Jurisdiction-Based Measures of Committee Prestige

Measures of U.S. congressional committee popularity utilize the committee requests, transfers, and/or assignments of members of Congress over time to rate that popularity. They do not consider the prestige of committees based on jurisdictionally-relevant variables, such as committee work, their resources, or their outputs. Previous scholarship on parliamentary committees, especially Bates, McKay, and Goodwin (2020), do consider such variables, operationalized, for example, through committees' control of resources, policy influence, and visibility, and those variables’ relevance to categorizations of prestige. This paper suggests such a committee-jurisdiction-based prestige categorization for standing committees of the U.S. Congress, guided by the literature of non-U.S. legislative scholars and upon Democratic and Republican caucus committee rules, which establish their own categorizations of committee prestige that also do not map perfectly onto individual-level measures of committee prestige. To better understand the place of committees in legislative systems, we must be able to construe the relative importance of their work in the context of that work, not just in terms of the jockeying for position that proceeds the work.