1
How Do Committee Assignments Facilitate Legislative Party
Power? Evidence from a Randomized Lottery in the Arkansas
State Legislature*
David E. Broockman
Graduate Student
Department of Political Science
University of California, Berkeley
210 Barrows Hall
Berkeley, CA 94720
[email protected]
Daniel M. Butler
Assistant Professor
Department of Political Science
Yale University
P.O. Box 208209
New Haven, CT 06520-8209
[email protected]
Abstract
We analyze a natural experiment in Arkansas’ state legislature to reexamine how the committee
assignment process facilitates legislative party power. Our evidence stands in contrast to the
widespread view that parties use their control over access to seats on desirable committees as
significant carrots and sticks to enforce party discipline. First, we find that the rewards legislators
reap from winning their preferred assignments appear meager. Moreover, party discipline
prevails at typical levels in Arkansas despite that parties do not control assignments there.
However, we argue that parties are responsible for stacking powerful committees with
dependable partisans in order to control what these committees do. Supporting our contention
that parties are nonetheless responsible for the overrepresentation of loyalists on such
committees, we leverage Arkansas’ unique institutional environment to show that party loyalists
do not disproportionately gravitate towards seats on such committees of their own accord.
*
The authors’ names appear in alphabetical order and both contributed equally to this paper. We thank seminar
participants at Yale, the 2012 meeting of the Midwest Political Science Association, and the 2011 State Politics and
Policy Conference as well as Jay Barth, Jim Battista, Keith Krehbiel, Lynda Powell, Eric Schickler, and Rob van
Houweling for helpful comments. Replication materials for this study will be posted at Yale’s Institution for Social
and Policy Studies data archive (http://isps.research.yale.edu). Funding and institutional support were provided by
Yale’s Institution for Social and Policy Studies. David Broockman also acknowledges the National Science
Foundation Graduate Research Fellowship Program for support. The authors thank Roger Potts, the Arkansas
Legislative Digest, and many staffers at the Arkansas state legislature for their help with acquiring this data.
Cameron Rotblat and Stacey Chen also provided excellent research assistance.
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As partisan polarization has steadily risen, the puzzle of why legislators vote so
frequently with their copartisans has met increasing attention. Scholars have offered a number of
compelling explanations for this pattern, including majority party control over the legislative
agenda (e.g., Anzia and Jackman 2012), primary competition (e.g., Burden 2004), member-tomember contributions (e.g., Cann 2008), and the role of informal party organizations (e.g.,
Masket 2007, 2009) among many.
Arguably chief among these accounts has been the view that parties exploit their control
over access to seats on desirable committees as a powerful tool to discipline their members (see
next section for review). Scholars’ reasoning for implicating the committee assignment process
in party loyalty is straightforward. Seats on powerful committees are widely thought to represent
a “considerable asset” for legislators (e.g., Fenno 1973; Mayhew 1974, p. 150). However, party
leaders generally control assignments to such committees, thus allowing them to use desirable
assignments as carrots (and sticks). Consistent with this view that party leaders reward loyalty
with plum assignments, party leaders have been found to consistently assign their most loyal
members to the most powerful committees (e.g., Cox and McCubbins 1993; Kanthak 2009; see
next section for review).
We cast doubt on this leading account of legislative party loyalty and provide evidence
for a different view of how parties exploit their control of the committee assignment process to
attain their policy goals. Specifically, we argue that the presence of party loyalists on powerful
committees better reflects party leaders’ desire to stack powerful committees with dependable
partisans in order to control the policies that committees produce. In other words, we provide
evidence that party leaders cannot use committee assignments as carrots and sticks to
meaningfully control what individual legislators do, but rather simply place loyal legislators on
powerful committees because they want those who share their preferences to control important
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committees.
Existing evidence has had difficulty differentiating between these competing accounts
because they make the same predictions in legislatures where party leaders make committee
assignments: loyal legislators will tend to fill powerful committees. To make matters more
difficult still, there is yet a third explanation that could explain this pattern: loyalists may selfselect on to the best committees for other reasons entirely.
We are able to provide new insights into how committees facilitate legislative party
power by conducting tests that isolate distinct predictions of these otherwise observationally
equivalent explanations. Our evidence comes from the Arkansas state legislature, where parties
play no role in making standing committee assignments; instead, legislators choose their own
assignments in the order of their seniority. Moreover, for legislators who have served the same
length of time, this seniority order is randomly determined by a lottery. Some members are thus
randomly assigned to have the opportunity to select significantly better assignments.
We first use this randomized lottery to test whether legislators who win their preferred
committee assignments gain appreciable benefits as a result. If certain committee seats are so
valuable to legislators that party leaders can use their control over assignments to form the basis
for party power, we would expect legislators to be considerably more likely to achieve their
electoral, policy, and political goals as a result of gaining their preferred assignments. However,
in stark contrast to previous, strictly observational work, the results from the lottery in Arkansas’
legislature indicates that legislators randomly assigned to have the opportunity to select more
desirable assignments are not significantly more likely to attain any of these goals. These results
suggest that the benefits individual legislators derive from winning their preferred committee
assignments are at most still too meager to form a plausible basis for party power.
We next examine whether party loyalty appears to prevail at significant levels in
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Arkansas. If party control over the committee assignment process forms a significant basis for
the enforcement of party discipline, we would expect party loyalty to be significantly less
prevalent in Arkansas since parties do not control the committee assignment process there.
However, we show that party voting prevails at quite typical levels in the Arkansas legislature
(relative to both Congress and other state legislatures) even though parties do not control the
assignment process there. This lends further support to our contention that party control of the
committee assignment process cannot explain why legislators vote so consistently with their
parties; legislative party power appears to persist at typical levels even when party leaders do not
control assignments.
Finally, however, we argue that the committee system nevertheless does play a
significant role in facilitating parties’ influence over legislative outcomes, albeit a different one
than scholars typically posit. Specifically, we argue that powerful committees are typically filled
with loyalists because parties stack these important institutions with dependable partisans.
Supporting this argument, we find that legislators on more powerful committees in Arkansas
actually tend to be slightly less loyal to their parties, suggesting that the presence of loyalists on
powerful committees cannot be attributed to mere self-selection. This finding thus grants novel
evidence that party leaders are responsible for filling committees with loyalists in legislatures
where they can. In light of our other evidence, however, it appears that parties do so largely
because they hope to control these committees, not because doing so allows them to
meaningfully influence how individual legislators vote.
In summary, data from the Arkansas legislature’s randomized committee assignment
process suggest that party control over the committee assignment process is not a meaningful
basis for the enforcement of legislative party discipline: the results from the lottery indicate that
the benefits legislators attain from winning their preferred assignments are meager at best, while
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party discipline still persists in Arkansas even though party leaders do not control committee
assignments there. However, loyal legislators also do not appear to gravitate towards seats on
these committees of their own accord. Rather, the data suggest that party loyalists tend to fill
powerful committees primarily because party leaders use these loyal legislators to control the
committees on which they are placed, and not because they use committees to discipline
legislators. Our findings thus support the view that scholars should look beyond the committee
assignment process to understand legislative party discipline, though not neglect the role party
loyalists embedded in powerful committees play in facilitating party power.
