Low-cost policy specialisation, district characteristics and gender. Patterns of committee assignment in Romania

ABSTRACT

Committee assignment can influence the efficiency of legislative work, the success of parties in reaching their policy goals and even the electoral fates of individual legislators. Nevertheless, little is known about this process in the legislatures established in the Central and Eastern European democracies. These legislatures faced severe informational, electoral and partisan challenges which raised the stakes of efficient committee-seat allocation. Simultaneously, most parliaments in the region were endowed with strong committees. The Romanian Parliament is representative for this combination of conditions. Drawing on a dataset that covers the careers, sector knowledge, partisan and electoral attributes of all the members serving in five terms of the Chamber of Deputies the article shows that committee assignment is used to facilitate low-cost policy specialisation, district characteristics matter for gaining seats in committees with distributive potentials, while female legislators are confined to committees dealing with feminised policy areas.

KEYWORDS:

• Committee assignment
• legislative organisation
• political parties
• Romania

Disclosure statement

No potential conflict of interest was reported by the author.

Notes on contributor

Mihail Chiru is a Postdoctoral fellow at ISPOLE, UCLouvain. His research interests include legislative organisation and legislative behaviour, party politics and voting behaviour.

ORCID

Mihail Chiru http://orcid.org/0000-0002-0811-5457

Notes

1. Unfortunately, this prediction cannot be tested directly because electronic records of roll-call votes were introduced only in 2006.

2. The Standing Orders of the Chamber of Deputies adopted in 1994 specified a different threshold: 13–40 members.

3. This is computed as: 0.75/(M + 1), where M is the district magnitude

4. An exception is that MPs elected from larger district magnitudes in 2008 are more likely to be assigned to a high policy committee, whereas in the previous terms the variable exhibited the same direction but was not statistically significant.

Additional information

Funding

Mihail Chiru’ s work was supported by the Universit catholiqué de Louvain through the ‘MOVE-IN Louvain’ Incoming Post-doctoral Fellowship, co-funded by the Marie Curie Actions of the European Commission.