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Informational and partisan theories of legislative organization predict that most committees will be representative of their parent chamber and most committee delegations representative of their parent caucus. Unfortunately, despite the universalistic claims of these theories, the preponderance of evidence comes from only one chamber of one legislature: the U. S. House of Representatives. If informational and partisan theories are generalizable beyond the Congress, outlying committees should be rare in state legislatures as well as in the House of Representatives. We use a variety of measures of member preferences (e.g., roll call measures, surveys, constituency characteristics) and simple difference of means tests to explore the generalizability of these theories by examining the prevalence of committee outliers in the lower houses of a sample of 12 states. Consistent with expectations, outlying committees are rare in the state legislatures we sample, especially among important control committees. This provides evidence that informational and partisan models of legislative organization are applicable beyond the U. S. Congress.Although students of the Congress have long acknowledged the importance of committees for processing legislative workloads, their precise institutional roles have been hotly debated. Traditionally, most scholars have viewed committees as integral cogs in a highly decentralized, highly distributive institution. Under this view, committees are not "mini-legislatures," but often preference outliers with predilections at odds with those of the full chamber. This traditional distributive view of committees has recently come under intense criticism from two related theoretical perspectives: informational and partisan models. Both of these argue that collective concerns-either of the floor or of the majority The authors are indebted to

In this paper, we extend recent work exploring the prevalence of outlying committees in American state legislatures. Using an expanded sample of 45 states and measures of legislator preferences generated by a single, federated group, we find that most legislative committees are representative of the parent chambers from which their members are selected. Furthermore, we test multivariate models designed to account for theoretically relevant patterns in variations in outlier percentages among control and noncontrol committees. The fact that our models are such poor predictors of nonrepresentative committees speaks to the idiosyncratic nature of the relatively small percentage of outlying committees in the states. This conclusion, in turn, provides further support for the proposition that representative committees are simply rational.

Using data from an unusual survey, we gauge factors influencing support for a state anti-gay rights referendum. After controlling for other powerful predictors of attitudes, we find personal contact (especially relevant and voluntary contact) has an important impact on public support, although community context does not. These findings support an integrated notion of interactions with "out" groups, grounded in social categorization theory, that sees community context and interpersonal contact as concentric circles, moving from abstract, detached forms of contact to more pronounced, personal forms. However, even among those with substantial interpersonal contact, support for the referendum was still widespread.