Empirical Investigation
of Committee Power
As positive political theory has consumed a good portion of research on Congress over the last two decades, a major focus of such work has been the influence of congressional rules and structures in the production of policy outputs. A favorite subject of interest among scholars of this choice-based paradigm is the most prominent institution within the congressional decision making process legislative committees. Examine any new direction taken by legislative scholars to explore congressional policy making and the standing committees of the House and Senate take center stage in the theoretical and empirical [exploration] of their models. 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 committee 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, some recent observers of Congress have disagreed about the contemporary status of legislative committees vis-vis other congressional actors, particularly chamber and party leaders. On one side, scholars claim that the overall institution of legislative committees is not what it used to be, committee chairs have less power, there is greater reliance on staff for decision making, parties set the entire chamber agenda which trickles down to the panel-level, and more legislating is done through "unorthodox" methods than ever before (such as task forces, leadership decreed legislation, etc., Sinclair 1997). While some scholars focus on shifts in committee powers imposed as part of the Republican takeover of the House after the 1994 elections (Smith and Lawrence 1997), others trace the demise of the committee system back much further. One recent congressional observer remarks that seeds for the destruction of committee power were laid in the 1960s, when President Johnson's landslide election "allowed him to define the terms of debate" in subsequent political matters and to skirt around the authority of old-style Democratic committee barons (Cohen 1999).
The perception of the demise of committees, however, is not a universal feeling among congressional scholars. For instance, while Groseclose and King acknowledge that the period immediately following the start of 104th Congress (the first 100 days) was in many ways distinct from the normal functioning in the House legislative process, and thereafter "committees operated much as they have for one hundred years" (1998, 136). Specifically, they argue that the chamber's reliance upon non-traditional law-making practices like ad-hoc task forces was short-lived and that legislators still funneled their energies into committees that retained much of their independence and agenda-setting capacity (see also Hall and McKissick 1997).
Despite the assertions of some of the field's best scholars, 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 particular panels over time. This project seeks to rectify this shortcoming and introduce new data that will allow us 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.
E. Scott Adler and John Wilkerson.
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