Political Research Quarterly
Volume 60 Number 4
December 2007 593-606
© 2007 University of Utah
10.1177/1065912907304498
http://prq.sagepub.com
hosted at
http://online.sagepub.com
The Speaker’s Discretion
Conference Committee Appointments
in the 97th through 106th Congresses
Jeffrey Lazarus
Georgia State University, Atlanta
Nathan W. Monroe
University of the Pacific, California
House rules allow the Speaker to choose any conferees he wishes, suggesting he might use conference delegations to
advance partisan goals. In practice, the Speaker nearly always selects members of the bill’s jurisdictional committee(s). The authors propose a theory of conferee selection that endogenizes both partisan goals and committee participation. They argue that the Speaker’s incentives lead him to appoint committee members, but he anticipates cases in
which they would produce an outcome unfavorable to the majority party. In these cases, the Speaker appoints other
conferees in addition to those from the jurisdictional committee, thereby “packing” the delegation in favor of the
majority party position. The authors derive and test hypotheses regarding when the Speaker packs conference delegations, and what delegations look like when packed. The tests support the theory.
Keywords:
C
Congress; House of Representatives; parties; Speaker of the House; leaders; conference committees
onference committees play a significant role in the
American legislative process. The Constitution
requires that legislation pass through both chambers of
Congress in identical form before going to the president,
and though Congress employs several methods of
resolving differences between House and Senate versions of a bill, the most politically contentious and
important bills usually go to conference committee
(Oleszek 2001; Longley and Oleszek 1989). Because
conferees are often the last actors to substantively modify the bills they work on, they are well placed to influence the behavior of other actors in the legislative
process. They may condition the actions of people
involved in earlier stages of the process (interest
groups, other members of Congress) and alter the
language of proposals and statutes presented to actors
later in the process (the president, courts that will
eventually interpret statutes). Indeed, observers of
conference committees have contended that conferees’ influence over the bills they consider is so great
that many laws are actually written in conference
(Clapp 1963; Van Beek 1995).
Conference committees’ importance highlights an
anomalous finding in the congressional scholarship
focused on delegation relationships. Partisan theories
of congressional organization hold that the Speaker
acts as an agent of the majority party.1 From this point
of view, the House majority delegates authority to the
Speaker so that he may pursue goals valuable to the
party. Since House rules give the Speaker sole discretion to appoint conferees (Trandahl 2001), these partisan theories predict that the Speaker will select
conferees who will aid him in pursuing these party
goals. However, investigation of this hypothesis
reveals that the majority party enjoys no regular
numerical advantage in conferences relative to their
numbers in the chamber (Krehbiel 1993). Rather,
studies have found that the Speaker almost universally appoints members of the standing committee(s)
that held jurisdiction over the bill (Sinclair 1983;
Smith 1988; Longley and Oleszek 1989).
Thus, the received wisdom for some time has been
that committee chairmen and other committee actors
wield strong influence over conference committee
assignments, while the Speaker only rarely exercises
Authors’ Note: The authors wish to thank Jamie Carson, Gary Cox,
Arthur Lupia, Mat McCubbins, Elizabeth Rybicki, Robert Van
Houweling, Vincent G. Moscardelli, and Douglas L. Koopman for
valuable comments. They also wish to acknowledge Rob Henning
and Keith Poole for supplying data. Any remaining mistakes are the
authors’ alone.
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593
594 Political Research Quarterly
the authority granted him by the rules (e.g., Rogers
1922; Ferejohn 1974; Shepsle and Weingast 1987;
Oleszek 2001). Two aspects of this conclusion merit
further investigation. First, it stands in stark contrast
to the partisan theories’ predictions, and no student of
conference committees has reconciled them. Second,
authors writing on the subject have been vague when
discussing the scope of or limits on the influence of
jurisdictional committees. Little work has assessed
the relative levels of influence enjoyed by the
Speaker and jurisdictional committee actors, the conditions under which the Speaker intervenes, or a
mechanism by which he does so (though see Nagler
[1989] for a notable exception).
In this article, we address these issues.2 We construct
and test a theory of conference committee appointments
that builds on both the committee-specific conventional
wisdom and the broader literature on party effects in the
House. This theory predicts that although the Speaker
places jurisdictional-committee members on nearly
every conference delegation, he also finds ways to put
the majority party’s stamp on the makeup of those delegations. Specifically, the Speaker appoints members
who he believes will work for the party in addition to
conferees who are members of the bill’s jurisdictional
committee. This strategy, which we call “packing” a
committee delegation, allows the Speaker to assert the
will of the majority party over conference delegations
while doing as little as possible to step on the toes of the
jurisdictional committees’ members. We test the theory
with data drawn from conference committee appointments in the 97th through 106th Congresses. We find
that, under conditions specified by the theory, conference committees are more likely to include members
from outside the jurisdictional committee. We also find
that, under these same conditions, outsiders are ideologically closer to the party median than the conference
committee’s “insiders,” that is, those selected from the
bill’s jurisdictional committee.
This article offers two interrelated contributions to the
literature on Congress. First, we provide a specific theoretical framework for thinking about the strategic considerations that influence the conferee appointment process.
This framework holds a rationale for the long-observed
pattern of conference dominance by members from the
standing jurisdictional committee. Such a framework is
missing from previous studies of conference appointments (Longley and Oleszek 1989); as a result, scholars
have either been vague about the relative power exercised
by the Speaker and committee actors in the conference
committee process (Rogers 1922; Clapp 1963; Pressman
1966; Vogler 1971; Ferejohn 1974; Smith 1988; Sinclair
1997; Oleszek 2001) or have overstated committees’
influence (Shepsle and Weingast 1987). Second, the evidence that we present not only supports our theory, but
also provides support for party models of congressional
organization, and suggests one way in which we might
think that parties “matter” in the House.
The remainder of the paper proceeds as follows.
Section 1 discusses House rules and conferee
appointments generally. Section 2 presents predictions regarding how and when the Speaker is most
likely to intervene in the appointment process.
