Obstruction and Representativeness in Legislatures

Obstruction of the legislative process is often abhorred, but few attempts have been made to specify either the conditions under which it occurs or the precise nature and degree of its putative evil. The author presents necessary conditions for rational obstruction by standing committees, simulates congressional situations to estimate the representativeness of obstructed outcomes relative to outcomes that would have occurred without obstruction, states and proves general conditions for representative obstruction, and discusses the findings and results in light of more realistic congressional settings. Obstruction is a frequently criticized fact of congressional life, but usually the Senate's rule for extended debate is the target of criticism and the focus of scholarly works on obstructive behavior.' While studies of Senate filibusters are numerous, the frequency of filibusters pales in comparison to the thousands of bills that die less conspicuously in committees. Oleszek's (1984, p. 74) figures show that in sessions from 1965 to 1983 an average of 87 percent of the bills referred to committees never got out of committee. Granted, many of the bills never were intended to get out of committee, while others, perhaps, deserved to die. Nevertheless, of all the bottlenecks in the legislative process, committees are the most significant. How bad are committees' calculated acts of obstruction? This paper attempts to answer the question with several departures from previous studies of congressional rules and strategies. First, the focus is on the House rather than on the Senate, and specifically on obstruction by standing committees. Second, the study is primarily theoretical rather than empirical, and thus attempts to abstract from Congress only those elements of two-stage decision making needed to expose the necessary and sufficient conditions for rational obstruction. Third, legislative outcomes are assessed normatively in terms of representativeness, which is given a precise definition in the context of the theory. Finally, analytic and simulation techniques are employed to demonstrate the possibility of representative obstruction, to estimate its frequency, and to specify the exact conditions