Bypassing Congressional Committees: Parties, Panel Rosters, and Deliberative Processes

• Published date: 01 August 2016
• Author: William Bendix
• Date: 01 August 2016
• DOI: http://doi.org/10.1111/lsq.12125

WILLIAM BENDIX

Keene State College

Bypassing Congressional

Committees: Parties, Panel

Rosters, and Deliberative

Processes

Although scholars have examined committee rosters extensively, no study has

considered the relationship between the ideological composition of panels and their par-

ticipation in bill drafting. I thus ask: Which committees are frequently excluded from

legislative deliberations? Does the composition of committees affect the degree to which

they contribute to bill development? Using DW-NOMINATE data, I calculate ideologi-

cal scores for congressional panels between 1989 and 2010 to see whether certain

committees are routinely bypassed. I find that moderate panels, polarized panels, and

panels with moderate chairs are often excluded, while extreme committees in the

majoritydirection tend to retainbill-writing duties.

In a 2013 survey, the National Journal asked almost 200

“political insiders,” including legislators from both parties, about the

pros and cons of upholding regular order. Of those responding, 83%

said that it is better to maintain than bypass committee deliberations

for important, politically diff‌icult legislation. They provided many

reasons, among them:

Regular order is thebest way to try to achieve fuller buy-in.

Letting the body workits will is very much preferable to having every dissentingvoice

blame you personally for the final product’s every flaw.

Regular order is the Speaker’s best friend because it will shine a light on all the

problems in the bill.

The best policy passeson its merits—not by manipulating the process.

Regular order produces a product the majority can embrace, as opposed to one

the leaders must bludgeon members into supporting. (Catalini, Khan, and Bell

2013, 11)

LEGISLATIVE STUDIES QUARTERLY, 41, 3, August 2016 687

DOI: 10.1111/lsq.12125

V

C2016 Washington University in St. Louis

In other words, committee deliberations help the majority build

policy consensus and improve the quality of legislation. Yet, if main-

taining regular order provides important benef‌its to the majority,

why do its leaders frequently bypass committees and draft bills

behind closed doors?

The congressional literature widely acknowledges the decline of

formal deliberations in Congress, and it often cites the steady increase in

partisan polarization as the main contributor (e.g., Aldrich and Rohde

2000; Hanson 2014; Mann and Ornstein 2006; Sinclair 2006). As the

gap between Democrats and Republicans increases, the temptation to

exclude committees increases as well. Majority-party leaders can control

legislative content by simply omitting panel markups, thereby prevent-

ing minority members from shaping bill provisions at the pref‌loor stage.

But general-level increases in polarization do not explain why, within

the same Congress, some bills undergo committee deliberations while

others do not. What accounts for this variation in legislative procedures?

One possibility is that certain types of committees are especially

likely to be excluded from bill drafting. Research on congressional orga-

nization suggests that panel rosters affect the kinds of legislation that

committees produce (e.g., Adler and Lapinski 1997; Fenno 1973;

Krehbiel 1990, 1991). However, this research has provided conf‌licting

answers as to how committees are organized and what effect their com-

position has on bill content. On one side, partisan accounts contend that

the majority party controls panels by stacking them with members who

support the majority’s legislative agenda. In this way, committees pro-

duce bills that fulf‌ill majority-party goals (Cox and McCubbins 2005,

2007; Poole and Rosenthal 2007). On the other side, informational

accounts posit that committees ref‌lect the preferences of the parent

chamber and develop bills that fulf‌ill the policy interests of broad major-

ities, not simply the policy goals of panel members (Krehbiel 1990,

1991; Martorano 2006). A large body of research has produced impor-

tant evidence for and against each account, leaving the debate over panel

rosters unresolved. This debate persists in part because studies have

largely failed to examine the relationship between committee rosters and

deliberative procedures. Who sits on panels is an important question.

But we need to go a step further and see whether committees participate

in bill development as a result of their respective members.

To that end, I examine whether the exclusion of committees from

legislative deliberations is correlated with the ideological composition of

panel rosters. I collect DW-NOMINATE data on all panel members in

the House and Senate from 1989 to 2010 (the 101st to 111th Congress)

and develop multiple ideological measures for both permanent and select

688 William Bendix