Section 3 first discusses the methodological problem
of observing which members committee actors would
place on conference if they could choose, and then
presents empirical tests. Section 4 concludes.
1. The Speaker and Conference
Appointments
House rules seem to be at odds with the dominant
pattern of conference committee appointments. On
one hand, House rules give the Speaker sole authority to appoint conferees and a great deal of autonomy
in exercising that authority. Rule I, Section 11 states,
“The Speaker shall appoint all . . . conference committees ordered by the House” and requires the
Speaker to “appoint a majority who generally supported the House position, as determined by the
Speaker.” Finally, the Speaker is to “name those
who are primarily responsible for the legislation,
and shall, to the fullest extent feasible, include the
principal proponents of the major provisions of the
bill or resolution passed or adopted by the House”
(Trandahl 2001). The Speaker receives no further
guidance from the rules, indicating that, although he
is admonished to include members who supported the
bill on final passage, the Speaker may determine for
himself who those supporters are (Nagler 1989). On the
other hand, the bill’s committee(s) of jurisdiction typically dominates conference delegations. Most conferees are members of these committees, and delegations
tend to be dominated by high-seniority members.
Additionally, the delegations almost always include the
committee’s chairman and ranking minority member.3
This dominance seems to be widespread: members of
the jurisdictional committee were included in 672 of
the 678 conference delegations appointed between the
97th and 106th Congresses.4
Scholars have noted the disparity between the
written rules and observed appointments, but usually
do not address it directly. Many who write on conference committees note that, although the Speaker
often prefers to let committee actors take the lead in
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Lazarus, Monroe / The Speaker’s Discretion 595
selecting conferees, he reserves the right to intervene
should he feel it necessary (Rogers 1922; Clapp
1963; Pressman 1966; Vogler 1971; Ferejohn 1974;
Smith 1988; Sinclair 1997; Oleszek 2001). However,
scholars making this point do so only vaguely: few
specify the conditions under which the Speaker is
likely to intervene, or a mechanism by which committee interests interact with the Speaker’s authority
to produce the observed pattern (see Shepsle and
Weingast [1987] for a notable exception). Rather, the
primary focus of these previous works is on answering the question of who gets selected as a conferee.
Most studies focus on how members’ individual characteristics, such as seniority and ideology, influence
their chances of being selected (Longley and Oleszek
1989; Krehbiel 1991, 1993). Recently, some scholarship has identified party as an important factor
(Carson and Vander Wielen 2002; Hines and Civettini
2004), but this work does not theoretically link party
to the selection of conferees.
Thus, there is a gap in the literature on conference
committee appointments, characterized aptly by
Patterson (1990) in his review of Longley and
Oleszek (1989):
[Their] heavy reliance on the extant literature
about Congress sometimes leads them astray.
This appears strikingly in their assertions about
the weakening of party leadership in Congress,
especially the House. In contrast to the authors’
claims, I believe careful research would show
that House leaders carry much more influence
in conference outcomes in the 1980’s than did
Speaker Rayburn in the 1950’s. . . . At a minimum, their argument points to the need for
more substantial research on the influences of
party and committee leaders on conference
decision making. (pp. 662-63)
Scholars have yet to account for the apparent contrast
between the House rules, on one hand, and the dominance of jurisdictional committees, on the other. This
puzzle gives rise to several unanswered questions. If
the Speaker has sole authority to make conference
committee appointments, why does he so often appoint
members of the bill’s jurisdictional committee? Can the
Speaker appoint from outside the jurisdictional committee at his own discretion? If he can, how and under what
conditions does he choose to do so? Nagler (1989, 76)
identified a key element of the puzzle surrounding conferee appointment: “The conference does indeed convey
influence to the conferees. However, there is reason to
believe that the conferees do not always represent the
standing committee. Rather, they may represent only
what is acceptable to a majority of the majority party
on the floor.” In the next section, we develop a theoretical framework for addressing these questions.
2. The Speaker’s Discretion
We begin by asking a question: if the Speaker has
sole authority to appoint conferees, why are members
of the jurisdictional committee so predominant on conference delegations? We posit that these members’
presence in conference benefits both them and the
Speaker. A position on conference committee benefits
members of the bill’s jurisdictional committee by
extending the benefits of standing committee membership. Being on a standing committee confers upon
members opportunities to ingratiate themselves to their
constituents by working on legislation (Rohde and
Shepsle 1973) and by allowing them to engage in
credit-claiming and position-taking activities (Mayhew
1974, 95-97). A conference appointment allows a
member to continue either or both of these activities
into the later stages of the legislative process: they may
protect the substance of, claim credit for, or simply
take strong public positions with regard to the bill at
hand, even after final passage. Thus, conference
appointments are electorally valuable to members of
the bill’s jurisdictional committee.5 Turning to the
Speaker, he is a selected agent of the majority party,
and as such he must pay attention to the electoral
needs of those who select him.6 If he does not, he
risks losing his Speakership, either by de-selection or
by his party’s loss of majority status. Speakers, therefore, also have career-based incentives to appoint
members of the standing committee(s) of jurisdiction
to conference committees.7
Despite this alignment of incentives, sometimes
appointing members of the jurisdictional committee
gets in the way of another of the Speaker’s goals as a
selected agent of the majority party: engineering the
passage of legislation that is beneficial to (a majority
of) the party. Conference delegations composed strictly
of jurisdictional-committee members might interfere
with that goal. For example, conferees might write narrow or personalistic provisions into a conference report
that other party members would consider wasteful.8 In
doing this, these conferees can inflict real damage on
the party’s label, because conference committees act
autonomously in writing a conference report and can
submit any report they like.9 Furthermore, once
reported, conference reports are always privileged on
the House floor, making them difficult to ignore and
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596 Political Research Quarterly
are usually considered without amendment, making
them difficult to change.10
The Speaker’s best course of action is to prevent
the damage in the first place. If the Speaker has reason to believe that a delegation composed solely of
jurisdictional-committee members will produce a
party-damaging conference report, the Speaker can
use his appointment power to select a preferable conference delegation. However, there are two selfimposed limitations. First, although the rules allow
the Speaker to intervene on conferee appointment at
any time, we expect him to do so only when the benefits outweigh the costs of infringing on committee
members’ ability to use conference committee to
advance their own career goals. Second, although the
rules allow the Speaker to do this in any way he sees
fit, we expect him to do so in a way that is least damaging to committee members’ career goals.
