Entering the Committee System: State Committee Assignments

Abstract

ONTEMPORARY American legislatures are organized around committee systems which are largely responsible for how legisla-. tures work and what they accomplish. Any analysis or description of Congress or a state legislature gives a prominent position to committees and the roles they play; however, the emphasis in committee research has been on Congress.One important yet understudied area of state committee activity relates to the committee appointment process. In his review of committee selection, Eulau (1985) listed 4 studies at the state level, compared with 63 on Congress. In a modest effort to contribute to our knowledge of state committee selection, the present study provides insights regarding this process and its consequences for the legislature in one stateWisconsin-for six recent legislative sessions-

Balancing Power: Committee System Autonomy and Legislative Organization

“…1. Other important works in this area include Cooper 1970Cooper , 1981Hall 1996;Hedlund 1989;Maass 1983;andTucker 1985, 1989. 2. In this analysis, "committee system autonomy" refers to the ability of committees to act independently of other actors-be it the floor, the party, etc.-in the legislative process.…”

Outlying Committees in the Statehouse: An Examination of the Prevalence of Committee Outliers in State Legislatures

“…Since state legislative committees were considerably less independent than their congressional counterparts and since their compositions were determined by party leaders, we would, a priori, have expected to find greater evidence for the informational or partisan models of legislative organization (see Jewell 1969, 52ff; on the other hand, it is worth noting that even though Jewell paints a picture of firm partisan control of state legislative committee appointments in the 1950s and 1960s, he acknowledges the likelihood that some committees would be captured and turned into "powerful lobb[ies] influential in passing legislation favorable to a single interest" [56]). Within the last decade, however, scholars such as Francis (1985Francis ( , 1989, Hedlund (1989), and Hamm and Hedlund (1990) have convincingly argued that even though state party leaders often have substantial formal powers over the composition of committees in their chambers, in practice they usually go to considerable lengths to accommodate members' individual committee requests, and in some states congressional-like seniority rules also protect committee members (see below). As a result, the frequency of committee outliers is now an open question in the states, as is the more fundamental issue of whether state legislative committees serve principally distributive, informational, or partisan purposes.…”

The Legislative Matching Game: Committee Matching and Effective Legislating in the States

“…The literature indicates that legislators have incentives to pursue assignments that comport with their policy agendas and that leadership usually has incentives to accommodate member requests. To this point, however, scholars have not proposed a means of assessing the relationship between agendas and assignments; although, measures of the related concepts of leadership accommodation (e.g., Hedlund 1989; Hedlund and Patterson 1992; Rohde and Shepsle 1973; Shepsle 1978) or committee assignment value (e.g., Bullock and Sprague 1969; Munger 1988; Francis 1985; Grosclose and Stewart 1998; 1999) do exist. The primary difficulty in measuring the committee-agenda match is devising a means of estimating individual policy agendas against which we can evaluate a member’s committee assignments.…”