Conflict Management Revisited: Committee Chairs and Policy Conflict in Congress

• In Event: Agenda Setting Dynamics in Contemporary Policymaking

Abstract

While congressional committees often are seen as bastions of bipartisan cooperation and counterweights to rancorous floor debate, recent years have seen policy disagreement within committees on a host of issues previously marked by consensus such as agriculture subsidies and the Export-Import Bank. Committee chairs typically are responsible for managing policy disagreements among committee members, and their success at doing so often is attributed to personal characteristics. “Views” attached to committee reports express members’ additional, dissenting, and minority opinions on the underlying legislation or issue and thus represent disagreement with the committee’s work to varying degrees. In this paper I construct a series of focused quantitative case studies to compare the tenures of committee chairs who served in comparable positions: representatives and senators who each chaired the same committees; a legislator who chaired counterpart committees in the House and Senate; and a senator who chaired the same committee at different points in time. Preliminary findings suggest that issue characteristics, committee organizational contexts, and the macropolitical environment play a larger role in incidence of committee report views than a chair’s individual conflict management ability. These data suggest that attempts to improve capacity and reduce conflict in Congress depend on committee norms, jurisdictions, and the issue agenda.

Author

• Jonathan Lewallen, University of Tampa