Congressional Committee Leadership, 1971-1978

Recent research on parliamentary institutions has demonstrated that legislatures featuring strong committees play an important role in shaping government policy. However, the impact of the legislators who lead these committees – committee chairs – is poorly understood. This study provides the first examination of whether the partisan control of committee chairs in parliamentary systems has a systematic impact on legislative scrutiny. The article argues that committee chairs can, in principle, use their significant agenda powers to serve two purposes: providing opposition parties with a greater ability to scrutinize government policy proposals, and enabling government parties to better police one another. Analyzing the legislative histories of 1,100 government bills in three parliamentary democracies, the study finds that control of committee chairs significantly strengthens the ability of opposition parties to engage in legislative review. The analysis also suggests that government parties’ ability to monitor their coalition allies does not depend on control of committee chairs.

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“… 40 See, e.g., Cox and Terry 2008; Evans 2001; Fenno 1973; Frantzich 1979; Talbert, Jones, and Baumgartner 1995; Unekis and Rieselbach 1983.…”

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confidence: 99%

Committee Chairs and Legislative Review in Parliamentary Democracies

Fortunato

Martin

Vanberg

2017

Brit. J. Polit. Sci.

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“… 10. Adler and Lapinski’s (1997) study was used as a guide for indentifying high demand committees. For other research dealing with the subject, see Fenno (1973), Rohde and Shepsle (1973), Unekis and Rieselbach (1984), Smith and Deering (1990), Cox and McCubbins (1993), and most recently Edwards and Stewart (2006). Mobility is not analyzed across types of committees because it is beyond the scope of this project.…”

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confidence: 99%

The Institutional Mobility of Minority Members of Congress

Rocca

Sánchez

Morin

2010

Political Research Quarterly

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This article examines the extent to which race and ethnicity affect mobility to leadership positions within Congress. The authors utilize survival analysis to examine the rate at which legislators attained committee leadership positions between the 101st and 108th Congresses. The results show that black legislators attain leadership positions faster than white legislators. This may be because of the tendency for black members of Congress (MCs) to sit on less prestigious committees than white MCs, which creates greater opportunity for institutional promotion. Ethnicity, on the other hand, does not matter to mobility as Latinos acquire leadership positions at the same rate as non-Latino legislators.

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1985

Political Science Abstracts

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Congressional Committee Leadership, 1971-1978

Cited by 10 publications

References 8 publications

Committee Chairs and Legislative Review in Parliamentary Democracies

Committee Chairs and Legislative Review in Parliamentary Democracies

The Institutional Mobility of Minority Members of Congress

Abstracts of Documents in this Supplement

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