Committee Hierarchy and Assignments in the U.S. Congress: Testing Theories of Legislative Organization, 1789-1946

drawn from Canon and Stewart (2002). This paper examines the evolution of committee hierarchies in the U.S. House and Senate and attempts to explain variation in the quality of member’s committee assignments within a given Congress and over time. Understanding these topics is important for many reasons. Recent congressional scholarship has emphasized the agenda-setting power of committees in legislative action. Understanding how committees were composed, assuming they were not constructed randomly, is the first step in beginning to understand how the formal institutions of the House and Senate may have influenced policy making throughout its history. For example, although the Senate is known for its informal rules of procedure, we also know that heat was periodically generated in senatorial politics in the nineteenth century over the institutional design of the Senate. Weingast (1998) has argued, for instance, that the “balance rule ” was designed to institutionalize a deal between northern and southern interests over the handling of slavery. If so, was that deal continued at the committee level? Did the shift from balloting on the floor to party lists as the means for determining committee assignments in the Senate have any impact on the determinants of committee portfolios? What impact did the change from making assignment