Committee Outliers in State Legislatures
L. Marvin Overby
University of Mississippi
Thomas A. Kazee
University of the South
and
David Prince
University of Kentucky
Paper prepared for delivery at the annual meeting of the Midwest Political Science Association,
Chicago, IL, April 27-30, 2000.
Please direct all correspondence to:
L. Marvin Overby
Department of Political Science
University of Mississippi
University, MS 38677
Voice: 662.915.7190
FAX: 662.915.7808
e-mail: [email protected]
Abstract
In this paper we extend our own previous work (Overby and Kazee 2000) exploring the
prevalence of outlying committees in American state legislatures. Using an expanded sample of
44 states and measures of legislator preferences generated by a single, federated group, we find
that most legislative committees are representative of the parent chambers from which their
members are selected.. We discuss how this finding contributes to the generalizability of
informational models of legislative organization developed to account for the U. S. Congress.
Committee Outliers in State Legislatures
For well over a century, political scientists have recognized the importance of legislative
committees. From Woodrow Wilson’s (1885) dictum that congressional government was
“government by standing committee”, to Nelson Polsby’s testimony that “[a]ny proposal that
weakens the capabilities of congressional committees weakens the Congress” (Hearings on
Committee Organization..., 1973), to Davidson and Oleszek’s (1998) observation that
“committees are the centers of policy making, oversight of federal agencies, and public
education” (emphasis added), it has been the received wisdom that committees are vital to the
operations of the United States Congress. There is far less consensus, however, on exactly why
legislative committees are so important ... or, indeed, what their primary purpose is. The three
theories most commonly proposed to explain committee purpose and power --- the distributive
perspective, the party-dominant perspective, and the informational (or chamber-dominant)
perspective (for a succinct overview, see Deering and Smith 1997) --- posit conflicting claims
regarding not only what core functions committees perform, but also regarding the fundamental
organizational principles of the Congress. What is more, at their stylized extremes, these
theories make assertions that go far beyond the Congress to draw much more general conclusions
concerning how any “rational legislature” (Gilligan and Krehbiel 1990) should be organized. In
this paper, we attempt to shed additional empirical light on these claims by extending our own
previous work examining legislative committee compositions in the American states. Using data
from a 44-state sample, we provide evidence that committee compositions are broadly
representative of the full chambers from which their members are drawn, further buttressing the
informational theory of legislative organization.
1
Theories of Legislative Organization
Theories of legislative organization have recently received exhaustive scholarly attention
and require only brief recapitulation here. For years, the textbook portrayal of the Congress held
that it was a highly distributive institution and that its members had created a largely autonomous
committee structure to reflect this ethos (Wilson 1885; McConachie 1898; Fenno 1966, 1973;
Manley 1970; Mayhew 1974; Price 1978; Davidson 1981; Weingast and Marshall 1988). In such
a decentralized institution, members are more or less free to self select onto committees of
special interest to their constituents (Shepsle 1978), and this in turn permits them to exert
disproportionate influence over policies that will help ensure their reelection. Since legislators
do not perceive of themselves as engaging in a zero-sum transactions (Mayhew 1974), they
regularly logroll with each other, trading for influence in areas of interest to them in exchange for
deference to others on matters on which they care little. While this might result in a chamber
composed of very unrepresentative committees, it also fosters gains from trade that can lead to an
efficient allocation of resources, the development of significant expertise, and an expedited
policy making process (Shepsle and Weingast 1995; Deering and Smith 1997).
Theorists associated with the informational perspective disagree with the distributional
model on several significant points. First, they believe that the textbook, distributive view
seriously underestimates the basic majoritarian nature of the Congress (and similar legislative
institutions). Since bills must ultimately face the judgment of the floor and since it is the
chamber that empowers committees, Krehbiel (1991) and others think it appropriate to conceive
of committees as agents of the more powerful floor. Second, they hold that the chamber has
substantial motivation to keep its committee agents on relatively short leads. For while a
2
distributional arrangement might be rational under stylized conditions of full information, such is
never the case in the real world of legislative activity. In real legislatures, the full implications of
legislation are rarely immediately obvious, and hence the larger chamber usually relies on its
committees to research and report costly information. Such committee-chamber cooperation is
more likely when committee preferences are similar to those of the parent chamber or, if nonrepresentative (i.e., outlying) committees cannot be avoided, by limiting their mischief through
strict restrictions on their jurisdiction and by the utilization of subsequent rules that facilitate
chamber attempts to undo committee actions (Krehbiel 1991; Gilligan and Krehbiel 1990). In
sum, the informational perspective holds that collective informational motives — not individual
electoral ones — drive legislative organization and that the larger legislative institution has both
the motives and the means to construct a committee system that serves collective rather than
individual ends.
