THE COMMITTEE OUTLIER DEBATE - A REVIEW AND A REEXAMINATION OF SOME OF THE EVIDENCE

An ongoing and controversial topic of congressional scholars is the qu estion ''Are committees 'preference outliers' vis-a-vis their parent c hamber?'' Despite numerous research efforts showing isolated cases of outlying committees, little evidence shows a systematic tendency for c ommittees to be unrepresentative of their legislature. A paper which c omes close to being an exception is Weingast and Marshall's (1988) ana lysis of ''the industrial organization of Congress,'' which reports ev idence of many and very strongly outlying committees. However, the app arently strong evidence is due more to the authors' incorrectly execut ed methods than to a general tendency for committees to be outliers. I n this note I review the state of the committee-outlier debate and als o show that Weingast and Marshall's empirical results cannot be replic ated. I accordingly provide the correct results once their statistical tests are properly executed.