Committee Office Allocation under High Informational and Organizational Constraints: A Longitudinal Analysis

In new democracies the assignment of committee offices takes place under a number of powerful informational and organizational constraints (Olson and Crowther 2002). First, there is limited relevant parliamentary expertise to be mobilized and used efficiently (Mansfeldova et al 2004; Ciftci et al 2008). Second, parliamentary parties are more ideologically fuzzy (van Biezen 2003; Enyedi and Toka 2007; Tavits 2008) and more prone to splits and loss in membership - via party hopping (Heller and Mershon 2009) than parties in consolidated democracies. Third, high party electoral volatility is likely to make any calculations regarding individual electoral gains from committee assignment irrelevant. All these factors seem to favor partisan explanations of committee office allocation, i.e. committee offices would be disproportionately allocated to party leaders and senior members. But can one expect policy specialization to matter more for the distribution of committee offices with the passage of time and the increase in parliamentary professionalization? We explore this question as well as the explanatory power of the major committee organization theories: the distributional, the informational and the partisan approach by drawing on a unique longitudinal dataset which includes all the politicians who have served in the Romanian Parliament between 1992 and 2012. Moreover, our matched longitudinal data allows us to measure not only the impact of cumulated expertise (membership or office in the relevant committee) but also to test comprehensively the impact of past parliamentary activity and choices on committee office allocation. Thus, we are able to test whether the more active MPs are rewarded with committee offices and also to evaluate the impact of party switching on office distribution.