Formal Models of Committee Behavior

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Collective action is fraught with difficulty. The difficulties of coordinating the actions of individuals exists in all segments of society. Though scholars have reported on general problems confronting communities - - largely dilemmas resulting from an incompatibility between the individuals' incentives and the collective goal - - relatively little attention has been directed toward understanding the principles by which communities solve these problems. For example, why do communities solve some problems via a decentralized system of individual property rights while other problems require hierarchical organizations? Why are some organizational arrangements, for example firms and committees, successful at mitigating collective difficulties for their communities, while other organizational structures, for example communes, are not successful? The failure of communities to accomplish their collective goals is a failure of institutional design. This project focuses on the institutional structure of legislatures and parties. It is common in studies of party-dominated legislatures, such as the British House of Commons, to see changes in the rules of procedure as intimately linked to changes and developments in the party system. In the U.S. House of Representatives, however, with its relatively weak parties, legislative structure is more often linked to the electoral concerns of individual legislators, rather than to any collective electoral concerns. This is especially true of research that is in or influenced by the rational choice perspective. In this research investigation the researchers explore the degree to which specifically partisan factors enter into, and have historically entered into, the structure of the House of Representatives. The investigators focus on the committee system and articulate a view of committees as agents of political parties. This necessitates answering a number of broader questions: What is a party and how can it control any agents that it might appoint, committees or not? What are agency relationships like when they involve collective principals, such as a party? What is the role of the party leadership? How do the specifics of committee appointment affect their responsiveness to partisan demands? What is the relationship between committees and the floor? Employing an approach that is consistent with rational choice premises, the investigators develop and test this model of committee behavior, based on principal agent theory.