Personal Ambitions, Expertise or Parties’ Choices? Understanding Committee Assignments in the Italian Chamber of Deputies

Committees’ composition may significantly affect legislative proceedings and outcomes. The distributive approach to legislative organization suggested that legislators will seek to become members of those committees where they can serve the specific interests of their territorial or functional constituency. Alternatively, according to the informational perspective, legislators will seek to become members of those committees where they can better exploit their policy expertise. These competing views have been extensively debated with regard to the US Congress. The composition of legislative committees may be crucial also in parliamentary systems, where the government enjoys agenda-setting powers and often controls the median member of the legislature. The plenary floor is indeed just one arena of the legislative process; committees represent another important arena. We propose an individual-level account of committee assignment in parliamentary systems, using Italy as a case study. Our argument is based on the assumption that legislators pursue individual goals, which interact with party leaders’ ones. Legislators may want to become members of a specific committee for several reasons such as those highlighted within the distributive and informational approaches. On the other hand, MPs are usually assigned to committees by party leaders. In parliamentary systems, we expect that party leaders will assign party members to different committees in such a way to foster party goals. This implies that legislators’ individual aims will be fulfilled only insofar as they help enhance party goals: legislators will be allowed to pursue their personal interests only if they are sufficiently loyal to their party. We examine alternative views about committee membership by using original survey data about elected candidates in the Italian Parliament. Our data, collected just after the 2013 general election, provide key individual-level information: preferences about committees’ assignment, expertise, past experience, educational/occupational background, ties with interest groups, ideological preferences and relations within the party.