Foundations of Legislative Organization and Committee Influence

Abstract

We revisit seemingly settled questions of legislative organization, specifying a more general, realistic, informational model than previously. While theorists, unlike empiricists, have commonly inferred that the floor lacks incentive to allow committee influence via gatekeeping, we find otherwise. By assuming that (1) legislators know more about the status quo than alternative proposals, and (2) committee authority is endogenously determined, we show for numerous realizations of floor-committee preference divergence that vesting committees with agenda-setting power under an open rule is preferred to either an open rule without agenda setting or a closed rule. Net of a closed rule, when committees can receive status quo payoffs from inaction, their sending a message, particularly with monopoly agenda setting, frequently transmits more information than under a pure open rule. As such, many situations exist where the floor will not want to use majoritarian mechanisms, such as discharge petitions or non-germane amendment authority, even if the committee chooses inaction. Although for different reasons than postulated by distributive theorists, gatekeeping and related features such as deference norms are sustainable equilibrium phenomena.