U.S.

State Legislative Committee Assignments

and Encouragement of Party Loyalty:
An Exploratory Analysis
Kristin Kanthak, University of Pittsburgh

abstract
Although political parties in U.S. legislatures cannot compel discipline with the
threat of expulsion from the legislature, they can encourage greater party loyalty by
strategically bestowing benefits upon favored members. This article explores the use
of plum committee assignments to encourage legislators’ loyalty to their parties. I
outline a theory of how party leaders can use committee assignments strategically to
encourage more loyal legislative behavior. This occurs when legislative rules meet two
criteria: (1) parties and their leaders can determine who serves on committees and
(2) committees have real authority over policy outcomes. I test the theory using data
from five state legislatures that differ on the relevant set of legislative rules, finding
more party loyalty shown by legislators who receive plum committee assignments
when rules meet both criteria and no effect when they do not.

faced with the possibility of voting for a Democratic gubernatorial

candidate he despised, John F. Kennedy famously said, “Sometimes party
loyalty asks too much” (Schlesinger 2002, 31). Yet the fact that Kennedy could
make such an assertion and still have a career in politics is based, at least in
part, on the American institutional structure. In many democracies, disloyalty
to one’s party can result in expulsion not just from the party, but also from
the legislature or from subsequent ballots (Norris 2004; Carey and Shugart
1995). Given this stark cost-benefit analysis, it is unsurprising that legislators
feel compelled to toe the party line in such systems. Nonetheless, compulsion
is not the sole means of increasing party loyalty. In the U.S., parties in legis-
latures often control a set of valuable benefits—in my case, plum committee
assignments—they can use to encourage party loyalty. Moreover, legislative
rules determine how the party distributes those benefits. This article, then,
seeks to answer the following question: Can the party use committee assign-
ment rules to alter the behavior of individual party members?

State Politics and Policy Quarterly, Vol. 9, No. 3 (Fall 2009): pp. 284–303

©2009 by the Board of Trustees of the University of Illinois

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One cannot analyze the relationship between parties and committees with-
out addressing the question of committee agency. Committees can be agents to
the party (Shepsle 1978; Cox and McCubbins 1993), the floor (Krehbiel 1991;
Schickler 2000), or to themselves and/or principals outside the legislature (Hall
and Grofman 1990; Adler and Lapinski 1997), a theoretical understanding that
has clear applications to the states (Overby and Kazee 2000; Overby, Kazee,
and Prince 2004; Prince and Overby 2005). One perspective is that committees
can be agents to different principals at different times (Maltzman 1995, 1997),
a choice that might be related to party competition in the electorate (Aldrich
and Battista 2002). Furthermore, rules governing how committee seats are
assigned could play a role in identifying a committee’s principal. Particular
sets of rules create special incentives for committee members to be agents of
the party, both within and outside the committee, while others tie committees
to other agents.
Using committee assignments to encourage party loyalty requires that
the rules governing the assignment process meet two criteria. First, parties
must have control over who receives these assignments. Second, the plum
assignments must be truly valuable; committees must have real authority over
policy outcomes. This implies that, somewhat paradoxically, party leaders
who want to maximize party loyalty ought to allow committees real authority
over policy outcomes, a perspective that puts in new context the finding that
the size and power of a committee system is related to weaker party leader-
ship (Jewell and Whicker 1994). This study finds that when both criteria
are met, legislators with plum committee assignments are more loyal to the
party during floor votes, an effect that does not occur in other legislatures.

Encouraging Party Loyalty

A major component of committee agency to the party in the U.S. House of
Representatives is the party leaders’ ability to stack important committees with
legislators loyal to the party (Cox and McCubbins 1993; Maltzman 1997), a
process that also occurs in state legislatures (Rosenthal 1998). Usually, this line
of research focuses on the effect of partisan committee stacking on the nature
of the bills the committee writes, thereby affecting which bills come to the
legislature’s floor. Party-friendly committees create party-friendly bills. One
implication of partisan stacking is that legislators who desire plum assign-
ments can feel pressure to toe the party line in an effort to either secure or
retain these plum assignments. In other words, these legislators might choose
ideological positions closer to the party if those ideological positions ensure
them attractive committee assignments.1 Certainly, the willingness to select

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an ideological position in pursuit or protection of a plum committee assign-

ment is directly related to that assignment’s value. If the assignment promises
dramatic benefits for legislators and their constituents, one would expect to
see dramatic policy changes to secure those benefits. Less valuable gifts would
be related to less dramatic behavioral changes. In this manner, one can think
of the party as encouraging loyalty with valuable gifts, rather than compelling
loyalty with threats of dismissal or denied ballot access. Either way, the result
is more disciplined parties. Indeed, Crook and Hibbing (1985) show evidence
of a similar effect in the U.S. House of Representatives after rules changes
encouraged party loyalty among potential committee chairs.
Nevertheless, this encouragement does not occur at a specific point in
time. Instead, legislators who have plum committee assignments ought to
be more loyal to the party, at all times, than their colleagues who have not
been similarly advantaged. The encouragement to toe the party line remains
so long as the plum assignment remains. Furthermore, those without such
assignments, even legislators who greatly covet them, will be unable to match
the loyalty of those with the plums, because constituents will be less likely to
tolerate divergence from their own preferences, absent the rewards the plum
assignment provides.