1. The Committee Assignment-Based Theory of Legislative Party Discipline
The foundation of the committee assignment-based theory of legislative party discipline
lies with scholars’ view that legislators gain appreciable advantages from serving on influential
committees. Fenno (1973), for example, first identified legislators’ three main goals – achieving
re-election, crafting good public policy, and securing prominence in their chamber – and argued
that committee memberships helped legislators achieve all of them.
Scholars since Fenno have consistently supported this view. Most prominently, scholars
find that legislators who receive their preferred committee assignments are more likely to win reelection (e.g., Mayhew 1974; Smith and Deering 1983; Maltzman 1997; Heberlig 2003 among
many).1 These assignments are theorized to help legislators win re-election for three main
reasons. First, legislators tend to sit on committees that concern policy issues relevant to their
districts and can thus strongly influence policy on issues that are particularly important to their
constituents, allowing them to claim credit for policy changes on issues that are particularly
salient to their constituents (Fenno 1973; Mayhew 1974; Weingast and Marshall 1988; Adler and
1
See also Bullock (1976), Shepsle (1978), Fowler, Douglass, and Clark (1980), Katz and Sala (1996), Crain and
Sullivan (1997), Milyo (1997), Maltzman (1997), Leighton and Lopez (2002), and Grimmer and Powell (2012).
6
Lapinski 1997). Second, seats on certain committees may also help legislators steer more
government money to their districts (Stewart and Groseclose 1999). Finally, interest groups give
more money to legislators assigned to committees with greater influence, especially over areas
relevant to them (Grier and Munger 1991, 1993; Romer and Snyder 1994; Dow, Endersby, and
Menifield 1998). Scholars also argue that certain committee assignments help legislators gain
prestige among colleagues as they vie for leadership positions (Manley 1970; Shepsle 1978;
Fenno 1973).
Membership on certain committees is thus widely argued to be instrumental in
legislators’ attempts to achieve their central goals. As Shepsle (1978, p. 35) sums up this
enduring conventional wisdom, “the seeking and obtaining of desirable committee assignments
[is] a matter of the highest priority” for legislators.
Existing Argument: Controlling Committee Assignments Help Parties Discipline Legislators
Building on the view that certain committee assignments provide legislators with
considerably greater benefits than others, scholars have subsequently argued that party leaders’
control over the committee assignment process represents a formidable tool for them to enforce
party discipline among the rank-and-file. Committee assignments are one of the few excludable
benefits party leaders appear to have at their disposal, and thus it is quite reasonable to implicate
them in these leaders’ quest to discipline their members given their apparent attendant rewards
(see, among many, Rohde and Shepsle 1973; Westefield 1974; Crook and Hibbing 1985; Coker
and Crain 1994; Sinclair 1995, p. 93; Stratmann 2000, p. 666; Snyder and Groseclose 2000, p.
194; Roberts and Smith 2003; Kanthak 2004). Consistent with this theory, Cox and McCubbins
(1993, p. 175) find that “loyalty to the party leadership is a statistically and substantively
important determinant of who gets what [committee] assignment”, leading them to conclude that
the committee assignment process makes legislators “more responsive to both the party’s
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leadership and goals” (p. 182). As Smith (2000, p. 62) similarly writes, ably reviewing scholars’
enduring view, “tangible incentives [parties use to enforce loyalty] come in many other forms,
although few are as important as committee assignments to most legislators.”
Though there are of course many other complementary explanations for the rise of
partisan polarization (e.g., Burden 2004; Cann 2008; Masket 2007, 2009), the view that partisan
control of the committee assignment process is central to legislative parties’ ability to discipline
their members has heretofore met little skepticism. Only one study of which we are aware –
Bullock (1972) – has produced evidence that more desirable assignments do not help freshmen
legislators attain their re-election goal.2 Likewise, Krehbiel (1993) stands apart from the
literature by raising doubts that parties play a role in causally influencing legislators’ voting
behavior, and we know of no studies that have cast doubt on the proposition that parties can use
committee assignments as significant inducements.
Endogeneity in the Party-Led Assignment Process
Though scholars have consistently claimed that (1) desirable committee assignments hold
crucial benefits for legislators and (2) can hence be used by party leaders to discipline their
members, previous attempts to estimate the benefits members accrue from their committee
assignments have faced several formidable empirical challenges.
First, estimating whether attaining desirable committee assignments helps legislators
attain their re-election, fundraising, and other goals has been challenging because we do not fully
understand why legislators are assigned to the committees that they are. Without full knowledge
of the criteria party leaders use to make assignments or why legislators request certain
2
On a related though distinct point, Kellerman and Shepsle (2009) find that Members of Congress with less
seniority on a committee are less likely to serve as committee chair and have fewer sponsored bills passed in the
jurisdiction of their committee as a result; however, they find no effect of this increased likelihood of service as a
committee chair on legislators’ re-election prospects.
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committees, we cannot adequately control for the factors that might influence their choices in
order to distinguish the effects of service on certain committees from pre-existing differences in
their members’ characteristics. If members’ expected success in winning re-election, fundraising,
or gaining influence correlates with the reasons different legislators end up on different
committees, comparing how members of different committees behave could thus mistake cause
and effect (and indeed, a number of studies conclude that such factors do influence legislators’
own choices as well as party leaders’ ultimate assignments; see Masters 1961; Shepsle 1978;
Hedlund and Patterson 1992; Hedlund et al. 2011).
Likewise, even with it clear that party leaders tend to assign their most loyal members to
the most powerful committees, it is difficult to distinguish between three competing explanations
for this pattern: party leaders may do so in order to incentivize party loyalty (the prevailing
explanation), in order to influence committee outcomes by filling the committees with their allies
(e.g., Hedlund et al. 2011),3 or simply because loyalists tend to most request these assignments.
Unfortunately, the widely-documented pattern that party loyalists tend to fill important
committees is observationally equivalent with all three of these alternatives when party leaders
control the assignment process.
In the next section we discuss the natural experiment in the Arkansas state legislature –
where a randomized lottery helps determine legislators’ committee assignments instead of party
leaders – that helps us shed light on these questions.
2. Research Design: The Randomized Committee Lottery in Arkansas
Each legislator in Arkansas’ two state legislative chambers has a seniority number, and
legislators choose their own standing committee assignments in the order of this seniority
number. This seniority number is first determined by how long a member has served in the
3
Cox and McCubbins (1993, p. 182) acknowledge this possibility as well.
9
chamber, with the lowest numbers (and thus the first choice of committee assignments) going to
those who have served longest. Crucially, however, the seniority number of legislators who have
served the same length of time is randomly determined: before their first term, legislators draw
numbers written on slips of paper out of a hat to determine their seniority within their freshman
class. This seniority number within their cohort stays with them for the remainder of their time in
the legislature.
The Independent Variable: Relative Rank
There is one slight complication in the committee assignment lottery: though legislators’
seniority is randomized across their entire cohort, committee assignments in the House are
allotted within four separate ‘caucus districts’ corresponding to the four congressional districts in
Arkansas. Because only a certain pre-set number of legislators from each caucus district can sit
on each committee, House members only compete with other legislators within their caucus
district for committee seats.