The party-dominant perspective shares with informational models the assumption that
committees ultimately are agents responsible to a more powerful principal. In this case, though,
the principal is the parties, and particularly the majority party, not the full chamber (Liebowitz
and Tollison 1980; Kiewiet and McCubbins 1991; Cox and McCubbins 1993). Like the
distributional model, however, the party-dominant perspective accepts that electoral concerns
weigh heavily on the minds of legislators. Here, though, the logic has is that members believe
their individual electoral fortunes are closely tied to their party’ s success in the institution ... and
that party leaders have access to numerous devices (e.g., influence over committee assignments,
control of the agenda, access to special rules) with which to encourage cooperation (Rohde
1991).
3
Attempts to test these differing perspectives have produced mixed empirical findings,
although overall more support for the informational and party-dominant models than for the
distributional one. In an important 1990 article, Krehbiel demonstrated that in the 96th through
the 99th Congresses only the Armed Services Committee was consistently an outlier and,
following his lead, others have produced similar results (see, e.g., Groseclose 1994; Brown, et al.
1997). In the party-dominant tradition, studies by Cox and McCubbins (1993) and Kiewiet and
McCubbins (1991) have also uncovered a small number of committee outliers, in particular
among important control committees like Rules, Appropriations, and Ways and Means that
structure chamber deliberations, produce proposals that affect essentially every member, and are,
therefore, of particular interest to party leaders.
Others have challenged these findings, often noting that the roll-call-based interest group
measures used by Krehbiel and others bias studies toward null results because they are “ not well
tailored to the jurisdiction-specific hypotheses being tested” and because floor deference to
committee members could result in “ nonmember voting patterns that mirror committee voting
patterns,” even though the committees were, in fact, “ biased and powerful” outliers (Hall and
Grofman (1990). Using constituency-based measures instead of interest group scores, Hall and
Grofman (1990) find substantial evidence of committee (and subcommittee) outliers in the 99th
Congress.1 Further support for this position has been provided by Adler and Lapinski (1997)
1
Krehbiel (1994) has, in turn, answered both of these critiques. Drawing a sharp distinction
between the geographical constituencies used by Hall and Grofman and the election constituencies that
legislators care far more about, he has argued that “ constituency-characteristic measures are inferior to
vote-based measures” as predictors of voting behavior on key legislative decisions. Second, Krehbiel
(1994) argues that the Type II error risk from deference is exaggerated. Since the measure of true
preferences is disturbed by a constant term in the pro-committee direction, and since the disturbances in
the mean differences and the variance expectations cancel each other out, the t-statistics used for
4
who searched for outliers employing “ district-level measures of policy need.” Using a 50-year
time series, they compare 13, non-exclusive committees with the floor and find that “ several
committees are overrepresentative of members whose districts possess qualities of particular
concern to that panel.” 2 Still others have argued for the use of scaled algorithms such as
NOMINATE scores (Poole and Rosenthal 1991), since interest groups ratings “ exaggerate the
degree of extremism and bipolarity in Congress” (Snyder 1992), leading to artificially inflated
variances in t-scores and, again, a bias toward null results.3 Using NOMINATE scores and a
times series involving all House committees in 17 post-World War II Congresses, Londregan and
Snyder (1994) conclude that one-third are outliers, including --- in many instances --- even
important control committees (i.e., Appropriations, Rules, and Ways and Means).
In the “ conditional party government” tradition (Rohde 1991), some recent research has
argued that studies focus on the conditions that lead to either committee-, party-, or chamberdomination. Maltzman (1995), for instance, finds that while none of the 14 committees in his
sample was an outlier compared to the floor and that control committees are, in fact,
“ significant[ly] representative” of the floor, majority party committee delegations often differ
from their parent caucus, even on control committees. He concludes that this is compatible with
inferences regarding outliers are left unbiased. See also Herron (1999) for mixed evidence regarding the
effects of artificial extremism in interest group ratings.
2
Adler and Lapinski concede that the majority of outlying committees they uncover are
“ traditionally considered to be private goods committees” (e.g., Agriculture, Interior and Insular Affairs),
while there are few outliers among policy committees. Notably, they do not even consider control
committees, stipulating that such committees extremely unlikely to be outliers.
3
Based on simulations bounded within the range of likely observations, Krehbiel (1994)
demonstrates that --- as with deference --- this concern is probably overstated, since the probability of an
extremism-based Type II error is only marginally greater than that universally accepted when using
customary 95 percent confidence intervals.