Empirical Implications
The implication remains that systematic and empirically verifiable differences
exist in the characteristics of who receives plum committee assignments
across legislatures with different institutional rules. If parties are not involved
in the committee assignment process (i.e., a random or pure seniority rule
is in effect), one would expect to see no differences, either ideological or
electoral, between those legislators who receive plum assignments and those
who do not. If the party is involved in the assignment process, however,
systematic differences will be apparent.
First, if the party controls the assignment process, but the committees
themselves are not particularly attractive, one would expect to see the party
select its most preferred legislator, but no legislators altering their voting
behavior to secure or retain these less attractive assignments. Given the desire
to stack the committee with legislators willing to act as agents of the party,
party leaders will select those legislators who are most electorally secure.
Absent the worry of having to win reelection, these electorally-safe legisla-
tors can presumably make tough decisions that might threaten the careers
of their more vulnerable colleagues.2 This leads to the following empirically
testable hypothesis:

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H1: When the party controls committee assignments, the probability of receiv-
ing a plum assignment increases as the margin of victory in the last election
is larger.

Second, if the party controls the assignment process and the assignments
themselves are very valuable, one would expect to see party members alter
their voting behavior to ensure that they are attractive to the party, either to
secure or to retain these committee prizes. Even when taking into account
constituency preferences, legislators who receive plum committee assign-
ments will be those whose floor voting behavior is most ideologically proxi-
mate to their parties. Certainly, the definition of what constitutes valuable
assignments will differ. For the current project, I define powerful committees
as those that have what Cox and McCubbins (2005) call “negative agenda
control”; here, gatekeeping authority, or the power effectively to kill a bill
at the committee stage by refusing to report it to the floor. This implies the
following empirically testable hypothesis:
H2: In those states in which the party controls committee assignments and
committees are powerful, the probability of receiving a plum committee
assignment increases as the difference between the voting behavior of the
party’s median and a legislator decreases.

Encouraging Party Loyalty in the States

I cannot test the theory in the U.S. House because there is very little variation,
even over time, in the rules governing who receives assignments. Crook and
Hibbing’s (1985) analysis, for example, is limited to one rules change in the
House. For this reason, the proper testing ground is the states. By turning
to the U.S. states, I can assess the effects of differing institutional designs on
legislatures operating in the contemporary era. Furthermore, state legislatures
provide a particularly difficult test because it might be less likely, for a vari-
ety of reasons, that state legislators are concerned enough about committee
assignments to alter their behavior in order to gain one.
First, one might suspect that legislators at the state level, where legislatures
are less professionalized, are less concerned with committee assignments than
are members of the U.S. Congress. Yet previous research shows that state legis-
lators do care about assignments. They are strategic about requests (Hedlund
and Patterson 1992), and the committee process clearly affects both the level
of centralization in decisionmaking (Francis and Riddlesperger 1982) and in
overall happiness with decisions (Francis 1985). Most important to the current
issues, some evidence suggests that legislators who are more loyal to their par-
ties are more likely to receive better assignments (Leighton and Lopez 2002).

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Second, it is not clear that committee property rights are as strong in the
states as they are in the Congress because state legislative careers are typically
shorter. Certainly, a temporary committee prize is not nearly as valuable as
one a legislator can reasonably expect to keep. Some evidence indicates that
property rights tend to emerge as membership stability increases (Squire et
al. 2004), but it is clear that these rights are not strong in many legislatures.
If committee property rights can be violated, this increases the incentive to
remain loyal to the party once the legislator secures the coveted committee
assignment. Potentially inviolate committee property rights could induce
shirking—displaying loyalty to the party to secure a plum assignment, then
ignoring the party, becoming disloyal, and enjoying the protection of prop-
erty rights.3
Third, paths to leadership are not nearly as stable and predictable in state
legislatures as they are in Congress. Freeman (1995) finds that leadership career
patterns are beginning to show signs of institutionalization in many state leg-
islatures, thus increasing the chances of correctly predicting who will be future
leaders. Even so, it is clearly easier to know where one stands with respect to
an ideological litmus test in places like Georgia, where, in the period under
consideration, the speaker4 had held the job for nearly 30 years.
Fourth, committee assignments are likely to be but one of a wide variety
of tools leaders can use to pressure legislators to vote with party discipline.
Indeed, if leaders use other tools, such as member-to-member campaign
contributions or even the strategic withholding of prime offices or staffs,
to compel discipline, it can be harder to find evidence of party pressure in
committee assignments. All of these factors increase the difficulty of finding
an effect of committee assignments on party discipline. Detecting an effect
in the states, therefore, provides strong evidence in favor of the theory.
In the current analysis, I consider five state legislative bodies: the Con-
necticut, Georgia, Iowa, and Louisiana lower houses, and the South Carolina
upper house. The states were selected based on variation of the factors of
interest.5 In all of the legislatures except one (South Carolina), the speaker
has the power to make all committee assignments and name all committee
chairs. Connecticut and Iowa are the only legislatures included in the study
in which committees do not have clear gatekeeping authority. Therefore, I
should be able to predict the party loyalty of legislatures in these states based
on two factors: limits on speaker’s appointment power and limits on the
powers of committees. Note that speaker power and committee power can
often conflict: a powerful speaker might mean less power available for com-
mittees, and vice-versa (Jewell and Whicker 1994). For this reason, I must be
very careful about how I define power. For my purpose, a powerful speaker

