The Committee Outlier Debate: A Review and a Reexamination of Some of the Evidence

Tim Groseclose

Public Choice, 1994, vol. 80, issue 3-4, 265-73

Abstract: An ongoing and controversial topic of congressional scholars is the question 'Are committees 'preference outliers' vis-a-vis their parent chamber?' Despite numerous research efforts showing isolated cases of outlying committees, little evidence shows a systematic tendency for committees to be representative of their legislature. A paper which comes close to being an exception is Weingast and Marshall's (1988) analysis of 'the industrial organization of Congress,' which reports evidence of many and very strongly outlying committees. However, the apparently strong evidence is due more to the authors' incorrectly executed methods than to a general tendency for committees to be outliners. In this note I review the state of the committee-outlier debate and also show that Weingast and Marshall's empirical results cannot be replicated. I accordingly provide the correct results once their statistical tests are properly executed. Copyright 1994 by Kluwer Academic Publishers

Date: 1994
References: Add references at CitEc
Citations:

There are no downloads for this item, see the EconPapers FAQ for hints about obtaining it.

Related works:
This item may be available elsewhere in EconPapers: Search for items with the same title.

Export reference: BibTeX RIS (EndNote, ProCite, RefMan) HTML/Text

Persistent link: https://EconPapers.repec.org/RePEc:kap:pubcho:v:80:y:1994:i:3-4:p:265-73

Ordering information: This journal article can be ordered from
http://www.springer. ... ce/journal/11127/PS2

Access Statistics for this article

Public Choice is currently edited by WIlliam F. Shughart II

More articles in Public Choice from Springer
Bibliographic data for series maintained by Sonal Shukla () and Springer Nature Abstracting and Indexing ().