends interact in systematic ways, although their relationship has never been tested empirically. Using original data and micro-level measures of individual hearings by the national security committees of the House and Senate, we demonstrate how time constraints and routine responsibilities limit the number of opportunities for expert witnesses from 1995 to 2020. We find some influence for chamber polarization on witness totals but less impact on the type of experts. We uncover significant differences among individual committees in their use of academics and think tank representatives. Our study is unique in its focus on both chambers, inclusion of closed hearings, differentiation between academics and think tank representatives, and attention to the public salience of foreign affairs. Shrinkage in the official marketplace of foreign policy ideas warrants concern, highlighting the executive branch's increasing dominance over military and diplomatic decisions, diminished legislative capacity, and public disinterest in international affairs.
"The thesis of this paper is that restrictions on the ability of a parent body to amend committee proposals can enhance the informational role of committees. More precisely, restrictive procedures can encourage committees to gather information and can facilitate the adoption of informed policies that are jointly beneficial to the committee and parent body. Thus, acting in its self-interest, the parent body often restricts its ability to amend committee proposals."
A study of Senate committees and leadership behavior.
In principle, committees hold hearings to gather and provide information to their principals, but some hearings are characterized as political showcases. This article investigates conditions that moderate committee members' incentives to hold an informative hearing by presenting a game-theoretic model and a lab experiment. Specifically, it studies when committees hold hearings and which types of hearing they hold by varying policy preferences of committee members and the principal and political gains from posturing. Findings provide new insights to how preferences and power distribution affect individuals' incentives to be informed when they make decisions as members of a committee in many contexts.
Scholars of the U.S. House disagree over the importance of political parties in organizing the legislative process. On the one hand, non-partisan theories stress how congressional organization serves members’ non-partisan goals. On the other hand, partisan theories argue that the House is organized to serve the collective interests of the majority party. This book advances our partisan theory and presents a series of empirical tests of that theory’s predictions (pitted against others). It considers why procedural cartels form, arguing that agenda power is naturally subject to cartelization in busy legislatures. It argues that the majority party has cartelized agenda power in the U.S. House since the adoption of Reed's rules in 1890. The evidence demonstrates that the majority party seizes agenda control at nearly every stage of the legislative process in order to prevent bills that the party dislikes from reaching the floor.
In this paper we assess the role of political parties in organizing state legislative committees. This research is guided by an explanation found in Malcolm E. Jewell's early work on responsible political parties in U.S. state legislatures and in his more recent assessment of the conditions associated with state legislative control by strong political parties. We evaluate majority party representation (MPR) on the membership of all standing committees in 10 state legislative chambers for the last two sessions in each decade of the twentieth century. Findings from two of our earlier studies of majority party representation on committees are also included.
Equilibria are identified for a three-person game theoretic model of a legislature in which two heterogeneous committee members have superior information (vis-à-vis the legislature) about the consequences of policies that fall in their committee's jurisdiction. Equilibria associated with open, modified, and closed rules are each assessed in terms of distributional benefits (which legislators win and at whose expense) and informational efficiency (how much information becomes available in the course of decision making). While the closed rule tends to confer distributional benefits to the proposing committee member at the direct expense of other legislators, the informational efficiency of the closed rule is greater than that for open and modified rules. The findings have implications for the choice of rules governing the consideration of committee's proposals and for the composition of specialized standing committees.
A large literature has demonstrated that such economic factors as growth, inflation, and unemployment affect the popularity of incumbents within many democratic countries. However, cross-national aggregate analyses of ''economic voting'' show only weak and inconsistent economic effects. We argue for the systematic incorporation of political factors that shape the electoral consequences of economic performance. Multivariate analyses of 102 elections in 19 industrialized democracies are used to estimate the cross-national impact of economic and political factors. The analyses show that considerations of the ideological image of the government, its electoral base, and the clarity of its political responsibility are essential to understanding the effects of economic conditions on voting for or against incumbents.
“Congressional government is Committee government” said Woodrow Wilson in 1884, and political scientists since that day have seen no reason to disagree with him. It would be reasonable to suppose then that once committees ceased to meet secretly (as they did when Wilson wrote) and began to keep verbatim public records of their proceedings, the committee process would be subjected to relentless and systematic study. Such has not been the case. The frequency with which Wilson is quoted is as much a reflection of a lack of substantive research by later students as it is a tribute to his intuitive insights.