5
a conditional party-dominant model because party leaders are apt to appoint “ extreme delegations
... [in order] to counter-balance minority party delegations,” especially on vital “ institutional
maintenance committees” (p. 675). This evolving consensus around a conditional model is
perhaps best encapsulated by Deering and Smith (1997) in their textbook on congressional
committees:
None of these perspectives [i.e., the distributive, chamber-dominant, or partydominant perspectives] full captures the nature of the relationship among
committees, parties, and the parent chambers. Rather, each exaggerates the
importance of certain features of congressional rules and practices. In fac, policy
making through committees represents an admixture of these alternate models....
In fact, we believe that the exercise of committee discretion, party influence, and
chamber influence is visible in some degree on most major bills passed by
Congress (pp. 4-5).
Committee Outliers in State Legislatures
As controversy continues along both theoretical and empirical dimensions, it is important
to reiterate the point that virtually all of the evidence marshaled in the committee outlier debate
has been gathered from only one legislature. Even though all camps in the debate tend to frame
their arguments with universalistic rhetoric, the empirical bases for these claims come almost
exclusively from studies of only one chamber of one legislature --- the U. S. House of
Representatives.4 In an earlier paper (Overby and Kazee 2000), we utilized the federal structure
of the United States to gain added purchase on the outlier question.5 Arguing that state data
4
But see studies by Marshall, Prins, and Rohde (1997) on Senate committees, and Ainsworth and
Akins (1997) on congressional caucuses.
5
See also Battista (1998) who found little evidence of committee outliers in the lower houses of
the Minnesota, Iowa, Connecticut, and New Hampshire state legislatures.
6
would allow us to test the generalizability of legislative organization theories developed in the
congressional environment and that there are substantive reasons in an era of policy devolution to
be concerned with state committee representativeness, we employed a sample of 12 state
legislative lower chambers to search for committee outliers at the sub-national level. Across a
fairly good cross-section of states6 and using a variety of different measures of legislator
preference,7 we found very little evidence of outlying committees. Among non-control
committees, rates of outliership ranged from 0 percent (found in seven states) to 21 percent (in
Louisiana), with an average of 6 percent per state. We found no evidence in any state in the
sample of outliers among the important appropriations, finance, and rules committees that
exercise disproportionate control of legislative activities. We found somewhat higher incidents
of committee partisan delegations that differed significantly from the parent caucuses, although
here, too, outliers were the exception rather than the norm: 9 percent in the case of Democratic
delegations, 10 percent in the case of Republican delegations.8
In this paper, we extend this initial analysis through a substantial expansion of the sample
size, from 12 states to 44. We believe there are compelling reasons to do so. First, the initial
sample was largely a purposive one. Although the original sample included a good deal of
6
The states included in the sample were Arkansas, Colorado, Illinois, Kentucky, Louisiana,
Mississippi, New York, North Carolina, Ohio, South Carolina, Virginia, and Washington.
7
We utilized four types of interest group measures: ratings based entirely on roll call voting
behavior, modified roll call-based measures (i.e., those that either use survey results to supplement rollcall scores or add/subtract points to reward/punish legislators for efforts such as bill sponsorship),
constituency characteristic-based measures, and survey-based measures.
8
Unlike Maltzman (1995), we did not find consistency in the direction of partisan delegation
extremity (e.g., Democratic delegations were as likely to be more conservative as more liberal than their
parent caucus).
7
diversity in terms of legislative professionalization,9 party control10, and the balance of power
among committees, party leaders,11 and party caucuses, it was not random, but rather generated
by our access to various interest groups that rate state legislators. By expanding the number of
cases to include virtually the entire universe of states, we can have greater confidence that our
earlier results were not driven by the cases included in the non-random sample. Second,
increasing the number of cases provides leverage to undertake multivariate analysis. To the
extent that the occurrence of committee outliers does vary by state, multivariate analysis can help
us isolate and examine the institutional factors that contribute to the emergence of nonrepresentative committees.
Data and Methods
In this paper, we expand our original 12-state sample by adding an additional 32 states.
For each state, we have obtained ratings of members of the lower legislative chamber compiled
by the state chapter of the National Federation of Independent Business (NFIB). NFIB describes
itself as “ the largest advocacy organization representing small and independent businesses” in the
country,” with a membership of “ 600,000 business owners, who employ more than seven million
9
Using Squire’ s (1992) index of professionalization, the states in the sample ranged from the
most professionalized (New York) to the 44th most professionalized (Kentucky), with four in the top
third, six in the middle third, and two in the bottom third.
10
Seven of the 12 chambers were controlled by the Democratic party, five by the GOP.
11
At least one legislative chamber in our initial sample fell into five of the six categories of
committee-leader-caucus powers identified by Francis (1989), including an over-representation of
chambers (25 percent) identified by Francis as having powerful committees.
