Majority-party leadership and the committee system in the United States House.

다국어 초록 (Multilingual Abstract)

This dissertation asks how members of the majority party in the U.S. House of Representatives relate to each other, how they fill out coalitions, how they staff the whip system and other party organizations, and how they decide which bills to protect from challenges on the floor. It builds on the party-centered view of legislative politics, which argues that parties influence procedure and voting on issues over which they disagree. Uncertainty about members' underlying motivations affects how parties operate. I find evidence of this information problem and of the majority's efforts to lessen its effects in several phases of legislative politics.
Chapter two argues that a member can exploit others' uncertainty about his or her preferences in order to attract extra inducements from coalition builders. To facilitate coalition building, the majority party has a collective interest in reducing uncertainty about its members' preferences. A probit analysis of coalition building in the 103rd House suggests that ambiguous motivations can attract attention from coalition builders. Another probit analysis reveals that Democrats in the 103rd House selected whips and other party leaders based on their ability to inform leaders about member motivations.
Chapter three makes a methodological point relevant to many studies of legislative organization. It examines a common method of estimating preferences, W-NOMINATE, by comparing estimates with simulated preferences. Recovered ideal points do not preserve the order of actual ideal points, and these misrankings exaggerate differences between parties and confuse different kinds of simulated committees.
Chapter four examines the distribution of protective rules in the House. Probit analyses suggest that amendment protections and procedural protections (waivers) favor partisan goals, and that majority leaders learn about which bills need protection by consulting observable clues such as committee votes.
This dissertation suggests that party politics and legislative organization are explained by more than copartisans' responses to collective action problems. The majority's efforts to aggregate privately held information about member preferences are also important for understanding legislative politics. A complete picture of the mechanisms underlying House politics must take into account both standard partisan concerns and parties' informational problems as well.