IDEAS home Printed from https://ideas.repec.org/a/oup/qjecon/v94y1980i2p261-277..html
   My bibliography  Save this article

A Theory of Legislative Organization: Making the Most of Your Majority

Author

Listed:
  • Arleen Leibowitz
  • Robert Tollison

Abstract

In this paper we seek to explain why legislative committees exist and what is the optimal number and size of committees in a legislature. Our theory is based on the idea that committees are a "sample" taken from the full house and on the assumption that the majority party seeks to maximize the proportion of its favored bills which are reviewed and passed in voting trials. We show that for a given size of majority fewer and larger committees lead to larger passage rates, if majority members do not always vote the party-line.

Suggested Citation

  • Arleen Leibowitz & Robert Tollison, 1980. "A Theory of Legislative Organization: Making the Most of Your Majority," The Quarterly Journal of Economics, President and Fellows of Harvard College, vol. 94(2), pages 261-277.
    • Handle: RePEc:oup:qjecon:v:94:y:1980:i:2:p:261-277.
    as

    Download full text from publisher

    File URL: http://hdl.handle.net/10.2307/1884540
    Download Restriction: Access to full text is restricted to subscribers.
    ---><---

    As the access to this document is restricted, you may want to search for a different version of it.

    Citations

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


    Cited by:

    1. Joseph McGarrity, 2005. "Macroeconomic conditions and committee re-election rates," Public Choice, Springer, vol. 124(3), pages 453-480, September.
    2. Bruce L. Benson, 1983. "“High Demand†Legislative Committees and Bureaucratic Output," Public Finance Review, , vol. 11(3), pages 259-281, July.
    3. David Laband & Richard Seals & Eric Wilbrandt, 2015. "On the importance of inequality in politics: duplicate bills and bill co-sponsorship in the US House of Representatives," Economics of Governance, Springer, vol. 16(4), pages 353-378, November.
    4. Russell Sobel & Matt Ryan, 2012. "Seniority and anti-competitive restrictions on the legislative common pool: tenure’s impact on the overall production of legislation and the concentration of political benefits," Public Choice, Springer, vol. 153(1), pages 171-190, October.

    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:qjecon:v:94:y:1980:i:2:p:261-277.. 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/qje .

    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.