8
people,” and a legislative office in each state capitol.12 The six states excluded from this analysis
fall into one of four categories. Maine and Connecticut use joint House-Senate committees that
complicate calculating committee-chamber comparisons. Nebraska has a unique unicameral
legislature that renders it analytically distinct from the other states. NFIB does not currently have
ratings posted for members of the New Hampshire and New Jersey legislatures. And, finally, in
Hawaii, the NFIB compiles not a rating, but merely a listing of “ Friends of Small Business” ,
which makes data from that legislature incommensurable with that from the others.13 The NFIB
generally takes a conservative, pro-business stance on legislation and sometimes takes stances on
issues that are not directly (or exclusively) related to small businesses. Votes included in the
ratings for some of the states in our analyses included tort reform, legislative term limits,
privatization of government functions, regulatory reform, limits on government spending, repeal
of minimum wage laws, educational reform to stress basic skills, and a variety of tax cuts ... all
positions that the NFIB endorsed. A listing of the states in the original analysis and those in the
current expanded sample is found in Table 1.14
[Table 1 About Here]
12
Description taken from the organization’ s website, www.nfibonline.com.
13
The Hawaii branch of the NFIB justifies this by noting that “ the Hawaii legislature seldom
allows an issue to reach the floor for a final vote unless legislative leaders are assured passage. There are
few no votes on final passage. The Voting Record usually showed each Hawaii legislator with a
near-perfect, 100 percent, voting record on small-business supported bills” (see the www.nfibonline.com
entry for Hawaii).
14
In our original analysis of South Carolina (Overby and Kazee 2000), we reported two ratings of
members of the South Carolina legislature calculated by the state’ s Business and Industry Political
Education Committee. One is based on the strength of business interests in each member’ s district; the
other is based on members’ roll call voting behavior. Here we use only the roll call-based rating, which
is more analogous to the NFIB scores used for most of the states in this analysis.
9
In each of the 32 new states added in this analysis, the state chapter of the NFIB rated the
members of the lower chamber of the state legislature, using legislators’ votes on bills of
particular interest to the groups’ leadership. In each case, legislators are ranked according to
their support for the NFIB’ s agenda with scores reflecting the percentage of times they agreed
with the group’ s position on the pieces of legislation used in the rating. Higher scores reflect a
higher level of support for the NFIB agenda and, more generally, conservative voting patterns.
Summary statistics related to these ratings are included in Table 2. While not all of the state-bystate ratings are particularly well behaved and there is a pronounced upward bias in most scores
(reflecting a general pro-business bias in the state legislatures), in most cases there is some
considerable variation in the range of scores. Since different state legislatures have different
agendas, and consider and vote on different pieces of legislation, no behavioral measure of
member preferences can be entirely commensurable across states. However, the use of ratings
generated by a federated group such as the NFIB at least ensures that in each state we are
measuring — more or less — legislative preferences across a similar dimension and in a roughly
similar manner.
[Table 2 About Here]
Data on members’ committee assignments were gathered from relevant issues of the State
Yellow Book. In all cases, we examine only committees composed entirely of members from the
state’ s lower legislative chamber; in some cases (e.g., Oregon) excluding joint committees
substantially lowers the number of committees in the analysis.
To test for the presence of committee outliers, we rely most heavily on difference
of means tests (i.e., two-sample t-tests) to ascertain whether or not there statistically meaningful
10
differences between the preferences of committees and those of their relevant parent chambers.
While difference in medians are more useful for purposes of formal modeling and have,
therefore, become the de facto industry standard in most committee outlier research, we believe
there are numerous reasons --- both statistical and substantive --- for using t-tests (e.g., their
greater transparency, their greater sensitivity to outliers, the utility of means for estimating
medians, our belief that in real legislative settings the intensity of preferences matter). Since we
have outlined those justifications in detail elsewhere (see Overby and Kazee 2000), we will
simply note here that difference of means tests and difference of medians tests (whether
computed using Monte Carlo simulations or Wilcoxon rank-sum tests) yield virtually identical
results (see Groseclose 1994; Londregan and Snyder 1994; and Overby and Kazee 2000).
Findings
We report our initial findings in Table 3, which lists the number of control and noncontrol committees by state and, in the column on the far right, records the percentage of
committees in each category that are outliers compared to their parent chambers according to
mean interest group ratings.15 One finding is immediate and obvious: outlying committees are
rare. Of the 115 control committees that we identify in our 44-state sample, only 3 percent (n =
4) are outliers. Similarly, of the 764 non-control committees, only 4 percent (n = 34) are outliers.
In a majority of the 44 states (n = 25 or 57 percent), there are no instances of outliers of any
15
We counted as control committees those whose names indicated they were responsible for tax
bills, appropriations choices, or the rules of the chamber; all others we coded as non-control. A complete
list of committees of both types is available from the authors.
