An Explanation of Committee Behavior in the US House of Representatives
Open Access
- Author:
- Thaler, Mark D
- Area of Honors:
- Political Science
- Degree:
- Bachelor of Arts
- Document Type:
- Thesis
- Thesis Supervisors:
- Zachary Donald Baumann, Thesis Supervisor
Dr. Gretchen G Casper, Thesis Honors Advisor - Keywords:
- Congress
legislative behavior
political science
House of Representatives - Abstract:
- This thesis addresses a fundamental question in Congressional politics, why some bills succeed where others fail. Previous work examines the committee stage as a single step in a larger legislative process. This approach, however, breaks a bill’s time in committee into three phases: action taken (was there a committee hearing or markup session), committee vote (did a vote occur), and committee report (was the bill issued to the House floor). The existing literature on what factors motivate lawmakers centers on the distributional, partisan, and informational models. My theory expands on previous research by combining variables from all three models to form a more complete picture of what issues cause legislators to act. Utilizing a logistic regression technique to analyze more than 5,000 bills over the past 18 years, I find that no single theory has variables that prove to be significant at every phase; however, all three models show significance at the stage of whether or not action is taken on a specific bill. This first hurdle in the committee process acts as a gatekeeping phase for the rest of a bill’s time in committee. Once action is taken, a bill is much more likely to receive a vote by the full committee and to be reported to the floor. These findings demonstrate that the committee process is more nuanced than previously shown and that all three of the major theories appear to have some impact on a bill’s passage through committee.