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multiparty governments need strong committees within the legislature to keep an eye on the
executive, to prevent individual cabinet ministers drifting from negotiated coalition policy in a
way that single party governments need not be concerned with. Further, I hypothesize that the
prospect of a strong committee system emerging in a legislature is systematically affected by
the incentive structures facing individual members of the legislature. Specifically, I argue that
in parliamentary systems, electoral systems which encourage and require incumbents to be
responsive to the particularistic needs of constituents are likely to inhibit the development of
strong committees within the legislature.
These perspectives differs fundamentally from existing approaches to understanding
when and under what conditions strong committees will emerge within the legislature.
Although much is known about the committee structures of some legislatures, and the relative
significance of committees is often well-understood locally, their exists a dearth of knowledge
about the degree and cause of variance in committee structure across different legislatures. In
parliamentary systems, comparative work on committee structures is largely, if not
exclusively, descriptive in nature and ambition. The lack of theory building stems, in large
part, from the lack of comparable data on national committee systems. I address this issue by
collecting new data on committee structures in multiple settings. As such this paper represents
one of the first attempts to investigate at both a theoretical and empirical level the cross-
national variation in committee systems.
A notable exception to the atheoretical work on committees in non-presidential
regimes is Strøm’s (1990) employment of committee strength as an explanatory variable in
his study of minority government formation.
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Committees are, in essence, one of the points of
departure on his journey to explain the formation of minority governments. Strøm does not
attempt to explain why certain legislatures are endowed with strong committee systems while
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