11
kind.16
[Table 3 About Here]
Table 4 identifies, by state, which committees are outliers relative to their parent
chambers and in which direction (i.e., more conservative/pro-business or more liberal/antibusiness). While there are relatively few cases on which to base any sort of trends, there does
seem to be at least a faint pattern in the distribution of outliers, which split almost evenly
between those that are more conservative and those that are more liberal than the chamber. As a
general rule, the few committees that are outliers in the conservative/pro-business direction tend
to be those with jurisdictions over matters like banking, insurance, and natural resources. Such
committees undoubtedly routinely deal with matters of particular interest to conservative/probusiness constituencies. Conversely, the few liberal/anti-business outliers tend to have
jurisdictions over matters such as labor, cities, health, and education ... issue areas where the
most active constituencies are likely to be relatively liberal/anti-business.
[Table 4 About Here]
Of the four control committees that are outliers, three (i.e., the finance committees in
West Virginia and Wisconsin, and the Rules Committee in Wyoming) are conservative/probusiness outliers, while only one (i.e., the Ways and Means Committee in Vermont) is
liberal/anti-business.
While the pattern of outliers seen in Table 4 comports well with a distributive perspective
on legislative organization (i.e., legislators migrating to committees on which they can serve
16
As with the previous studies cited earlier, difference of medians tests yield virtually identical
results, both in terms of the total number of outliers identified and the particular committees so
designated.
12
constituency interests), the overall paucity of outliers in our sample speaks much more strongly
in favor of the informational perspective. The fact that only one committee in 25 is an outlier is
consistent with institutional efforts to create representative committees that will serve as loyal
agents of the floor in terms of acquiring and divulging important legislative information. If NFIB
scores (and the other interest group ratings we use) are read narrowly only as jurisdiction-specific
indicators of support for small business, the meager number of outliers uncovered in this study
can be interpreted as strong evidence that most state legislative committees that regulate,
monitor, and oversee business matters in their respective states have not been captured by
business’ s most ardent advocates within the legislature (nor, conversely, by anti-business
interests). The plethora of non-outlying committees in our sample that deal with such matters as
labor-management relations, commerce, industrial development, tourism, natural resources,
public lands, banking, insurance, consumer protection, environmental regulation, utilities,
business regulation, transportation, and the like dwarf the small number of business-related
committees that do emerge as outliers. In sum, when creating committees to handle matters of
the greatest relevance to small business, state legislatures generally behave as though they are
motivated primarily by informational concerns, constructing panels whose mean preferences on
business-related matters are quite close to those of the full chamber. If NFIB (and similar)
scores can be interpreted more broadly, as surrogate measures of members’ general ideological
inclinations, the point can be extended. Within the ideological spectrum represented by their
members, the dearth of committee outliers indicates that state legislatures seek to construct
committees with central philosophical tendencies that closely mirror the floor ... a point that is
especially important in terms of the control committees that structure key legislative allocational
13
decisions.
We also examine here the relationship between party delegations on the committees
included in this analysis and their caucuses in the larger chamber. These results are summarized
in Table 5.
[Table 5 About Here]
The party-dominant perspective on committee organization holds that the party
delegations on committees should be generally representative of the larger caucus, and that is
generally what we find. Although party delegation outliers are more common than committee
outliers, they are still certainly the exception rather than the rule. Among Republican committee
delegations, we find that only 11 percent of control committees and eight percent of non-control
committees are outliers when compared to the Republican caucus in their respective chamber.
The figures are roughly the same for Democratic committee delegations, where we find eight
percent of delegations on control committees and nine percent of those on non-control
committees to have mean NFIB ratings that differ significantly from their respective caucus
average.17
What is perhaps more interesting is that the direction of committee delegation outliers is
often not as predicted. In his work on the U.S. House, Maltzman (1995) found evidence that
Democratic delegations on important control committees tended to be liberal outliers compared
to the Democratic caucus. He interprets this as evidence of conditional party control of
committee composition, arguing that this results from the fact that Democratic party leaders
17
These findings differ somewhat from Maltzman’ s (1995) analysis of the U.S. House of
Representatives, where he reports party delegation outliers only on important control committees. Here
we find more on less influential, non-control committees.
14
packed important committees with liberal Democrats, anticipating that Republicans would do
just the opposite and that they would need relatively liberal membership on these committees to
balance out the conservative GOP members. We find considerably more mixed evidence of that
in our sample of state legislative committees. Specifically, of the 12 outlying Republican
delegations on control committees, five (42 percent) are outlying in an unexpectedly liberal
direction; even more telling, of the nine outlying Democratic delegations on control committees,
fully seven (78 percent) are conservative outliers compared to their parent caucuses.18 If
conditional party control of committee composition is occurring at the state level, it is far less
obvious than it is at the federal level.
