Reliable Source or Ususal Suspects? Cue-taking, Information Transmission, and Legislative Committees

This paper critiques the expectation that informative legislative committees, those that provide policy-relevant information to their parent body, will be "microcosms of their parent chamber" (Krehbiel 1991, 95), with the median committee ideal point close to the floor median and remaining ideal points distributed about the committee median. Drawing on the concept of cue-taking (Matthews and Stimson 1975), I show that a similarity of medians is not necessary for a committee to inform its parent body; a nonmedian committee can easily perform this function if the right mix of legislators is appointed. However, heterogeneity is found to be a critical factor in facilitating a committee's informational role Accordingly, comparisons of committee and floor medians designed to identify informative committees may lead scholars to incorrect conclusions. The final section of the paper uses this intuition to reevaluate Krehbiel's (1990) and Hall and Grofman's (1990) analysis of committees in the 99th Congress.