Partisanship,Consensus,and Committee-Floor Divergence

Abstract

Although some studies of Congress have employed aggregate-level ideological measures to characterize the outlier tendencies of congressional committees, such measures cannot reveal intracommittee variation in the propensity for disagreement between committees and the floor. In this analysis, we examine differences in voting behavior between members of the committee to which bills were initially referred and the House in the 96th and 104th Congresses. We demonstrate that significant variation occurs both within and among committees, and divergence is at times quite high among some committees not traditionally considered outliers. In the multivariate analysis, we discover that many vote-level factors significantly influence the degree of committee-floor divergence, and a considerable range of variation is evident in the level of divergence across committees. We also find that the number of committees exhibiting divergent behavior, the degree of this divergence, and the breakdown between the parties differs dramatically between the two periods.

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