Coalition Bargaining in the United States Congress

• In Event: The Legislative Process in American Politics

Abstract

In the US House of Representatives, the position of committee chair is considered to be enormously powerful. In particular, committee chairs are understood to exercise agenda setting powers over the policy areas addressed by their committees. By virtue of their position, committee chairs have the power to propose new alternatives to status quo policies (positive agenda control), but they also exercise a de facto veto over proposals that affect their issue area (negative agenda control). Given the power afforded a committee chair to control a particular policy domain, it is no surprise that leadership of a House committee is a highly sought after position.

The existent literature argues that, since the early 20th century, committee chairmanship has been almost exclusively determined by seniority. As it happens, when a chair becomes vacant, there are frequently multiple committee members with the same seniority that could become committee chair under a seniority rule. We argue that these “ties” in seniority present an opportunity for party leaders to strengthen their party in much the same way that leaders in parliamentary systems build and maintain coalitions. We show that even though seniority plays a role, party leaders use committee chairmanships as a tool to build and maintain coalitions of factions that makeup congressional parties. Using data on committee leadership, we show how changes in committee chairs may reflect renegotiations among factions within the majority party. Furthermore, we combine committee chairmanship data with data on committee outcomes to show how changes in committee control change committee policy production.

Authors

• Daniel Blyth Magleby, Binghamton University

• Gisela Sin, University of Illinois, Urbana-Champaign