Organizational decisions in the U.S. House of Representatives are important. They
determine which House members occupy positions of power and they distribute procedural rights
across these positions. They affect the balance of power in the House, which, in turn, affects
every piece of legislation that comes out of Washington.
The House’s organizational decisions are also of great interest to scholars. Among their
most fascinating aspects is that they are endogenous. The Constitution places few limitations on
House management. If enough members dislike a previous organizational decision, they can
change it. This fact raises many questions about why the House allocates power as it does.
In current scholarship, three legislative organization theories are focal. One theory, for
which the work of Shepsle and Weingast (1987) is iconic, contends that distributional concerns
drive organizational decisions. Here, House power relations are managed through a committee
system, which uses jurisdiction-bound agenda controls and the threat of ex post vetoes in
conference committees to enforce legislative bargains among House members. A second theory,
advocated by Krehbiel (1991), posits efficient information distribution as a key goal of legislative
organization. A third theory focuses on parties as organizational cartels. Scholars such as Aldrich
and Rohde (2000) and Cox and McCubbins (1994) argue that the majority party organizes the
chamber in ways that help its leadership maintain control.
These theories, and others like them, have two common attributes. First, they portray
House members as rational, strategic and acting with policy-related goals in mind. Second, they
assume that the House does not account for the Senate or the President when organizing itself.
Does it matter that leading theories of legislative organization treat the Senate and
President as irrelevant? We find that it does. Counter to the intuition provided by existing models,
changes in the partisan balance of the Senate or the identity of the President can lead to radical
changes in the House’ balance of power. Including the Senate and President in a model of
legislative organization in the House offers a new perspective on why certain members, rather
than others, wield power in the House.
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Convention