Committee Power, Leadership, and the Median Voter: Evidence from the Smoking Ban

In an intricate sequence of legislative decisions rich with implications for theories of collective choice, the U. S. House of Representatives in 1987 initiated a smoking ban on all domestic airline flights. Two previous studies—by LaRue and Rothenberg in 1992 and Shipan in 1995—analyzed and interpreted the case as supportive of institutional or committee-power theories. This study reanalyzes the case to assess specific instances of committee-power, leadership, and median-voter theories Overall, the findings undermine LaRue and Rothenberg‘s support for gatekeeping-based committee power; they replicate and extend Shipan’s refutation of the hypothesis that majority-party leaders are enforcers of pro-committee institutional arrangements; and they corroborate a variation of median-voter theory. The bulk of evidence is consistent with an unconventionally nonpartisan claim: that the House (analytically, its median voter) chooses and uses procedural arrangements such as its Rules Committee to limit the effective exercise of committee and leadership powers.