Table 1 illustrates how we operationalize the full randomization that occurs within these
chamber-cohort-caucus district groupings for estimating the effects of the quality of legislators’
committee assignments. In the Table we present a fictional 25-member Arkansas House
populated with legislators in their first or second term. Legislators in their first term have lower
seniority numbers than the legislators in their second term. However, seniority within each
cohort is randomly determined, thus what matters for the natural experiment is one’s seniority
rank within one’s chamber-cohort-caucus district group. The fictional legislator assigned the
seniority number 4 in Table 1 is therefore actually in a more advantageous position than the
legislator assigned a 3, because legislator 4 picks first in his caucus district, whereas legislator 3
picks only after legislator 2 because they are both in caucus district B.
[INSERT TABLE 1 HERE]
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The resulting Relative Rank metric we use as our main dependent variable is shown for
our fictional legislature in part (b) of Table 1. Legislators are arranged in groups by their cohort
and caucus district and then sorted by their randomized seniority number within these groups
because legislators pick their own assignments in direct succession within these groups. Thus,
for example, within caucus district A, legislator 4 would pick first, followed by legislator 6 and
11. Once the senior members finish picking, legislators 14, 15, 18, and 23 would then pick the
remainder of the assignments allocated to district A. Legislators 4, 6, and 11 serve as
counterfactuals for each other, as do legislators 14, 15, 18, and 23. Note that a legislator who has
no peers in her cohort and caucus district, such as legislator 13, cannot be assigned a relative
rank metric because there are no counterfactual observations to which to compare her and are
therefore dropped from the analysis.
The relative rank metric gives the percentile ranking of each legislator’s lottery number
relative to the legislators in their chamber-cohort-caucus district on a 0 to 1 scale. Legislators
assigned to 1 are the most senior in their chamber-cohort-caucus district group (and thus are in
the position to select the best committee assignment among those in their caucus district elected
at the same time) and legislators with a 0 are the least senior. A value of 0.5 would mean that the
legislator is at the 50th percentile and chooses in the middle of her cohort.
Some Committees Are More Desirable
We first verify that committees in Arkansas are meaningfully heterogeneous in their
desirability to legislators by examining the mean relative rank of legislators on different
legislative committees. Panel (a) of Figure 1 shows the average relative rank on the y-axis of the
committee members in each committee in the Arkansas House (The data comes from the
Arkansas Legislative Digest and describes all sessions held between 1977 and 2011).
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[INSERT FIGURE 1 HERE]
As is clear from Figure 1, legislators’ revealed preferences show that senior members
(who have greater latitude over their committee assignments) systematically prefer seats on some
committees over others. The Insurance and Commerce Committee, for example, appears to fill
up with the most senior members at the beginning of the committee selection process. On the
other hand, few members, it seems, would serve on the Public Transport or Aging Committees if
they had the choice to serve on others. Panel (b) of Figure 1 shows the same pattern of results for
the 35-member Senate.
To display this data another way, the scatter plot in Figure 2 shows the relationship
between the probability that legislators within each chamber-cohort-caucus district groupings
served on one of the three most desirable committees, given on the Y-axis, and their seniority
number in their chamber-cohort-caucus district group, given on the X-axis. The subgraphs in
Figure 2 correspond to the size of the chamber-cohort-caucus district group that each legislator
serves in. The lines show the linear best-fit for the data. As expected, the downward sloping lines
in Figure 2 indicate that legislators who are more senior within their chamber-cohort-caucus
district are more likely to serve on the more desirable committees (i.e. the committees preferred
by the longest-serving members). Moreover, the same top three committees consistently capture
legislators’ interest. The opposite pattern is observed for the least desirable committee (see
Figure A1 in the Appendix). Legislators randomized to higher (i.e., worse) seniority numbers
within their cohort end up on committees disproportionately filled with others who have been
similarly (randomly) disadvantaged.
[INSERT FIGURE 2 HERE]
Relative Rank as a Source of Randomized Variation in Legislators’ Assignments And Typical
Measures of Legislative Committee Quality
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Most studies on the benefits of committee assignments employ an implicit model that the
regard party leaders have for a legislator influences the quality of their committee assignments
(from that legislators’ perspective), which itself then leads to better outcomes for legislators that
party leaders hold in higher regard. In practice we do not have reliable measures for the value of
each committee assignment to each individual legislator, and instead researchers use rough
proxies such as whether a legislator sits on a ‘power committee’ or wins the assignments he or
she requested.4 Our data allows us to avoid the problem of having to approximate the value of the
committee for each legislator; instead we can directly measure the equivalent of the first stage of
the process, the degree to which legislators can get the assignments they want – in the typical
setup, the degree to which party leaders wish to reward them. In Arkansas, however, it is the
randomized lottery number and not the party leader’s regard for a legislator that determines
whether they win their preferred assignment. Because this lottery position is randomly
determined, we thus can measure the impact of legislators getting their preferred assignments
(the first stage of the process) directly on their outcomes. Though there are undoubtedly other
factors that influence whether legislators achieve their goals or which committees they choose,5
these factors will be uncorrelated with the assignment mechanism in our data – the randomized
lottery – whereas in traditional data they may be highly correlated with the assignment
mechanism – the strategic decisions of party leaders.
Relative Rank Substantially Predicts Committee Assignments. As a result of the seniority
lottery, not only do certain committees tend to fill with members with higher relative ranks, but,
as one would expect, members who have higher relative ranks also tend to systematically prefer
4
Legislators’ requests in typical legislatures are not necessarily reliable guides for their true preferences; few
freshmen in the US House, for example, immediately request a seat on the Ways and Means committee. We thus
cannot be confident that legislators actually ask for their most preferred committee assignments when they make
requests to party leaders, and indeed there is ample evidence that they do not (Hedlund, DeLeo, and Hedlund 2011).
5
E.g., legislators both in Arkansas and elsewhere may decide to stay on less ‘objectively’ desirable committees to
develop seniority, etc.
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seats on some committees over others. While each committee has a different potential value to
each legislator, as a lower bound on the effect of the lottery on the desirability of individual
legislators’ committee portfolios we find that some committees are systematically valued more
by legislators on average: legislators with better lottery numbers systematically gravitate to
different committee assignments.
Figure 3 presents the lowess regression lines for legislators’ relative rank and their
likelihood of being on either a top committee in their chamber (panel a) or the least desirable
committee in the chamber (panel b). As these graphs show, Relative Rank substantially predicts
the quality of legislators’ committee assignments. Fully sixty percent of the legislators who are
first in their cohort serve on one of the top committees in the legislature, whereas those lower in
the seniority rankings are about 15 percentage points less likely to serve on one of these
committees. (Recall that legislators with last pick by this metric still serve on top committees
because the least senior members of the most senior cohort still pick before any members of the
next most senior cohort.) Panel (b) shows that the effect for the least desirable committees is also
strong. Table A2 in the Appendix shows that these patterns are also highly statistically
significant.
The Appendix also presents a randomization check verifying that the relative rank is
independent from observable characteristics of legislators’ districts.
