Uncertainty and the Prevalence of Committee Outliers

In: Legislative studies quarterly, Volume 33, Issue 2, p. 323-347

Abstract

Political scientists often suppose that the informational model of legislative organization predicts an absence of committee outliers. In fact, the model predicts that committee outliers will be more common when the floor is more uncertain than its committees. Data limitations have largely prevented testing this uncertainty‐outlier prediction, until now. For this article, I investigated whether or not the informational model correctly predicts under what scenarios outliers will be more frequent. As predicted, more uncertainty is associated with more committee outliers in U.S. state legislatures. Legislatures in which the floor is less informed than the committees are more likely to have committee outliers.