Partisan and Nonpartisan Theories of Organization in the US

Introduction

“Legislative organization” refers to the internal organization of a legislature—that is, the structures and processes of the lawmaking process, such as committees and party caucuses; the “Congressional Organization” literature centers on different aspects of the organization of the US Congress. An early generation of theories treats organization as a dependent variable to be explained, whereas subsequent theories tend to model the effects of organization on legislative outcomes (albeit, often with an eye toward testing predictions of the earlier theories). Debate came to focus largely on the question of whether parties play a significant role in legislative decision making, which has given rise to large literatures addressing both the extent and basis of parties’ influence. Other debates in the literature examine key premises from different theories (such as committee composition), as well as the evolution of legislative organization over time.

Textbooks

Both Davidson, et al. 2011 and Smith, et al. 2009 are Congress textbooks that serve as high-quality introductions to many aspects of Congress. Oleszek 2011 focuses more specifically on the legislative process, while Sinclair 2011 emphasizes Congress’s tendency to deviate from the regular legislative process in recent decades. Stewart 2011 takes a more technical approach, introducing readers to many of the analytical tools used in the congressional literature. Dodd and Oppenheimer 2012 present accessible overviews of different aspects of congressional literature.

Davidson, Roger H., Walter J. Oleszek, and Frances E. Lee. Congress and Its Members. 13th ed. Washington, DC: CQ Press, 2011.
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An excellent introductory Congress textbook, especially its treatment of the context in which congressional action occurs. Multiple editions available.
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Dodd, Lawrence C., and Bruce I. Oppenheimer, eds. Congress Reconsidered. 10th ed. Washington, DC: CQ Press, 2012.
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Comprised of chapters by many leading scholars from the field, presenting a blend of original research and accessible overviews of current understandings of various topics. Multiple editions available.
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Oleszek, Walter J. Congressional Procedures and the Policy Process. 8th ed. Washington, DC: CQ Press, 2011.
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An authoritative introduction to the legislative process, this should be one of the first books that any undergraduate or graduate student reads before delving into the congressional organization literature. Multiple editions available.
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Sinclair, Barbara. Unorthodox Lawmaking: New Legislative Processes in the U.S. Congress. 4th ed. Washington, DC: CQ Press, 2011.
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A definitive overview of Congress’s tendency in recent decades to deviate from the “textbook” legislative process, especially when handling major legislation. Multiple editions available.
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Smith, Steven S., Jason M. Roberts, and Ryan J. Vander Wielen. The American Congress. 6th ed. New York: Cambridge University Press, 2009.
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Another excellent introductory textbook, which devotes considerable space to congressional organization and insights from the congressional organization literature. Multiple editions available.
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Stewart, Charles III. Analyzing Congress. 2d ed. New York: W.W. Norton, 2011.
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A different approach that emphasizes many of the analytical tools, such as spatial modeling, that dominate the literature. An excellent starting point for understanding many of the debates and methods from studies of congressional organization.
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Data

Various data sources are invaluable for research on congressional organization and legislative decision making. Poole and Rosenthal 1997 estimates of congresspersons’ ideological positions on roll call votes are available at Voteview, which also provides data on roll call voting. Charles Stewart’s Congressional Data Page features data on congressional committee membership. Congress’s homepage, Thomas, allows search and browsing of legislation and related topics for both houses of Congress going back to the 1970s. A handful of other sources provide legislative data organized around different units: David W. Rohde’s Rohde/PIPC Roll Call Database includes characteristics of roll call votes; Adler and Wilkerson’s Congressional Bills Project includes characteristics of bills; and Baumgartner and Jones’s Policy Agendas Project data are organized around different policy topics.

Adler, E. Scott, and John Wilkerson. Congressional Bills Project.
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Downloadable datasets with observations for each bill in each chamber since 1947, including data on bill sponsors and their characteristics, bills’ progress through the legislative process, bills’ policy substance, hearings, votes, CQ Almanac coverage, and the federal budget.
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Baumgartner, Frank R., and Bryan D. Jones. Policy Agendas Project.
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Provides a variety of datasets that, in one way or another, capture different policy issues’ salience, and legislative action on those issues, at various points in time.
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Charles Stewart’s Congressional Data Page.
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Downloadable datasets, compiled by Stewart and various coauthors, which identify each member of each congressional committee for all Congresses. The page also includes downloads and links for other useful congressional datasets.
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Poole, Keith T., and Howard Rosenthal. Congress: A Political-Economic History of Roll-Call Voting. New York: Oxford University Press, 1997.
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Poole and Rosenthal’s NOMINATE scores are estimates of each legislator’s position in an ideological space, based on legislators’ roll call votes. These scores are the empirical standard —though there is considerable debate about the extent to which ideology and other factors influence the estimates. This book explains the methodology and analyzes changes in ideology across US history.
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Rohde, David W. Rohde/PIPC Roll Call Database. Duke University.
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A dataset that codes information about each House roll call vote, dating back to the 1930s. Codes many characteristics of the nature of each roll call, including vote totals, party vote totals, and what type of vote it was (e.g., substantive or procedural, amendment vs. final passage). Updated as data for each new Congress become available.
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Thomas. Library of Congress.
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A convenient source for researching particular legislation; allows a wide range of search and browsing options for legislation dating back to the 1970s, linking bills, legislative histories, and roll call votes. Also includes links to the House, House Clerk, and Senate websites, which include additional data on parties, leaders, and committees, as well as other resources.
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Voteview.
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Site features many different datasets—most notably NOMINATE scores (vote-based measures of each member’s ideology in each Congress), roll call vote files for each chamber in each Congress that document how each member voted on each roll call vote during that Congress, and party unity patterns by member and by Congress.
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Reference Works

Both Tiefer 1989 and Gold 2008 are thorough reference sources for details of legislative procedure. The Senate’s Rules and Procedures page also include links to information about other aspects of the legislative process, as does the House’s Legislative Process page. The Library of Congress’s A Century of Lawmaking page provides access to the text of many congressional documents, including House and Senate Journals and the Congressional Record, from 1774 to 1875. Martis 1989 is an authoritative guide to party affiliations of congresspersons across history.