Conclusions
In this paper, we have advanced the literature on legislative organization to take a more
comprehensive look at state legislatures. Replicating and expanding the analysis first presented
in Overby and Kazee (2000), we have examined committee compositions in the lower chambers
of a sample of 44 states relying largely on legislative ratings generated by the National Federation
of Independent Business. In general, our findings provide strong evidence in support of an
informational model of legislative organization. The fact that only four percent of all committees
and only three percent of important control committees are outliers relative to their parent
18
Unlike the practice in the U.S. House of Representatives, minority parties in state legislatures
do not always have the right to name their own committee delegations (although minority party leaders
are often consulted, either formally or informally). Because of this, it is important to note that for both
the Republican and Democratic analyses a majority of outlying committee delegations that are in the
“ wrong” direction (i.e., three of the five Republican cases; four of the seven Democratic cases) come
from state houses where that party is in the majority.
15
chambers indicates that, across states, legislative committees are composed in a manner that
makes them broadly representative of the floor. Substantively, while this does not necessarily
mean that business interests are not over-represented in state legislatures,19 it does provide
evidence that relative to the chambers conservative, pro-business interests are not overrepresented on state legislative committees ... especially not on the vital institutional maintenance
committees that structure the legislatures’ most important taxing and spending decisions, and
generally not even on the committees with jurisdictions over issue areas most relevant to
business. In terms of legislative theory, these findings provide robust evidence that our previous
findings (Overby and Kazee 2000) were not the result of our original sample size and, therefore,
that informational models of how “ rational legislatures” are organized are generalizable beyond
the United States House of Representatives. The dearth of committee outliers in our sample is
highly consonant with the perspective of Krehbiel and others that committees are constructed in
such a way that they will be loyal agents of the floor, so that they can be relied upon to collect
and divulge the information their parent chambers need to arrive at reasonable policy decisions.
While we plan further work to build upon these findings,20 at this juncture we think it safe
to paraphrase Deering and Smith (1997:109) to the effect that the preponderance of evidence available
from both Washington and the state capitals indicates that at best, only a relatively small portion of
legislative committees are significantly enough different to sustain the distributive committees theory.
19
Indeed, the positive bias in NFIB scores noticed in most states indicates that businesses have
many friends in state legislatures, a phenomenon that is probably rooted in candidate emergence and
campaign finance patterns.
20
For example, expanding the time series, using other interest group ratings and/or developing
state-level NOMINATE scores, and using multivariate analyses to tease out the factors responsible for
the limited variance observed in the prevalence of outliers in the states.
16
Table 1
States Included in the Analysis
State
States included in
original Overby and
Kazee (2000) analysis
States new to this
analysis
Interest Group
Arkansas
NFIBa
Colorado
NFIBa
Illinois
Chamber of Commerce
Kentucky
KY Forward
Louisiana
LABIb
Mississippi
BIPECc
New York
CPNYd
North Carolina
NCCPPRe
Ohio
NFIBa
South Carolina
BIPECc
Virginia
VA Free
Washington
NFIBa
Alabama
Alaska
Arizona
California
Delaware
Florida
Georgia
Idaho
Indiana
Iowa
Kansas
Maryland
Massachusetts
Michigan
Minnesota
Missouri
Montana
Nevada
New Mexico
North Dakota
Oklahoma
Oregon
Pennsylvania
Rhode Island
South Dakota
Tennessee
Texas
Utah
Vermont
West Virginia
Wisconsin
Wyoming
a
NFIBa
National Federation of Independent Business; bLouisiana Association of Business and Industry; cBusiness and
Industry Political Education Committee; dConservative Party of New York; eNorth Carolina Center for Public
