Jurisdiction, Institutional Structure, and Committee Representativeness

Abstract

I model the ideological representativeness of state legislative committees and their majority-party slates, testing hypotheses derived from extant models of committees and institutional choice. Committee representativeness and the representativeness of majority-party slates vary across states as a function of their effective number of parties and professionalization, but the jurisdiction of a committee has little discernible effect on representativeness of either. A possible mechanism is that competitive parties create committees that more closely adhere to the party ratio of the chamber, eliminating many possible outlying committees.