In terms of methods, the Speaker has at least two
options. One is a strong tactic that we label “replacement.” In this scenario, the Speaker ignores the jurisdictional committee, appointing only members who are
most likely to produce the ideal conference report. This
would result in delegations being populated by party
loyalists, irrespective of standing committee membership. The second option is to appoint jurisdictionalcommittee conferees as well as others whom the
Speaker judges to be likely to produce a majorityparty-friendly conference report. We call this strategy
“packing.” Note that packing can secure a favorable
conference report for the Speaker just as assuredly as
replacement can. For a conference committee to send
a report back to the House and Senate, only a bare
majority of each chambers’ conferees need to sign it.
Obviously, the Speaker could use replacement to handpick the median member of his chamber’s delegation,
and thus the likely outcome. However, the same result
obtains if the Speaker employs packing. Loyalists can
form the necessary majority either by themselves or
with a faction of conferees from the jurisdictional
committee, to yield the same party-friendly outcome.11
The primary difference between the two strategies
is that replacement denies members of the jurisdictional committee opportunities to take positions and
defend provisions, while packing does not. When a
conference delegation is packed, members of the
jurisdictional committee do not get the conference
report they want, but at least they can signal to their
constituents that they fought the good fight on their
behalf: they can refuse to sign the conference report
and, as a conferee, claim media attention for a public
stand against it. For his part, the Speaker gets the
conference report he wants because, ultimately, the
committee-of-jurisdiction members’ refusals to sign
and public statements do little damage to the party’s
position; their signatures are unnecessary for sending a
majority-party-friendly report back to the chambers.
Thus, we assume that the Speaker prefers packing
to replacement, since it achieves the same objective
with fewer political costs.12 A quick empirical investigation offers some prima facie evidence that wholesale replacement is not an attractive option. While 21
percent of conference delegations appointed in the
97th through 106th Congresses have been packed (as
we define the word), replacement occurred in only
six cases, or less than 1 percent.
A second question is, Under what conditions does
the Speaker pack a committee? There are two necessary and sufficient conditions. First, there must be a
significant policy disagreement between members of
the standing committee and the Speaker, which
would give the Speaker cause to worry about policy
losses in conference. Second, members of the jurisdictional committee must be in a position (as conferees) to write the outlying policy position into a
conference report. This second condition comes via
the “Interval Rule,” which dictates that the policy
position in any conference report must be within the
interval defined by the positions of the House and
Senate bills at final passage (Longley and Oleszek
1989). Although the Rule is procedurally unenforceable (as conferees may issue any report they want),
empirical evidence indicates that conferees adhere to
it (Steiner 1951; Kiewiet and McCubbins 1991). To
see how the interval rule structures interaction
between the Speaker and House conferees, we refer
to a simple one-dimensional spatial model of bill passage. We first assume that all bills are amended to the
floor median at final passage (Krehbiel 1998), and
second that the Speaker prefers the House position on
any bill that reaches the conference stage to the status
quo (Cox and McCubbins 2005).13 Whenever the
jurisdictional committee’s ideal point is outside the
interval defined by the House and Senate position
and the committee is on the House’s side of that
interval, the Interval Rule dictates that the best policy
position available to the committee is the House
position. Since the Speaker already prefers this
position to the status quo, he need not pay the political costs to pack these committees. Thus, the
Speaker packs conference committee delegations
only when the jurisdictional committee is unrepresentative of the floor and is on the same side of the
House as is the Senate (left or right).
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Lazarus, Monroe / The Speaker’s Discretion 597
This is illustrated in Figure 1, in which the House
position at final passage is denoted by H, the Senate by
S, and jurisdictional committee’s ideal point by J. The
interval between the House and Senate positions is
the only bargaining space allowed to conferees under
the Interval Rule. In case 1, the jurisdictional committee’s ideal point is outside of the interval, but the closest point which is within the available bargaining space
is the House position. Thus, the committee can do no
better than adopting the House position in negotiations
with the Senate. In cases 2 and 3, however, the conference committee can make significant gains by deviating from the House final-passage position. In case 2,
the committee may adopt its own ideal point, while in
case 3, the jurisdictional committee’s best available
option is the Senate position.
Putting the above discussions together, we have
several fundamental expectations about conference
appointments. Three detail the manner in which a
packed conference delegation should be different
from other delegations. First and most obviously, it
contains conferees from outside the jurisdictional
committee. Second, the theory predicts that extracommittee appointments are in addition to, rather
than instead of, committee appointments. Thus, we
expect packed delegations to be larger on average
than those that are not packed. Third, if the Speaker’s
motive in packing a conference delegation is to move
the conference median away from the unrepresentative
committee’s ideal point and toward that of the majority
party, then the “outsider” conferees should have ideal
points that are closer to the party median than conferees from the jurisdictional committee. Fourth and
finally, we have expectations about which conferences
should be packed. The probability with which the
Speaker packs a conference delegation grows with the
ideological distance between the standing committee of
jurisdiction and the House median, and the jurisdictional committee must be on the same side of the chamber as the Senate chamber median. These expectations
yield the following hypotheses:
Hypothesis 1: The probability with which a conference delegation contains “outsider” conferees increases with the ideological distance
between the standing committee of jurisdiction
and the House median, if those committees and
the Senate position are on the same side relative
to the House position.