[INSERT FIGURE 3 HERE]
Data and Dependent Variables
Our analysis uses 2,173 legislator-term observations from the period 1977-2011.6 We
analyze sixteen dependent variables related to four aspects of legislators’ careers and goals:
6
There are 2,431 legislator-term observations during this period. However, only 2,173 of these observations are
used because some legislators were the only ones elected in their caucus district in their cohort, and thus were not
subject to any randomization, and because some committee assignment data was missing from 1977.
14
legislators’ electoral success, chamber leadership, policy productivity, and roll call voting.
For electoral goals, we used data from Carsey et al. (2007) and the Arkansas Secretary of
State’s website on whether each legislator won re-election, lost their primary re-election, lost
their general re-election, ran for or won higher office, retired, was opposed in the general
election, and was opposed in the primary election, as well as their general and primary election
vote shares. We collected the amount of campaign money that each incumbent raised from
www.followthemoney.org.
For chamber leadership, we collected data from the Arkansas Legislative Digest on
whether legislators served in party or official chamber leadership.
Policy productivity variables were only available for the years 2005-2008. For those
years we collected data from the Arkansas Legislative Digest on the number of bills legislators
filed and the number of bills they passed, a metric other scholars have used to measure policy
productivity and effectiveness (Kousser 2005).
Last, we used members’ roll call votes from 1997-2010 to construct three final dependent
variables about their voting and party loyalty: members’ extremity (based on their WNOMINATE score); the percentage of the time they vote with their party on roll calls where the
majority of Democrats opposed the majority of Republicans (Party Unity); and the percentage of
the time they vote with their party on roll calls where the majority of Democrats opposed the
majority of Republicans and their party lost the vote, i.e., when the majority of their party is
rolled (Party Unity (Losing Votes)).
3. Are Committee Assignments Valuable Enough To Discipline Legislators?
It is clear that legislators prefer seats on some committees over others, but are these more
desirable committee seats so valuable to legislators that they may be willing to change how they
vote in order to win them? Table 2 presents our estimates of the benefits legislators gain by
15
obtaining their preferred committee assignments. In all the regressions in the Table the
independent variable is Relative Rank, the scaled randomized seniority of legislators within their
chamber-cohort-caucus district that allows them to pick from a much larger and more desirable
set of committees. Because Relative Rank varies from 0 to 1, the coefficient on this variable
indicates the estimated difference between the most and least senior member within each cohort
– that is, between the cohort members who have the most and least choice in their assignments.
Recall as described in the previous section that these limiting cases are roughly analogous to the
situations in which a hypothetical party leader wished to reward a loyal legislator with the best
available committee assignment that more senior members had not already taken or,
alternatively, consign a disloyal one to the last remaining assignment after all others legislators’
wishes were granted.7
The dependent variables, each described in the previous section, are listed under each of
the headings in Table 2. For each outcome we present the results from a regression without any
fixed effects and the results from a regression with fixed effects for chamber-cohort-caucus
district (i.e., the groups within which the randomizations occur). The last two rows under each
dependent variable in Table 2 describe the number of observations and, when applicable, the
number of fixed effects. As discussed, these dependent variables correspond to the key goals that
scholars near-unanimously posit desirable committee assignments help legislators achieve.
Table 2 shows that legislators’ relative rank does not have a statistically significant effect
on any measures of their election outcomes. Legislators who have their pick of desirable
committee assignments are not meaningfully more likely to win their primary or general election
bids, raise campaign money, run for or win for higher office, deter opponents, or increase their
7
Legislators can be expected to choose their most preferred available choice since they choose for themselves (i.e.,
in a “serial dictatorship” arrangement; see Satterthwaite and Sonnenschein 1981).
16
vote share.8 They are also not noticeably more likely to be successful in achieving progressive
ambition goals. When we spoke with Arkansas legislators, they told us that because of termlimits in the state, progressive ambition is one of their most salient goals (see also Kousser
2005). However, as Table 2 shows, we fail to reject the null hypothesis that legislators who
choose their committee assignments first are just as likely to either run for or win higher office.
The variable we examine related to chamber leadership – whether the legislator is elected
to serve as a party leader in their chamber or a presiding office in their chamber – is also
insignificant. We also find that legislators are no more likely to write nor pass bills as a result of
their seniority.
Last, we find no appreciable effect of assignments on whether legislators vote with their
parties or vote more extremely. One interpretation of this effect is that legislators with better
committee assignments are no more likely to influence the agenda such that they support it;
another is that legislators do not vote differently simply by virtue of their assignments.9
In their totality, the results from Table 2 are clear and highly surprising in light of
decades of scholars’ conventional wisdom about the value of desirable committee assignments.
Across all thirty-six estimates for the eighteen dependent variables, we find no statistically
significant effects for a legislators’ seniority on the outcomes of interest we identified (with a
generous threshold of p < 0.10). Further, our estimates are based on a large number of
observations and have substantively small standard errors. For example, the 95% confidence
8
This finding is consistent with qualitative evidence from Hall (1996), who finds that lawmakers generally do not
see committee participation as an especially electorally rewarding activity.
9
This finding also rules out an alternative explanation for the null findings, namely that legislators do receive
electoral benefits from more attractive committee assignments but use this additional ‘political capital’ to vote more
extremely. In this way, committee membership might grant members additional leeway to vote against their
constituents’ preferences (Cain, Ferejohn, Fiorina 1987, p. 87). However, the results show that legislators with more
attractive committee assignments are neither more likely to be extreme nor more likely to vote with their party.
Likewise, the consistent null results across the large number of variables we tested suggests that legislators do not
use ‘political capital’ from their committee assignments in order to help them achieve other goals.
17
interval for the estimate of the decreased probability that a legislator loses a general election
because of their seniority extends only to 1.2 percentage points. In summary, the benefits
legislators may reap from having an upper hand in the committee assignment process appear to
be at best meager.
These results directly speak to whether party leaders can use the committee assignment
process to form the basis for the enforcement of party discipline (see review in previous section).
Though legislators clearly do prefer some assignments to others and thus see some non-zero
value in winning better assignments, we found that these benefits appear to be at most quite
small. On the other hand, legislators face quite significant electoral costs for voting out of step
with their constituents (e.g., Fiorina 1974; Canes-Wrone, Brady, and Cogan 2002; Masket and
Greene 2011). Given the substantial electoral costs legislators are thought to face for voting out
of step with their constituents, our evidence thus suggests that the committee assignment process
is unlikely to plausibly form an important basis for the formidable power over legislators’ roll
call votes scholars typically posit that legislative parties exercise.
4. Party Power in Arkansas Persists Despite Parties’ Lack of Control Over Assignments
In this section we add an additional empirical leg to our case that observed patterns of
party power in most legislatures cannot be attributed to party leaders’ control over the committee
assignment process. Quite simply, if we are correct that party control of the committee
assignment process cannot explain why legislators vote with their parties so often, we would
expect legislators to do so at similar rates in Arkansas as elsewhere because parties do not
control assignments there. On the other hand, if party control over the committee assignment
process represents the formidable disciplinary instrument that most scholars posit, we should
expect to see conventional barometers of party power significantly fall in Arkansas’ unique
institutional environment. In this section we further bolster our argument by documenting that
18
high levels of party voting and power do prevail in Arkansas despite the fact that Arkansan
legislative party leaders do not control the committee assignment process.
