Procedural Choice and the House Committee on Rules

Dion, Douglas; Huber, John D.

doi:10.2307/2960347

Cited by 131 publications

(54 citation statements)

References 29 publications

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“…Rather, we introduce the vote options concept to bring a dose of day-to-day reality to the examination of how legislative coalitions are often formed. Our empirical findings support our vote options formulation, but our findings do not exclude other complementary contributions from selective gatekeeping by committees to agenda manipulation by the Rules Committee (Groseclose & King 1997;Dion & Huber 1996;Krehbiel 1987;Shepsle & Weingast 1987). We believe that our empirical findings apply 5 most forcefully when there is not a strong counter-mobilization effort underway.…”

supporting

confidence: 63%

Congressional Vote Options

King

Zeckhauser

1999

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supporting

confidence: 63%

Congressional Vote Options

King

Zeckhauser

1999

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“…This Þnding does not seem to be affected by alternative measures preference divergence: continuous (x c ) or binary (outlier). The only exception is that in some models estimated by Dion and Huber (1996), the effect of the outlier variable is insigniÞcant.…”

Section: Empirical Implicationsmentioning

confidence: 99%

“…Moreover, the closed and modiÞed rules are identical in this situation. 8 We previously established that in this case, closed and …”

Section: Specializationmentioning

confidence: 99%

Asymmetric Information and Legislative Rules: Some Amendments

Krishna¹

2001

Am Polit Sci Rev

177

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We re-examine the major tenets of the informational theory of legislative rules, focusing on the informational efficiency of rules with varying degrees of restrictiveness. When committees are heterogeneous, full efficiency is attainable under the unrestrictive open rule as well as the somewhat restrictive modiÞed rule. In contrast, the restrictive closed rule always leads to inefficiencies. When committees are homogeneous, the situation is different. All equilibria are inefÞcient regardless of legislative rules. The closed rule, however, leads to greater informational efficiency than does the open rule. Further, the efficiency gains under the closed rule more than offset distributional losses regardless the degree of preference divergence. We also examine the incentives provided by the different rules for information acquisition and committee specialization.

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“…2 Ray (1980), Weingast and Marshall (1988) and Dion and Huber (1996) present results indicating that many or most committees are outliers, while Krehbiel (1990Krehbiel ( , 1991 and Cox and McCubbins (1993) nd that there is no convincing evidence that committees systematically consist of preference outliers. Poole and Rosenthal (1997) nd a dramatic shift toward less representative committee contingents among democrative representatives after the 83rd House, concentrated on four committees: Agriculture, Armed Services, Veterans ' A airs, and Education and Labor. as information intermediators between lobbyists and the legislative body.…”

mentioning

confidence: 71%

Legislative committees as information intermediaries: A unified theory of committee selection and amendment rules

Ambrus

Azevedo

Kamada

et al. 2013

Journal of Economic Behavior & Organization

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This paper considers a model of legislative decision-making, in which information must be collected from a strategic lobbyist. The legislature appoints a committee to communicate with the lobbyist and propose a bill, and determines whether the proposal is processed under open or closed rule. Consistent with empirical evidence, it can be optimal for the legislature to appoint a biased committee and, depending on the lobbyist's bias, both open and closed rule are used in equilibrium. For small lobbyist bias, it is optimal to choose closed rule and a committee whose interests are perfectly aligned with the lobbyist's. For intermediate lobbyist bias, closed rule remains optimal with a committee whose preferences lie between those of the legislature and those of the lobbyist. For large lobbyist bias, open rule and a committee biased against the lobbyist become optimal. o ers an explanation to two widely discussed puzzles concerning the legislative process: why legislative bodies sometimes tie their own hands by delegating power to specialized committees, and why committees consist of preference outliers. In our model, the legislature has to collect information from a strategic lobbyist. Depending on the lobbyist's bias, the legislature either wants to delegate power to a committee aligned with the lobbyist, or retain power but communicate with the lobbyist through an adversely biased committee.We thank Georgy Egorov, Drew Fudenberg, Maxim Ivanov, Navin Kartik, Kenneth Shepsle, and especially Keith Krehbiel for useful suggestions.

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Procedural Choice and the House Committee on Rules

Cited by 131 publications

References 29 publications

Congressional Vote Options

Congressional Vote Options

Asymmetric Information and Legislative Rules: Some Amendments

Legislative committees as information intermediaries: A unified theory of committee selection and amendment rules

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