Congressional Committee Requests Revisited: Professional Expertise, Multiple Goals and Representation Public Deposited
- Last Modified
- March 20, 2019
- Creator
-
Faricy, Christopher George
- Affiliation: College of Arts and Sciences, Department of Political Science
- Abstract
- House members pursue multiple goals during their legislative career. The goals of reelection, good policy making and power affect member voting and committee composition. Yet in arguably a legislator’s most important choice, committee request, only the goal of reelection has empirical support. I argue that a member utilizes all three goals when going through the committee process and requests a committee assignment that will maximize their utility across all legislative goals. Utility maximization is achieved when a member can gain influence within a policy jurisdiction through leveraging their prior expertise. I employ a multinomial logit model in examining committee requests, for eight committees over fifty years. My findings indicate that across five of the eight committees a member’s prior occupation is a strong and consistent predictor of a legislator’s request. It is plausible, given the results that members pursue multiple goals in making their request for committee assignment.
- Date of publication
- December 2006
- DOI
- Resource type
- Rights statement
- In Copyright
- Advisor
- Engstrom, Eric J.
- Language
- Access
- Open access
- Parents:
This work has no parents.
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Congressional committee requests revisited : professional expertise, multiple goals and representation | 2019-04-10 | Public |
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