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Distributive theory is perhaps the dominant paradigm for understanding committee organization and behavior in Congress. Central to distributive theory is the assertion that members will self-select to committees based on constituency related concerns; however, few studies have tested this assumption and those that have focus primarily on the behavior of House Democrats. We use committee request data from both Democratic and Republican members, combined with district-level census data, to determine whether committee requests are empirically related to district-level characteristics. Our findings suggest mixed support for the self-selection hypothesis. While there is some support for the self-selection hypothesis, members' requests for committee assignments often are not related to district-level characteristics. In addition, we examine the degree to which the party committees-on-committees accommodate requests, finding that the degree of accommodation has been overestimated by previous studies.
The distributive model of congressional committees is based on a set of four assertions: (1) members of Congress seek membership on committees that will best serve their constituency and reelection oriented goals; (2) congressional parties seek to accommodate member requests above all else; (3) committees, in turn, are composed of members with extreme preferences on policy issues under the committees jurisdiction; and (4) public policy is skewed in favor of the extreme positions of committee members, often resulting in an oversupply of benefits (spending) for the districts of committee members caused by institutionalized logrolling across committees.1 The empirical literature on Congress has primarily concentrated on evaluating the latter two assertions; there are many published works exploring the preference outlier and benefits hypotheses.2 However, only a handful of scholars have empirically examined the first two assertions, which comprise the self-selection element of the theory and serve as the theoretical foundation of distributive theory. These studies have been limited to Democrats and, in the best case, examined behavior over eleven Congresses.3 In this study we use new data composed of committee preferences from more than 2,100 Democratic and Republican members of Congress to evaluate the self-selection assumptions of distributive theory.
Our results indicate less support for the self-selection hypothesis among members of either party than previous studies. Furthermore, we identify differences in behavior between members of the two parties. We then consider our findings in the context of previous studies of the...