A Century of Lawmaking for a New Nation: U.S. Congressional Documents and Debates, 1774–1875. Library of Congress.
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A phenomenal resource for studying Congress across the first century of its existence, its links to the chambers’ journals, the Congressional Record, and other documents make an amazing amount of historical material easily available. After using this, you will cry if you need documents from after 1875 and have to track them down at a library.
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Gold, Martin B. Senate Procedure and Practice. 2d ed. Lanham, MD: Rowman & Littlefield, 2008.
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An authoritative and legalistic guide to the intricacies of Senate procedure, updated in 2008 to include recent developments.
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The Legislative Process. Office of the Clerk of the U.S. House of Representatives.
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Includes links to overviews of the House’s legislative process, and other sources that delve into greater detail, such as the voluminous House precedents that fill in many of the details of the chamber’s legislative process.
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Martis, Kenneth A. The Historical Atlas of Political Parties in the United States Congress. New York: Macmillan, 1989.
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A massive one-stop source for information about the party affiliations of members of Congress across history. Particularly in the 19th century, party affiliation was often unclear; Martis has done exhaustive research in determining affiliations, and is admirably transparent in acknowledging the limits of his ability to categorize some members.
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Rules and Procedure. U.S. Senate.
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This website includes many links to data and information about the Senate, ranging from the legislative process to parties and party leaders.
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Tiefer, Charles. Congressional Practice and Procedure: A Reference, Research, and Legislative Guide. New York: Greenwood, 1989.
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A detailed guide to legislative procedures in the House and Senate, as of 1989. Some of the information is outdated given the now more than twenty years of intervening legislative evolution.
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Studies of Congressional Organization

Theories of congressional organization rest on beliefs about how Congress is (and has been) organized, so the theoretical literature rests upon beliefs about which aspects of organization are important. Such beliefs are heavily informed by many detailed studies of organization in each chamber, many of which also play important roles in theoretical development. McCubbins and Sullivan 1987 presents a snapshot of the state of the literature through the mid-1980s. Shepsle 1989 notes the increasing divergence between the conventional and observed House behavior by the late 1980s, while Sinclair 1998 gives a comprehensive overview of the changes in the dominant perceptions of House organization between the 1950s and the 1990s. In Smith 1989, the treatment of floor behavior hints at much of the subsequent literature on procedures, and capture. On the Senate side, Sinclair 1990 covers changes in the chamber’s organization from the 1950s onward.

McCubbins, Mathew D., and Terry Sullivan, eds. Congress: Structure and Policy. New York: Cambridge University Press, 1987.
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This edited volume features many classic works on congressional organization, which collectively paint a broad picture of the state of congressional organization literature as of the mid-1980s.
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Shepsle, Kenneth A. “The Changing Textbook Congress.” In Can the Government Govern? Edited by John E. Chubb and Paul E. Peterson, 238–266. Washington, DC: Brookings Institution, 1989.
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A treatise on the increasing extent to which the “Textbook Congress”—i.e., the long-dominant understanding of the House as a committee-dominated institution—did not seem to square with the House of the 1980s.
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Sinclair, Barbara. The Transformation of the U.S. Senate. Baltimore: Johns Hopkins University Press, 1990.
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An analysis of changes in the postwar Senate, from a “club” dominated by small groups of senior senators in the 1950s, to a chamber characterized by chaotic individualism in the 1970s, to an increasingly partisan chamber by the late 1980s.
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Sinclair, Barbara. Legislators, Leaders, and Lawmaking: The U.S. House of Representatives in the Postreform Era. Baltimore: Johns Hopkins University Press, 1998.
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A comprehensive analysis of the emergence of parties as a major part of House organization in the 1980s and 1990s. It also includes excellent overviews of the evolution of House organization—and scholars’ understanding of it—from the 1950s through the 1990s.
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Smith, Steven S. Call To Order: Floor Politics in the House and Senate. Washington, DC: Brookings Institution, 1989.
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A pioneering qualitative and quantitative analysis of actions on the floors of the House and Senate. It emphasizes the increase in decision making on the chamber floor s, and foreshadows the literature’s greater emphasis on procedural battles over the past two decades.
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Committees

By all accounts, committees are an important part of organization in each chamber. Much of the work that happens in Congress occurs in committees, which play significant roles in legislating and oversight. Deering and Smith 1997 provide an excellent starting point for learning about committees and committee literature. Cooper 1970 on the emergence of the House standing committee system in the early 1800s documents the rise of the crucial part of organization. Fenno 1973 on committees is an authoritative account of committee activity. Evans 1991 focuses on the role of committee leaders in the Senate and their effects on committee behavior. Pearson and Schickler 2009 examines discharge petitions as a means of evaluating House members’ levels of deference to committees.

