Committees

Abstract

Abstract To help us understand better the challenges of legislative capacity and accountability within the three ideal-typical models of legislative assemblies developed in Chapter 1 (the members’ assembly, the leaders’ assembly, and the voters’ assembly), this chapter focuses on committees. The chapter discusses why a legislative assembly would create and empower a system of committees. The scholarly literature on committees has offered competing explanations of why committees have been such a popular form of legislative organization. This chapter therefore reviews the four most prominent explanations. We describe the primary contours and variation in how real-world legislative committees are designed and relate such organizational design to our concepts of voters’, members’, and leaders’ assemblies. Formal structures and powers define a legislative assembly’s committee system. Our focus is on the number of committees, their membership, and their powers. This will help identify the degree to which committees play a significant role in the life of a legislative assembly. It will also aid our understanding of whom, if anyone, this legislative organization privileges, and how. Having described the components of a legislative committee system, we next examine variation in their structure across different assemblies.