us is that variation in committee outliers and the mandate divide were affected by party
cohesion.
Conclusion
The continued assessment of the effects of mixed-member systems has generated
a growing literature on their legislative behavior effects. Building on the intuitive
hypothesis that the difference in electoral incentives between the two different mandates
created by the nominal- and list-tiers should create divergent legislative behavior,
scholars has undertaken a number of studies in the search for the mandate divide. Given
the nature of the debate in the U.S. Congress on the formation and role of legislative
committees, the topic seems a natural one for those interested in understanding the
relationship between electoral mandate, party pressures, and legislative behavior.
Distributional theories of legislative committees clearly argue for the presence of a
mandate divide, thus, if the logic of the mandate divide hypotheses and distributional
theories are correct, then we should see evidence of outliers in mixed-member systems.
The empirical results from this study indicate, however, that the presence of the
mandate divide and committee outliers is a contingent one. In the Duma, the presence of
outliers on the budget committee was impacted by two factors—the percentage of single-
member district deputies on the committee and the level of party cohesion. The Sixth
Duma, where the level of single-member district deputies was high and the level of party
cohesion was low, was the only convocation of the Duma that demonstrated clear,
consistent evidence of committee outliers and a mandate divide. In the Fifth and Seventh
Duma, which featured variation in the level of party cohesion and the percentage of
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Convention