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is one who can make committee assignments as he or she pleases. Other

conventionally-recognized forms of speaker power, such as floor agenda
control or power over the referral of bills to committees, might or might not
be present. Furthermore, a powerful committee is one that has gatekeeping
authority: the power to kill a bill at the committee stage.
Therefore, classifying states according to whether or not they have power-
ful speakers or powerful committees is a simple matter of determining (a)
whether or not speakers, either by rule or by norm, have the power to name
whomever they choose to committees, and (b) whether or not committees
have the authority to kill bills with which they disagree. The description
of the rules derives from information contained in Erickson (1997) and
an analysis of each state’s published legislative rules for the period under
consideration, from 1997–98.6 I use the rules to derive a prediction about
how legislators in each state should behave with respect to the model.7 That
information is summarized in Table 1. More detailed information about the
states is available in the Appendix.
In summary, the only state that meets both criteria for encouraging party
loyalty in all cases is Georgia. In some cases, but not all, Louisiana does as
well. Connecticut meets neither of the criteria, so I expect no agency to the
party. Similarly, I expect no agency in South Carolina, despite the fact that
committee prizes are valuable enough that they could encourage more loyal
voting; this is because South Carolina has no party selection mechanism.
Presumably, legislators would be willing to alter their behavior in pursuit
of plum committee assignments, but they do not have to do so, so they do
not. Iowa also does not meet the requirements for the theory. Here, there is
a selection mechanism, but the prize is not valuable enough to encourage
legislators to alter their voting behavior. The selection mechanism indicates

Table 1. Legislative Rules

South
Connecticut Georgia Iowa Louisiana Carolina
Speaker control over No Yes Yes Yes (Rules) No
  committee appointment? No
(Appropriations)
Speaker control over chair appointment? No Yes Yes Yes No
Committees with gatekeeping power? No Yes No Yes Yes
Chairs with gatekeeping power? No Yes No No Yes
Prediction: No agency Strong Limited Limited No
to party agency agency agency agency
to party to party to party to party
Source: Erickson (1997) and state legislatures’ web pages

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that one should expect party leaders to select legislators in safe seats for
plum assignments (i.e. H1 holds), but that legislators would not alter their
behavior to pursue plum committee assignments (i.e. H2 does not hold).

The Data
The dataset consists of information collected for each of five state legislatures
in 1997 or 1998. Only legislators affiliated with one of the two major parties
in the legislature were included in the dataset. Below, I describe each of the
variables included in the model. I include three separate empirical models,
each with a different dichotomous dependent variable. The first dependent
variable is committee chair, coded 1 if the legislator serves as a committee
chair, and 0 otherwise. The second is money committee, coded 1 if the legisla-
tor serves on a committee whose major responsibility is the disbursement or
collection of state funds and 0 otherwise. The third dependent variable is rules
committee, coded 1 if the legislator serves on a rules committee, 0 otherwise.
All chairs or members of the committee, including new or continuing, are
included in the analysis as a means of better measuring the ongoing nature
of encouraged party loyalty.
These dependent variables are included because they provide the best
test of the theory’s predictions concerning powerful committee assignments.
Although other committees, such as education or agriculture, can also be pow-
erful, different legislators judge their levels of power differently.8 For example,
a legislator could simply have no interest in education policy and therefore
would not consider a slot on that committee a prize. One can assume, how-
ever, that virtually all state legislators equally will prize the rules and money
committees.9 And while there has not been a similar study for state legislatures
(Jewell and Whicker 1994; Rosenthal 1998), evidence indicates that members
of the U.S. House value these types of committees over all others (Groseclose
and Stewart 1998).
Several independent variables are included in the analysis. The two of
theoretical interest are interacted with dummies indicating whether or not
that variable, given the effect the theory postulates based on the rules, ought
to matter when making decisions about who receives prime committee
assignments. The two variables of theoretical interest are the legislator’s
ideological distance from the party and the legislator’s performance in the
last election.
To test H1, which posits that those in the safest seats are most likely to
receive plum committee assignments, the analysis includes the percentage of
the vote a legislator received in the last general election. If the speaker has the
power to select those the party prefers in terms of stacking, legislators who

