18
in that committees will be dominated by members of the majority party. Theory developed by
Cox (2001) and Cox and McCubbins (2002) argues that majority party contingents on committee
should act as “agents” for the interests of the underlying majority in the House. As a result,
committee rolls should be quite infrequent, as the time, effort, and recommendation of the
committee will be honored on the floor. Their results on contemporary bill referral data confirm
these expectations.
In the 601 contested election cases across time, fifty committee rolls have occurred.
Excluding the 43 cases involving territorial delegates and two cases involving seceded states in
the 38th Congress where partisan identification of the claimants is difficult to determine, the
relevant committee (Elections or House Administration) has been rolled on 39 occasions, or 7
percent of the time. The relevant information for these cases is reported in Table 3.
In fact, as
shown, the committee’s recommendation was inconsistent with the interests of the majority party
in only 10 of 39 cases. In the other 29 cases, either a third-party claimant was involved in the
case or the House overruled the pro-majority party recommendation of the committee. Thus,
committee rolls were rarely the “fault” of the committee.
26
That is, the committee only rarely
provided “bad” advice to the floor (in the sense of recommending non-majority party outcomes).
Rather, the majority of the rolls occurred because of third-party complications or the majority
party’s own failure to support the committee’s pro-majority recommendation on the floor.
[Table 3 about here]
The Impact of Partisanship
After all is said and done, what has been the impact of partisanship on contested House
elections? While various forms of evidence can be marshaled to argue that partisanship has
26
Interestingly, a unanimous committee recommendation has been rolled on four occasions. In only one of those
cases was the committee recommendation inconsistent with the interests of the majority party.
Convention