Hypothesis 2: Among packed conference delegations, the number of conferees increases with
the ideological distance between the standing
Figure 1
Influence of the Interval Rule
on Speaker Incentives
Case 1:
J
H
S
Case 2:
H
J
S
Case 3:
H
S
J
Note: The House position at final passage is denoted by H, the
Senate by S, and jurisdictional committee’s ideal point by J.
committee of jurisdiction and the House
median, if those committees and the Senate
position are on the same side relative to the
House position.
Hypothesis 3: For those conference delegations
with both outsider and insider conferees, outsider conferees should be ideologically closer to
the chamber median than insider conferees, if
the jurisdictional committee and the Senate
position are on the same side relative to the
House position.
According to the theory, the probability with
which outsiders appear on the conference delegation
rises with the ideological distance between the committee and the chamber median influences. This specific relationship is illustrated in Figure 2. The x-axis
in this figure represents the location of the committee
relative to the House median (H) and the Senate
median (S)—in other words, it represents the point
labeled J in Figure 1. The y-axis represents the probability, predicted by the theory, with which the
Speaker appoints outsider conferees. This probability
is zero when the jurisdictional committee is on the
opposite side of the House median as the Senate
median, becomes nonzero as the committee moves to
the “Senate side” of the House median, then
increases as the committee moves away from the
House median.14
Moreover, the presence of outsiders should
increase delegation size because the Speaker has no
wish to displace insider conferees, as discussed
above. Additionally, within the set of delegations
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598 Political Research Quarterly
Figure 2
Predicted Relationship between
Primary Variables
Probability of Outsider
Conferees
1
0
H
S
Ideological Position of
Jurisdictional Committee
Note: H = House median; S = Senate median.
containing outsider conferees, the Speaker has incentives to appoint larger delegations when the ideological distance is great. This is because when the
distance between the jurisdictional committee and the
chamber is greatest, the Speaker will most worry
about insider conferees changing the substance of a
bill in conference.
3. Empirical Analysis
We test our hypotheses with data from the 679
House conference delegations appointed from the
97th through 106th Congresses.15 This time period
represents varied conditions of Congressional operation, including split control between the parties
(97th-99th), unified Democratic control (100th101st), and unified Republican control (104th-106th),
which enhances the external validity of our results.
Summary statistics for the data set appear in Table 1.
3.1. Identifying a “Packed” Committee
Testing the hypotheses presented above requires us
to identify individual conferees who are placed on the
delegation by the Speaker without the prior approval
of the relevant committee actor(s). This, in turn,
requires us to (1) identify the relevant committee
actor and (2) identify which conferees these actors
approve of. As to the first task, several scholars (e.g.,
Oleszek 2001) have noted that committee chairmen
and (less often) ranking minority members submit
slates of proposed conferees to the Speaker when a
conference delegation is being formed. Any conferee
listed on these slates is presumed to be favored by the
committee chair (we call this person an “insider”
conferee), while any conferees who are appointed
despite not being on that list would represent the
Speaker’s influence on the conference (an “outsider”
conferee). The second task, distinguishing insiders
from outsiders, is more difficult. Ideally we would
simply compare the suggested slates to actual
appointments. Unfortunately, this type of analysis is
impossible to conduct because, to the best of our
knowledge, the slates are not on the public record.
Rather, they are often passed along informally; sometimes the committee chair passes the list to the
Speaker verbally; other times he or she may write it
on a scrap of paper—on the back of an envelope, as
it were—and pass it along. As a result, the slates are
not available for collection and study.
Thus, we rely on two secondary observations to
distinguish insiders from outsiders. First, even
though the slates’ specific contents are not known to
academics, scholars writing on the topic have long
noted that the slates contain only the names of
members who are on the chairman’s committee,
which is the bill’s jurisdictional committee (e.g.,
Morrow 1969, 105; Oleszek 2001, 253). Second,
although most conferees are members of the bills’ jurisdictional committee, many are not. Thus, for the purposes of identifying insiders and outsiders, there are
three types of conferees: members of the jurisdictional
committee who are on the chair’s slate, members of the
jurisdictional committee who are not on the chair’s
slate, and conferees who are not on the jurisdictional
committee. Only those who are of the first type are
truly insiders (i.e., they are on conference because the
chairman wanted them to be there). The second and
third types are outsiders. The crux of the problem is
that, because the slates are not observable, we cannot
distinguish between the first and second types. That is,
when observing conferees who are from the jurisdictional committee, we do not know which are insiders
and which are outsiders. On the other hand, conferees
of the third type—those not on the jurisdictional
committee—are identifiably outsiders.
Our solution is to assume that all conferees drawn
from the jurisdictional committee are insiders, and only
members from outside the jurisdictional committee are
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Lazarus, Monroe / The Speaker’s Discretion 599
Table 1
Summary Statistics for Conferences in Data Set
Congress
97
98
99
100
101
102
103
104
105
106
Total
Years
Total Conferences
Conferences Including
Outsider Conferees
Percentage of Conferences
Including Outsider Conferees
1981-1982
1983-1984
1985-1986
1987-1988
1989-1990
1991-1992
1993-1994
1995-1996
1997-1998
1999-2000
80
86
65
65
78
82
65
91
45
52
679
7
7
14
18
21
22
20
14
8
5
136
8.8
8.1
21.5
27.7
26.9
26.9
30.8
15.4
17.8
9.6
20.0
outsiders. Using this schema, we identify a delegation as having been packed if it contains any conferees who are not on the jurisdictional committee.
Similarly, we identify a conference delegation as not
having been packed if it contains only conferees who
are members of the jurisdictional committee.
If a conference contains members of the second
type (on the jurisdictional committee but not on the
chair’s slate) but no members of the third type (from
outside the jurisdictional committee), we are forced to
identify it as not packed when, in reality, it has been
packed. This type of inaccuracy introduces bias against
our theory rather than for it for two reasons. First, this
scheme makes us more likely to falsely label a packed
committee as having not been packed than the reverse.