Cooper, Joseph. The Origins of the Standing Committees and the Development of the Modern House. Houston: William Marsh Rice University, 1970.
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A detailed account of the rise of standing committees, specialization, and norms of committee deference early in House history.
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Deering, Christopher J., and Steven S. Smith. Committees in Congress. 3d ed. Washington, DC: CQ Press, 1997.
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A thorough survey of various aspects of committees in the House and Senate, it is a useful resource for undergraduates or experienced congressional scholars. Includes committee history, discussion of committees and theories of congressional organization, quantitative data, and many valuables details about the workings of the committee systems.
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Evans, C. Lawrence. Leadership in Committee: A Comparative Analysis of Leadership Behavior in the U.S. Senate. Ann Arbor: University of Michigan Press, 1991.
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A thorough and insightful examination of Senate committee chairs’ and ranking members’ effects on legislative decisions in committee, including tools and strategies by which leaders influence committee decisions.
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Fenno, Richard. Congressmen in Committees. Boston: Little, Brown, 1973.
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A classic study of congressional committees during the committee government era, including analysis of variation in behavior among committees and development of a proto-theory for explaining this variation.
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Pearson, Kathryn, and Eric Schickler. “Discharge Petitions, Agenda Control, and the Congressional Committee System, 1929–76.” Journal of Politics 71.4 (October 2009): 1238–1256.
DOI: 10.1017/S0022381609990259Save Citation »Export Citation »E-mail Citation »
Examines discharge petitions as a means of evaluating House members’ levels of deference to committees. They find that deference to committees is less universal than supposed by earlier conventional wisdom, and that deference varies systematically across House members.
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Parties and Leadership

Like committees, parties are often treated as important parts of congressional organization (though there is far more debate about the importance of parties); those who see parties as important typically see them as coalitions of legislators that attempt to manipulate legislative outcomes by shaping the workings of other aspects of organization; there is, however, broad debate about how they do so, the extent to which they succeed, conditions that affect their success, and how these things vary over time. Jones 1968 distinguishes between parties as procedural coalitions—that is, as groups whose members cooperate on decisions over legislative procedure, such as special rules in the House––and parties as substantive coalitions—meaning, groups whose members cooperate on substantive policy decisions, such as adoption of amendments or final passage of bills. Cooper and Brady 1981 also foreshadows later theories, arguing that party leaders are constrained by contextual factors that affect their leadership styles (see also Rohde 1991, under Partisan Theories). On the Senate side, conventional wisdom long held that the majority party had little power to shape legislation; Schiller 2000 foreshadows subsequent work on Senate parties by challenging that view, while Lee 2009 studies the role of partisanship in the contemporary Senate, arguing that partisan competition explains a great deal of legislative behavior that is not explained by other factors alone.

Cooper, Joseph, and David W. Brady. “Institutional Context and Leadership Style: The House from Cannon to Rayburn.” American Political Science Review 75 (June 1981): 411–425.
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An important development of thinking about party leadership, it articulates the idea that leaders’ styles are contingent upon party strength, with strong-party leaders exercising more hierarchical leadership and weak-party leaders employing less centralized, bargaining-based leadership.
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Jones, Charles O. “Joseph G. Cannon and Howard W. Smith: An Essay on the Limits of Leadership in the House of Representatives.” Journal of Politics 30 (August 1968): 617–646.
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Jones’s distinction of procedural and substantive coalitions is the basis for his analysis of party leadership. His emphasis on the importance of party leaders maintaining their procedural coalitions informs much of the later literature on parties in Congress.
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Lee, Frances E. Beyond Ideology: Politics, Principles and Partisanship in the U.S. Senate. Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 2009.
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Argues that the partisan competition for electoral and legislative success drives a significant amount of legislative behavior. In particular, it often leads to partisan fights even over items on which members of different parties have similar policy preferences.
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Schiller, Wendy J. “Trent Lott’s New Regime: Filling the Amendment Tree to Centralize Power in the U.S. Senate.” Paper presented at the Annual Meeting of the American Political Science Association, Washington, DC, 31 August–3 September 2000.
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Argues that, contrary to most claims up to that point, the Senate majority leader is not entirely without tools with which to shape the agenda and decisions in the upper chamber: examines then-majority leader Trent Lott’s use of procedure to prevent others from offering unwanted amendments.
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History of Congressional Organization

The congressional organization literature long tended to emphasize the postwar House. More recently, however, there has been a burgeoning “Congress and history” literature that documents and explains organization over a longer time period, and that also uses historical variation to improve testing of theories developed largely to explain postwar organization. An oft-cited forerunner of this literature is Polsby 1968. Brady and McCubbins 2002 and Brady and McCubbins 2007 are edited volumes featuring chapters on many aspects of organization across history and thus serve as broad introductions to this literature. A smattering of other examples of work in this field includes, on the House side, Aldrich 1995 on the emergence and evolution of parties across history, Stewart 1989, an account of the evolution of budgeting procedures, and Roberts 2010, an analysis of special rules. Swift 2002 provides and authoritative account of the dramatic changes that swept through the Senate in its early decades, while Gamm and Smith 2002 is a history of the origins of party leadership in the Senate.

