Committee Parallelism and Bicameral Agenda Coordination

In: American politics research, Band 38, Heft 1, S. 3-32

Abstract

We examine why a significant proportion of the policy issues passed in either the U.S. House or Senate often fail to pass in the other chamber. We hypothesize that much of this failure of the House and Senate to coordinate their agendas occurs because committee jurisdictions are not parallel across chambers. To compare House and Senate agendas, we develop a comprehensive issue-level data set covering all bills introduced in the 103rd Congress. We estimate a multinomial logit model that reveals that the degree of jurisdictional parallelism across chambers is indeed one of the most important determinants of whether issues that pass in one chamber also pass in the other chamber. [Reprinted by permission of Sage Publications Inc., copyright holder.]