behavior of members of Congress (e.g., Londregan, and Snyder 1994; Shepsle 1986,
1989; Shepsle and Weingast 1981; Weingast and Marshall 1988). This insight leads to
two expectations. First, the formation of committees will be dominated by self-selection
based on reelection needs. That is to say, legislators will prefer those committees that
will best allow them to provide parochial policies to their districts to secure reelection.
Second, once on these committees, legislators will be “preference outliers,” pushing
policy away from preferences of the typical legislators towards their own preferences.
The logic of distributional theories provides us with an interesting angle with
which to explore the dynamics of mixed-member systems. If the same forces that drive
committee self-selection and preference outliers in the U.S. Congress exist in mixed-
member legislatures, then we would expect to see divergent legislative behaviors for
nominal- and list-tier legislators in these two areas. First, nominal-tier legislators will
self-select onto those committees, which best serve their reelection needs in local
elections. List-tier legislators, however, given an alternative set of incentives, which
emphasis party discipline, will not display such a tendency. Second, once on committees,
nominal-tier legislators will have an incentive to skew policy, becoming preference
outliers. List-tier legislators, conversely, do not have similar incentives to push for
parochial benefits.
The twin logics of distributional theories and the mandate divide hypothesis
suggest that even in mixed-member electoral systems, nominal-tier legislators will have
behaviors that differ from list-tier legislators due to their different electoral mandates.
Yet, is this expectation correct? To search for a mandate divide in committee behavior, I
analyzed patterns of committee selection and preference outliers on the budget committee
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Convention