We consider the effects of the initial assignments of committee seniority on the career outcomes of Democratic members of the House of Representatives from 1949 to 2006. When more than one freshman representative is assigned to a committee, positions in the seniority queue are established
by lottery. This ensures that, within these groups of freshmen, queue positions are uncorrelated with other legislator characteristics. This natural experiment allows us to estimate the causal effect of seniority on a variety
of outcomes. We find that lower ranked committee members are less likely to serve as subcommittee chairs on their initial committee, are more likely to transfer to other committees than members who receive higher ranks, and have fewer sponsored bills passed in the jurisdiction of their initial committee. On the other hand, we find little evidence that the results of the seniority randomization have a net effect on reelection, the total length of time the members serve in the House, or the total number of sponsored bills passed during their tenure.
This paper develops a theory of optimal institutional structure for staggered-term
(OLG-type) organizations such as legislative bodies like the US Senate and the Indian Rajya Sabha.
Our model is a simple stochastic game of a particular kind of multi-principal, multi-agent dynamic
relationship. It captures interactions in each of an infinite number of periods on the one hand,
amongst two or more legislators (legislative policy-making), and on the other hand between each
legislator and his principal/voters (elections). Two key institutional features of these interactions
are jointly determined by the principals (from the distinct electoral districts) when the legislature
is founded, at the constitutional moment. We emphasize two main results. First, the principals
will agree to institute a mechanism that endows (imperfectly informed) legislators in each period
with all the required information about the history of play in the legislature. Transparency of agentactions
to agents (in order to enable agents to hold each other to account) is a key and robust feature of
the principal-optimal institutional structure. Second, under some circumstances, the principals will
be indifferent to the structure of legislative procedures (which determine the allocation of agenda
power amongst the agents). We apply our results to the US Senate.
Models of nomination politics in the US often
find "gridlock" in equilibrium because of the super-majority
requirement in the Senate for the confo
rmation of presidential nominees. A blocking coalition often prefers
to defeat any nominee. Yet empirically nominations are successful. In the present paper we explore the
possibility that senators can be induced to vote contrary to their nominal (gridlock-producing) preferences
through contributions from the president and/or lobbyists, thus breaking the gridlock and con
forming the
nominee. We model contributions by the president and lobbyists according to whether payment schedules
are conditioned on the entire voting pro
file, the vote of a senator, or the outcome. We analyze several
extensions to our baseline approach, including the possibility that lobbyists may
find it more productive
to offer inducements to the president in order to affect his proposal behavior, rather than trying to induce
senators to vote for or against a given nominee.
We consider the consequences of the Senate electoral cycle and bicameralism for distributive
politics, introducing the concept of contested credit claiming, i.e. that members of a states
House and Senate delegations must share the credit for appropriations that originate in
their chamber with delegation members in the other chamber. Using data that isolates
appropriations of each chamber, we test a model of the strategic incentives contested credit
claiming creates. Our empirical analysis indicates that the Senate electoral cycle induces
a back-loading of benefi
ts to the end of senatorial terms, but that the House blunts this
tendency with countercyclical appropriations. Our analysis informs our understanding of
appropriations earmarking, and points a way forward in studying the larger consequences of
bicameral legislatures.