 Electoral and Financial Effects of Changes in Committee Power: The Gramm-Rudman-Hollings Budget Reform, the Tax Reform Act of 1986, and the Money Committees in the HouseJournal of Law and Economics, 1997, vol. 40, issue 1, 93-111 Abstract: Most rational choice theories of legislatures locate the source of committee power in the restrictive procedural rules that enforce committee jurisdictions. However there is no empirical support for this claim; further, there is little evidence for the natural implication that membership on more powerful committees confers electoral benefits. I address these puzzles by exploiting the occurrence of major budget and tax reforms in the mid-eighties; these reforms provide a natural experiment for measuring the electoral and financial consequences of changes in committee power. The author shows that the procedural rule changes, instituted by the Gramnm-Rudman-Hollings budget reform, caused an increase in campaign contributions to members of the Budget Committee and led to a reduction in the vote share of members of the Appropriations Committee. This heretofore unrecognized effect, of the Gramm-Rudman-Hollings budget reform on the welfare of members of the House, rivals that of a more widely recognized "policy shock," the Tax Reform Act of 1986. Copyright 1997 by the University of Chicago. Date: 1997 Downloads: (external link) Related works: Export reference: BibTeX RIS (EndNote, ProCite, RefMan) HTML/Text Persistent link: https://EconPapers.repec.org/RePEc:ucp:jlawec:v:40:y:1997:i:1:p:93-111 Access Statistics for this article More articles in Journal of Law and Economics from University of Chicago Press |
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