Cabinets, Committees and Careers in 19th Century France

The Third French Republic (1870-1940) was characterized by personalistic politics, with weak cabinets, frequent ministerial turnover, and high levels of deputy independence. The absence of a formalized party system meant neither the cabinet nor emerging parties were able to control the legislative process until a series of constitutional reforms in 1910. Yet the system of legislative committees was unusually powerful and prolific, and thus had the potential to play an important role in the early professionalization of individual deputies. This paper describes how the committee system was reformed over the first decades of the Republic and takes advantage of a natural experiment in how committees were chosen before and after key reforms. We utilize plausibly exogenous variation in committee experience, namely the random assignment of deputies to legislative bureaus, to show how committee membership affected individual careers and support for reform, paving the way for the consolidation of the Republic.