Aldrich, John. Why Parties? The Origin and Transformation of Political Parties in America. Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1995.
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Aldrich analyzes parties across US history, casting them as organizations that exist in order to serve the interests of their members. He documents the changing nature of parties in different time periods, which he explains as a function of changing collective goals among party members.
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Brady, David W., and Mathew D. McCubbins, eds. Party, Process, and Political Change in Congress: New Perspectives on the History of Congress. Palo Alto, CA: Stanford University Press, 2002.
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An edited volume that brings together works by many prominent congressional scholars in developing our knowledge of Congress in the 19th and early 20th centuries.
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Brady, David W., and Mathew D. McCubbins, eds. Party, Process, and Political Change in Congress. Vol. 2, Further New Perspectives on the History of Congress. Palo Alto, CA: Stanford University Press, 2007.
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A follow-up to the first Brady and McCubbins volume, this one includes work on additional topics, many by relative newcomers to the congressional organization field.
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Gamm, Gerald, and Steven S. Smith. “Policy Leadership and the Development of the Modern Senate.” In Party, Process, and Political Change in Congress: New Perspectives on the History of Congress. Edited by David Brady and Mathew D. McCubbins. Palo Alto, CA: Stanford University Press, 2002.
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Party leadership in the Senate first developed on an informal basis in the late 19th century. Drawing on extensive analysis of newspapers and other accounts, this (along with a series of related Gamm and Smith papers) is as complete a picture as we have of the rise of party leadership in the Senate.
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Polsby, Nelson. “The Institutionalization of the U.S. House of Representatives.” American Political Science Review 62 (March 1968): 144–168.
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An early attempt at analyzing the development of House institutions over time, Polsby matches descriptive and quantitative techniques with a theoretical framework to document the development of some prominent characteristics of the modern House, such as seniority and careerism.
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Roberts, Jason M. “The Development of Special Orders and Special Rules in the U.S. House, 1881–1937.” Legislative Studies Quarterly 35.3 (2010): 307–336.
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Modern theories of party influence emphasize the significance of special rules as a mechanism of House agenda control. Roberts studies the content and use of special rules (originally called special orders) across the first few decades in which they were adopted by majority vote.
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Stewart, Charles H. Budget Reform Politics: The Design of the Appropriations Process in the House of Representatives, 1865–1921. Cambridge, UK: Cambridge University Press, 1989.
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Budgeting is likely the most important type of legislative decision that Congress makes. Stewart’s compelling analysis explains the fundamental changes in the budgeting process that occurred between the Civil War and the 1920s.
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Swift, Elaine K. The Making of an American Senate: Reconstitutive Change in Congress, 1787–1841. Ann Arbor: University of Michigan Press, 2002.
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Traces the profound changes in the Senate as it developed across the first few decades of its existence. Across this period, the chamber evolved from a passive body that mostly followed others’ leads (i.e., the House or the president), into an active legislative participant.
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The Evolution of Rights

A subset of the Congress and History literature centers on documenting and explaining changes in legislators’ “rights”—meaning, broadly, their ability to meaningfully participate in legislative decision making. Binder 1997 and Dion 1997 are often seen as the starting points for debate over the determinants of rights, followed in Schickler 2001, which focuses less on parties, and Koger 2010, which documents the evolution of filibustering in the House and Senate across congressional history. Cooper and Young 1989 is an underappreciated account of the 19th-century evolution of the right to introduce legislation.

Binder, Sarah. Minority Rights, Majority Rule: Partisanship and the Development of Congress. Cambridge, UK: Cambridge University Press, 1997.
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Binder observes that, across history, rights have generally been restricted in the House but not in the Senate. She offers a theory explaining this pattern as a matter of party strength: strong parties restrict the rights of individuals and opponents in order to maximize influence over legislative outcomes.
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Cooper, Joseph, and Cheryl D. Young. “Bill Introduction in the Nineteenth Century: A Study of Institutional Change.” Legislative Studies Quarterly 14 (1989): 67–106.
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A detailed account, combining historical and quantitative analysis, of the evolution of the right to introduce legislation in the 19th century House. Documents the changes by which this right was transformed to a limited prerogative of committees into an unrestrained right of individual members.
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Dion, Douglas. Turning the Legislative Thumbscrew: Minority Rights and Procedural Change in Legislative Politics. Ann Arbor: University of Michigan Press, 1997.
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Offering a dissimilar theory of changes in rights, Dion argues that the majority party is most likely to restrict rights when it is most threatened—often when it has a very narrow majority.
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Koger, Gregory. Filibustering: A Political History of Obstruction in the House and Senate. Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 2010.
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A thorough analysis of the history and variety of filibustering strategies in both the House and Senate across congressional history, including extensive data on many different aspects of filibustering, and a thoughtful explanation of changes over time.
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Schickler, Eric. Disjointed Pluralism: Institutional Innovation and the Development of the U.S. Congress. Princeton, NJ: Princeton University Press, 2001.
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In contrast, Schickler explains changes in rights as a function of a broader set of factors than just partisan considerations, and argues that different considerations are the key drivers of change at different points in time.
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Budgeting

Many argue, with substantial reason, that budget decisions are the most significant choices that a government makes. Wildavsky 1988 is a classic portrait of the enormous changes in federal budgeting across the second half of the 20th century, and is an excellent starting point in the budget literature (see Stewart 1989, under History of Congressional Organization, for an account of 19th-century budgeting). Fenno 1966 (like the original version of Wildavsky’s book) is an authoritative account of budgeting in the period prior to the major budgeting overhaul brought on by the landmark Congressional Budget Act of 1974. Gilmour 1990 covers some of the same ground as Wildavsky, though up to a slightly later date and with more emphasis on budget deficits (see chapter 2 of Oleszek 2011, under Textbooks, for a current overview of the budget process). Krutz 2001 studies the rise of omnibus bills (large bills that bundle many policies together) as a common budgeting tool. Anderson and Harbridge 2010 take a close empirical look at budgeting, with an eye toward assessing the common claim that budget changes are usually incremental.