Given the purpose of our article—to propose and test a
theory that suggests that conference committee packing occurs—a methodological bias toward false negatives makes our job more difficult. Second, the
instances of packing which we can observe represent a
more “extreme” type of packing (i.e., adding nonjurisdictional outsiders) than those we do not observe. The
Speaker, at times, might prefer to reduce the cost of
packing by practicing the strategy in a more subtle
form. Thus we may be limited to observing a less frequently used form of packing.
3.2. Empirical Results
The starting point of our empirical analysis was
determining each standing committee’s ideological
position relative to the House chamber median: first,
which are on the Senate side and which are on the
opposite side; second, how far away is the committee
from the chamber median? The first step in this
process was to determine the relative ideological
positions of the House and Senate for each Congress,
97th to 106th. To do this, we compared each chamber’s median Common Space score (Poole 1996). As
the name implies, Common Space scores provide a
measure of House, Senate, and presidential ideologies in a common space, allowing direct comparisons
across chambers. We find that the Senate median is
more conservative than the House median in the 97th
through 101st Congresses; and the Senate is more liberal in the 102nd through 106th Congresses. The second step was to compute each standing committee’s
(as well as the permanent Select Committee on
Intelligence) median Common Space score in each
Congress.16 Third, we compared the results of the
committee analysis to those of the chamber analysis.
Committees whose median was more conservative
than the House median in Congresses in which the
Senate was also more conservative than the House are
coded as being on the “Senate side”; committees that
were more liberal in these Congresses were coded as
being on the “other side.” The appropriate similar coding was used for Congresses in which the Senate was
more liberal than the House. Finally, we observed the
absolute value of the distance between the chamber
median and each committee median.
We test Hypothesis 1 with a logit estimation of the
probability with which the Speaker appoints at least
one outsider conferee to the conference delegation.
The unit of analysis is the piece of legislation. Our
primary independent variables are Senate side distance and other side distance. Senate side distance is
set equal to the absolute value of the distance between
the House chamber median and the median of the bill’s
jurisdictional committee, for bills whose jurisdictional
committee is on the Senate side of the House median.
For bills whose committee of jurisdiction is on the
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600 Political Research Quarterly
other side, Senate side distance is set to zero. For bills
that were multiply referred, the variable is set to the
value of the committee on the Senate side, which is furthest from the committee median; if none of the committees were on the Senate side, the variable was set to
zero.17 Other side distance is coded in a similar manner
to indicate committees that are on the opposite side of
the House median from the Senate. Both variables are
logged, which accounts for a diminishing impact of
the importance of increases in distance between the
chamber and the committee. The difference between,
say, 10 and 20 points of distance is more significant
than the difference between 150 and 160: the first
change doubles the ideological distance between the
two bodies, while the second change is marginally
small. Hypothesis 1 predicts that the coefficient associated with Senate side distance is positive and significant and that the coefficient for Other side
distance is indistinguishable from zero.
Other independent variables control for aspects of
bill passage that might correlate with the key independent and/or dependant variables. First, Party vote
is a dummy variable coded 1 if the final passage vote
fell along party lines, 0 otherwise. It is included
because the Speaker might have different postpassage
incentives and pressures when dealing with partisan
bills than bills with more unanimous support.
Second, we account for multiple referral for two reasons. First, it is likely to correlate with committee
representativeness: as the primary committee is
increasingly unrepresentative, the Speaker should
grow more likely to refer a bill to an additional committee. In addition, when a bill has many jurisdictional committees, the large set of potential insider
conferees presents the Speaker with little need to
search elsewhere for conferees that fit his needs. To
account for this confounding factor, we include a
variable that indicates the number of committees to
which the bill was referred, committees of referral.
The coefficient on this variable should be negative.
Third, a dummy variable indicates whether the bill is
an appropriations bill; we expect conference delegations on these bills to only rarely have outsider conferees, for two reasons. First, the Appropriations
Committee is delegated a considerable amount of
authority by the majority party (Kiewiet and
McCubbins 1991); second, Fenno (1966) suggested
that the threat to the Speaker’s goals in an appropriations conference would come not from within the
House but from the Senate. Fourth, a dummy variable
indicates whether the bill originated in the Senate.
Table 2
The Effect of Committee Distance from
Chamber Median on the Presence
of Outsider Conferees
Senate side distance
Other side distance
Party vote
Committees of referral
Appropriations bill
Senate bill
Constant
N
Log-likelihood
Pseudo-R2
0.141* (.073)
0.075 (.073)
–0.161 (.241)
–0.074 (.110)
–2.92*** (.346)
–0.900*** (.245)
0.009 (.555)
679
–290
.219
Note: Robust standard errors appear in parentheses. Fixed effects
by Congress not reported.
*p < .05. ***p < .001 (two-tailed tests).
Finally, we account for fixed effects by including a
dummy variable for each Congress.
Results of the estimation are in Table 2 (year
dummies not reported). Results conform closely to
Hypothesis 1: the coefficient on Senate side distance is positive and significant. This indicates that,
for bills whose committees are on the Senate side of
the House median, the probability with which the
Speaker places outsider conferees on the conference
delegation grows with the ideological distance
between committee and chamber median. Several
other independent variables correlate with the presence of outsider conferees. Outsider conferees are
less likely to appear on the conference delegations of
both appropriations bills and bills that originate in the
Senate. On the other hand, party vote is not statistically significant, meaning that whether the bill’s final
passage vote is a party unity vote is not related to the
appearance of outsider conferees. Finally, committees
of referral is not statistically significant, indicating
that the number of committees has little relationship
with the appearance of outsider conferees.
To illustrate the relationship between Senate side
distance and the probability of outsider conferees being
included in the delegation, we used CLARIFY (Tomz,
Wittenberg, and King 2003) to estimate the probability
of outsider conferees being appointed to a conference
committee. We set all independent variables to their
median position, except Senate side distance, which we
vary from zero to the variable’s 90th percentile value.
