The Partisanship of House Committees and Member Self-Selection

Abstract

The extant literature suggests that members choose committees for distributive reasons and seek more prestigious committees as they move up the seniority ranks. But why do some members chose committees like Rules and Judiciary which are not distributive in nature? I claim that committees also offer representational benefits: namely, the ability to signal ideological preferences to constituents. Members from moderate districts seek out committees with jurisdictions over consensual issues, while members from extreme districts prefer committees with highly partisan jurisdictions. Using a unique dataset of committee partisanship constructed from committee roll-call votes, I show that members are more likely to select ideologically congruent committees and more likely to leave noncongruent committees, though this relationship is conditioned by the distributive value of the committee. This research has implications for committee selection and theories of legislative organization by demonstrating that committees offer ideological representation benefits as well as distributive ones.