Anderson, Sarah, and Laurel Harbridge. “Incrementalism in Appropriations: Small Aggregation, Big Changes.” Public Administration Review 70.3 (2010): 464–474.
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Uses a new database to more closely assess whether budgeting changes are incremental. After confronting the question of how to define “incremental,” shows that many changes are not incremental and draws counterintuitive conclusions about the effects of changing party control and divided government on budget decisions.
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Fenno, Richard F., Jr. The Power of the Purse: Appropriations Politics in Congress. Boston: Little, Brown, 1966.
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A detailed, contextually rich study of the postwar budgeting process, which it characterizes as incremental, decentralized, and revolving around the House and Senate Appropriations committees.
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Gilmour, John B. Reconcilable Differences? Congress, the Budget Process, and the Deficit. Berkeley: University of California Press, 1990.
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Like Wildavsky, covers the decentralized and postreform budgeting periods, the consequent shifts in power, and post-1974 modifications. However, places more emphasis on the exploding deficits of the 1980s and the question of whether the reformed process caused these deficits. He concludes that political differences among the House, Senate, and president, rather than the budget process, was responsible for deficits by the end of the 1980s.
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Krutz, Glen S. Hitching a Ride: Omnibus Legislating in the U.S. Congress. Parliaments and Legislatures Series. Columbus: Ohio State University Press, 2001.
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Examines the emergence of omnibus legislation in the 20th century, and the acceleration of their use for budgeting after 1974. Attributes the trend in large part to the increased volume of legislation and portrays omnibus bills as a useful way for Congress to deal with increasing legislative demands.
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Wildavsky, Aaron. The New Politics of the Budgetary Process. Glenview, IL: Scott, Foresman, 1988.
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Sketches the historical evolution of budgeting, then goes into more detail about the process in the second half of the 20th century, including the 1974 changes and subsequent modifications. Explains the transformation and examines its impact on the legislative process. Also details entitlement and military spending and the rapid growth of each as factors contributing to the changes in budgeting.
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Theories of Congressional Organization

An early explanation of congressional organization is Mayhew 1974, a classic study of House members’ goals and the way committee structures facilitate achievement of those goals. Shepsle and Weingast 1994 describes how theories of organization discussed in this section were a response to earlier, abstract theories that predicted organizational and policy instability in Congress. Smith 2007 is a thorough critique of the organizational models discussed in this section, as well as the lawmaking models discussed in Models of Lawmaking.

Mayhew, David R. Congress: The Electoral Connection. New Haven, CT: Yale University Press, 1974.
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Undoubtedly one of the most influential books ever about Congress, it emphasizes electoral incentives and ways in which the committee system helps House members achieve electoral goals.
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Shepsle, Kenneth A., and Barry R. Weingast. “Positive Theories of Congressional Institutions.” Legislative Studies Quarterly 19.2 (1994): 149–179.
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This definitive literature review traces the origins of organizational theories to social choice models that predicted rampant instability that is not observed in reality. In other words, the organizational theories were an attempt to explain the stability of congressional organization.
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Smith, Steven S. Party Influence in Congress. New York: Cambridge University Press, 2007.
DOI: 10.1017/CBO9780511812613Save Citation »Export Citation »E-mail Citation »
A thoughtful and critical analysis of prominent partisan and nonpartisan theories of Congress from recent decades.
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Distributional Theories

Shepsle 1979 offers a formal model of how institutional arrangements can bring organizational stability, in contrast to social choice predictions. Shepsle and Weingast 1981 extends this logic to legislative committees, laying an important part of the groundwork for “distributional” theories that treat the congressional committee system as a solution to potential instability problems. Weingast and Marshall 1988 presents a full-blown version of distributional theory, in which the committee system and other congressional organizations allow members to realize gains from exchange—mostly in the form of parochial benefits that facilitate reelection––that stem from the committee system.

Shepsle, Kenneth A. “Institutional Arrangements and Equilibrium in Multidimensional Voting Models.” American Journal of Political Science 23.1 (1979): 27–59.
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A seminal prelude to the organization literature, Shepsle addresses the (in)stability conundrum with an abstract, formal model of collective decision making in a multidimensional policy space. He demonstrates that, if the space is broken into a collection of one-dimensional spaces with germaneness restrictions on amendments, the prediction of instability disappears; this is known as structure-induced equilibrium.
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Shepsle, Kenneth A., and Barry R. Weingast. “Structure-Induced Equilibrium and Legislative Choice.” Public Choice 36 (1981): 221–237.
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Builds on Shepsle 1979 by linking the abstract concept of structure-induced equilibrium, positing House committees and their jurisdictions as organizational structures that explain observed stability.
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Weingast, Barry R., and William Marshall. “The Industrial Organization of Congress; or, Why Legislatures, Like Firms, Are Not Organized as Markets.” Journal of Political Economy 96.1 (1988): 132–163.
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Shepsle and Weingast’s early papers gave rise to the distributional theory of congressional organization, in which legislators realize gains from exchange by trading influence over committee jurisdictions they value less in order to gain influence over those they value more. This paper presents the most advanced, developed form of the distributional theory.
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Informational Theories

An organizational theory that followed, and challenged, the distributional models is the “informational” theory; from this perspective, committees are institutional features that enable good public policy, rather than parochial policy. Gilligan and Krehbiel 1990 models committees as information-gathering mechanisms that serve the larger chamber’s interests. Krehbiel 1991 fleshes out this theory in greater detail and presents data to support the model.

