Party Effects in State Legislative Committees

• Author: Robert J. McGrath,Josh M. Ryan
• DOI: http://doi.org/10.1111/lsq.12235
• Published date: 01 November 2019
• Date: 01 November 2019

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LEGISLATIVE STUDIES QUARTERLY, 44, 4, November 2019

DOI: 10.1111/lsq.12235

ROBERT J. MCGRATH

George Mason University

JOSH M. RYAN

Utah State University

Party Effects in State Legislative

Committees

Legislative scholars have theorized about the role of committees and

whether they are, or are not, tools of the majority party. We look to the states to

gain more empirical leverage on this question, using a regression discontinuity

approach and novel data from all state committees between 1996 and 2014. We

estimate that majority-party status produces an 8.5 percentage point bonus in

committee seats and a substantial ideological shift in the direction of the major-

ity party. Additionally, we leverage a surprisingly frequent, but as if random oc-

currence in state legislatures—tied chambers—to identify majority-party effects,

finding similar support for partisan committees. We also examine whether the ex-

tent of committee partisanship is conditional on party polarization or legislative

professionalism, but we find that it is not. Our results demonstrate that parties

create nonrepresentative committees across legislatures to pursue their outlying

policy preferences.

In both Congress and t he American state legisl atures, much

of the work of the body is completed within standing commit-

tees. This fact has been recognized since the earliest congres-

sional research by McCona chie (1898) and Wilson, who famously

observed that “Congress in session is Congress on public ex-

hibition, whilst Congress in its committee rooms is Congress

at work” (1885, 79). State legislatures use committees in simi-

lar ways to Congress, yet their structure and operation remain

subject to debate. Are legislative committees primarily organi-

zational tools to achieve efficiency of legislative outcomes, or

are they designed to bias those outcomes in the majority party’s

favor? In particular, how ideologically representative of their

parent chambers are legislative standing committees? Whether

© 2019 Washington University in St. L ouis

554Robert J. McGrath and Josh M. Ryan

partisan bias exists in committees had been a staple of legisla-

tive research for decades (Adler and Lapinski 1997; Aldrich

and Battista 2002; Cox and McCubbins 1993; Groseclose 1994;

Krehbiel 1991; Richman 2008), but we reinvestigate the topic in

the context of American states in order to learn more about the

causal effects of party inf luence.

Previous research has generally failed to find evidence of

partisan st acking on committee s. Yet, we argue that the literatu re

has not been well-suited to discerning local treatment effects of

majority-party status on committee composition. Thus, we test

the extent to which committees represent their parent chambers

using a regression discontinuity design and leveraging a natural

experiment that occurs in some states: tied chambers with no

majority party. We argue that both empirical approaches allow

for direct comparisons between parties having majority status to

those that, as if random ly, fall just short of commanding a cham-

ber majority.

These two empirical approaches demonstrate that state leg-

islative majority parties receive membership “bonuses” on com-

mittees that t ranslate into signific ant ideological shifts away from

chamber medians. Our interpretation thus conflicts with much

existing research that fails to find that committees are statisti-

cal “outliers” and confirms a key prediction of how party power

might matter in legislative organization.

This research contributes to a long-standing debate in the

literature and does so in a substantively informative way. We

also examine the extent to which compositional bias has down-

stream effects on legislative agendas and policies (Anzia and

Jackman 2012; Cox and McCubbins 1994; Jackman 2013; Kiewiet

& McCubbins 1991; Maltzman 1998) by analyzing coalition sizes

(a proxy measure of policy extremity) in tied, majority-less cham-

bers and chambers with bare-majority-party control. In tied

chambers, coalition sizes are significantly larger, implying that

party effects are consequential for policy outcomes. Our findings

are especially important as state legislatures increasingly take

responsibility for legislating on such salient topics as religious

freedom, gun control, health policy, and voting rights and ballot

access (Moncr ief and Squire 2013).

An additional advantage of examining committees at the

state level is the variation in institutional and political contexts

across states. The recent rise in the strength and influence of

party leaders in Congress (Curr y 2015; Koger and Lebo 2017; Lee

555Party Effects in State Legislative Committees

2009) might imply that leaders a re increasingly able to stack com-

mittees with ideologically extreme (partisan) members. We thus

investigate whether more polarized legislatures allow the leader-

ship greater autonomy in creating ideologically extreme, nonrep-

resentative committees (Aldrich and Rohde 1997; Rohde 1991).

Similarly, we examine whether the committee-stacking effects

we find across states differ based on levels of legislative profes-

sionalism. Interestingly, we find no evidence that either of these

two features change the relationship between majority st atus and

party effects in state comm ittees.

Previous attempts to assess committee representativeness

in the states have proven difficult because data limitations have

driven most research to focus on select sets of committees in a

few states and/or for a limited set of years. We introduce a new

data set that measures membership in all standing committees in

all state chambers from 1996 to 2014, resulting in far more obser-

vations than is typical in congressional studies or previous state

research. The data provide sufficient variation across different

contexts to explore how committee composition changes as a re-

sult of partisan and institutional factors, and it will be useful to

other researchers interested in questions of committee composi-

tion and state legislative behavior and outcomes.1

Theories of Committee Composition and Legislative Outcomes

In majoritarian legislatures, the median must be included in

any winni ng coalition (Black 1948), and competition betwe en two

coalitions should lead to outcomes situated at exactly the medi-

an’s ideal point (Downs 1957).2 Thus, stand ing committees would

seem to have to serve the ne eds of the median or pivotal member,

perhaps acting as an efficient information gathering mechanism

(Krehbiel 1991).3 Median-oriented theories of legislative organi-

zation suggest that while committees are not representative of

their parent chambers in terms of policy-level expertise, in most

cases their collective ideological preferences or demand for dis-

tributional goods should not diverge much from the median’s

(Gilligan and Krehbiel 1990; Krehbiel 1990).4

America n legislatures have long been viewed as havi ng weak

parties compared to their counter parts in parliamentary systems

(Carey 2007; Cox 2000), but recent trends, including a reduction

in committee autonomy and the rise of polarization, have led to

a reexamination of the extent to which committees serve partisan