Committee Assignments: Theories, Causes and Consequences

Abstract

Conventional wisdom suggests that a strong legislature is built on a strong internal committee system, both in terms of committee powers and the willingness of members to engage in committee work. Committee assignments are the behavioural manifestation of legislative organisation. Despite this, much remains unknown about how committee assignments happen and with what causes and consequences. Our focus in this article is on providing the context for, and introducing new research on, what we call the political economy of committee assignments-which members get selected to sit on which committees, why, and with what consequences.

Who Gets What? The Interactive Effect of MPs’ Sex in Committee Assignments in Portugal

“…Ciftci et al, 2008;Mickler, 2018aMickler, , 2018b) appeared much later. This explains why most of the latter research follows the so-called congressional framework of legislative organisation (Martin and Mickler, 2019), comprising distributive theory, informational theory and partisan theory.…”

Conclusion: prospects for analysing committees in comparative perspective

“…In this section we wish to offer some comment on what might be considered as two visions for future committee studies, as presented by Yordanova (2011) on the one hand, and Martin and Mickler (2019)) on the other. Yordanova's conclusion, following extensive study of the European Parliament, tends to the view that while a generalisable theory of legislative organisation remains possible, the 'next generation' of studies ought to try to emancipate itself fully from the congressional framework which she regards as too static and insensitive to change in the external environment in which legislatures and by extension, committees must operate.…”

“…Many of the issues and debates regarding the analysis of legislative committees are well known and have been excellently summarised recently elsewhere (Martin and Mickler 2019; see also Martin 2014). These issues include: (i) the continuing dominance of theories of congressional committees, as summarised in the introduction, as a starting point for research, even for analyses of those committees which operate within parliamentary systems; (ii) how best to test those theories in non-congressional settings and what methodological issues, if any, arise; (iii) what other theories and approaches are available, and whether they can be more fruitful than congressional theories ; and, (iv) what else to study beyond committee assignments.…”

Constituency Preferences and Assignment to Agriculture Committees

“…In contrast to distributive theory, two other theories predict that legislators seeking to represent their constituents' interests on committees to further their personal ambitions are not likely to be appointed to their desired committees (Martin and Mickler, 2018). One is informational theory, which argues that legislatures are designed to ensure they receive the most accurate information possible in order to produce good policies (Gilligan and Krehbiel, 1990;Krehbiel, 1991).…”