Are Congressional Black Caucus members more reliable? Loyalty screening and committee assignments of newly elected legislators

American Journal of Economics and Sociology, The, April, 2007 by Franklin G. Mixon, Jr., Amanda C. Pagels

   In reality, very few goods are entirely search or experience.
   Rather, most goods have characteristics of both types ... A
   continuum exists between the polar cases of search and experience.
   Most products fall somewhere along this spectrum. The distinction is
   a convenient simplification that allows products to be grouped
   according to the costs of search. (1988: 8-9)

This conclusion applies to legislative services as well. The important aspect of this work for the present study is the idea that newly elected representatives have, at first, two sets of constituents (in addition to interest groups). The first set is citizens-voters, who face the perennial problem of evaluating a candidate's advertised qualities against his or her actual qualities. The second constituency that legislators face is party leaders, who have the power, through the assignment of legislative committees, to significantly influence the level of legislative representation that a legislator can provide to voters or interest groups. As with voters, party leaders may find it difficult to distinguish between the advertised and actual qualities of newly elected representatives of their own party affiliation. As such, difficulty may arise in determining the committee placement of freshmen legislators (both CBC and non-CBC). However, the fact that CBC incumbents have formed a well-functioning, uniform voting cartel organization is known to the leaders. This knowledge suggests that CBC membership may offer a low-cost screening device for the leaders, who might then be expected to place new CBC legislators on important committees. (5) This possibility is not formally tested in Mixon and Ressler (2001) but is explored in detail below.

III

Cartels as Loyalty Screens: The Model and the Congressional Data

As THE IDEAS ABOVE SUGGEST, one would expect that the probability that Democratic leaders place newly elected CBC members on important committees will be greater than the probability that newly elected non-CBC members will receive such treatment from the leaders. This is expected because, in the absence of ADA voting scores for federal legislative issues, Democratic leaders rely on the fact that CBC legislators have historically functioned as a uniform voting body that supports the leaders' preferences or legislative agenda. As such, race becomes a low-cost screening device for leaders in selecting reliable legislators to serve on important committees.

This study examines the tendency of the Democratic leaders to place newly elected Democrats--those without House voting histories---on important (unimportant) committees. That tendency, however, is not observed. What is observed is whether or not newly elected legislators are placed on important (unimportant) committees. Therefore, as with Mixon and Ressler (2001), we create a dichotomous variable, CIMP, equal to 1 if the newly elected legislator received an appointment to at least one committee in the top half, in terms of importance (based on the Coker-Crain index of committee loyalty/ importance), of standing committees in the U.S. House of Representatives and 0 otherwise. With this variable, we specify the following: