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Re-examining Legislative Committee Representativeness in the States

Published online by Cambridge University Press:  25 January 2021

James Coleman Battista
James Coleman Battista*
Affiliation:
University of North Texas
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Abstract

I re-examine theories of legislative committee organization by using simulation to assess how representative state legislative committees are of their parent bodies. I find that clearly unrepresentative committees are rare and concentrated in a few chambers. I also find that comparing committee and chamber medians leads to very different conclusions about representativeness than does comparing means. My findings tend to confirm the informational model of committees and disconfirm the partisan model, but they cannot directly address the distributive model.

Type
Research Article
Information
State Politics & Policy Quarterly , Volume 4 , Issue 2 , Summer 2004 , pp. 161 - 180
Copyright
Copyright © Board of Trustees of the University of Illinois

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