Who Brings Home the Pork? Committee Assignments under Germany’s Mixed System

The assignment of committee seats is a most consequential choice in legislative contexts. Distributive theories of legislative organization suggest that electoral incentives for incumbents to cultivate personal votes explain the emergence of strong standing committees staffed with preference outliers determined to pursue particularistic benefits for geographic constituents. However, these theories discard the partisan basis of European legislative politics and thus raise questions as to whether they are relevant in this regard. This paper aims to gauge the role of distributive politics for the German case on the basis of a new and rich data set including statistical data for five legislative terms (1983, 1987, 1998, 2005, 2009) on an overall universe of 2.865 observations. The paper shows that contingent upon electoral rules parties support personal vote seeking concerns while assigning seats to so called pork committees. It however finds that under Germany’s mixed system parties use personal characteristics of legislators to guide their choices rather than their modes of election. The paper aims to contribute to both debates on legislative organization and on the functioning of mixed systems.