The Value of Legislative Design: A Comparative Analysis of State Legislative Institution

My dissertation is comprised of three essays investigating the economic and representative implications of institutional variation in legislatures using time and space varying data as well as experimental methods. The first essay argues that there is substantial variationin informational resource centrality. My theory predicts that intra-partisan voting discipline is more difficult to enforce when members have access to individual informational resources. The empirical implication, which is supported by the data, is that there will be higher levels of party cohesion when party leadership dominates informational resources. My results provide a new understanding of the role of informational resources in legislative behavior and how the parties use information to control members. My second essay considers the contextual variation in state economic productivity and derives testable hypotheses regarding committee membership. I find that majorities tend to dominate committees that receive high-value political contributions and have jurisdiction over policy areas with decreasing economic stability while minority members are overrepresented on committees which receive lower contributions and that have jurisdiction of policy areas with increasing economic stability. Additionally, these differences are conditioned in some cases by formal committee assignment procedures. These findings have implications associated with how the majority party gains power in the legislature outside of traditional procedural and agenda control powers. Finally, my third essay argues that committee request procedures can mitigate and exacerbate gender bias in committee assignments. I predict that gender bias will manifest and women will be more frequently assigned to committees handling stereotypically feminine jurisdictions absent an open request procedure. I use a scientific approach to finding the gender stereotypes associated with policy areas. Using the results of this analysis, I find experimental support for my prediction that committee request procedures mitigates gender bias. These findings have implications for understanding of how the design of institutions allow for bias against minority groups which can impact subsequent policy outcomes and representation