Partisanship, consensus, and committee-floor divergence - A comparison of member behavior in the 96th and 104th Congresses

Although some studies of Congress have employed aggregate-level ideological measures to characterize the outlier tendencies of congressional committee s, such measures cannot reveal intracommittee variation in the propensity f or disagreement between committees and the floor. In this analysis, we exam ine differences in voting behavior between members Of the committee to whic h bills were initially referred and the House in the 96th and 104th Congres ses. We demonstrate that significant variation occurs both within and among committees, and divergence is at times quite high among some committees no t traditionally considered outliers. In the multivariate analysis, we disco ver that many vote-level factors significantly influence the degree of comm ittee-floor divergence, and a considerable range of variation is evident in the level of divergence across committees. We also find that the number of committees exhibiting divergent behavior, the degree of this divergence, a nd the breakdown between the parties differs dramatically between the two p eriods.