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 com mit-

tees. Thi s fact has been recognize d since the earl iest congres-

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

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

hibition, whilst Congress in its comm ittee rooms is Congre ss

at work” (1885, 79). State legislatures u se committ ees in sim i-

lar ways to Congress, yet their st ructure and op eration remain

subject to debate. Are leg islative committe es primarily organi-

zational tools to achieve ef ficiency of leg islative outcomes, or

are they designed to bias those outcomes in t he majority party’s

favor? In particular, how ideologically repre sentative of their

parent chambers are legislative standing com mittees? W hether

© 2019 Washington University in St. L ouis

554 Robert J. McGrath and Josh M. Ryan

partisan bia s exists in com mittees had b een a staple of legisla-

tive research for decad es (Adler and Lapinski 1997; Aldrich

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

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

the context of Americ an states in order to learn more about the

causal effects of party inf luence.

Previous resea rch has generally failed to find ev idence of

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

has not been well-su ited to discer ning local tr eatment effects of

majority-party statu s on committe e composition. Thus, we test

the extent to which com mittees represent their parent cha mbers

using a regression discontinuity design and leveraging a natu ral

experiment th at occurs in some st ates: tied chambers with no

majority party. We argue that both empir ical approaches allow

for direct compari sons between par ties having majority st atus to

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

ber majority.

These two empir ical approaches demonst rate that state leg-

islative majority partie s receive membersh ip “bonuses” on com-

mittees that t ranslate into signific ant ideological shifts away from

chamber medians. Our interpret ation thus conf licts with much

existing rese arch that fails to find that committ ees are statisti-

cal “outliers” and conf irms a key predi ction of how party power

might matter in leg islative organization.

This rese arch contributes to a long-stand ing debate in the

literature and doe s so in a substantively inform ative way. We

also examine the extent to which compositional bi as has down-

stream effect s on legislative agendas and pol icies (Anzia and

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

& McCubbins 1991; Maltzman 1998) by analyzing coa lition sizes

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

bers and chamber s with bare-majority-par ty control. In tied

chambers, coal ition sizes are sig nificantly larger, implying that

party effects are consequentia l for policy outcomes. Our f indings

are especially importa nt as state legislature s increasingly take

responsibilit y for legislating on such salient topics as religious

freedom, gun c ontrol, health policy, and voting rights and bal lot

access (Moncr ief and Squire 2013).

An additional advantage of exa mining com mittees at the

state level is the variation i n institutional and political contexts

across states. The recent rise i n the strength and influenc e 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 w ith ideologically extreme (partisa n) members. We thus

investigate whether more polari zed legislatu res allow the leader-

ship greater autonomy in creating ideologically extre me, nonrep-

resentative comm ittees (Aldrich and Rohde 1997; Rohde 1991).

Similarly, we examine whether the committ ee-stack ing effects

we find across st ates differ bas ed on levels of legislative profes-

sionalism. Interestingly, we find no evidence t hat either of these

two features change the relationship between majority st atus and

party effects in state comm ittees.

Previous attempts to as sess comm ittee repres entativeness

in the states have proven diff icult bec ause data lim itations have

driven most resea rch to focus on select set s of committee s in a

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

data set that measu res membership i n all standing c ommittee s in

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

vations than is typic al in congres sional studies or previous st ate

research. The d ata provide sufficient variation across d ifferent

contexts to explore how committe e composition changes as a re -

sult of partisan a nd institutional factors, and it w ill be usef ul to

other researcher s interested in questions of committ ee composi-

tion and state legislative be havior and outcomes.1

Theories of Committee Compo sition and Legislative Outcomes

In majoritarian legislatures, the median must be includ ed in

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

coalitions should lead to outc omes 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 a n efficie nt information gathering me chanism

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

zation suggest that whi le committe es are not representat ive of

their parent chambers in terms of p olicy-level expertis e, in most

cases thei r collective ideologic al preferences or dem and for dis-

tributional goods should not diverge much from the me dian’s

(Gilligan and Krehbiel 1990; Krehbiel 1990).4

America n legislatures have long been viewed as havi ng weak

parties compa red to their counter parts in parliamentary systems

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

in committ ee autonomy and the rise of polar ization, have led to

a reexamin ation of the extent to which comm ittees ser ve partisan