Capturing the Rules Committee: The Rules Committee enlargement decision in 1961.

The purpose of this dissertation is twofold. The first purpose is explaining the incidence of the Rules Committee capturing (the enlargement of the Rules Committee) in the 87th House. The second purpose is providing an in-depth analysis of the enlargement decision from partisan theory. I developed a formal model to test the incidence of capturing. The focus of the formal model was on finding out the equilibrium strategies of the majority party depending on the zones of the Rules Committee, which are endogenously determined. The majority party's incentive to capture the Rules Committee is largely determined by the zones of the Rules Committee. According to the formal model, the necessary condition for the majority party to capture is that it can increase its policy utility by capturing. In other words, only when the majority party has an incentive to capture the Rules Committee in terms of policy benefit, does capturing take place. In the empirical part, I analyzed five Houses, the 84th through 88th Houses, across three Kennedy committees. The spatial analysis found that only in the 86th and 87th Houses did the majority party have an incentive to capture the Rules Committee and that capturing only took place in the 87th House, because the Democratic majority party, with Democratic President John Kennedy, did not have to worry about the presidential vetoes. This dissertation utilized multiple methods. Formal modeling was useful in deriving hypotheses and making predictions; archival research was invaluable in reading the motives of important actors during the Rules Committee fight; probit analysis of the enlargement vote was useful in testing partisan theory and distributive theory. In summary, the Rules Committee enlargement in the 87th House in 1961 was executed to legislate the Kennedy programs involving the expansion of the federal government in addressing social problems. In order to legislative liberal Kennedy programs, it was necessary for the Democratic majority party to capture the Rules Committee. And capturing took place in the 87th House when the Democratic party had a substantive incentive to capture and when the presidency was occupied by John Kennedy.PhDAmerican historyPolitical scienceSocial SciencesUniversity of Michigan, Horace H. Rackham School of Graduate Studieshttp://deepblue.lib.umich.edu/bitstream/2027.42/130590/2/9732187.pd