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represent safest districts are most likely to gain positions of power. Therefore,
in legislatures with strong speaker assignment power, the theory predicts
that legislators with high values on the percent variable will be more likely
to gain positions of power. At the same time, accounting for district-level
effects in this manner allows us to control for important effects of party
competition within states (Aldrich and Battista 2002; Barrilleaux 2000; Bar-
rilleaux, Holbrook, and Langer 2002; Wright and Schaffner 2002), as well as
the potentially unusual effects of the Louisiana nonpartisan primary,10 thus
allowing the pooling of data from all the states in one regression.11 I interact
percent with a dummy variable indicating whether or not rules allow speak-
ers to select on ideology when making committee assignments.
But the crux of the theory is the test of H2. Here, the relevant independent
variable is distance, which is the ideological distance between the legislator
and the median voter of that legislator’s political party in the legislature. The
theoretical model predicts that power-seeking legislators in legislatures with
party control over assignments to valuable committees will select ideological
positions closer to their parties, whereas when either party control or valu-
able committees is missing, distance has no effect. I interact distance with
a dummy variable indicating whether or not such rules are in place, to test
H2.12 Distance is the squared distance from the ideal point of the legislator
in question to the ideal point of the median voter in that legislator’s party.
Ideal points derive from a dataset of state legislator ideology scores (Battista
2000). The dataset relies on the same methodology as the Poole-Rosenthal
Nominate scores (Poole and Rosenthal 1984; Poole and Rosenthal 1991). It
is important to note, however, that one ought not to consider these scores
as a measure of a legislator’s true preferences. Instead, they are something of
an amalgam of, among other things, the true individual preferences of the
legislator, the preferences of the legislator’s constituents, and, most relevant
to the current line of research, the pressures on voting, such as pressure from
party leaders the legislator encounters from within the legislature. Although
I partially account for constituent preferences in the model using election
data, I include only information about revealed preferences via floor voting
using the distance measure. Because of this, legislators who tend to vote with
the party more because of their true preferences and those who vote with it
more because they feel party pressure are observationally equivalent.
The distance measure, then, is the distance between the legislator’s ideol-
ogy score (Battista 2000) and that of the median voter of his or her own party.
In those legislatures in which the ability to select for party loyalty is clear and
the positions are powerful, one would expect distance to be significant in the
negative direction. This is because one would expect those legislators with

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the shortest distances from their party’s median voter to be most likely to
win positions of power. Further, those legislators with ideological positions
very distant from that of their party, and thereby high values on the distance
variable, should be less likely to gain positions of power in legislatures whose
rules encourage party loyalty through committee assignments. Note that the
distance variable measures proximity to one’s own party, not solely to the
majority party. In the legislatures included here, the speaker, by either rule or
norm, defers to the minority leader to select his or her own party’s commit-
tee assignments. In these cases, minority leaders likely have similar powers
to the speakers in their chambers. In other words, strong speakers should
be associated with strong minority leaders, thus allowing the exploration
of both in the same regression. Further, the ideology scores represent only
a snapshot of the ideology of a particular legislator. If a legislator’s ideol-
ogy were to swing wildly from one position to another (for example, after
a committee assignment is secured), this measure would be unable to pick
that up. But such swings are likely uncommon, since they would require a
legislator to abandon a successful strategy in favor of an unknown one. And
while there have not been similar studies on the state level, legislators in
the U.S. House and Senate do not make such swings (Poole and Rosenthal
1991). Furthermore, there is little reason to suspect that legislators would be
unstable when in the statehouse, yet exhibit stability in Congress. Lastly, such
swings would complicate the task of finding results supporting the theory.
I also include a number of ancillary variables in the analysis to control
for factors that might affect the probability of receiving a committee assign-
ment, but do not relate to the theory. Seniority is likely to be correlated with
receipt of a committee assignment, either because a strong seniority rule is
in effect or because leaders select more experienced members for the best
committee assignments. Second, whether or not the legislator is a member
of the majority party should play an important role in that legislator’s likeli-
hood of receiving a position of power, if only because the majority has more
plums to allocate (Jewell and Whicker 1994), even when taking into account
their necessarily larger size. Therefore, I include a dichotomous variable,
majority, coded 1 if the legislator is a member of the majority party and 0
otherwise. The clear expectation is that the coefficient on the variable should
be significant regardless of the legislature. I also include state-specific dummy
variables to account for the fixed effects of each state, such as the number of
plum assignments available in a particular legislature. Last, I include dum-
mies for each of the other committee assignments considered here, since an
appointment to one could be a substitute for appointment to another.

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data analysis
I analyze the data using probit because the dependent variables are all dichot-
omous. I estimate three models that differ only on the dependent variable:
appointment to a committee chair, appointment to a rules committee posi-
tion, or appointment to a money committee position. Results of the estimates
are presented in Table 2. First, we easily see that the crux of the theory, H2,
receives strong support. For all three committee decisions, distance from the
median voter matters in states where the rules call for valuable committee
assignments and party control over the assignment process, as evidenced by
the significantly negative coefficient on the distance interaction in all three
regressions. Furthermore, in those states where the rules do not allow an
ideological litmus test for committee assignments, the effect of distance is
neither significant nor in the direction hypothesized.
The effect of distance in those states whose rules meet both criteria is
not only statistically significant, but also substantively dramatic. To highlight
this, I use Clarify software (Tomz, Wittenberg, and King 2003) to estimate
the effect of varying distance on the predicted probability of successfully
receiving the committee prize of interest, holding all other values at their
means, as described in King, Tomz, and Wittenberg (2000). I can use Clarify
to estimate the effects of differing values of the coefficients of interest on
probabilities of achieving the committee assignment in question. Figure 1

