Collaborative Research: Congressional Committee Jurisdictions, Gatekeeping, and Agenda Setting

对国会结构的研究往往集中在参众两院常设委员会的权力和权威上。从理论上看，委员会要么是国会政策过程的基础和核心，就像立法结构的分配模式一样，要么被视为向党派和信息模型中描述的党或议院等上级机构提供信息和政策建议的关键主力。从更实证的角度来看，最近的国会观察家对立法委员会相对于其他国会参与者，特别是参议院和政党领袖的当代地位存在分歧。尽管该领域一些最优秀的学者声称委员会目前在国会决策过程中的优势或劣势，但我们仍然没有多少手段来衡量委员会的权力和权威，特别是如果我们试图了解特定小组的影响力随着时间的变化。这个项目通过收集有关法案介绍和转介的新数据来纠正这一缺点。这使调查人员能够更准确地定义委员会管辖权，更好地测试管辖权变化的理论，了解委员会议题把关的过程和普遍性，并发现个人和委员会议程对国会两院整体工作的影响。研究人员收集1947-2000年间国会提出的所有法案的信息。基于目前对国会组织和政策决策的研究，调查人员描述了法案提交和转介的数据如何能够回答有关委员会权力和政策议程设置的一系列问题。例如，关于法案转介的信息提供了对“普通法”委员会管辖权的更全面的描述，将学者们从小组活跃的那些问题(举行听证会)转移到对小组有转介权的其他事项的额外考虑，这些问题可能仍然处于不活跃的状态(没有听证)。同样，有关委员会“非决策”的信息使研究人员首次能够真正测试委员会跨小组把关的模型以及程序规则和结构的变化。通过将有关政策“输入”(法案介绍)的数据与有关政策需求(舆论和媒体线索)和政府产出(法规和预算授权)的现有信息相结合，他们能够通过更全面地描述国会决策来研究委员会权力的动态和对立法议程的影响。该数据集将对许多其他对这一主题感兴趣的学者具有重要价值。

Studies of congressional structure frequently focus on the powers and authority of standing committees in the House and Senate. From a theoretical perspective, committees are either the foundation and core of the policy process in congress as in a distributive model of legislative structure, or are seen as the vital workhorse in providing information and policy proposals to parent bodies like the party or chamber as described in partisan and informational models. From a more empirical standpoint, recent observers of Congress have disagreed about the contemporary status of legislative committees vis-a-vis other congressional actors, particularly chamber and party leaders.Despite the claims of some of the field's best scholars as to current strengths or weaknesses of committees in the congressional decision making process, we still have few means by which to measure the power and authority of committees, particularly if we seek to understand the changes in influence of specific panels over time. This project rectifies this shortcoming by gathering new data on bill introductions and referrals. This allows the investigators to more accurately define committee jurisdictions, better test theories of jurisdictional change, understand the process and prevalence of committee issue gatekeeping, and discover the effects of individual and committee agendas on the overall work of each chamber of Congress.The researchers collect information on all bills introduced in Congress from 1947-2000. Grounded in current research on congressional organization and policy decision making, the investigators describe how data on bill introductions and referrals can answer a wide range of questions concerning committee authority and policy agenda setting. For example, information on bill referrals provides a more complete delineation of "common law" committee jurisdictions by moving scholars beyond simply those issues on which a panel is active (holding hearings), to additional consideration of those matters on which it has referral authority by may remain inactive (no hearings). Similarly, information on "non-decisionmaking" in committees allows the researchers for the first time to truly test models of committee gatekeeping across panels and over changes in procedural rules and structures.By integrating data on policy "inputs" (bill introductions) with existing information on policy demand (public opinion and media cues) and governmental outputs (enactments and budget authorizations), they are able to study the dynamics of committee authority and influence over the legislative agenda with a more comprehensive depiction of congressional decision making. The dataset will be of great value to numerous other scholars interested in this topic.