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use hearings to highlight issues for the purpose of building momentum behind them to
pressure the floor, to shape the debate around issues the floor may take-up anyway, or to
claim new issue jurisdiction. To achieve any of these goals the outlier committee desires
to show unity among interest groups, and the sectors of society they represent, to
demonstrate to non-committee legislators the importance of the issue and the committee’s
position on it. Therefore they will expect that interest groups asked to testify will support
the committee agenda and suppress divisions resulting from differing member positions.
The second assumption is that lobbyists desire to testify. As Schlozman and
Tierney (1986) argue, testifying is a low-cost, high visibility form of advocacy. Given
that competition exists among interests in that there are differences in the policy goals
they seek to achieve, the incentive to testify can induce a modification in the group’s
stated position. But this modification takes place within limits imposed by the members
of the organization to whom the lobbyist is accountable. The greater the importance of
the issue to members, and the more unified they are in their preferred positions, the less
flexibility the lobbyist has to modify the group’s official position as stated at the hearing
to please the committee.
The third assumption is that legislators and lobbyists alike know which
committees are ideological outliers and which are not. In the language of game theory,
the committee’s “type” is common knowledge. In practical terms, this means that when
asked to testify, or when soliciting an invitation, lobbyists know whether or not their
member preferred positions must be modified to please at outlier committee (unless the
positions are already the same). But whether the members of any given interest group
collectively support a position similar to the committee median is not known with
Convention