of the Russian State Duma in its first three post-communist convocations (the Fifth,
Sixth, and Seventh Dumas) between 1994 and 2003.
The empirical results of this
analysis, however, present a more complex picture. While I find consistent evidence that
nominal-tier legislators were serving on the budget committee at a higher rate than were
list-tier legislators, I find only inconsistent evidence that nominal-tier legislators were
committee preference outliers. Instead, I find of nominal-tier preference outliers and a
mandate divide based on preference differences primarily in the Sixth Duma, between
1996 and 1999, but not the Fifth or Seventh Dumas.
What explains the presence of committee outliers in the Sixth Duma but not the
Fifth or Seventh Dumas? I argue that the Sixth Duma differed from the others in two
critical respects: the percentage of nominal-tier legislators on the budget committee and
the average level of party cohesion. In comparison with the other convocations of the
Duma, the Sixth Duma featured both a higher percentage of nominal-tier legislators on
the budget committee and lower levels of parliamentary party cohesion. Thus, not only
did the Sixth Duma budget committee have a higher percentage of legislators with an
incentive to cast personal votes, but also the Sixth Duma featured more heterogeneous
parliamentary parties. This clearly suggests that the existence of a mandate divide and
committee outliers in a mixed system will not simply be a function of electoral-system
incentives, but also the ratio of nominal- to list-tier legislators and the cohesiveness of
parties.
The article will proceed as follows. First, I will discuss the existing literature on
mixed-member systems and the logic of the mandate divide hypothesis. Second, I will
present the contending theories of legislative committees and derive a set of hypotheses
3
Convention