The relationship between committee ideology and the
probability of outsider conferees is illustrated in Figure
3. The x-axis represents the distance between the chamber and committee medians; numbers from 0 to 250
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Lazarus, Monroe / The Speaker’s Discretion 601
Figure 3
Committee Distance from Chamber Median and the Probability of Outsider Conferees
Probability of Outsider Conferees
0.5
0.45
0.4
0.35
0.3
0.25
0
50
100
150
200
250
Distance From Chamber Median
represent the difference between their Common
Space measures multiplied by 100. The figure indicates a relatively standard diminishing-returns relationship between the jurisdictional committee’s ideological
placement and the probability of outsider conferees: as
the committee moves in the direction of the Senate
position, the probability of the Speaker appointing an
outsider conferee rises.
We now turn to Hypothesis 2, which predicts that
packed conference delegations are larger than other
delegations. This addresses the following question:
when the Speaker includes outsiders in conference
delegations, is he adding them to the list of insider
conferees, or merely displacing the insiders? The
packing theory outlined above predicts that the outsiders are placed on the slate in addition to insiders,
meaning that packed conference delegations should
be larger than others, all else equal. We test for this
effect by estimating the dependent variable number of
conferees. This is a count variable, and analysis indicates significant overdispersion. This leads us to
employ negative binomial regression.
In this test, we focus on conference delegations that
contain outsider conferees, since these are the only delegations which the Speaker might have possibly packed
in the manner discussed in section 2. To do this, we
employ interaction variables in the analysis.18 The
dummy variable outsiders is coded 1 if at least one
outsider conferee was on the conference delegation and
0 if none was. (Note that outsiders was the dependent
variable in Table 2.) We interact outsiders with the key
independent variables described above to obtain
Outsiders × Senate Side Distance and Outsiders ×
Other Side Distance. Each interaction indicates the distance between the jurisdictional committee and the
House median for conference bills whose delegations
contain outsider conferees. Hypothesis 2 predicts first
that the coefficient on outsiders is positive and significant; these conferees do not take others’ places on the
delegation. Second, the coefficient on Outsiders ×
Senate Side Distance should also be positive and significant, as the effect should be most pronounced in the
delegations for bills originating from committees which
are distant from the chamber median and on the Senate
side. Additionally, Outsiders × Other Side Distance
should not be significantly different from zero. We also
include the slate of control variables discussed above,
as well as fixed-effect variables for each Congress.
Results are presented in Table 3. Robust standard
errors are once again in parentheses, and Congress dummies are not reported. The first result to note is that outsiders has the expected strong positive relationship:
when outsider conferees are included, delegations tend
to be larger. This indicates that generally they are present in addition to, rather than instead of, insider conferees. Secondly, Senate Side Distance × Outsiders is also
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602 Political Research Quarterly
Senate Side Distance × Outsiders
Other Side Distance × Outsiders
Outsiders
Party vote
Number of committees
Appropriations bill
Senate bill
Constant
N
Log-likelihood
Alpha
0.103* (.056)
0.038 (.056)
0.732** (.256)
–0.012 (.074)
0.010 (.040)
0.069 (.073)
–0.161* (.089)
2.38*** (.115)
679
–2465
.351*** (.030)
Note: Robust standard errors appear in parentheses. Fixed effects
by Congress not reported.
*p < .05. **p < .01. ***p < .001 (two-tailed tests).
19
positive and statistically significant. Thus, when
the jurisdictional standing committee is to the
Senate side of the House chamber median, there is a
positive and significant relationship between the
distance between them and the size of the committee. Conference delegations for bills which originate
from unrepresentative committees tend to be the
largest delegations, all else equal. Of the control
variables, only Senate is significantly related to the
number of conferees: conference delegations for
Senate-originated bills have smaller House delegations, on average.
Once again, we illustrate the relationship between
Senate Side Distance × Outsiders and the number of
conferees using CLARIFY. We set all independent
variables to their median values except outsiders,
which we set to 1. The x-axis represents the committee’s distance from the chamber median in the same
manner as in Figure 3, and the y-axis displays the estimated size of the conference delegation. The results
are displayed in Figure 4, and once again there is a
diminishing-returns relationship, with bills originating
from the least representative committees having conference delegations of about twice the size of bills
originating from the most representative committees.
Finally, we turn to Hypothesis 3. Whenever packing is
the motivation behind including outsider conferees in delegations, outsider conferees should be more representative of the House’s final passage position than insider
conferees. Packing is not the only reason that a Speaker
might place an outsider conferee on a conference committee (see note 11), but when it is, the Speaker selects
outsiders specifically to advocate the House’s position.
We present two tests of this hypothesis.
Figure 4
Committee Distance from Chamber Median and
the Size of Conference Delegations
22
20
Number of Conferees
Table 3
The Effect of Committee Distance
from Chamber Median on the Size of
Conference Committees
18
16
14
12
10
0
50
100
150
200
250
Distance from Chamber Median
First, we conduct an ordinary least squares (OLS)
analysis that includes only conference delegations
that contain both outsider and insider conferees. The
dependent variable is based on conferees’ Common
Space scores. For each conference, we separate conferees into insider and outsider contingents—those
who are on the bills’ committee(s) of jurisdiction and
those who are not. We identify the median member of
each group and compare each to the chamber median.
The dependent variable is a measure of the relative
distance between each group of conferees and the
chamber median. To obtain this measure, we first
obtained the absolute value of the distance between
each outsider contingent and the chamber median and
the absolute value of the distance between each contingent of insiders and the chamber median. Then,
we subtracted the outsider distance measure from
the insider distance measure. As a result, conference
delegations in which the outsiders are closer to the
chamber median than insiders have a positive value
of relative distance, and as the difference between
the two contingents grows, the value of relative distance gets larger. Similarly, delegations in which the
outsiders are farther from the chamber median have a
negative value of relative distance.
The key independent variables are once again
Senate side distance and other side distance.