Gilligan, Thomas W., and Keith Krehbiel. “Organization of Informative Committees by a Rational Legislature.” American Journal of Political Science 34.2 (1990): 531–564.
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In contrast to distributional theories, this paper models a congressional chamber as having a collective interest in gathering quality information in order to make better policy decisions. The chamber delegates to committees the job of becoming information specialists within their jurisdictions, and does so in ways that induce committees to transmit their specialized knowledge to the chamber as a whole.
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Krehbiel, Keith. Information and Legislative Organization. Ann Arbor: University of Michigan Press, 1991.
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A book-length treatment of the informational model developed in papers by Gilligan and Krehbiel, this is the definitive source for the informational theory of organization.
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Partisan Theories

In sharp contrast with the distributional and informational theories, each of which includes no role for parties, two types of organizational theories centering on parties emerged in the early 1990s. Rohde 1991 and Aldrich and Rohde 2000 offer the “conditional party government” theory, in which party leaders’ power is strong under some conditions and weak under others (along with Aldrich 1995, cited under History of Congressional Organization, Rohde 1991 include important parts of organizational history that serve as the foundation for the conditional party government theory). Kiewiet and McCubbins 1991 and Cox and McCubbins 1993 offer unconditional theories in which parties’ roles are treated as being constant (see also Cox and McCubbins 2005, cited under Models of Lawmaking). One of the implications of these models is that parties at least partially enable legislators, who are in many ways self-interested and parochial, to nonetheless make collective decisions that serve a broader public interest.

Aldrich, John H., and David W. Rohde. “The Consequences of Party Organization in the House: The Role of the Majority and Minority Parties in Conditional Party Government.” In Polarized Politics: Congress and the President in a Partisan Era. Edited by Jon R. Bond and Richard Fleisher. Washington, DC: CQ Press, 2000.
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Summarizes the conditional party government theory, in which party power is conditional upon the homogeneity of preferences among each party’s members, and the polarization of preferences between the two parties. Power flows toward leaders as the conditions are met, and toward committees as they are unmet.
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Cox, Gary W., and Mathew D. McCubbins. Legislative Leviathan: Party Government in the House. Berkeley: University of California Press, 1993.
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Presents the “cartel” theory of partisan organization, in which majority party members delegate power to party leaders with the expectation that leaders will use the power to facilitate collective action that maintains the electoral value of the party’s brand name, which affects members’ reelection chances.
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Kiewiet, D. Roderick, and Mathew D. McCubbins. The Logic of Delegation: Congressional Parties and the Appropriations Process. Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1991.
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Models organization as a function of majority party delegation to committees and to the executive branch, and the majority’s attempts to minimize the extent of agency loss that results from such delegation.
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Rohde, David. Parties and Leaders in the Postreform House. Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1991.
DOI: 10.7208/chicago/9780226724058.001.0001Save Citation »Export Citation »E-mail Citation »
Recasts the “postreform” House of the 1970s as one in which Democratic majority party members became more unified in their policy goals, leading to greater empowerment of party leaders as a means of achieving collective goals. This introduces a key part of the conditional party government logic. See pp. 1–105.
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Other Perspectives

Many other works deal in one way or another with congressional organization, but do not fit squarely into the distributional, informational, or partisan categories. Adler and Wilkerson 2012 offer a theory in which legislators’ common interests in solving problems that voters care about leads to organization and behavior designed to facilitate problem-solving. The remaining sources are a somewhat idiosyncratically grouped collection of interesting takes on aspects of the workings of Congress. The American Political Science Association Committee on Political Parties 1950 made an argument about the absence of strong parties in Congress that provided a normative underpinning for much of the later work on organization. Arnold 1990 offers an insightful theory of how the types of costs and benefits associated with a policy often shapes the legislative procedures used for consideration of a bill. Evans 2004 analyzes the relationship between pork-barrel projects and the broader public policy and draws a counter-intuitive argument about the consequences of pork. Volden, et al. 2013 examines how the legislative strategies of male and female House members tend to differ from one another, how these differences affect legislative decisions, and how their effectiveness varies with polarization.

Adler, E. Scott, and John D. Wilkerson. Congress and the Politics of Problem Solving. New York: Cambridge University Press, 2012.
DOI: 10.1017/CBO9781139150842Save Citation »Export Citation »E-mail Citation »
Argues that, loud declarations of gridlock and broken government notwithstanding, Congress actually does a decent job of dealing with policy problems. The theory builds on the premise that voters hold members of Congress collectively responsible for problems; this leads to far more bipartisan cooperation, and organizational features designed to engender such cooperation, than is widely supposed. The book integrates insights from public policy and other non-Congress subfields, and uses a dazzling array of newly collected data.
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American Political Science Association Committee on Political Parties. Toward a More Responsible Party System: A Report. New York: Rinehart, 1950.
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In this landmark work, the committee loudly laments the lack of Westminsterian, responsible parties and party conflict in Congress, contributing to the perception that congressional parties were so feeble as to be unimportant in congressional organization.
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Arnold, R. Douglas. The Logic of Congressional Action. New Haven, CT: Yale University Press, 1990.
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Starts with Congress’s propensity to adopt policies that benefit concentrated groups at the expense of the public more broadly, then addresses the puzzle, Why does Congress sometimes do the opposite? Makes compelling arguments about ways in which congressional organization is sometimes adapted so as to produce broad public benefits at the expense of concentrated interests.
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Evans, Diana. Greasing the Wheels: Using Pork Barrel Projects to Build Coalitions in Congress. New York: Cambridge University Press, 2004.
DOI: 10.1017/CBO9780511617140Save Citation »Export Citation »E-mail Citation »
Challenges the common belief that pork barrel projects serve no positive purpose, by studying how the use of pork barrel projects are used to build coalitions that support broad public policy.
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Volden, Craig, Alan E. Wiseman, and Dana E. Wittmer. “When Are Women More Effective Lawmakers Than Men?” American Journal of Political Science (2013).
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A fascinating study of how the different legislative strategies that typify male and female representatives affect their legislative success. Draws intriguing conclusions about how the effects vary depending on majority or minority status and on the level of polarization in the House.
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Models of Lawmaking

