Legislative Organization and Political Representation

The emergence of the standing committee system is arguably the most important organizational innovation in the history of the US Congress. Previous scholarship has considered theoretical explanations for the organization of congressional committees and studied the consequences of committee membership for individual legislators. We evaluate how committee membership affects individual legislators' responsiveness to constituency preferences. Using data on issue-specific voting behavior for members of the U.S. House from 1969 to 2011, we show that committee membership reduces legislative responsiveness to constituency preferences on the issue area associated with the committee's policy domain. These results are robust across model specifications, policy areas, and subsets of observations. Our findings provide new evidence about how committee membership affects legislative voting behavior and illustrate how institutional arrangements affect political representation.