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Intrainstitutional Mobility in the Postreform House of Representatives Wawro, Gregory Uploaded 08-26-1998 Keywords legislative entrepreneurship legislative organization maximum likelihood methods mobility analysis career concerns vacancy competition Abstract Theory: When deciding whom to promote to prestigious positions within the House, members will favor those individuals who are the most likely to use the resources associated with prestigious positions to produce legislation when there is substantial demand for it. Members will select those individuals who have demonstrated a propensity for engaging in legislative entrepreneurship because they are the most qualified in this regard. Hypothesis: "The job ladders hypothesis": Members who engage in legislative entrepreneurship are more likely to move up the job ladder to prestigious positions within the committee and party hierarchies in the House. Method: I develop measures of legislative entrepreneurship using data on the characteristics of bills sponsored by members and members' testimony before committees. I develop a statistical model that addresses the problems of analyzing intrainstitutional mobility and the problems with assessing entrepreneurial ability. With this model I perform a multivariate analysis to assess the effects of legislative entrepreneurship while accounting for other variables that previous studies have found to affect intrainstitutional mobility. Results: Engaging in legislative entrepreneurship increases the probability that members of the majority party will advance to full committee, subcommittee, and party leadership positions.

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Agents and Outliers: Testing Organization with Committee Preference Expression Fortunato, David Uploaded 06-22-2009 Keywords ideal point estimation legislative organization theories of law making Abstract This paper offers a test of the three dominant schools of thought on the organization of the U.S. House of Representatives by revisiting the old question, Are committees composed of preference outliers? This study takes a new approach to the outlier question by explicitly assuming that the distribution of preferences among committee members varies from that of their colleagues on the floor. By making this assumption I free myself of the obligation of measuring ideology and focus instead on gauging the degree to which the committee crafted agenda allows these preference differences to be expressed --- or the degree to which committees are allowed to high jack the policy making process. Evaluating the latitude that committees take in setting the agenda allows me to assess not only the degree to which committee agents shirk from their principal but also the ability of the three dominant schools of thought on the organization of the U.S. House to predict legislative behavior. By generating jurisdiction specific estimates of agenda manipulation I find strong support for party dominated models of organization with a hierarchical ordering of agency in committee members and evidence for more outlier committees than previous research.