Comparing Committee and Floor Preferences

A statistical model is proposed which permits us to test whether congressional committees are preference outliers and indicates that each representative's policy preferences are unique and that a comparison of committee and floor preferences must account for this heterogeneity.

Abstract

We propose a statistical model which permits us to test whether congressional committees are preference outliers. Unlike previous tests, our model acknowledges that each representative's policy preferences are unique and that a comparison of committee and floor preferences must account for this heterogeneity. We apply our model to the House of Representatives over the period 1951 to 1984 and identify many more committee outliers than previous research.