The Informational Theory of Legislative Committees: An Experimental Analysis

In: American political science review, Band 113, Heft 1, S. 55-76

Abstract

We experimentally investigate the informational theory of legislative
committees (Gilligan and Krehbiel 1989). Two committee members provide policy-relevant
information to a legislature under alternative legislative rules.
Under the open rule, the legislature is free to make any decision;
under the closed rule, the legislature chooses between a member's
proposal and a status quo. We find that even in the
presence of biases, the committee members improve the legislature's
decision by providing useful information. We obtain evidence for two
additional predictions: the outlier principle,
according to which more extreme biases reduce the extent of
information transmission; and the distributional
principle, according to which the open rule is more
distributionally efficient than the closed rule. When biases are
less extreme, we find that the distributional principle dominates
the restrictive-rule principle, according to
which the closed rule is more informationally efficient. Overall,
our findings provide experimental support for Gilligan and
Krehbiel's informational theory.