James Coleman Battista

Conditional Party Government in the States

We extend theories of congressional parties and committees to the state legislative setting, using the variation among legislatures to explore the links between elections and parties and between parties and committees. We examine elections by comparing the electoral concentration of parties to measures of conditional party government. We examine informational and partisan theories of com? mittees by looking to the relationship between committee representativeness and conditional party govern? ment. With data from eleven states, we find that competitive party sys? tems breed highly polarized legisla? tive parties, and these two traits lead to representative committees.

Jurisdiction, Institutional Structure, and Committee Representativeness

I model the ideological representativeness of state legislative committees and their majority-party slates, testing hypotheses derived from extant models of committees and institutional choice. Committee representativeness and the representativeness of majority-party slates vary across states as a function of their effective number of parties and professionalization, but the jurisdiction of a committee has little discernible effect on representativeness of either. A possible mechanism is that competitive parties create committees that more closely adhere to the party ratio of the chamber, eliminating many possible outlying committees.

Re-examining Legislative Committee Representativeness in the States.

I re-examine theories of legislative committee organization by using simulation to assess how representative state legislative committees are of their parent bodies. I find that clearly unrepresentative committees are rare and concentrated in a few chambers. I also find that comparing committee and chamber medians leads to very different conclusions about representativeness than does comparing means. My findings tend to confirm the informational model of committees and disconfirm the partisan model, but they cannot directly address the distributive model.

Common-Space Ideal Points, Committee Assignments, and Financial Interests in the State Legislatures:

We present a new unified dataset of common-space ideal points, committee assignments, and financial interests for all state legislators in 1999. We describe the compilation of the dataset and offer a few possible applications.

Why Information? Choosing Committee Informativeness in U.S. State Legislatures

Using a new dataset drawn from American state legislatures, I modeled the informativeness of legislative committees as a choice over institutions. I found higher informativeness to be associated with better preparedness for information transfer, morepartisan chambers, and higher demand for information combined with greater incentives to control committee assignments. These associations shed light on congressional committee informativeness. A simple model of committee informativeness can predict the informativeness of the U.S. Houses committees.

Formal and Perceived Leadership Power in U.S. State Legislatures

While there is a growing literature on the factors linked to the power held by leaders in state legislatures, the complexity of leadership power as a concept makes assessing it difficult. The author demonstrates that measures of formal leadership power derived from the written rules are uncorrelated with survey measures capturing legislators’ own assessments of their leader’s strength. These differences have practical importance, with each type of measure yielding different substantive findings in models predicting leadership power.

State Legislative Committees and Economic Connections Expertise and Industry Service

American state legislators commonly remain connected to the market, giving them the potential for unique expertise on how policy affects the industries they are connected to and the opportunity to help enact laws favoring those industries. This paper describes the extent to which state legislative committees are populated by legislators with economic connections to their jurisdiction, and analyzes appointment patterns to help distinguish stacking to tap expertise from stacking to serve an industry. I find that a substantial minority of committees are stacked with connected legislators. Appointment patterns show limited evidence for expertise in education and health care, for industry service in banking, and for both in agriculture.

Committee Theories and Committee Votes: Internal Committee Behavior in the California Legislature

Previous tests of theories of legislative committee development have relied on floor behavior and votes, data which is one step removed from committee behavior itself. I test these prominent theories of committees by looking directly at legislative behavior in committee. I examine the patterns of committee votes in the 2000–01 sessions of the California Legislature to assess the distributive, informational, and partisan theories of committee development. I find some support for all three theories, leading me to conclude that committee behavior varies across time and issue.