Table 2. Probits with Committee Assignments as the Dependent Variables

Committee Chair Money Committee Rules Committee
Distance 0.25 (0.39) 0.10 (0.24) 0.040 (0.30)
Distance*Value and Control –2.1* (1.0) –2.0* (0.62) –1.1# (0.64)
Percent 0.00096 (0.0091) –0.0028 (0.0075) –0.0052 (0.0074)
Percent*Control 0.0037 (0.12) 0.011* (0.0054) 0.0098 (0.0090)
Years in office 0.13 (0.016) 0.055* (0.012) 0.050* (0.013)
Other committee appointment(1) –0.29 (0.22) –0.043 (0.17) –0.037 (0.16)
Other committee appointment(2) –0.59* (0.28) –0.32# (0.19) –0.48# (0.23)
Majority party member — 0.40* (0.14) 0.18 (0.16)
Louisiana –1.9* (0.92) –1.6* (0.76) 0.60 (0.49)
South Carolina –1.1 (1.2) –1.7* (0.80) 1.6# (0.79)
Connecticut –0.85 (1.2) –1.8* (0.76) 0.46 (0.74)
Iowa –0.60 (0.85) –0.95# (0.51) 1.1* (0.30)
Constant –0.78 (0.93) –0.12 (0.63) –1.8* (0.51)
N 271 436 436
Pseudo R2 0.30 0.10 0.14
*p<0.05; #p<0.10
Notes: Values in parentheses are standard errors. For the chair and rules regressions, “Other committee (1)” is the money com-
mittee. For the money and rules regression, “Other committee (2)” is the chair. Rules is “Other committee (1) for the chair
regression and “Other committee (2)” for the money regression.

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is a graph depicting the effect of increases in ideological distance from the

median voter on the probability of receiving a committee assignment.
The most dramatic effect of ideology is on the probability of receiving an
assignment to a money committee. When parties control powerful assign-
ments, legislators face a 0.58 probability (S.E. = 0.07) of receiving a money
committee assignment when they are located on the party’s median voter’s
ideal point. At the highest level of divergence, this probability drops to 0.01
(S.E = 0.03). In other words, legislators who toe the party line have a chance
greater than a coin flip of obtaining a money committee position, whereas
their much less loyal colleagues have virtually no chance of receiving the
same assignment.
The relationship repeats itself, although less dramatically, for the other
committee assignments. When both criteria are in effect, the probability of
receiving a chair is 0.34 (S.E. = 0.11) when ideological distance from the
party is at its lowest value13 (i.e., the legislator is located directly at the party’s
median voter ideal point). When distance is at its highest level, however, the
probability of receiving a chair drops to 0.02 (S.E. = 0.02). In those states in
which parties control powerful committee assignments, legislators closest
to the party face a probability of 0.21 (S.E. = 0.04) of receiving a committee
assignment, whereas their most different colleagues face a 0.03 (S.E. = 0.08)
probability of receiving the same assignment. Furthermore, I note that the

Figure 1. The Effect of Ideological Distance on the Probability of Receiving a

Committee Assignment

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rules committee assignment is the least sensitive of the three assignments to

changes in ideological proximity. Given that rules committees in the states
are less powerful than in the U.S. House (and also less powerful than the
other state positions considered here), this could indicate that legislatures
are less willing to alter their voting behavior for less valuable prizes.
Results for H1—the effect of percentage of the vote received in the last
election—are more muted. Although all three of the interactions are in
the direction hypothesized, only the coefficient in the money committee
equation is statistically significant. There are two reasons why this might
be the case. Either the hypothesis is not correct, or the hypothesis is cor-
rect and the data has too much multicollinearity to reveal this effect more
strongly. A potential reason for this lack of result could be the one stated at
the outset—plum assignments actually go to electorally weaker legislators
in an effort to help them maintain their seats. Indeed, both processes could
be occurring at the same time, thus cancelling each other out in the analysis.
At the same time, the variance inflation factor (VIF) of the percent variable
is 20. Kennedy (1996, 183) indicates that a VIF greater than 10 is cause for
concern, which points to a concern that multicollinearity is masking the
effect.14 The VIF for the distance variable, at three, is not nearly as high.

Where’s the Party? It’s in the Rules.

Parties populate committees in an effort to affect the policies that committees
produce. Effective use of this strategy requires placing people who are both
willing and able to engage in behavior that is loyal to their parties. The cur-
rent article shows that legislative rules, when they allow parties to determine
committee assignments and when they provide for powerful committees,
lead to committees that are composed of more loyalists on the floor. Those
who receive plum assignments are more ideologically proximate than are
their counterparts without plum assignments or in legislatures where rules
do not make such provisions. Indeed, willingness appears to trump ability,
since ideological proximity is a much better predictor of assignment than
electoral security.
Furthermore, this study points to one answer to the “Where’s the party?”
question: The party may be in the rules. Parties matter when legislative insti-
tutions are structured such that loyalty is generously rewarded, even if the
reward implies that the party has less control over a committee’s actual prod-
uct. Those who serve in powerful committees when selection mechanisms
are in effect are more loyal to the party, likely because they must display loy-
alty in order to keep or to retain powerful committee assignments. Without
powerful committees and the selection mechanism, there is no such result.