We employ the method proposed by Snyder and Groseclose (2000) to evaluate the extent
of party loyalty in Arkansas. (There are legitimate criticisms to be made of this procedure
[Krehbiel 2003; McCarty, Poole, and Rosenthal 2001]. We take no position about the best way to
measure party influence, but merely hope to see whether applying an identical procedure in
Arkansas and will yield similar results as in other legislatures.) This method first estimates
legislators’ ideology from their votes on bills that passed or failed by large margins and thus
where party pressure is unlikely to have been necessary. The procedure then uses these estimates
and a dummy variable for the legislator’s party to predict legislators’ position on close roll call
votes. The dummy variable thus estimates whether legislators voted differently than their
ideology alone would have predicted. In Snyder and Groseclose’s formulation, the statistical
significance of the dummy variable registers party influence, and the magnitude of the dummy
indicates the strength of this influence.
We created these same two summary outcomes for the Arkansas legislature – the
percentage of the time that the coefficient of the party influence dummy was significant, and the
average absolute value of this dummy (first calculated in each session, then averaged across
sessions) – to facilitate comparisons with the results Snyder and Groseclose generated for
Congress. For this analysis, we use the roll call votes taken in the Arkansas House10 during
legislative sessions between 1997 and 2011.
[INSERT TABLE 3 HERE]
Table 3 compares our results from the Arkansas House with Snyder and Groseclose’s
10
Snyder and Groseclose (2000) note that this procedure is vulnerable to measurement error in small legislative
chambers. As the Arkansas Senate has only 35 members, and thus is very prone to these concerns, we focus on the
100-member Arkansas House.
19
results from final passage votes in the US House and Senate. The first row shows that the
dummy for party influence was significant on 41% of the votes we analyzed, versus the 39% of
the time that Snyder and Groseclose find for the House and Senate (pooled). Likewise, we find
that the absolute value of the magnitude of this influence is similar as well – 0.32 in Arkansas
and 0.36 in the US House and Senate. Party loyalty thus appears to prevail at substantial levels in
Arkansas, and similar levels to those seen in Congress.
Further evidence on this point has recently been tendered by Anzia and Jackman (2012),
who calculate average majority party roll rates in all 99 state legislative chambers in the United
States. On this metric, another key barometer of party power (e.g., Cox and McCubbins 2005),
Anzia and Jackman calculate that both of Arkansas’ chambers are typical of other state
legislatures, occupying positions solidly in the middle of the pack (see Figure A2).
In two separate comparisons, Arkansas thus appears quite typical in terms of ostensible
party power. Precisely because party leaders in Arkansas do not make committee assignments,
these results thus further support our contention that parties’ control of the committee assignment
process is unlikely to form an important basis for party power. Not only do the benefits from
committees appear meager, but even when parties do not control the assignment process
legislators appear to vote with their parties and party majorities appear to avoid being rolled at
similar rates.
5. Why Do Party Loyalists Fill Powerful Committees In Other Legislatures?
Given that desirable committee assignments do not appear to be lucrative enough to
induce party loyalty from legislators, why do party loyalists tend to fill the most powerful
legislative committees (e.g., Cox and McCubbins 1993; Kanthak 2004; Hedlund et al. 2011)?
We argue that party leaders stack powerful committees with loyalists because they expect these
legislators to remain faithful to the party’s agenda as they cast important votes in these key
20
institutions. However, the data we have shown so far does not directly imply this explanation as
there is yet a third possibility that might explain the correlation between a legislator’s party
loyalty and her committee quality: the most loyal party members may simply tend to self-select
on to the most powerful committees for other reasons entirely. In this section we further exploit
the unique institutional environment in Arkansas to evaluate this possibility.
The Contested Role of Self-Selection
Even though party leaders control the assignment process in Congress, most legislators
still win their first choice assignment, meaning that the presence of loyalists on powerful
committees could simply be a result of loyal legislators’ own desire to sit on these committees
(e.g., Gertzog 1976; Smith and Deering 1984). Party loyalists may tend to choose seats on the
most powerful committees because these committees tend to be policy-oriented (Stewart and
Groseclose 1999): if legislators from safe districts disproportionately focus on policymaking
(instead of constituency service) (e.g., Grimmer 2012), these relatively more extreme legislators
might thus also tend to dominate influential committees due to self-selection.
On the other hand, there are also reasons to expect that if party leaders played no role in
making assignments, committees might be composed of a representative assortment of members,
or even of less loyal members. Krehbiel (1991) argues, for example, that committees are not
composed of preferences outliers because legislators prefer for committees to be representative
of their parent chamber for informational purposes; these concerns might be particularly salient
for especially influential committees. Likewise, Weingast and Marshall (1988) might predict that
committees should be composed of more moderate members: if legislators with more
idiosyncratic preferences (e.g., legislators who support redirecting money towards the most rural
counties) also tend to desire seats on less popular committees (e.g., Agriculture), this might
produce a correspondence between a legislator’s presence on committees with high universal
21
desirability and their likelihood of having preferences similar to other members.
The Arkansas state legislature represents a unique opportunity to understand how
legislators arrange themselves on committees when party leaders play no role in making
assignments.11
In the Absence of Party Leader Control, Loyalists Do Not Fill Powerful Committees
To understand what kinds of legislators would fill powerful committees without party
leaders’ interposition in the assignment process (and thus whether self-selection alone could
explain the pattern that loyalists tend to fill powerful committees), we replicate the existing
literature’s most common approach (e.g., Cox and McCubbins 1993): comparing the party
loyalty of legislators who sit on one of the three most desirable committees in each chamber to
those who do not.12 We identified these committees by the procedure described previously and
shown in Figure 1: these three committees in each chamber are filled with the most senior
legislators, implying that legislators typically find seats on these committees most desirable.
To evaluate what kinds of committees the most loyal legislators tend to choose, we
regress the same dependent variables dealing with how legislators vote on roll calls as shown in
Table 2 on a dummy variable for whether the legislator sits on one of these top three committees.
For the sake of comparability, we limit the sample to legislators on whom we also had seniority
data (though the results still hold when including all legislators). These results are shown in
Table 4. For consistency with Table 2, we estimate specifications with and without the fixed
effects for chamber-cohort-caucus district groups.
11
Though Cox and McCubbins (1993, p. 43-44) dismiss the possibility that self-selection can explain why loyalists
fill powerful committees with evidence from transfer requests, it is difficult to understand what committees
legislators truly prefer because they have incentives to act strategically when submitting their assignment requests;
see footnote 4. However, legislators in Arkansas can be expected to choose their most preferred available choice
since they choose for themselves (see Satterthwaite and Sonnenschein 1981).
12
In Arkansas these are the House Revenue and Taxes Committee, Insurance and Commerce Committee, and
Health, Welfare and labor Committee, and the Senate Insurance and Commerce, State Agencies, and Health and
Welfare Committees.
