Membership in Speaker's Task Forces

Abstract

Recent research on leadership in the U. S. House of Representatives has emphasized the development of a new "strategy of inclusion," by which party rank-and-file members are included to a much larger extent in the party decision-making process, and hence become more responsive to leadership pressures. This article explores the use of one such mechanism of inclusion, the Speaker's task force, utilized in the House during the late 1970s. A model is developed to test the process by which House members are selected to serve on task forces. Two major sets of motivations are seen as underlying the selection process: (1) the short-term goal by House leaders to maximize the probability that important legislation for which task forces are created will pass the House; and (2) the long-term goal of inclusion and the associated socialization of rank-and-file party members into partisanship and/or followership roles. Based on the analysis of task force membership lists, substantial empirical evidence is found for both motivations during the period under study, although variables representing the short-term goals of House leaders tend to dominate the task force selection process.