Abstract
We examine the factors that are associated with whether a bill passes the committee stage in the U.S. House of Representatives. Probit results for the 97th and 98th Congresses show that a bill is more likely to pass (1) if the sponsor chairs the committee that considers the bill or a subcommittee of that committee; (2) the higher the number of Democratic cosponsors who sit on the committee; (3) if the bill has bipartisan cosponsorship from members who sit on the committee that considers the bill. However, in the multivariate probit model including the above mentioned variables, other variables previously found to be important, e.g., the total number of cosponsors, whether or not the sponsor sits on the committee that considers the bill, and the party affiliation of the sponsor, are not statistically significant. Also a variable related to a public choice model of committee behavior, the difference between the sponsor's ideology (as measured by ADA score) and the ideology of the committee's median member, has no effect on a bill's probability of committee passage.
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We are grateful to Linda Cohen, Tyler Cowen, Amihai Glazer, and Rick Hall for helpful comments. We are indebted to the Word Processing Center, School of Social Sciences, University of California, Irvine for manuscript typing. Any errors are our responsibility.
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Thomas, S.J., Grofman, B. Determinants of legislative success in House committees. Public Choice 74, 233–243 (1992). https://doi.org/10.1007/BF00140770
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DOI: https://doi.org/10.1007/BF00140770