Bipartisanship and Bicameralism: A New Inside View of Congressional Committees Pamela Ban∗ Harvard University October 2017 Abstract Polarization in Congress has reached record highs in recent times, leading to concerns about gridlock and partisan outcomes. I show that even in a polarized environment, committees achieve consensus in the face of partisan conflict and can act as a cue for bipartisanship. Using a new text dataset of House committee hearings and committee reports from 2003-2014, I propose and construct bill-level measures of committee-stage disagreement between Republican and Democratic committee members. Results show that regardless of the level of committee-stage disagreement between the two parties, minority committee members still vote against their party on the floor, in their commit- tee's jurisdiction, to achieve high levels of bipartisanship among committee members. A difference-in-differences design suggests that this behavior comes from the sorting mechanism in the committee assignment process; these members were inclined to vote against their party at the same rate in the committee's jurisdiction even when they are not on committee. ∗Ph.D. Candidate, Political Economy and Government.
[email protected]. 1 Introduction Congressional committees are central legislative units of Congress. Scholars have noted the congressional committee's strategic policy-making position, viewing committees as gatekeep- ers of their jurisdictions, policy experts, and agenda controllers in their policy area (Shepsle and Weingast, 1987; Smith and Deering, 1984; Fenno, 1973; Weingast and Marshall, 1988; Cox and McCubbins, 1993). Given the importance of congressional committees to Congress, understanding the dynamics of committees is crucial to understanding congressional politics.