Rules for War: Procedural Choice in the Us House of Representatives by Bryan W. Marshall

Author:Bryan W. Marshall [Marshall, Bryan W.]
Language: eng
Format: epub
Tags: International Relations, Political Science, General
ISBN: 9781351149709
Google: nqSbDwAAQBAJ
Goodreads: 9066609
Publisher: Routledge
Published: 2005-08-29T00:00:00+00:00

Distributive Theory

According to the distributive rationale, the organization of Congress reflects the membership’s desire for reelection (Mayhew 1974). Institutions are used by the legislature to facilitate cooperation so that individual reelection-related gains-from-trade can be realized (Weingast and Marshall 1988). The committee system provides the membership with an exchange mechanism so that individual legislators can trade influence. Legislative trading is possible because the influence a member gives up in policy areas of low interest does not exceed the gains in influence a member receives from those policy areas of high interest. In this fashion, a coalition of minorities (a willing majority) through cooperation and institutional mechanisms are able to fashion support for policies that serve the particularistic interests of a small number of members (Aldrich and Rohde 1997-1998).

From this perspective, special rules may be used to protect legislative agreements that allocate specific constituent-related benefits through the committee system. In the gains-from-trade context, restrictive rules tend to be used on distributive policies that concentrate benefits to committee members and allocate the costs to the rest of the chamber membership (Weingast and Marshall 1988; Baron and Ferejohn 1989). Baron (1991) argues that some distributive policies will be granted open rules to eliminate the most inefficient policies.

The predictions for rule choice made by the distributive framework are somewhat less precise than the previous informational argument. However, most distributive arguments assert that (see Shepsle and Weingast 1995; Krehbiel 1991; Baron and Ferejohn 1989): (1) policies that concentrate benefits on a limited number of congressional districts and spread the costs to the rest of the membership should be increasing in the likelihood of receiving restrictive rules.

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