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Do Better Committee Assignments Meaningfully Benefit Legislators? Evidence from a Randomized Experiment in the Arkansas State Legislature

Published online by Cambridge University Press:  25 March 2015

David E. Broockman  and
Daniel M. Butler
David E. Broockman
Affiliation:
Department of Political Science, University of California, Berkeley, 210 Barrows Hall, Berkeley, CA 94720, USA; e-mail: broockman@berkeley.edu
Daniel M. Butler
Affiliation:
Department of Political Science, Washington University in St. Louis, Campus Box 1063, One Brookings Drive, St. Louis, MO 63130-4899, USA; e-mail: daniel.butler@wustl.edu
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Abstract

A large literature argues that the committee assignment process plays an important role in shaping legislative politics because some committees provide legislators with substantial benefits. However, evaluating the degree to which legislators benefit from winning their preferred assignments has been challenging with existing data. This paper sheds light on the benefits legislators accrue from winning their preferred committee assignments by exploiting rules in Arkansas’ state legislature, where legislators select their own committee assignments in a randomized order. The natural experiment indicates that legislators reap at most limited rewards from winning their preferred assignments. These results potentially raise questions about the robustness of widely held assumptions in literatures on party discipline and legislative organization.

Keywords

Committeesparty leadersstate politicsnatural experimentre-election
Type
Research Article
Information
Journal of Experimental Political Science , Volume 2 , Issue 2 , Winter 2015 , pp. 152 - 163
Copyright
Copyright © The Experimental Research Section of the American Political Science Association 2015 

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