Electoral institutions, the personal vote and legislative organization", Legislative Studies Quarterly

What is the relationship between electoral institutions and the internal organiza-tion of legislatures? Existing research on the U.S. Congress suggests that electoral incentives shaped by the candidate-centered nature of congressional elections explain the emergence of strong committees in that legislature. Exploring the issue from a compara-tive perspective, it is argued that the impact of ballot structure on committee system structure is dependent on how legislators cultivate personal votes. Committees will be stronger when legislators supply fiscal legislative particularism (pork), but weaker when legislators cultivate support by delivering extra-legislative constituency service. Statisti-cal analysis, combining original data on committee design in 39 democratic legislatures with measures of ballot structure and mechanism to cultivate a personal vote (MCPV), confirms the expectation. Scholars of legislative politics have long recognized the potential for electoral rules to impact not just the behavior of individual legislators but the design of legislative structures. One of the principal theories of American politics suggests that incentives for incumbents to cultivate personal votes explain the emergence of strong standing committees as the most significant organizational feature of the modern Congress (Katz and Sala 1996; Shepsle and Weingast 1987).1 Members of Congress, faced with the need to cultivate personal votes, create strong standing committees to decentralize power, allowing them to deliver electorally rewarding, geographically targeted, particularistic spending. The wider implication of this distributive theory of congressional organization is that candidate-centered electoral systems should result in legislatures with strong committees. While the candidate-centered electoral system is said to produce strong committees in Congress, other personal vote electoral environments exist alongside legislatures with weak committee systems. This observation calls into question the degree to which a causa