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In the absence of draconian rules demanding loyalty in the threat of losing

one’s seat, these plum assignments can instead compel party loyalty with
rewards.

appendix
Weak Speaker, Weak Positions: Connecticut
The rules of Connecticut’s house limit the ability of the speaker to name committees and
chairs, largely because of a norm of not using committee assignments as an ideological
litmus test. When Thomas D. Ritter began his term as speaker in 1993, he used his power
to make assignments to increase gender diversity on committees, rather than applying
an ideological litmus test (Noel 1993). More recently, but outside the period in question,
house speaker Moira Lyons’ attempts to increase party loyalty met with strong opposition
from legislators unfamiliar with such tactics (Jacklin 2001).
The codified rules of the house also point to a weak speaker. All committees in the
house are joint with the Connecticut senate, thus diluting the power of the speaker to
construct committees with a particular ideological bent, since the speaker has no con-
trol over senate committee assignments. Also, the speaker has the power only to name
co-chairs of the joint committees, thereby again diluting the speaker’s power to apply
a litmus test. Although often only the house members of the committee vote on house
proposals, the joint nature of the committee likely affects both committee hearings
and debate. These two factors, then, point to a weak speaker with respect to committee
assignments.
Committees in the Connecticut house are also fairly weak, largely because of an emer-
gency certification procedure that allows legislative leaders to bring bills directly to the
floor with no committee consideration. The procedure is neither rare nor limited to non-
controversial legislation. Indeed, in the years considered in this study, 45 bills came to the
floor under emergency certification. For example, in 1999, committees were completely
ignored in the leadership’s attempts to strike a deal to bring the New England Patriots
football team to Hartford. A 1997 bill to help children’s hospitals passed under emergency
certification, known in Hartford as “e-cert,” amid speculation that the speaker gave the
bill special attention because it aided a hospital in his hometown. According to Senator
John W. Fonfara, “Bills that are far less complex and far less important take weeks to go
through. At the very least, governments shouldn’t be advantaging one institution over
another unless there are reasons that are appropriate under public policy” (Keating 1997).
But emergency certification is not the only means leaders in Connecticut use to bypass
committees. Also in 1997, committee members felt their contribution to tax writing legis-
lation was merely political theater. In that case, leaders’ arm-twisting changed a committee
vote on a property tax provision, prompting Representative Robert T. Keeley, Jr. to state:
“Today is an example of how leadership has relieved the rank and file of all decisions”
(Daly and Keating 1999). Moreover, in a 2003 report on the state’s budget process, the
General Assembly’s Legislative Program Review and Investigations Committee found
that frequent use of the emergency certification process on budgetary matters “seems
to undermine the purpose of the committee process.” (Connecticut General Assembly

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2003). Committees in Connecticut do have the power to introduce unfavorable reports

for legislation they wish to kill, but the floor is free to reject these reports. If rejected, the
legislative process is the same as that for a committee’s favorable report that the house
accepts. Given these facts, then, the chairs of those committees are also rather weak. There
is no way for the chair, or indeed, even the entire committee, to prevent legislation to
come to the floor. Committees and their chairs, then, are not strongly significant in the
Connecticut legislative process.
Given these facts, the prediction for Connecticut is that committees will not act as
agents to the party. The speaker does not have the power to apply an ideological litmus
test to all of the members of the committee, thereby greatly reducing his or her ability
to construct a committee to his or her liking. Further, the positions in question are not
powerful enough to offset constituent utility losses from legislators diverging from their
constituents. Taken together, these two facts predict no committee agency to the party
in Connecticut.

Strong Speaker, Strong Positions: Georgia

The rules of the Georgia house place no limits on the power of the speaker to name
committee chairs. The only limit on the speaker’s power to name committee members is
that legislators who served on a committee in the previous legislative session cannot be
prevented from serving on that same committee in the current session.15 Indeed, Georgia
is the only state included in the study that contains such a provision.
The position of the Georgia speaker is likely the most powerful in state legislatures of the
era, largely due to its occupant at the time, Tom Murphy. For example, Murphy, who had
held the seat for almost 30 years during the period under consideration, single-handedly
changed the way high schools in Georgia divide into regions for competition. He did so
because the debate team at the 378–student Bremen High School in his district (which is
coached by his daughter-in-law) was consistently beaten by a private school in the same
region (Manasso 2000). According to Georgia Representative Tyrone Brooks, “nothing
really happens on that House floor of any great significance unless Tom Murphy wants
it to happen” (Roedemeier 2001).
At the same time, however, committees and chairs in the Georgia house are quite power-
ful. Committees have gatekeeping power because a recorded vote that could stop the bill
at the committee stage is required if 1/5 of the committee requests it. This requirement
also allows the committee chair to have more control over the process. Although the chair
alone does not have the power to kill a bill, the other members of the committee can pass
a bill only on a recorded vote. Therefore, committee members who wish to vote against
the wishes of the chair must do so in the chair’s plain sight, a strong disincentive should
the legislator hope to work with the chair in the future. And while Murphy’s stronghold
on the floor could somewhat weaken the ability of chairs to pass legislation, it has little
effect on the negative power to committees to kill a bill through gatekeeping.
Given the strong nature of the committees and chairs, as well as the speaker’s direct
control over assignments, committees should be strong agents of the parties. Because the
speaker is able to select leaders, he or she will select only those legislators who are most
likely to do the bidding of the party. Since the positions are powerful, they are worth the
electoral risk to legislators associated with diverging from constituents. The expectation
for Georgia is that it should have strong committee agency to the party.