Since the late 1990s, organizational theories have moved away from explaining organization, and toward modeling the effects of organization on legislative outcomes (although this is sometimes done for the purpose of generating tests of earlier theories). Spatial models dominate this literature, most of which build upon the Black 1958 “median voter theorem.” Like Black, the Krehbiel 1998 “pivotal politics” model emphasizes the role of the ideological median legislator; it also emphasizes the roles of other key floor actors, such as the legislators needed to end a filibuster or override, in determining outcomes. It includes no role for parties. The Cox and McCubbins 2005 “cartel agenda” model emphasizes the effects of the majority party’s ability to block action on issues, while Den Hartog and Monroe 2011 models costs of legislating as a constraint on the majority and minority parties’ ability to affect outcomes. Chiou and Rothenberg 2003 contrasts a variety of models that mix and match elements of other theories in different combinations.

Black, Duncan. The Theory of Committee and Elections. Cambridge, UK: Cambridge University Press, 1958.
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A seminal work that presents the median voter theorem, which is the foundation on which virtually all subsequent spatial models of legislatures are built.
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Chiou, Fang-Yi, and Lawrence S. Rothenberg. “When Pivotal Politics Meets Partisan Politics.” American Journal of Political Science 47.3 (2003): 503–522.
DOI: 10.1111/1540-5907.00036Save Citation »Export Citation »E-mail Citation »
Present several lawmaking models, representing pivotal and cartel perspectives, hybrids of the two, and modified versions of them. Their tests find most support for models that include party discipline and presidential effects.
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Cox, Gary W., and Mathew D. McCubbins. Setting the Agenda: Responsible Party Government in the U.S. House of Representatives. New York: Cambridge University Press, 2005.
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Presents the cartel agenda model, a one-dimensional model in which the median voter model applies for any issue dimension that reaches the floor, but the majority party has negative agenda power–i.e., the power to prevent issues from reaching the floor, or a final passage vote. This allows the majority to protect status quos that it likes, while amending status quos it dislikes to the floor median.
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Den Hartog, Chris, and Nathan W. Monroe. Agenda Setting in the U.S. Senate: Costly Consideration and Majority Party Advantage. New York: Cambridge University Press, 2011.
DOI: 10.1017/CBO9780511851957Save Citation »Export Citation »E-mail Citation »
A spatial, one-dimensional version of a bargaining model geared especially to the Senate, in which the majority and minority parties can each propose changes to the status quo. The majority party’s first-mover advantage and the costly nature of proposing changes leads to most policy outcomes and status quos being concentrated on the majority party’s side of the ideological spectrum.
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Krehbiel, Keith. Pivotal Politics: A Theory of U.S. Lawmaking. Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1998.
DOI: 10.7208/chicago/9780226452739.001.0001Save Citation »Export Citation »E-mail Citation »
Expounds and tests the pivotal politics model, a one-dimensional model in which—as with Black’s model and with Krehbiel’s 1991 informational theory (see Informational Theories)—the floor median is the most important determinant of legislative outcomes. Explains gridlock as a function of the constraints imposed by the sixty-vote cloture requirement and the two-thirds veto override requirement, which sometimes prevent outcomes from moving to the floor median.
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Empirical Support for Theories of Organization

Congressional organization and lawmaking theories have generated a vast empirical literature aimed at testing theoretical premises and predictions. Three of the major categories of tests deal with the ideology of committees, the voting cohesion of party members, and legislative outcomes.

Committee Composition

Key premises of the distributional, informational, and cartel theories have to do with the composition of committee membership. The distributional model rests on the premise, famously expounded in Shepsle 1978, that committee memberships are not representative of the chamber as a whole—that is, they are composed of preference outliers. Krehbiel 1990 tests that premise and finds it wanting. Krehbiel 1993 tests the cartel model’s premise about committee composition and rejects it, although Cox and McCubbins 1993 presents evidence supporting the cartel premise. Groseclose 1994 identifies methodological problems with prior studies and reevaluates the findings with different tests.

Cox, Gary W., and Mathew D. McCubbins. Legislative Leviathan: Party Government in the House. Berkeley: University of California Press, 1993.
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Test distributional and cartel predictions about committee composition, rejecting the former and accepting the latter. They find that committees with jurisdictions over policies that affect other party members have representative compositions (similar to the informational model), while those without such jurisdictions have unrepresentative compositions (similar to the distributional model).
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Groseclose, Tim. “Testing Committee Composition Hypotheses for the U.S. Congress.” Journal of Politics 56.2 (1994): 440–458.
DOI: 10.2307/2132147Save Citation »Export Citation »E-mail Citation »
Identifies various methodological shortcomings of previous analyses of committee composition, then presents a different method that circumvents these shortcomings. Using this method, finds little conclusive support for any of the premises.
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Krehbiel, Keith. “Are Congressional Committees Composed of Preference Outliers?” American Political Science Review 84.1 (1990): 149–163.
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Tests the outlier hypothesis and finds little evidence to support it. Notes that these results are consistent with the informational model, which rests on the premise that committee memberships are representative of the chamber as a whole.
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Krehbiel, Keith. “Where’s the Party?” British Journal of Political Science 23.2 (April 1993): 235–266.
DOI: 10.1017/S0007123400009741Save Citation »Export Citation »E-mail Citation »
Tests the cartel model premise that majority party contingents on committees are (generally) representative of the majority party caucus as a whole, and finds little evidence to support this claim. As with Krehbiel 1990, this finding serves as support for the informational model.
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Shepsle, Kenneth A. The Giant Jigsaw Puzzle: Democratic Committee Assignments in the Modern House. Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1978.
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A landmark study of committee appointments and composition that played a large role in establishing the assumption that committees are composed of preference outliers.
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Party Cohesion

Across the 1990s, debates over organization evolved such that a central question became, Do parties matter? Cartel and conditional party government theories (see Partisan Theories) emphasize party leaders’ use of legislative procedures to manipulate legislative outcomes—and, since doing so requires fairly high levels of party cohesion on many procedural votes, debate turned to questions about whether such cohesion exists. Krehbiel 2000 calls into question many measures of party cohesion in the literature. Snyder and Groseclose 2000 finds strong evidence of party effects, but McCarty, et al. 2001 questions the authors’ methodology. Cox and Poole 2002 uses a different methodology and finds broad evidence of party influence on voting.