Policy Research
17
Table 2
Summary Statistics of NFIB Ratings
for New States
State
Year/s
Range
µ
)
State
Year/s
Range
µ
)
Alabama
1995-8
17-100
82
24
Montana
1997-8
10-100
70
29
Alaska
1997-8
0-100
81
30
Nevada
1995
71-100
96
7
Arizona
1997-8
10-100
64
32
New Mexico
1997-8
33-100
73
21
California
1997-8
0-100
50
43
North Dakota
1997-8
25-100
77
26
Delaware
1997-8
50-100
87
14
Oklahoma
1997-8
50-100
79
14
Florida
1997-8
23-100
76
23
Oregon
1999
23-100
73
25
Georgia
1997-8
0-100
70
18
Pennsylvania
1997-8
50-100
80
9
Idaho
1998
50-100
85
17
Rhode Island
1997-8
60-100
81
7
Indiana
1998
30-100
67
28
South Dakota
1998
33-100
60
13
Iowa
1996
22-100
78
29
Tennessee
1997-8
43-100
72
14
Kansas
1997-8
75-100
93
7
Texas
1998
0-100
74
31
Maryland
1995-8
0-100
66
24
Utah
1998
57-100
82
11
Massachusetts
1996
17-100
43
31
Vermont
1997-8
0-100
43
41
Michigan
1997-8
10-100
54
33
West Virginia
1997-8
66-100
94
11
Minnesota
1996
0-100
63
35
Wisconsin
1997-8
25-100
70
21
Missouri
1997-8
33-100
75
21
Wyoming
1998
0-100
51
25
18
Table 3
Committee Outlier Percentages by State
State
Committee Type
Alabama
Alaska
Arizona
Arkansas
California
Colorado
Delaware
Florida
Georgia
Idaho
Illinois
Indiana
Iowa
Total # of Committees
% Outliers
Control
2
0
Non-Control
27
0
Control
2
0
Non-Control
8
0
Control
3
0
Non-Control
16
0
Control
1
0
Non-Control
9
0
Control
3
0
Non-Control
24
0
Control
2
0
Non-Control
8
0
Control
3
0
Non-Control
19
5
Control
2
0
Non-Control
35
3
Control
3
0
Non-Control
29
17
Control
2
0
Non-Control
12
8
Control
6
0
Non-Control
23
0
Control
2
0
Non-Control
19
0
Control
3
0
Non-Control
14
0
19
Table 3 continued
Kansas
Kentucky
Louisiana
Maryland
Massachusetts
Michigan
Minnesota
Mississippi
Missouri
Montana
Nevada
New Mexico
New York
North Carolina
Control
3
0
Non-Control
18
11
Control
2
0
Non-Control
16
6
Control
2
0
Non-Control
14
21
Control
3
0
Non-Control
5
0
Control
2
0
Non-Control
5
20
Control
2
0
Non-Control
26
0
Control
3
0
Non-Control
20
0
Control
3
0
Non-Control
31
19
Control
7
0
Non-Control
36
0
Control
3
0
Non-Control
13
0
Control
2
0
Non-Control
10
0
Control
3
0
Non-Control
13
0
Control
2
0
Non-Control
33
6
Control
3
0
Non-Control
24
0
20
Table 3 continued
North Dakota
Ohio
Oklahoma
Oregon
Pennsylvania
Rhode Island
South Carolina
South Dakota
Tennessee
Texas
Utah
Vermont
Virginia
Washington
Control
2
0
Non-Control
9
0
Control
3
0
Non-Control
17
0
Control
3
0
Non-Control
24
8
Control
2
0
Non-Control
6
0
Control
2
0
Non-Control
20
0
Control
1
0
Non-Control
5
0
Control
2
0
Non-Control
8
13
Control
2
0
Non-Control
11
18
Control
2
0
Non-Control
11
0
Control
3
0
Non-Control
33
3
Control
2
0
Non-Control
10
20
Control
3
33
Non-Control
12
8
Control
3
0
Non-Control
17
0
Control
3
0
Non-Control
15
0
21
Table 3 continued
West Virginia
Wisconsin
Wyoming
All States
Control
2
50
Non-Control
13
0
Control
3
33
Non-Control
37
0
Control
3
33
Non-Control
9
22
Control
115
3
Non-Control
764
4
All Committees
879
4
22
Table 4
Outlying Committees by State
State
Delaware
Florida
Georgia
Idaho
Kansas
Kentucky
Louisiana
Massachusetts
Mississippi
New York
Type
Committee Names
Control
None
NonControl
Labor
Control
None
NonControl
Agriculture
Control
None
NonControl
Banking;
Defense/Veterans;
Health; Insurance;
Special Rules
Control
None
NonControl
Agriculture
Control
None
NonControl
Calendar and Printing
Control
None
NonControl
Banking/Insurance
Control
None
NonControl
Labor; Municipalities;
Natural Resources
Control
None
NonControl
Personnel
Control
None
NonControl
Conservation; Military;
Oil/Gas; Utilities;
Investigations; Library
Control
None
NonControl
Children/Families;
Social Services
State
Oklahoma
South Carolina
South Dakota
Texas
Utah
Vermont
West Virginia
Wisconsin
Wyoming
Type
Committee Names
Control
None
NonControl
Mental Health;
Transportation
Control
None
NonControl
Medical, Military,
Public, & Municipal
Control
None
NonControl
Education; Health and
Human Resources
Control
None
NonControl
Land/Resource
Management
Control
None
NonControl
Education; Energy
Control
Ways and Means
NonControl
Fish and Wildlife
Control
Finance
NonControl
None
Control
Finance
NonControl
None
Control
Rules
NonControl
Judiciary;
Transportation
Committees outlying in a liberal direction relative to
the floor are italicized; committees outlying in a
conservative direction relative to the floor are not.