22
[INSERT TABLE 4 HERE]
A purely self-selection based account of the presence of party loyalists on powerful
committees in other legislators would predict that loyal legislators would tend to fill the most
desirable committees in Arkansas as well. However, Table 4 shows that we can confidently
reject this account: in fact, most of the specifications are statistically significant in the opposite
direction, indicating that disloyal legislators fill the most attractive committees in this setting
where party leaders play no role in the assignment process. Legislators who sit on the three most
desirable committees are around 2 percentage points less likely to vote with the majority of their
fellow party members, and about 3 percentage points less likely to do so on the crucial votes
where the majority of their fellow party members are ‘rolled’ (by either voting against a motion
that passes or voting for a motion that fails). Members of these powerful committees also appear
to be less extreme than their colleagues, with W-NOMINATE scores closer to the median
legislator.13
That powerful committees tend to be composed of more moderate, less party-loyal
legislators in Arkansas, where party leaders play no role in the assignment process, lends
evidence to the assertion that leaders do play a crucial role in shaping the ideological
composition of committees elsewhere. We know from evidence in the previous subsection that
there is no direct causal effect of legislators sitting on these committees on their party loyalty;
rather, the patterns we do find in Arkansas must be due to self-selection. However, these patterns
of self-selection go in the exact opposite direction of what scholars reliably find in other
legislatures (e.g., Cox and McCubbins 1993; Kanthak 2009), suggesting that parties do appear to
13
Though our data do not allow us to firmly determine the mechanism for this finding, we suspect that a simple
intuition might explain this result: legislators who are more moderate in their voting and who desire to sit on more
‘in-demand’ committees both, by definition, are ‘more similar’ to the typical legislator in their behavior than
legislators who desire seats on less popular committees or tend to vote against their colleagues. In other words, both
of these measures capture a degree of legislators’ ‘typicality’. However, though the mechanism for this intriguing
result is not material to our main findings, we believe more research should investigate its roots.
23
play a key role in filling key committees with their allies in legislatures where they can.
Consistent with this theory, Manley (1970), Hinckley (1983), and Sinclair (1995) all document in
qualitative interviews and from participant-observation that party leaders diligently consider
legislators’ record of party loyalty when making assignments.
However, our data suggest that this evidence should be interpreted differently than
scholars typically do. Specifically, the evidence from Arkansas’ unique institutional environment
suggests that party leaders’ careful attention to their members’ loyalty during the committee
assignment process is best explained by their desire to control committees by stacking them with
loyal legislators, not a quest to generate incentives for legislators to remain loyal. As was starkly
illustrated with House Speaker John Boehner’s 2011 placement of staunch conservative House
members Jeb Hensarling, Dave Camp, and Fred Upton on the so-called ‘budget supercommittee’
that was charged with reducing the federal debt, legislative parties recognize that loyal partisans
on key committees play a key role in maintaining control over the agenda and shaping legislation
– but it is clear that Boehner primarily placed Hensarling, Camp, and Upton on this key
committee in order to better control what it did, not to meaningfully incent other members.
6. External Validity: Committees Wield Substantial Powers in Arkansas
One may well wonder whether results from one state’s legislature could meaningfully
speak to general theories of legislative organization. Are committees and parties in the Arkansas
legislature similar enough to those in other legislatures that scholars should take interest in these
results, or is Arkansas so different that the results shed little generalizable light? We argue for
the external validity of our results by briefly discussing how the committee and party system in
Arkansas shares the key institutional details central to the theories of committees with which we
engage.
First, as discussed in section 4, party voting prevails in Arkansas at levels similar to
24
Congress and in other state legislatures (Anzia and Jackman 2012). On the other hand, despite
these similarities, state legislatures in general do tend to witness partisan stacking of powerful
committees (Hedlund et al. 2011); Arkansas does genuinely stand apart from the pack when it
comes to the disproportionate presence of moderates on its powerful committees.
More importantly, the features that form the basis for committee power in legislative
theories exist in Arkansas. Committees have sole jurisdiction over large policy areas, supervise
regulatory agencies, are responsible for doling out substantial sums of state money in their areas
of jurisdiction, and are de facto veto points for legislation in these areas. Discharge petitions
circumventing committee veto power are exceedingly rare in Arkansas, with legislators and staff
we spoke with only able to recall two occasions when a discharge petition has been successful in
the last two decades.
Legislators in Arkansas we interviewed also described procedures by which legislators
can kill legislation they do not support in their committees – for example, by leaving the room
during the vote (because nays and absences count identically). When a committee fails to pass a
bill, legislators in Arkansas consider it “dead.”
Likewise, committees in Arkansas undertake significant regulatory oversight and help
appropriate the state’s $4.4 billion annual budget, which include a number of opportunities for
members to steer money towards their districts.
The most important institutional features in other legislatures are present in Arkansas too.
We therefore believe that these results are valuable for better understanding outcomes seen
elsewhere.
7. Discussion
Understanding if and how party leaders succeed in passing policies more extreme than
what the median legislator prefers is a longstanding and significant question about legislatures
25
(e.g., Krehbiel 1993; Cox and McCubbins 1993) that continues to grow in importance as partisan
polarization continues to rise (e.g., Layman, Carsey, and Horowitz 2006; Burden and Frisby
2004).
Scholars’ chief explanation for party control has long been that parties exploit their
control of the committee assignment process to discipline rank-and-file members to be “more
responsive to both the party’s leadership and goals” (Cox and McCubbins 1993, p. 182):
desirable committee assignments are hypothesized to hold considerable benefits for legislators,
and legislative leaders are thus believed to use the excludable nature of these benefits as carrots
(and sticks) for enforcing party discipline (e.g., Shepsle 1978, p. 35; Smith 2000, p. 62;
Stratmann 2000, p. 666; Snyder and Groseclose 2000, p. 194; see section 1 for review).
However, existing studies have been unable to distinguish these theories from
observationally equivalent alternatives due to potentially severe omitted variable bias that arises
from the unobservable criteria that leaders use to make assignments and the possibility of
systematic member self-selection to desirable committees. We overcame these challenges with
data from the Arkansas legislature, where party leaders play no role in the committee assignment
process and where a randomized lottery allowed us to estimate the causal effect of legislators’
membership on their desired committees.
The results first showed that Arkansas state legislators are not significantly more likely to
succeed in their re-election campaigns, raise money, influence policy, become leaders in their
chambers, or vote differently by virtue of their assignments. Moreover, the estimates’ confidence
intervals rule out even substantively small effects. This finding suggests that the benefits
legislators can accrue from winning their preferred assignments are too small to plausibly form
the basis of party power when considered relative to the significant electoral costs legislators
face for voting out of step with their constituents (e.g., Fiorina 1974; Canes-Wrone, Brady, and
26
Cogan 2002). Bolstering this argument, we also found that canonical barometers of party power
register at typical levels in Arkansas’ legislature even though parties do not control the Arkansas
legislatures’ committee assignment process.
To be clear, our data do not imply that committees have no value to legislators – the
legislators clearly have some degree of preference over committees, suggesting they perceive at
least a small advantage in sitting on some committees over others (see Figures 1 and 2).