Hypothesis 3 predicts that the coefficient on Senate
side distance is positive and significant, since large
values of this variable identify delegations the
Speaker is most likely to pack. That is, the greater
the ideological distance between the committee and the
chamber (in the direction of the Senate), the more the
Speaker must compensate for the insider conferees
with more representative outsider conferees. The
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Lazarus, Monroe / The Speaker’s Discretion 603
Table 4
Relative Distances: When Are Insiders
Closer to the Chamber Median than Outsiders?
Senate side distance
Other side distance
Party vote
Number of committees
Senate bill
Percentage outsiders
Constant
N
Pseudo-R2
.267* (.136)
.130 (.120)
.298 (.452)
–.143 (.188)
–.457 (.556)
–.260* (.139)
.262
169
.143
Note: Robust standard errors appear in parentheses. Fixed effects
by Congress not reported.
*p < .05 (two-tailed test).
hypothesis also predicts that the coefficient on other
side distance is indistinguishable from zero. Other
independent variables include party vote and committees of referral, as discussed above. Additionally, we
include percentage outsiders, which indicates the
percentage of the delegation that is made up of outsider conferees.
Results are reported in Table 4 and are similar to
results of the above analyses. Senate side distance is
positive and significant, as predicted by Hypothesis 3.
This indicates that, as the jurisdictional committee
moves away from the House median in the direction of
the Senate’s position, the outsider conferees selected
by the Speaker grow closer to the chamber median, relative to insider conferees. As with the previous analyses, other side distance is negative and significant.
A different way to measure the same effect is to
look at the ideological distance between the conference delegation and the chamber. Whenever the
Speaker appoints outsider conferees for the purposes
of packing, outsider conferees should bring the delegation closer to the chamber median. However, if the
Speaker appoints outsider conferees for other, presumably nonideological reasons over a large number
of cases, packing should have no effect on the conference ideology, as effects should be random and
cancel each other out. We test for this effect by comparing conference-median Common Space scores to
chamber-median Common Space scores. First, we
calculate the median for each conference delegation,
then obtain the (absolute value of) the distance
between the delegation median and the chamber
median. We conduct an OLS estimation in which distance is the dependent variable.
The key independent variable is number of outsiders, which indicates the number of outsider conferees appointed. To conduct the analysis, we separate
conference bills into two groups: one contains bills
with a committee of jurisdiction on the Senate side of
the House median, and the other contains bills with a
committee of jurisdiction on the Other side of the
House median. Hypothesis 3 predicts that, in the analysis of the Senate-side group, number of outsiders will
be negative and significant—that is, each outsider will
bring the conference closer to the House median. In the
analysis of the other-side group, the hypothesis predicts
no relationship. We include party vote and committees
of referral as control variables.
Results are presented in Table 5, and conform precisely to the predictions. Model 1 reports the results for
the Senate-side group. Number of outsiders is negative
and significant, meaning that the presence of more outsiders is associated with a smaller ideological distance
between the conference and the chamber medians. This
indicates that, among bills that have jurisdictional committees on the Senate side of the House median, outsider
conferees pull the conference median back toward the
House median. In model 2, which reports the results for
the other-side group, number of outsiders is not significantly related to the dependent variable.
Table 5
The Effect of Outsider Conferees on Conference Delegation Ideology
Number of outsiders
Party vote
Number of committees
Appropriations bill
Senate bill
Constant
N
Adjusted-R2
Model 1: Senate-Side Standing Committee
Model 2: Other-Side Standing Committee
–.002** (.0006)
.035 (.030)
–.005 (.014)
.067 (.049)
.039 (.029)
–.024 (.025)
69
.087
–.0003 (.0003)
.028 (.020)
.003 (.010)
.042 (.037)
.039† (.023)
–.039† (.017)
89
.078
Note: Robust standard errors appear in parentheses. Fixed effects by Congress not reported.
†
p < .05 (one-tailed test). **p < .01 (two-tailed test).
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604 Political Research Quarterly
4. Conclusion
Conference committees have the potential to exert
enormous influence over policy in the United States.
Conferences are convened for the most important and
contentious bills, their members are often the last legislators that edit a piece of legislation, and conference
reports are privileged under House rules. Thus, conferees are well placed to inject their personal policy
preferences into bills of great national importance
and can do so relatively free of constraint from other
political actors. It is easy to conclude, as some have,
that conferees are able to virtually write laws.
We argue that, while this is technically true, conference outcomes are to a large degree constrained by
majority party preferences. When potential conferees’
private agendas overlap with majority party preferences, they are able to vigorously pursue their own
preferences while doing relatively little damage to the
party position. Only when their agendas diverge from
majority-party preferences must party leaders rein
conferees in. Even here, the Speaker does so via the
path of least resistance: he appoints conferees from the
jurisdictional committee who are free to pursue their
own interests. However, he also appoints members
whom he knows to be sympathetic to the party’s position and who can obtain a conference report that is
favorable to the majority party—while at the same
time pursuing their own interests as well. Thus, the
Speaker employs a system that is beneficial to all parties: the Speaker and majority party get the bills they
want, and both “outsider” and “insider” conferees are
able to vigorously pursue their own private agendas.
Of course, when discussing conference committees,
looking at the House gives us only half of the story. The
argument pursued in this article leaves open the question of whether similar incentives exist for the Senate
majority leader in appointing Senate conferees. Though
the majority leader does not have as free a hand in making appointments as the House Speaker, he does enjoy
considerable autonomy in his own right (Oleszek
2001). However, the Senate is considered by many to
be a much more diffuse body than the House, in which
individual legislators benefit from a great deal of freedom to pursue their own goals. It could be that, in such
a setting, “insider” conferee Senators can prevent their
conferences from being packed by the majority leader.
This question warrants further study.
