The Question of Committee Bias Revisited

This study revisits the question of whether committees are biased in their policy outputs-pursuing policies at odds with noncomniittee members. We find evidence that committees in the House are biased: Most committees are either more divided than the larger membership in the House, or there is a greater consensus within the committee than among noncommittee members. These patterns extend across all types of committees. There is a persisting controversy in studies of the U.S. Congress as to whether committees are inherently biased and configured to promote policies that favor narrow special interests (constituency committees), or largely representative of the chamber and induced by the prospects of legislative influence to supply policies that serve the collective interests of the legislature (informative committees).1 The polar positions on this question are represented by the research of Keith Krehbiel (1990, 1991) and William Niskanan (1971). Krehbiel contends that the expectations of the larger chamber-namely, that committees will produce unbiased policies in order to ensure influence and agenda control-incline committees to fashion policies in the best interests o(the larger institution. From Niskanan's perspective, policies are biased because committee members are beholden to constituency and special interests, and gravitate to committees that serve these interests, resulting in committees populated by legislators with homogeneous preferences for policies favoring group interests. The objective ol our analysis is to test these propositions about committee bias. There are several reasons for revisiting the question of committee bias despite the research recently devoted to this issue (see footnote 1). Existing research and conclusions are based upon rather imperfect, and perhaps unrepresentative, measurements of committee member preferences. Specifically, previous treatments of committee member preferences have largely relied upon measurements concocted from indicators of constituency "demand" (demographics), or based upon votes taken on the floor of the House. Demographic variables, while supplying useful information about some of the demands of constituents, provide an inadequate mapping of committeemember preferences; these measurements ignore loo many other important considerations that also enter committee members' vote decisions, for example personal goals. Thus such measurements are apt to be error-prone, and the conclusions based upon these measurements problematic. Floor votes present another problem: it is almost impossible to find floor votes that are identical in substance to those taken in committee; hence, inferences about committee member preferences based upon floor votes are questionable. Moreover, floor votes rarely encompass the types of intracommittee vote trades that mark committee deliberations, reveal committee members' preferences, or represent adequately the nests of decisions essential in moving bills to the floor. In addition, there is empirical evidence that the voting alignments of committee members are altered when voting on the floor in those committees most susceptible to partisan influences (Parker and Parker 1998). Therefore, floor votes are at best incomplete representations of intracommittee deliberations and policy preferences of committee members. Committee votes would seem a far better approximation of committee members' preferences. Further, reliance on floor votes as measures of both committee and noncommittee preferences can result m a confusing test of the existence of committee outliers. This point is made by Richard Hall and Bernard Grofman (1990) who observe that Krehbiel's findings (i.e., the absence of committee bias) would fit quite well with a model that characterizes the House committee system as composed of homogeneous preference outliers: In short, if one imagines a classical scenario under which committees are biased and powerful (i. …