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Strong Speaker, Weak Positions: Iowa

The speaker of the Iowa house has strong control over who receives positions of power.
Indeed, that strength is even greater in Iowa than in Georgia, since there is absolutely
no condition to the power of the speaker to name committees and chairs. Therefore, the
speaker has the power to select whomever he or she chooses for committee and chairs
assignments. The expectation, then, is that it would be easy for the speaker to implement
an ideological litmus test for power assignments.
At the same time, however, the prize the speaker offers is not a particularly attractive
one. Indeed, power is so concentrated in the upper ranks of the majority party little
power remains for committees or committee chairs. Former speaker Ron Corbett won
the speakership from its previous occupant largely because he pushed for a larger role
for the Republican Party leadership in Iowa politics (Smiley 1994). And while Corbett
tempered his partisan edge somewhat after the election of Democrat Tom Vilsack as
governor (Stern 1998), Corbett’s successor, the more laid-back Brent Siegrist, continued
to keep power in the hands of a few Republican leaders (Clayton 1999). Committees,
and therefore committee chairs, have no gatekeeping authority. Hence, one cannot
expect legislators to diverge significantly from their constituents, given the value of
committee prizes.
One can therefore expect legislators to be less apt to diverge than in a state where the
value of committee prizes is greater, such as in Georgia. However, the speaker could
still use ideology as a litmus test since he or she has sole power to make assignments.
Consequently, one would expect powerful legislators in Iowa to represent districts that
are ideologically safe. But one should not expect those legislators to diverge significantly
from their constituents.

Strong Speaker, Mixed Positions: Louisiana

Louisiana is an especially interesting case for the purposes of this project because the
rules governing who receives power vary for different committees. Therefore, it offers the
perfect case to test our hypotheses about speaker control over committee assignments.
Because there is variation within a single legislature, one can be more certain that dif-
ferences in legislators’ behavior can be attributed to differences in rules, since all else is
constant. In Louisiana, the speaker faces no limits on his or her power to name committee
chairs or to make committee assignments, but with one exception. That exception comes
with the Appropriations Committee, where the speaker can name only 12 of 19 members
and the membership as a whole elects the other seven. Clearly, this dilutes the power of
the speaker to control appropriations assignments. Legislators who seek appropriations
positions know that they have options for fulfilling that goal other than gaining the good
graces of the speaker. One should therefore expect those assignments to be somewhat
different from those of other committees.
Further, the norm in Louisiana politics is to give the governor the power to tap the
speaker of the house, thereby somewhat shielding the incumbent speaker from the ire
of rank-and-file legislators. Indeed, when Governor Mike Foster supported H.B. “Hunt”
Downer for the job in 1995, not even the sitting speaker, John Alario, prevented Downer
from taking the position. Downer inherited a legislature that was recently investigated by
the FBI for gambling improprieties and had recently seen members of the house engage
in a food fight on the floor. Downer, however, used the committee assignment power

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 fall 2009  /  state politics and policy quarterly   299

he had to increase order in the house. At that time, according to Representative Charles
McMains, committees “became facilitators of legislation instead of places where legisla-
tion gets stalled.” (Perkins 1996).
Louisiana’s rules also dictate strong committees, where a roll-call vote of all members
of the committee must accompany any bill sent to the floor of the house. Unlike in Con-
necticut, committees can both delay consideration of a bill or report the bill unfavorably.
Both moves prevent floor consideration of the bill. Committee members, therefore, have
clear gatekeeping power. Like in the U.S. House of Representatives, a discharge procedure
exists in the Louisiana house but is very rarely used, even on bills that have received senate
approval (Associated Press 2001). The power of the chair, however, is somewhat diluted
because roll calls are required on all bills reported to the committee. Therefore, if a com-
mittee member wishes to act outside the interests of the chair, that member must vote
to the contrary only in the roll call. The member does not have to directly challenge the
chair by calling a vote the chair does not wish to see happen.
Given these facts, one would expect legislators to behave differently in different situ-
ations within the Louisiana house. First, one should expect strong committee agency to
the party among legislators assigned to committees, with the sole exception of appro-
priations. This is because those committees have both a clear means of implementing
an ideological litmus test. Second, one would expect legislators to be willing to diverge,
since the committee assignments are powerful. At the same time, since appropriations
lacks the clear means of implementing the test, it would show weaker agency to the
party. By the same logic, the weaker committee chairs should show weaker agency to
the party as well.

