While a large body of research explores the federal-level influences over distributive politics decisions, very little attention has been given to the active role state and local governments play in the geographic distribution of federal funds. Before presidents, legislators, and agency leaders can influence the selection of federal grants, state and local governments must expend time and resources to submit grant proposals. We focus on grant applications as our unit of analysis and advance a theory that congressional representation influences the grant application behavior of state and local governments. We analyze US Department of Transportation grant applications and awards from 2009 to 2022 and find evidence that congressional representation meaningfully influences state-level grant application behavior. States apply more aggressively for federal transportation grants when represented by senators in the Senate majority party, and states apply more efficiently for grants when represented by a senator holding an advantageous committee leadership post.

I argue that the value of a particular set of committee assignments for a legislator is dependent on that legislator's policy interests. By this, I mean that “good” assignments will match committee policy jurisdictions with member policy priorities. I develop this concept of committee-agenda matching and present a measure of this match for legislators in 12 state lower chambers. After some brief measure validation, I present a substantive application, demonstrating that this match poses serious consequences for individual legislator's ability to shepherd their bills through the legislative process.

Legislative committees rely on the expertise and experience of their members, but instability in committee systems threatens the enhancements in productivity associated with specialization. This can occur in two ways, both of which are more common in state legislative committees than they are in Congress. First, membership retention on committees is generally lower, even after accounting for differing levels of legislative turnover across legislatures. Second, many state legislative committee systems undergo reorganization between sessions, changing the policy jurisdictions, and, therefore, the applicability of members' previously developed expertise. In this article, I examine the consequences of these two sources of committee instability on legislative output in 14 state legislatures. I find that both membership retention and jurisdictional reorganization significantly affect the number of bills processed through committees and the number of bills ultimately enacted. These linkages are also conditioned on several committee and institutional factors, particularly legislative turnover. Last, I find a weaker but discernible effect of membership retention on committees' propensity to perform their gatekeeping role.

We investigate the relationship between electoral institutions and committee autonomy in the context of U.S. state legislatures. The distributive theories of legislative organization suggest that electoral rules that make personal reputations more important motivate legislators to decentralize power and enhance committee autonomy to be able to target particularistic goods to their local constituencies. We argue that the distributive theories have direct implications for the relationship between candidate selection procedures and committee autonomy. The need to reach out to a large number of voters and to amass significant financial resources in states with more inclusive candidate selection procedures such as the open primary makes representatives more dependent on special interests, which is conducive to legislative particularism and committee autonomy. We take advantage of the great variation across the American states to investigate the effects of candidate selection procedures, a factor neglected in the previous literature. Examining 24 state legislatures from 1955 to 1995, we find that the inclusiveness of the selectorate, or the body electing candidates, has a significant effect on committee autonomy with more inclusive primary elections leading to more autonomous committee systems. By contrast, however, term limits were not a significant predictor of committee autonomy. This contributes to our understanding of how legislators amend institutional arrangements to achieve their electoral goals.

The role played by legislative committees in parliamentary democracies is directly related to some of their properties. In particular cohesion, namely similarity of committee members’ preferences, is the most important non-institutional feature that influences committee working. This non-institutional aspect, on its turn, is directly affected by the institutional environment. In this paper we hypothesize that electoral rules, committee agenda setting power and MP’s level of knowledge of the committee policy domain influence the committee cohesiveness by affecting the utility that a MP derives from a purposeful choice of the legislative committee she belongs to. To test this proposition we focus on the last 30 years of Italian legislative activity using data from co-sponsorship to infer MPs’ preferences in a multidimensional policy space. During this period Italy has experienced drastic changes in its political system. These changeable circumstances give a strong comparative flavor to the present study. Statistical analysis at individual level confirms our hypotheses.

Political parties are often faced with seemingly opposing goals when trying to secure members’ reelection and maintain party unity. On one hand, a party needs to fulfill members’ diverse electoral needs for their reelection, and on the other hand, the party must force members to vote in unison according to party lines for collective decisions. How does a party influence its members to take unified action while meeting their individual electoral needs? Through an analysis of the Japanese Diet, this study argues that parties attempt to achieve the reelection of their members and maintain party unity by manipulating legislative committee assignments and deliberations. In particular, the study demonstrates that a party shapes committees in a different way according to policy areas over which committees have jurisdiction. A party tends to accept its members’ requests for affiliation and allow their self-management in committees concerned with particularistic benefits so that they can deliver specific benefits to each electoral district. In addition, a party tends to assign members who have average policy positions in the party to committees concerned with general benefits to make policies that satisfy many constituencies.