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Electoral Incentives and Legislative Organization: An Examination of Committee Autonomy in U.S. State Legislatures

Published online by Cambridge University Press:  25 January 2021

Tanya Bagashka  and
Jennifer Hayes Clark
Tanya Bagashka
Affiliation:
University of Houston, Houston, TX, USA
Jennifer Hayes Clark*
Affiliation:
University of Houston, Houston, TX, USA
*
Jennifer Hayes Clark, University of Houston, 447 Philip G. Hoffman Hall, Houston, TX 77204-3011, USA. Email: jclark10@uh.edu
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Abstract

We investigate the relationship between electoral institutions and committee autonomy in the context of U.S. state legislatures. The distributive theories of legislative organization suggest that electoral rules that make personal reputations more important motivate legislators to decentralize power and enhance committee autonomy to be able to target particularistic goods to their local constituencies. We argue that the distributive theories have direct implications for the relationship between candidate selection procedures and committee autonomy. The need to reach out to a large number of voters and to amass significant financial resources in states with more inclusive candidate selection procedures such as the open primary makes representatives more dependent on special interests, which is conducive to legislative particularism and committee autonomy. We take advantage of the great variation across the American states to investigate the effects of candidate selection procedures, a factor neglected in the previous literature. Examining 24 state legislatures from 1955 to 1995, we find that the inclusiveness of the selectorate, or the body electing candidates, has a significant effect on committee autonomy with more inclusive primary elections leading to more autonomous committee systems. By contrast, however, term limits were not a significant predictor of committee autonomy. This contributes to our understanding of how legislators amend institutional arrangements to achieve their electoral goals.

Keywords

legislative politicslegislative committeescomparative legislatureslegislative professionalismtime seriesquantitative methodsmethodology
Type
Research Article
Information
State Politics & Policy Quarterly , Volume 14 , Issue 3 , September 2014 , pp. 297 - 320
Copyright
Copyright © The Author(s) 2014

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