A Measure of Congressional Committee Influence

• Autores: Stefani Langehennig, Ryan Bell, E. Scott Adler
• Localización: Legislative studies quarterly, ISSN 0362-9805, Vol. 50, N. 3, 2025
• Idioma: inglés
• Enlaces
  • Texto Completo Ejemplar
• Resumen

  • In this article, we develop a temporally dynamic measure of each congressional committee's influence across nearly all areas of U.S. federal law. Our measure is derived from the United States Code, which provides detailed information on the evolution of public law across time and issue areas. We categorize sections of the U.S. Code by Comparative Agendas Project (CAP) policy topic areas and then construct a committee-level influence score based on committees' authorship and revision of each section. Spanning the 104th through 115th Congresses (1995–2018), our measure demonstrates that there are dominant committees that consistently exercise control over enormous portions of federal law, a handful of committees expand their influence over time, while others ebb and flow in their influence.