It would not be hard to make a case for close and continuous study of congressional committees. On every count, they would seem to hold as much interest for the student of politics as administrative bodies or the courts, upon which so much more attention has been lavished. They are decision-making agencies of crucial importance; it is a commonplace that they hold life-or-death power over legislation. Again, they provide a point of focus for the political process; they are “miniature legislatures,” “microcosms” of their parent bodies—not in the sense that they epitomize the larger houses, but rather that the committees are subject to the same influences and power drives, which are easier to intercept and analyze here than in the larger and more complex houses themselves.
What is the role of political parties in the development of legislative institutions? Recent studies have explored the expansion and contraction of minority party procedural rights in the United States Congress (Binder 1997; Dion 1997), but these studies reach contradictory conclusions. Binder, emphasizing reciprocity norms, argues that minority party procedural rights expand as the majority party loses strength, while Dion, emphasizing the notion that small majorities are cohesive, asserts that these rights contract under these conditions. I apply Binder's and Dion's arguments to state legislative lower houses and test them with a dataset of 336 state legislative sessions in 23 states. The relevant variation among state legislatures provides the leverage necessary to understand better the relationship between partisan politics and legislative rule adoption more generally. I conclude that in state legislatures, minority party procedural rights expand as the minority party shrinks in size.
Building on interest group and congressional committee literature, the interest group impact theory is created to explicate the role of interest groups in congressional committee hearings. This theory applies not only to the influence interest groups have in congressional hearings, but also to the access given to them to be able to participate. The theory maintains that interest groups are necessary to legislators in this capacity since they provide valuable information relating to politics, elections and policy. Resource rich interest groups with visibility as experts in a policy area are expected to be given more access and influence particularly to committees that are more balanced in terms of partisanship, ideology and leadership experience.
Two statistical models test the interest group impact theory, one looks at the access granted to interest groups to participate in congressional hearings and the other at the influence wielded by the testimony they give in those hearings. A unique data set is developed for each model. The access dataset consists of attempts by interest groups to testify before House committees during the 105th, 106th, 107th and 108th sessions of Congress, and consists of data compiled from the Lobbying Disclosure database. A unique dataset of coded congressional hearing testimony submitted by interest groups from six committees and their subcommittees during the 103rd, 106th and 108th Congress was created for the influence model.
The research results indicate partial support for the interest group impact theory. Interest group resources increase the likelihood of an interest group access. However, any advantages those resources are in gaining access to congressional hearings, they do not influence the likelihood of the committee adopting the recommendations given in testimony. What do matter are characteristics relating to the committee such as ideology, partisanship and the experience of the chairs. Interest groups do attempt make real recommendations in hearing testimony although they see little success in influencing bill markups.
Can majority parties control legislative outcomes by controlling the agenda, or are roll-call patterns simply the product of legislators’ preferences? We argue that, holding members’ preferences constant, the majority party’s ability to set the agenda gives it the power to influence legislative outcomes. We present the implications of this view of party power formally and then explore them empirically in two quasi-experiments from American state legislatures. In both, agenda control varies while legislator preferences remain constant. Our consistent finding is that the majority party uses its control over the agenda to screen out bills that would split its own membership, devotes more floor time to bills that divide majority from minority party legislators, and ultimately uses agenda control to protect the policy interests of its members.
Do legislative institutions give majority parties gatekeeping power? In this paper, we exploit variation in U.S. state legislative institutions to test whether majority party gatekeeping rights affect majority roll rates. We begin by developing hypotheses about the institutional features of legislatures that could enable the majority party to block bills. Then, we test these hypotheses using an original dataset on the legislative organization and majority party roll rates of the 99 U.S. state legislative chambers. Our findings show that the presence of majority party gatekeeping rights at various stages of the legislative process is negatively and significantly associated with majority roll rates. Specifically, in legislatures where majority-appointed committees can decline to hear bills or decline to report them to the floor, or where the majority leadership can block bills from appearing on the calendar, majority roll rates are significantly lower than in legislatures where those veto points are absent.
While Congressional scholars agree that hearings are an important activity there is little consensus on their role in the legislative process. The traditional literature on hearings pplays down their role as mechanisms of disseminating information because committee members often do not appear persuaded by the information they reveal. In this paper we explore the premise that hearings may not be informative to committees but may provide crucial information to the floor. We show that, if hearings have some intrinsic informative content and are costly, even extreme committees can transmit useful information to the floor. Furthermore, the possibility of holding hearings creates an incentive for extreme committees to specialize and reveal information simply by the decision whether to hold hearings.
Leadership approaches in Congressional committee hearings
- C Degregorio
Discussion on best practices for bipartisan policymaking
- M Jackman