Title: Agents and Outliers: Testing Organization with
Committee Preference Expression
Authors: David Fortunato
Entrydate: 2009-06-22 12:56:05
Keywords: ideal point estimation, legislative organization,
theories of law making
Abstract: This paper offers a test of the three dominant
schools of thought on the organization of the U.S. House of
Representatives by revisiting the old question, Are committees
composed of preference outliers? This study takes a new approach
to the outlier question by explicitly assuming that the
distribution of preferences among committee members varies from
that of their colleagues on the floor. By making this assumption
I free myself of the obligation of measuring ideology and focus
instead on gauging the degree to which the committee crafted
agenda allows these preference differences to be expressed ---
or the degree to which committees are allowed to high jack the
policy making process. Evaluating the latitude that committees
take in setting the agenda allows me to assess not only the
degree to which committee agents shirk from their principal but
also the ability of the three dominant schools of thought on the
organization of the U.S. House to predict legislative behavior.
By generating jurisdiction specific estimates of agenda
manipulation I find strong support for party dominated models of
organization with a hierarchical ordering of agency in committee
members and evidence for more outlier committees than previous
research.
http://polmeth.wustl.edu/retrieve.php?id=908
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