Informative Committees and Legislative Performance in the American States

• Published date: 01 August 2015
• Author: Nick C.N. Lin
• DOI: http://doi.org/10.1111/lsq.12081
• Date: 01 August 2015

NICK C.N. LIN

Rice University

Informative Committees

and Legislative Performance

in the American States

The information theory of legislative organization suggests that legislative

committees are designed to provide their parent chamber with necessary information to

legislate. Despite empirical evidence for various aspects of the theory, we have limited

knowledge of committees’ influence on legislative outputs. I argue that informative

committees are more than information providers, that they also substantively impact

legislative outcomes. With supportive evidence from the US state legislatures, this

article shows that the presence of an informative committee system not only lowers the

number of bills introduced to the legislature but also enhances the chamber’s efficiency

in transforming legislative proposals into laws.

Introduction

What is the legislative consequence of having “informative

committees” in a legislature? The information theory of legislative

organization (hereafter information theory, e.g., Gilligan and Krehbiel

1987, 1989, 1990; Krehbiel 1991) argues that legislative committees are

designed to provide their parent chamber with the necessary information

and expertise to legislate. The chamber then relies on the unbiased policy

and political information conveyed by these committees to make

policies. However, while the literature has provided extensive empirical

tests of the information theory (e.g., Battista 2009; Hamm, Hedlund, and

Post 2011; Martorano 2006; Overby, Kazee, and Prince 2004; Prince

and Overby 2005), we have very little knowledge about the impact of

informative committees on the decision-making process as well as the

outputs. Beyond the role as information providers, how do informative

committees inf‌luence legislative outcomes? This article derives two

hypotheses on legislative performance from the information theory and

provides empirical tests for them.

LEGISLATIVE STUDIES QUARTERLY, 40, 3, August 2015 391

DOI: 10.1111 /lsq.12081

V

C2015 The Comparative Legislative Research Center of The University of Iowa

According to the information theory, since informative commit-

tees are ideologically representative of their parent body, the chamber

has little incentive to question the policy information provided by this

type of committee. The legislature not only grants them parliamentary

privileges but relies heavily on their expertise in the policymaking pro-

cess (Krehbiel 1991). From this perspective, informative committees

are depicted as eff‌icient institutions that help “smooth” the legislative

process in an effort- and cost-saving manner by collecting private

information and reducing policy uncertainties for their parent body.

The role of the legislature is simplif‌ied since all the “tough” work

(e.g., expertise cultivation) has been done by these informative

committees.

Such an argument has two essential implications of informative

committees’ potential impacts on legislative performance. First, it

implies that the presence of the informative committee system may

reduce the number of bill introductions by discouraging legislators from

introducing deviant and less prepared proposals. This is because, in a

system where bills from informative committees are more likely to reach

the f‌loor and to succeed than those from noninformative committees,

legislators concerned about passage of their bills as well as their legislative

records are motivated to be specialized in order to craft promising pro-

posals. Since specialization is costly, it ultimately dampens legislators’

incentive to introduce symbolic or less prepared bills.

Second, it also implies that informative committees may enhance a

chamber’s eff‌iciency by accelerating the whole legislative process. With

more such committees, a legislature is more capable of processing its

legislation because extra efforts are no longer needed from the chamber.

Consequently, we should expect to observe a positive relationship

between the number of informative committees in a chamber and its

ability to process bills. That is, a chamber which has more informative

committees should be more legislatively eff‌icient than those with fewer

informative committees.

While the inf‌luence of informative committees on legislative

outcomes has been surprisingly understudied, the goal of this article is to

call scholarly attention to the question as well as to provide initial empiri-

cal tests to the theoretical implications I proposed. With empirical

evidence from the US state legislatures, this study highlights the role of

informative committees in the legislative process and demonstrates that

a legislature with more informative committees is less productive regard-

ing the introduction of proposals but is more legislatively eff‌icient in

converting legislative inputs into laws.

392 Nick C.N. Lin