However, the benefits from these committees seem at most far too small to form a significant
foundation for a workable theory of party power. Likewise, the traditional hallmarks of
legislative party power appear to prevail in Arkansas at typical levels despite the fact that party
leaders do not control the assignment process there.
Yet just because committee assignments do not appear to serve as meaningful
disciplinary instruments does not mean parties do not use them to accomplish their collective
goals (Cox and McCubbins 1993, 2005). Consistent with the view that party leaders exploit
legislative institutions to help accomplish such shared goals, we also produced new evidence that
parties do appear to stack committees with legislators who they expect to remain loyal in
legislatures where they can. While this pattern cannot be distinguished from legislators’ own
self-selection in other legislatures, we demonstrated that when party leaders do not make
assignments the most important committees are actually filled with slightly less loyal legislators.
Consistent with qualitative evidence other scholars have produced, the results thus lend novel
support to the argument that party leaders are responsible for the presence of their loyalists on
powerful committees; however, they appear to do so largely because they wish loyalists to
control important committees, not because placing loyalists on important committees allows
party leaders to mint new loyalists.
How parties succeed in “usurping” (Cox and McCubbins 1993) the power of their
27
legislatures to pass their preferred policies and control the agenda is an (increasingly) important
question. Scholars have developed a number of compelling new accounts for this pattern,
including, among others, the role of legislators’ personal preferences (van Houweling 2012), the
role of campaign contributions (e.g., Cann 2008), and the role of informal party organizations
(Masket 2007, 2009). Our findings suggest that we should look beyond the committee
assignment process to explanations like these to understand how parties exercise power.14
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Table 1. Hypothetical Example of how Relative Rank is computed
(a)
(b)
Grouped by Cohort and Seniority
Grouped by Cohort Caucus District, and Seniority
Term
Random
Caucus
Term
Random
Caucus
Relative
Number Seniority
District
Number
Seniority District
Rank
(Cohort)
(Cohort)
2
1
D
2
4
A
1
2
2
B
2
6
A
.5
2
3
B
2
11
A
0
2
4
A
2
2
B
1
2
5
B
2
3
B
.67
2
6
A
2
5
B
.33
2
7
C
2
9
B
0
2
8
D
2
7
C
1
2
9
B
2
10
C
0
2
10
C
2
1
D
1
2
11
A
2
8
D
0
1
12
D
1
14
A
1
1
13
B
1
15
A
.67
1
14
A
1
18
A
.33
1
15
A
1
23
A
0
1
16
C
1
13
B
1
17
C
1
16
C
1
1
18
A
1
17
C
.67
1
19
D
1
20
C
.33
1
20
C
1
25
C
0
1
21
D
1
12
D
1
1
22
D
1
19
D
.75
1
23
A
1
21
D
.5
1
24
D
1
22
D
.25
1
25
C
1
24
D
0
Notes: This table illustrates how relative rank is calculated using a hypothetical 25-member
Arkansas House populated with legislators who were either just elected or are serving their
second term.
35
Table 2. Effect of Seniority within Cohort (Relative Rank) on Outcomes of Interest (OLS)
Electoral Goals
Coeff.
Std.
Error
# Obs.
# F.E.
Coeff.
Std.
Error
# Obs.
# F.E.
Coeff.
Std.
Error
# Obs.
# F.E.
Win Reelection
F.E.
No F.E.
0.012
0.026
(0.021)
(0.029)
1,875
433
1,875
-
Lose Primary
F.E.
No F.E.
-0.001
-0.004
(0.010)
(0.010)
1,875
433
1,875
-
Lose General
F.E.
No F.E.
0.001
0.001
(0.006)
(0.006)
1,875
433
1,875
-
Opposed in General
Opposed in Primary
Vote Share in General
F.E.
0.014
(0.019)
No F.E.
0.010
(0.020)
F.E.
0.005
(0.020)
No F.E.
0.000
(0.021)
F.E.
-0.012
(0.031)
No F.E.
-0.016
(0.020)
1,875
433
1,875
-
1,875
433
1,875
-
207
133
207
-
Chamber Goal
Serve as Chamber
Leader
F.E.
No F.E.
-0.002
-0.002
(0.013)
(0.013)
2,084
441
2,084
-
Run for Higher
Office
F.E.
No F.E.
-0.002
-0.002
(0.012) (0.012)
2,084
441
2,084
-
Vote Share in
Primary
F.E.
No F.E.
-0.026
-0.006
(0.038) (0.022)
223
163
223
-
Policy Productivity Goals
Number of Bills Filed
Number of Bills Passed
F.E.
-2.83
(1.85)
No F.E.
-2.54
(2.19)
F.E.
-0.74
(1.25)
No F.E.
-0.56
(1.51)
264
30
264
-
264
30
264
-
Party Unity
F.E.
No F.E.
0.002
0.001
(0.013) (0.014)
1,043
133
1,043
-
Win Higher Office
Retire
F.E.
0.008
(0.009)
No F.E.
0.008
(0.009)
F.E.
-0.009
(0.018)
No F.E.
-0.018
(0.023)
2,084
441
2,084
-
1,875
433
1,875
-
Money Raised
F.E.
No F.E.
-9164
-2895
(6512)
(6327)
453
61
453
-
Roll Call Voting
Party Unity
(Losing Votes)
F.E.
No F.E.
-0.005
-0.003
(0.022)
(0.024)
1,001
133
1,001
Extremity
(W-Nominate)
F.E.
No F.E.
-0.005
-0.005
(0.032)
(0.032)
1,040
133
1,040
-
Notes: Fixed effects refer to the groups in which the randomization takes place (i.e. for each chamber-cohort-caucus district group).
The independent variable for all regressions, relative rank, is the scaled random seniority rank of each legislator within their caucus
district. The variable ranges from 0 to 1, with legislators assigned to 1 as the most senior. Coefficients represent the estimated effects
of being the most senior member instead of the least senior member. No outcomes are significant at the 0.10 level. Ns differ in
regressions with dependent variables for which data is not available for all years.
Table 3. Comparing Party Influence In Arkansas And The US Congress
US Senate and US House (from Snyder an
Arkansas House
Groseclose 2000)
% Coefficients
Significant at 0.05
41%
39%
Average Absolute
Value of Party
Influence Dummy
0.32
0.36
Number of Members
100
100 & 435
Number of Sessions
8
44
Notes: See text for description of the Snyder and Groseclose (2000) method for calculating pa
influence. Results calculated for votes on legislations’ final passage.
37
Table 4. Association Between Committee Attractiveness and Party Loyalty (OLS)
Party Unity
Extremity
Dependent Variable
Party Unity
(Losing Votes)
(W-Nominate)
Fixed Effects Used?
Yes
No
Yes
No
Yes
No
Dummy for On a Top -0.027** -0.017^ -0.038*
-0.027^
3 Committee
-0.045*
-0.018
(0.009)
(0.009)
(0.016)
(0.016)
(0.024)
(0.023)
Constant
0.764**
0.563**
0.449***
0.436***
(0.006)
(0.011)
(0.016)
(0.016)
N
1,043
1,043
1,001
1,001
1,040
1,040
# of Fixed Effects
133
133
133
Notes: Fixed effects refer to the groups in which the randomization takes place (i.e. for each
chamber-cohort-caucus district group). ^Sig. at the 0.10 level (two-tailed), *Sig. at the 0.05 level
(two-tailed), **Sig. at the 0.01 level (two-tailed).
