The Functions of Committee Change in State Legislatures

Abstract

Little research has focused on the changes made in individual legislative committees through time. In this study we do a committee-by-committee analysis to determine the extent to which various committees were added, dropped, or had jurisdictional change in each chamber of eighteen states over a twenty-year period (1971-91). Using propositions adopted from organizational theory, we predict that committees are altered to help the legislature respond to both exter nal pressures and internal tensions. Two types of data are used to test our hypotheses: a longitudinal analysis of committee listings for each of the eighteen study states and individual level committee request data from four states. We find that professionalized legislatures make more committee changes and exhibit more commonality in the types of changes made than nonprofessional legislatures. The committees dropped in legislatures are requested less than the committees added. These findings reinforce the conclusions of others that committees have political as well as policy-making functions. While the stability of professional legislatures has been emphasized, our findings point to the adaptive function of organizational change.