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Modeling Committee Chair Selection in the U.S. House of Representatives

Published online by Cambridge University Press:  12 February 2008

Damon M. Cann
Damon M. Cann*
Affiliation:
Department of Political Science, University of Georgia, 104 Baldwin Hall, Athens, GA 30602-1615, e-mail: [email protected]
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Abstract

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.

Type
Research Article
Information
Political Analysis , Volume 16 , Issue 3 , Summer 2008 , pp. 274 - 289
Copyright
Copyright © The Author 2008. Published by Oxford University Press on behalf of the Society for Political Methodology 

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