A Matching Theory Perspective on Legislative Organization: Assignment of Committees

Abstract

How legislatures allocate power and conduct business are central determinants of policy outcomes. This has long motivated a study of parties and their relationship with the committee system in legislatures. A focus of the literature has been which members serve on which committees. What has received less attention are the mechanisms by which parties allocate members to committees. I show in this paper that parties in the U.S. Senate use matching mechanisms, such as those often found in other contexts like school choice and the medical residency match. I identify that Republicans and Democrats use two distinct matching mechanisms such that canonical theories of parties cannot apply equally to them. The Republican mechanism is strategy-proof; whereas the Democrat mechanism incentivizes politicians to manipulate their reported preferences. Leveraging the tools of matching theory, I make theoretical predictions that I then corroborate with archival correspondence and committee requests/assignments data.