1987/04/01 by Keith Krehbiel, Douglas Rivers, Krehbiel, Keith +1
Economics, Econometrics and Finance · Social Sciences · #Committees #Congressional voting #Electoral Systems and Political Participation #Fiscal Policy and Economic Growth #Indexing #Legislators #Local Government Finance and Decentralization #Minimum wage #Political power #Upper houses #Voting #Wages
paper · doi:10.7907/gtmj4-26n11
openalex publication_date 1987/04/01 · openalex created_date 2025/10/10 · openalex updated_date 2026/07/15
A widely noted empirical regularity of congressional behavior is that standing committees exert disproportionate influence on congressional choices. The observed phenomenon has a number of labels-committee influence, committee power, and (from the parent chamber's perspective) deference to committees-and a large body of theoretical and empirical research has sought to determine when and why it exists. This paper takes as given only the weakest form the observation, namely, that committee power exists sometimes. It does not directly address the questions of when and why committee power exists, although much of the relevant literature is reviewed. Rather, it focuses on a prerequisite to the resolution of disputes about committee power. How can committee power be assessed empirically? Section I reviews three classes of explanations and identifies obstacles to convincing empirical tests of the accounts. Section II introduces an econometric approach for analyzing committee power. Section III applies the technique to a sequence of votes on minimum wage legislation in the Senate in 1977. Section IV extends the technique to multi-dimensional choice spaces. Section V is a discussion and summary.