23
Table 5
Party Delegation Outliers by State
State
Committee Type
Republican Delegations
Democratic Delegations
Alabama
Control
0
0
Judiciary; Local Government;
Local Legislation 1
Local Legislation 2; Local
Legislation3; Local Legislation 5
0
0
Resources
Committee on Committees
0
0
Public Institutions
Environment; Government Reform
Control
0
0
Non-Control
0
0
Control
0
Rules
Agriculture; Consumer;
Elections; Water
Insurance; Public Safety
0
0
Agriculture; Local Government
Agriculture
0
Revenue/Finance
Labor
Business; Economic Development;
Housing
0
0
Environment; Government
Operations; Regulated Services
Agriculture; Educational
Appropriations; Water
0
0
Defense
Children; Health/Ecology;
Insurance; Special Judiciary
0
0
Agriculture
0
Revenue
0
Cities; Consumer
Judicial/Crime
Non-Control
Alaska
Control
Non-Control
Arizona
Control
Non-Control
Arkansas
California
Non-Control
Colorado
Control
Non-Control
Delaware
Control
Non-Control
Florida
Control
Non-Control
Georgia
Control
Non-Control
Idaho
Control
Non-Control
Illinois
Control
Non-Control
24
Table 5 continued
Indiana
Control
0
0
Aged; Natural Resources;
Transportation
Agriculture
0
Ways and Means
Commerce; Education
Agriculture; Natural Resources
Appropriations
Appropriations
Calendar; Interstate Cooperation
0
0
0
Judiciary
Banking
Control
0
0
Non-Control
0
Agriculture; Municipalities;
Natural Resources
Control
0
0
Environment; Judiciary
Judiciary
Control
0
0
Non-Control
0
Ethics; Personnel
Control
0
0
Senior Citizens
Commerce; Utilities
0
0
Regulation
Education
Rules
0
Conservation; Jobs; Oil; Salaries
Offices
Appropriations-Natural
Resources
0
Labor
Ethics; Federal/State; Higher
Education; Utilities
Control
0
Appropriations
Non-Control
0
0
Control
0
0
Non-Control
0
0
Non-Control
Iowa
Control
Non-Control
Kansas
Kentucky
Control
Non-Control
Control
Non-Control
Louisiana
Maryland
Non-Control
Massachusetts
Michigan
Non-Control
Minnesota
Control
Non-Control
Mississippi
Control
Non-Control
Missouri
Control
Non-Control
Montana
Nevada
25
Table 5 continued
New Mexico
New York
Control
Rules
0
Non-Control
0
0
Control
0
0
Small Business; Tourism
Education; Government
Operations; Local Government;
Social Services; Transporation;
0
0
Judiciary 3; Utilities; Government
Operations
Agriculture; Business Travel;
Ethics
0
Rules
Judiciary
0
0
0
Judicial/Crime;
College/University
0
Rules; Appropriations
0
Government Operations
Commerce; Mental Health; Public
Health; Tourism; Transportation
Control
0
0
Non-Control
0
0
Finance
0
Non-Control
0
Education
Control
0
0
Non-Control
0
0
Rules
0
Non-Control
0
Medical; Memorials
Control
0
0
Health/Human Services
0
0
0
Conservation; Consumer
0
Non-Control
North
Carolina
Control
North Dakota
Control
Non-Control
Non-Control
Ohio
Control
Non-Control
Oklahoma
Control
Non-Control
Oregon
Pennsylvania
Rhode Island
South Carolina
South Dakota
Control
Control
Non-Control
Tennessee
Control
Non-Control
26
Table 5 continued
Texas
Utah
Control
n/a
0
Non-Control
n/a
Agriculture; Transportation; Urban
Affairs
0
0
Education
Energy
Ways and Means
0
Judiciary
Housing/Military; Transportation
0
Rules
Education
Cheasapeake Bay; Health; Mining
0
0
Financial/Insurance; Health;
Law/Justice
Energy/Utilities
Control
n/a
Finance; Rules
Non-Control
n/a
0
Finance
0
Child/Family; Financial
Institutions; Labor
Assembly Organization; Insurance;
Mandates
Rules
0
Transportation
Judiciary
Control (n)
12
9
Non-Control (n)
60
68
All Committees (n)
72
77
Control
Non-Control
Vermont
Control
Non-Control
Virginia
Control
Non-Control
Washington
Control
Non-Control
West Virginia
Wisconsin
Control
Non-Control
Wyoming
Control
Non-Control
All States
Republican committee delegations in Texas and West Virginia are excluded from the analysis, since there is no
variance in Republican members’ NFIB ratings in those states.
Committee delegations outlying in a liberal direction relative to their parent caucus are italicized; delegations
outlying in a conservative direction relative to their caucus are not.
27
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