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The Informational Theory of Legislative Committees: AnExperimental Analysis

Published online by Cambridge University Press:  03 December 2018

MARCO BATTAGLINI ,
ERNEST K. LAI ,
WOOYOUNG LIM  and
JOSEPH TAO-YI WANG Open the ORCID record for JOSEPH TAO-YI WANG [Opens in a new window]
MARCO BATTAGLINI*
Affiliation:
Cornell University and EIEF
ERNEST K. LAI*
Affiliation:
Lehigh University
WOOYOUNG LIM*
Affiliation:
The Hong Kong University of Science and Technology
JOSEPH TAO-YI WANG*
Affiliation:
National Taiwan University
*
*Marco Battaglini, Edward H. MeyerProfessor of Economics, Department of Economics, Cornell Universityand EIEF, mb2457@cornell.edu.
†Ernest K. Lai, Associate Professor of Economics, Departmentof Economics, Lehigh University, kwl409@lehigh.edu.
‡Wooyoung Lim, Associate Professor of Economics, Departmentof Economics, The Hong Kong University of Science and Technology,wooyoung@ust.hk.
§Joseph Tao-yi Wang, Professor of Economics, Department ofEconomics, National Taiwan University, josephw@ntu.edu.tw.
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Abstract

We experimentally investigate the informational theory of legislativecommittees (Gilligan and Krehbiel 1989). Two committee members provide policy-relevantinformation to a legislature under alternative legislative rules.Under the open rule, the legislature is free to make any decision;under the closed rule, the legislature chooses between a member’sproposal and a status quo. We find that even in thepresence of biases, the committee members improve the legislature’sdecision by providing useful information. We obtain evidence for twoadditional predictions: the outlier principle,according to which more extreme biases reduce the extent ofinformation transmission; and the distributionalprinciple, according to which the open rule is moredistributionally efficient than the closed rule. When biases areless extreme, we find that the distributional principle dominatesthe restrictive-rule principle, according towhich the closed rule is more informationally efficient. Overall,our findings provide experimental support for Gilligan andKrehbiel’s informational theory.

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Type
Research Article
Information
American Political Science Review , Volume 113 , Issue 1 , February 2019 , pp. 55 - 76
Copyright
Copyright © American Political Science Association 2018 

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Footnotes

We are grateful to Andreas Blume, Colin Camerer, Yuk-fai Fong,Jean Hong, David Huffman, Navin Kartik, Joel Sobel, LiseVesterlund, Joel Watson, Emanuel Vespa, Jonathan Woon, theeditor, and four anonymous referees for their valuable commentsand suggestions. We also express our gratitude to the conferenceand seminar participants at the 3rd Haverford Meeting onBehavioral and Experimental Economics, the 2015 ESA NorthAmerican Meeting, the 12th International Conference of theWestern Economic Association International, HKUST, UCSD, theInstitute of Economics at Academia Sinica, the University ofArizona, the University of Pittsburgh, and the Kiel Institute ofEconomics for their helpful comments and suggestions. We thankAmanda Eng for excellent research assistance. This study issupported by a grant from the Research Grants Council of HongKong (Grant No. GRF-16502015). Replication materials can befound on Dataverse at: https://doi.org/10.7910/DVN/OWQNVF.

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