This article contributes specifically to the literature on
conference committees and more generally to the larger
congressional organization literature. With regard to
conference committees, we provide a specific theoretical rationale for the observed pattern of conference
appointments. The observed pattern is that there are
(nearly) always members of a bill’s jurisdictional committee on conference delegations, but that sometimes
nonmembers also make it onto conference. The theory
presented here predicts both outcomes: the Speaker
uses the discretion granted to him by the House rules to
appoint conferees in the manner that best fulfills his
multiple goals as a party agent. This means appointing
conferees who will electorally benefit from going to
conference committee whenever possible, but also
including enough members who are loyal to the party
on the issue involved to ensure a conference report that
reflects the party’s interests. Empirical tests of this
theory provide support.
Additionally, this article provides evidence relevant to the ongoing debate between partisan models
(e.g., Cox and McCubbins 1993; Aldrich and Rohde
2001) and individual-preference-based models (e.g.,
Krehbiel 1998) of House organization. In arguing
(and providing evidence) that the Speaker acts as an
agent of the majority party in making conference
appointments, we add to the growing list of aspects of
legislative behavior in which party or party leaders
have been shown to have an effect on outcomes, both
procedural and substantive.
Notes
1. Either under certain conditions (Sinclair 1983; Rohde 1991;
Aldrich and Rohde 1998, 2001) or universally (Kiewiet and
McCubbins 1991; Cox and McCubbins 1993, 2005).
2. Other work in this vein includes Sinclair (1997), Carson
and Vander Wielen (2002), Van Houweling (2003), and Hines and
Civettini (2004).
3. See, for example, Clapp (1963), Pressman (1966), Froman
(1967), Vogler (1971), Ferejohn (1974), Shepsle and Weingast
(1987), Smith (1988), Longley and Oleszek (1989), Smith and
Deering (1990), and Oleszek (2001).
4. Delegations for multiply-referred conference bills sometimes omit one or more of the bills’ jurisdictional committees.
This happens about one-third of the time (eighteen of fifty-three)
when there are two committees, and about two-thirds of the time
(twenty-nine of forty-six) when there are three or more committees. In no case were all jurisdictional committees left off. We do
not consider these cases separately, since conferees came from
the pool of available jurisdictional committee members.
5. Credit claiming for and position taking on conference is
made possible by the fact that conference proceedings have been
public record since 1974 (Longley and Oleszek 1989, 51).
6. Technically, the entire floor selects a Speaker. In practice,
however, this is always a straight party-line vote. The actual
selection takes place in the majority party caucus, by a majority
vote of the majority party members.
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Lazarus, Monroe / The Speaker’s Discretion 605
7. Additionally, the Speaker has a strong hand in appointing
members of his party to standing committees in the first place,
especially in recent years. Given this, he may sometimes safely
presume that committee members will support the party position
in conference.
8. Note that “party-damaging” action need not constitute a
bald-faced end run around the party leadership. Rather, it could
be agency loss experienced in incremental doses as members use
their delegated power to seek personalistic goals. This happens
all the time, but sometimes the costs to the party as a whole can
be great enough to warrant preemptive action by the Speaker.
9. Either chamber can vote to “instruct” its conferees, but
these instructions are nonbinding.
10. Though no provision in the House rules prevents amendments
to conference reports from being introduced, considered, or passed, it
is a rare occurrence (Shepsle and Weingast 1987; Longley and
Oleszek 1989). While this regularity presents a puzzle in its own right,
investigating it is beyond the scope of this article.
11. A third option is for the Speaker to strategically handpick
members of the committee of jurisdiction to serve on conference.
In principle, the Speaker might select only those committee
members who support the bill as passed. But considering this
possibility is problematic because, as we discuss below, we have
limited information about which committee members the
Speaker places on conference and which committee members are
placed there by the committee chairman.
12. We acknowledge that partisan gain is not the only reason
a Speaker would appoint conferees from outside the bill’s jurisdictional committee. Other motivations include acknowledging
other committees’ or members’ work on a bill, including
members with special knowledge of the bill’s topic, allowing
members to advance personal legislative goals, or advancing his
own personal legislative goals (Hines and Civettini 2004).
13. Spatial models of congressional action—even explicitly
partisan ones—regularly assume that the floor amends all bills to
the floor median, lifting the logic out of the median voter theorem wholesale. We follow this line of reasoning; specifically, we
follow Cox and McCubbins (2005) in assuming that the majority
party asserts itself not on floor votes per se, but at a prior stage of
the legislative process, through its ability to control which issues
come to a vote in the first place. We assume that the majority
party only allows issues to come to a final passage vote if (a
majority of) the majority party prefers the floor median to the status quo policy. Cox and McCubbins presented evidence that any
bill that the House votes on at final passage is preferred to the status quo by a majority of majority party members (87-105). We
extend the argument: in any stage of the legislative process that
occurs after the final passage vote, we assume that the majority
party likewise prefers median policy to the status quo. The
Speaker’s purpose, then, in packing the conference committee is
not necessarily to produce a nonmedian outcome but to protect
the proposal that the majority party prefers to the status quo from
being changed in conference.
14. So far as appointing outsiders for the purpose of influencing the final bill’s language; see note 12.
15. Throughout the analysis, we exclude five cases in which
the Speaker appointed outsider conferees, but only members of
the minority party. These are HR 3471 (100th), HConRes 67
(104th), HR 3103 (104th), and S4 (104th), in which the Speaker
appointed a single minority outsider; and HR 483 (104th), in
which the Speaker appointed four minority outsiders.
16. We used Common Space scores, rather than the more
commonly seen DW-Nominate scores, to maintain consistency
with the first step of this process. However, results are not
affected if we substitute DW-Nominate scores; the two variables
correlate at over .99 for this time period.
17. Fifty-four of the 679 bills in our data set (8 percent) have
at least one jurisdictional committee on the Senate side and one
on the opposite side. We replicated all analyses presented in section 3 excluding these bills. Those results are substantively similar to the results presented here.
18. An alternative approach would be to include only conference bills with packed delegations in the analysis and use the
same set of independent variables as the analysis presented in
Table 2. We ran this model as well, and results are substantively
similar to those reported in Table 3.
19. The one-tailed test is appropriate because of the directional hypothesis.
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