Book contents
- Frontmatter
- Contents
- List of Figures
- List of Tables
- Acknowledgments
- Legislative Leviathan
- Introduction
- PART ONE THE AUTONOMY AND DISTINCTIVENESS OF COMMITTEES
- PART TWO A THEORY OF ORGANIZATION
- PART THREE PARTIES AS FLOOR-VOTING COALITIONS
- PART FOUR PARTIES AS PROCEDURAL COALITIONS
- 7 Party Loyalty and Committee Assignments
- 8 Contingents and Parties
- PART FIVE PARTIES AS PROCEDURAL COALITIONS
- Conclusion
- Appendix 1 Uncompensated Seniority Violations, Eightieth through Hundredth Congresses
- Appendix 2 A Model of the Speaker's Scheduling Preferences
- Appendix 3 Unchallengeable and Challengeable Vetoes
- Appendix 4 The Scheduling Power
- Bibliography
- Author Index
- Subject Index
8 - Contingents and Parties
Published online by Cambridge University Press: 05 June 2012
- Frontmatter
- Contents
- List of Figures
- List of Tables
- Acknowledgments
- Legislative Leviathan
- Introduction
- PART ONE THE AUTONOMY AND DISTINCTIVENESS OF COMMITTEES
- PART TWO A THEORY OF ORGANIZATION
- PART THREE PARTIES AS FLOOR-VOTING COALITIONS
- PART FOUR PARTIES AS PROCEDURAL COALITIONS
- 7 Party Loyalty and Committee Assignments
- 8 Contingents and Parties
- PART FIVE PARTIES AS PROCEDURAL COALITIONS
- Conclusion
- Appendix 1 Uncompensated Seniority Violations, Eightieth through Hundredth Congresses
- Appendix 2 A Model of the Speaker's Scheduling Preferences
- Appendix 3 Unchallengeable and Challengeable Vetoes
- Appendix 4 The Scheduling Power
- Bibliography
- Author Index
- Subject Index
Summary
In the previous chapter, we explored a key expectation of our model – namely, that party leaders would have a systematic influence on committee assignments. If party leaders do influence committee assignments, one might expect that the overall composition of each party's contingents on the standing committees would be affected. In this chapter, we consider how they ought to be affected and then turn to data pertinent to testing our expectations. We focus on a key prediction regarding the shaping and reshaping of party contingents on committees following changes in committee membership arising from elections (see Section 3.6).
In thinking about whether or not one should expect contingents to be representative, we shall appeal to two different perspectives on how the appointment process works: the self-selection model and the partisan selection model. We have already discussed the first of these in Chapters 2 and 4. In a nutshell, the self-selection model posits, first, that members request appointment to committees based primarily on the interests of their constituencies and, second, that members' requests are routinely accommodated by each party's committee on committees. As Shepsle (1978) puts it, committee assignments are made in a way that “permits ‘interesteds’ to gravitate to decision arenas in which their interests are promoted” (p. 248) and allows “most members for most of their careers [to be] on the committees they ‘want’” (p. 236).
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- Information
- Legislative LeviathanParty Government in the House, pp. 176 - 210Publisher: Cambridge University PressPrint publication year: 2007