IDEAS home Printed from https://ideas.repec.org/a/oup/jleorg/v13y1997i2p366-86.html
   My bibliography  Save this article

Specialization Decisions within Committee

Author

Listed:
  • Gilligan, Thomas W
  • Krehbiel, Keith

Abstract

This study inspects specialization in legislatures by moving from a relatively macro level of analysis of committee-floor interaction to a relatively microlevel study of individual decision making within committee. This approach also addresses a common shortcoming in studies of specialization within committees: imperfect measurement. Signaling-theoretic reasoning provides a foundation for analysis of individual legislators' specialization decisions. Two testable conjectures are stated. One relates costs of specialization to the decision to specialization in an obvious fashion, and the other relates preference extremity to specialization in a manner that sharply contrasts a claim in recent literature on legislative participation. The empirical analysis centers on the House Energy and Commerce Committee and provides support for the conjectures, first in an indirect but conventional manner (probit estimates on cosponsorship) and then in a more direct and unique manner that addresses the obstacle of imperfect measurement of specialization. Copyright 1997 by Oxford University Press.

Suggested Citation

  • Gilligan, Thomas W & Krehbiel, Keith, 1997. "Specialization Decisions within Committee," The Journal of Law, Economics, and Organization, Oxford University Press, vol. 13(2), pages 366-386, October.
    • Handle: RePEc:oup:jleorg:v:13:y:1997:i:2:p:366-86
    as

    Download full text from publisher

    To our knowledge, this item is not available for download. To find whether it is available, there are three options:
    1. Check below whether another version of this item is available online.
    2. Check on the provider's web page whether it is in fact available.
    3. Perform a search for a similarly titled item that would be available.

    Citations

    Citations are extracted by the CitEc Project, subscribe to its RSS feed for this item.
    as


    Cited by:

    1. Maja Kluger Rasmussen, 2015. "The Battle for Influence: The Politics of Business Lobbying in the European Parliament," Journal of Common Market Studies, Wiley Blackwell, vol. 53(2), pages 365-382, March.
    2. Luke M. Froeb & Bernhard Ganglmair & Steven Tschantz, 2016. "Adversarial Decision Making: Choosing between Models Constructed by Interested Parties," Journal of Law and Economics, University of Chicago Press, vol. 59(3), pages 527-548.
    3. Robert A.J. Dur & Otto H. Swank, 2001. "Producing and Manipulating Information: Private Information Providers versus Public Information Providers," Tinbergen Institute Discussion Papers 01-052/1, Tinbergen Institute.
    4. Otto H. Swank & Bauke Visser, 2002. "Delegation or Voting," Tinbergen Institute Discussion Papers 02-005/1, Tinbergen Institute.
    5. Klaas J. Beniers & Otto H. Swank, 2003. "On the Composition of Committees," Tinbergen Institute Discussion Papers 03-006/1, Tinbergen Institute.
    6. Robert Dur & Otto H. Swank, 2005. "Producing and Manipulating Information," Economic Journal, Royal Economic Society, vol. 115(500), pages 185-199, January.
    7. Krehbiel, Keith, 2001. "Plausibility of Signals by a Heterogeneous Committee," Research Papers 1678, Stanford University, Graduate School of Business.
    8. Valeria Palanza & Carlos Scartascini & Mariano Tommasi, 2012. "On the Institutionalization of Congress(es) in Latin America and Beyond," Research Department Publications 4817, Inter-American Development Bank, Research Department.
    9. Jaehoon Kim & Lawrence S. Rothenberg, 2008. "Foundations of Legislative Organization and Committee Influence," Journal of Theoretical Politics, , vol. 20(3), pages 339-374, July.

    More about this item

    Statistics

    Access and download statistics

    Corrections

    All material on this site has been provided by the respective publishers and authors. You can help correct errors and omissions. When requesting a correction, please mention this item's handle: RePEc:oup:jleorg:v:13:y:1997:i:2:p:366-86. See general information about how to correct material in RePEc.

    If you have authored this item and are not yet registered with RePEc, we encourage you to do it here. This allows to link your profile to this item. It also allows you to accept potential citations to this item that we are uncertain about.

    We have no bibliographic references for this item. You can help adding them by using this form .

    If you know of missing items citing this one, you can help us creating those links by adding the relevant references in the same way as above, for each refering item. If you are a registered author of this item, you may also want to check the "citations" tab in your RePEc Author Service profile, as there may be some citations waiting for confirmation.

    For technical questions regarding this item, or to correct its authors, title, abstract, bibliographic or download information, contact: Oxford University Press (email available below). General contact details of provider: https://academic.oup.com/jleo .

    Please note that corrections may take a couple of weeks to filter through the various RePEc services.

    IDEAS is a RePEc service. RePEc uses bibliographic data supplied by the respective publishers.