Political Analysis Advance Access published online on February 12, 2008
Political Analysis, doi:10.1093/pan/mpm036
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Modeling Committee Chair Selection in the U.S. House of Representatives
Department of Political Science, University of Georgia, 104 Baldwin Hall, Athens, GA 30602-1615
e-mail: dcann{at}uga.edu
For many years, committee chairs have been selected on the basis of seniority. Recent work has suggested that alternative factors, specifically financial support of party goals and party unity, have diminished the importance of seniority in committee chair selection. However, previous work has either failed to quantify these effects or has done so with inappropriate methods. This paper argues for the use of a Bayesian conditional logit estimator to correctly model committee chair selection in the U.S. House of Representatives. Results show a declining commitment to seniority throughout the Republican era and support the importance of fundraising as a determinant of committee chair selection. This paper shows that two other factors, financial support of party goals and party unity, have essentially replaced seniority as the central criteria for selecting committee chairs.
Author's note: The author thanks John Aldrich, Scott Basinger, Jamie Carson, Stanley Feldman, Eric Heberlig, Brad Jones, Bruce Larson, Helmut Norpoth, David Rohde, Shawn Treier, and Jeff Yates for helpful comments. All errors, of course, are the responsibility of the author.