Weak Speaker, Strong Committees: South Carolina

The South Carolina senate has perhaps the most unusual decision rule of the states
included in this study and is therefore included as a control. Indeed, the party leadership
has no involvement in the committee assignment process. Instead, legislators select their
assignments themselves, based on seniority. Each legislator, beginning with the most
senior and ending with the most junior, selects one committee assignment. Then the
process begins again, in reverse order, until all of the assignments are made. Further, the
legislator with the most seniority on a committee automatically receives the chair assign-
ment for that committee. These rules seem only fitting for the incredibly individualistic
South Carolina senate.16 On statewide issues, senate rules require a daunting two-thirds
of members to break a filibuster. On local issues, however, senators from other areas have
a norm of abstaining from votes, thereby allowing senators an easy means of filibustering
any issue that affects their areas (Swindell 2000).
South Carolina committees also play a very important role. Committees have gatekeep-
ing authority. Indeed, 2/3 of the committee must approve a bill before it goes to the floor.
The chair, then, plays a strong role in establishing that 2/3 minimum of support. Further,
the gatekeeping authority is absolute, even if the bill has already passed the South Carolina
house. One bill requiring that high school students maintain a C average to participate
in extracurricular activities passed in the house, but died in the senate’s education com-
mittee, when committee chairman (and former University of South Carolina football
coach) Warren Giese refused to hold hearings (Gaulden 1998).
Despite the power of committees and chairs, one should expect very little committee
agency to the party, not because legislators would be unwilling to diverge from their

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districts for such valuable prizes, but because legislators need not do so under the rules.
Legislators can remain ideologically convergent with their constituents and, provided
they gather enough seniority, can have any position in the senate they choose. Indeed,
diverging from their constituency does not help them gain power in any way. Therefore,
one should not expect committee or chairs to be agents to the party in any form. Indeed,
not seeing committee agency in this case lends credence to the notion that it is legislative
rules, not some aspect of legislators’ preferences, that create the behavior attributed here
to agency.

endnotes
This research was supported by National Science Foundation award #9818888. Thanks
to Nicole Zeiss for her research assistance, to Jim Battista for the use of his data, and to
Chris Bonneau, Scott Desposato, Keith Hamm, George Krause, Laura Langer, Barbara
Norrander, Chuck Shipan, the editors of SPPQ, and three anonymous reviewers for help-
ful comments on earlier drafts of this article. Any remaining errors are the responsibility
of the author.
1. See Kanthak (2002) for a formalization of this process.
2. On the other hand, the most attractive legislator to the party may be the least elec-
torally secure, since the committee assignment itself might boost the esteem constituents
have for their legislators, thus helping these electorally vulnerable legislators to secure their
seats for the party in subsequent elections. I return to this alternative in the analysis.
3. Since the analysis includes both new and returning committee members, the exis-
tence of shirking due to inviolate committee property rights biases the results against
supporting the theory.
4. I use the word “speaker” throughout the paper to refer to the highest leadership post
in the legislature.
5. The Battista (2000) data upon which I rely includes 11 states. I conducted research
into the codified rules of each of the states to determine a list of five states whose rules
were representative of the possible differences among rules governing the committee
assignment process. I then did extensive qualitative research on those five states using
journalistic sources to ensure that I properly understood both the rules and the norms
surrounding how committee positions were assigned in those five states. After making
the categorizations according to the rules, I conducted the analysis. A more thorough
accounting of the analysis of the rules is included in the Appendix.
6. There have been several changes in the legislatures’ rules since then.
7. Certainly, my descriptions are not a complete picture of any of the legislatures. The
goal of the current project is not to present an exhaustive description of each legislature
or state, but to make a larger point about the effect of differences among legislatures in
one aspect of their rules.
8. I do not include a variable for previous service on the committee of interest because
there is not enough variation on the variable. Most legislators who hold a committee
assignment in the year in question held it previously. Further, legislators are unlikely to
change ideology mid-career (Poole and Rosenthal 1991), so omitting this variable will
not likely affect results.
9. Note, however, that most states’ rules committees are not nearly as important as that

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 fall 2009  /  state politics and policy quarterly   301

of the U.S. House. The Georgia legislature is the only one in which the rules committee
schedules floor action on bills. In the others, it handles issues involving the internal orga-
nization of the legislature, but not rules of debate for bills on the floor. Interestingly, the
rules committee in the South Carolina senate can hear disputes over the senate president’s
decisions on referring bills to committee.
10. In Louisiana during the period under consideration, all candidates of all parties run
together in the November election, and if no candidate receives more than 50 percent of
the vote, another vote is held in December.
11. Despite this, running separate regressions for each state yields results substantially
similar to those presented here.
12. I do not include in the analysis a variable for the independent effects of the rule
because such a variable would be perfectly collinear with some subset of the state-specific
dummies, which I do include.
13. All other values are held to their means.
14. Clearly, the problem here is that the interacted variables are causing collinearity,
exacerbated by the inclusion of the state-specific dummies. The VIF is high for the dis-
tance interaction, but it is not as high as for the percent interaction. Furthermore, the
fact that the z statistic is above two in most cases results in less cause for concern about
collinearity with respect to the distance variables (Kennedy 1996, 181).
15. Clear committee property rights can be perceived as a restriction on the speaker’s
power to name whomever he chooses, but this is not likely to be the effect in Georgia.
First, this is mitigated by the fact that the speakership in Georgia had not changed hands
in almost 30 years (although it has since). And second, committee property rights increase
the attractiveness of committee rewards to rank-and-file members. Further, in all of the
states considered here, not just in Georgia, legislators rarely involuntarily lose their previ-
ous assignments.
16. Note that these rules changed after the 2001 Republican takeover of the South
Carolina senate (thanks to Keith Hamm for pointing this out). The analysis presented
here, however, includes only data prior to the switch.

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