38
Figure 1. Average Seniority Scores on House and Senate Committees
Notes: The graph gives the average seniority score (with a 95 percent confidence interval) of the
members serving on the standing committees in the Arkansas state House (in panel a) and Senate
(b) from the period 1977-2011. The seniority scores range from 1 to 100 for the House and from
1 to 35 for the Senate.
39
Figure 2. Probability of Being on a Top Committee, by Seniority Number (Sub-graphs by
cohort size)
Notes: Each sub-graph corresponds to the size of the chamber-cohort-caucus district group that
each legislator serves in. Each dot represents the percent of people with that lottery number in
their cohort that serves on one of the top committees in the chamber.
40
Figure 3. Probability of Being on Best and Worst Committees, by Relative Lottery Number
Notes: This presents the locally weighted regression (lowess) to estimate the predicted
probability that a legislator serves on one of the top committees (panel a) and the least desirable
committee (panel b) in the chamber based on their relative rank in their chamber-cohort-caucus
district group.
41
Appendix for “How Do Committee Assignments Facilitate Majority Party Control?
Evidence from the Seniority Lottery in the Arkansas State Legislature”
Randomization Check: Balance in Covariates Across Groups
We conducted a randomization using covariates of interest available from the US Census
were constant across our randomized treatment. Specifically, we tested whether legislators who
were assigned higher seniority were more likely to come from districts that had different median
ages, median household incomes, population percentage black, Asian, and Hispanic, and
population percent rural. We also checked the legislator’s partisanship.
Unfortunately, the US Census only began providing this legislative district level data
beginning with the 2000 Census. However, the seniority selection process has remained the same
throughout the past several decades so we do not expect that our results would have differed if
we had access to such data for previous decades.
Table A1. Balance of Covariates Across Relative Rank and Seniority Score
Independent Variables
Dependent Variable: Relative
Dependent Variable:
Rank
Absolute Seniority Rank
Legislator is a Democrat
0.023
-4.732
(0.031)
(2.845)
Median Age
-0.001
-0.018
(0.004)
(0.322)
Median Household Income (in
0.007
0.258
$10,000s)
(0.019)
(1.699)
Black Percent
-0.128
-4.161
(0.087)
(7.834)
Asian Percent
-1.281
-32.54
(1.485)
(133.4)
Hispanic Percent
-0.383
-6.980
(0.256)
(22.98)
Rural Percent
-0.022
-5.063
(0.065)
(5.811)
Constant
0.542**
48.63**
(0.175)
(15.78)
2
R
.0120
.0094
N
673
673
Notes: In the first column, the dependent variable is the scaled random seniority rank of each
legislator within their caucus district. The variable ranges from 0 to 1, with legislators assigned
to 1 as the most senior. In the second column, dependent variable is the seniority rank of each
legislator within their caucus district. The variable ranges from 1 to 100 in the House and 1 to 35
in the Senate, with legislators assigned to 1 as the most senior. No results are significant at the
0.10 level.
The two columns in Table A1 display the results and show that both the Relative Rank
metric and legislators’ seniority numbers themselves are independent of the characteristics of
their districts. F tests show that both relative rank (F(7,665) = 1.15, p = .32) and the raw seniority
scores F(7,665) = 0.90, p = .51) are unrelated to these characteristics. This gives us additional
confidence that the randomization was successful and no other confounding factors lead some
42
legislators to gain better committee assignments than others.
The Desirability of Legislators’ Committee Assignments and their Relative Rank
The regression results displayed in Table A2 show that the pattern in Figure 3 holds up
quantitatively as well, with the most senior members in a cohort about 15 percentage points more
likely to sit on one of the top committees and members with the lowest seniority about 13
percentage points more likely to serve on the least desirable committee. Both results are
statistically significant at the 0.01 level. The two columns for each set of regressions show that
these effects are robust to the inclusion of fixed effects for each chamber-cohort-caucus district
group.
We also test our assumptions by assigning each legislator a score that corresponds to the
average seniority number on that legislators’ most desirable committee. To do so, we first assign
each committee in each session a score corresponding to the average seniority number on that
committee. We then calculate the desirability of best committee, the average seniority on the
committee with the highest such average of all the committees on which a legislator sits. We
finally rescale this metric from 0 to 1, so that 1 corresponds to the most desirable committee in
any session and 0 corresponds to the least desirable committee in any session. Table A2 shows
that legislators’ Relative Rank again substantially predicts how desirable their best committee is.
Table A2. Effect of Relative Rank on Likelihood of Serving on Desirable Committees
(OLS)
Dependent Variable
Fixed Effects?
Relative Rank
Constant
N Observations
Number of Fixed
Effects
On Top Committee
Yes
No
0.15**
0.15**
(0.03)
(0.03)
0.41**
(0.02)
2,084
441
2,084
-
On Least Desirable
Committee
Yes
No
-0.14**
-0.14**
(0.02)
(0.02)
0.26**
(0.01)
2,084
441
2, 084
-
Desirability of Best
Committee
Yes
No
0.06**
0.06**
(0.01)
(0.01)
0.49**
(0.01)
2,054
438
2,054
-
Notes: The independent variable for all regressions, relative rank, is the scaled random seniority
rank of each legislator within their caucus district. The variable ranges from 0 to 1, with
legislators assigned to 1 as the most senior. Coefficients represent the estimated effects of being
the most senior member instead of the least senior member. Fixed effects are used for the groups
in which the randomization takes place (i.e. for each chamber-cohort-caucus district group).
^Sig. at the 0.10 level (two-tailed), *Sig. at the 0.05 level (two-tailed), **Sig. at the 0.01 level
(two-tailed).
These results validate our assumption that a legislators’ Relative Rank constitutes a large,
exogenous shock to the desirability of their assignments. However, note that these aggregate
measures only capture the aspects of committee desirability that are common to all legislators,
whereas many committees (e.g. Agriculture) are likely far more attractive to some legislators
than to others. It is therefore likely that these results significantly understate the degree to which
a legislator’s Relative Rank affects the attractiveness of her assignments.
43
Revealed Preference for the Least Desirable Committee
Figure A1 shows the relationship between the probability that legislators served on the
least desirable committees, given on the Y-axis, and their seniority number in their chambercohort-caucus district group, given on the X-axis. The subgraphs in Figure A1 correspond to the
size of the chamber-cohort-caucus district group that each legislator serves in. The lines show the
linear best-fit for the data. The upward sloping lines in Figure A1 indicate that legislators
randomly assigned less senior lottery numbers are more likely to serve on the least desirable
committee in their chamber.
Figure A1. Probability of Being on Least Desirable Committee, by Seniority Number (Subgraphs by cohort size)
Notes: Each sub-graph corresponds to the size of the chamber-cohort-caucus district group that
each legislator serves in. Each dot represents the percent of people with that lottery number in
their cohort that serves on the least desirable committee in the chamber. The lines show the
linear best fit for the data.