Cox, Gary W., and Keith T. Poole. “On Measuring Partisanship in Roll-Call Voting: The U.S. House of Representatives, 1877–1999.” American Journal of Political Science 46.3 (2002): 193–211.
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Using yet another method, they find evidence of party effects on voting in all but one of the Congresses in their time series. They find the strongest effects on procedural votes, though they also find effects on substantive votes.
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Krehbiel, Keith. “Party Discipline and Measures of Partisanship.” American Journal of Political Science 44.2 (2000): 212–227.
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Critiques many commonly used measures of partisanship in voting, noting alternate explanations that could produce nonpartisan behavior that such measures would count as evidence of party effects.
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McCarty, Nolan, Keith T. Poole, and Howard Rosenthal. “The Hunt for Party Discipline in Congress.” American Political Science Review 95.3 (2001): 673–687.
DOI: 10.1017/S0003055401003069Save Citation »Export Citation »E-mail Citation »
They critique Snyder and Groseclose’s methodology, arguing that it has a bias toward overstating party effect. Using a different method and House data from 1947 to 1998, they find weaker effects.
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Snyder, James M., Jr., and Timothy Groseclose. “Estimating Party Influence in Congressional Roll-Call Voting.” American Journal of Political Science 44.2 (2000): 193–211.
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Using data for both the House and the Senate from 1871 to 1998, they find strong evidence of party effects, especially on procedural votes.
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Legislative Outcomes

Tests of lawmaking models have become a growth industry over the past decade, with scholars examining legislative outcomes from a wide variety of perspectives. Krehbiel 1998 examines the sizes of winning coalitions to test the pivotal politics model, while Cox and McCubbins 2005 and Campbell, et al. 2002 examine majority- and minority-party final passage roll rates (the proportion of votes on which a majority of party members vote no, but the bill passes anyway) in the House and Senate, respectively, to test predictions about negative agenda control. Gailmard and Jenkins 2007 broadens the study of roll rates in the House and Senate. Lawrence, et al. 2006 uses closely related win rates to study House outcomes. The final two papers critique the methodology of some of these tests. Krehbiel 2007 poses a nonpartisan explanation for observed roll rate patterns (rebutted in Cox and McCubbins 2005); while Clinton 2007 challenges the use of roll call vote data in many tests.

Campbell, Andrea C., Gary W. Cox, and Mathew D. McCubbins. “Agenda Power in the U.S. Senate, 1877 to 1986.” In Party, Process, and Political Change in Congress: New Perspectives on the History of Congress. Edited by David Brady and Mathew D. McCubbins. Palo Alto, CA: Stanford University Press, 2002.
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Examines Senate roll rates across the same period and finds similar results, though they are not as pronounced as in the House.
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Clinton, Joshua D. “Lawmaking and Roll Calls.” Journal of Politics 69.2 (2007): 457–469.
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Points out methodological problems with many tests of lawmaking theories, particularly those stemming from use of roll-call-vote data (or derivative measures) as both dependent and dependent variables. Using a test not subject to this problem, finds little evidence for either the cartel or the pivotal politics theory.
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Cox, Gary W., and Mathew D. McCubbins. Setting the Agenda: Responsible Party Government in the U.S. House of Representatives. New York: Cambridge University Press, 2005.
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Examines House roll rates from Reconstruction onward and finds that they are always near zero for the majority party, but higher for the minority party—giving rise to the assertions that the majority party’s negative agenda control is unconditional.
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Gailmard, Sean, and Jeffery A. Jenkins. “Negative Agenda Control in the Senate and House: Fingerprints of Majority Party Power.” Journal of Politics 69.3 (2007): 689–700.
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Analyzes House and Senate roll rates using a broader sample of legislation than previous studies, and finds strong evidence of majority negative agenda control in each chamber, with very similar patterns across the chambers.
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Krehbiel, Keith. Pivotal Politics: A Theory of U.S. Lawmaking. Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1998.
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Includes analyses of various data, including the sizes of winning coalitions on roll call votes and cloture voting, to support the theory.
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Krehbiel, Keith. “Partisan Roll Rates in a Nonpartisan Legislature.” Journal of Law, Economics, and Organization 23.1 (2007): 1–23.
DOI: 10.1093/jleo/ewm001Save Citation »Export Citation »E-mail Citation »
Critiques the use of roll rates as a measure of majority party agenda control and offers an alternative explanation in which nonpartisan behavior can produce the same roll rates that are taken as evidence of party agenda setting.
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Lawrence, Eric D., Forrest Maltzman, and Steven S. Smith. “Who Wins? Party Effects in Legislative Voting.” Legislative Studies Quarterly 31.1 (2006): 33–69.
DOI: 10.3162/036298006X201724Save Citation »Export Citation »E-mail Citation »
Examines individual win rates in the House and finds evidence of majority party agenda setting.
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