Inside the black box of legislative committees: internal processes, performance, efficiency and strength

Committees are ubiquitous in national legislative bodies regardless of the type of political system or the nature of the political regime. As such, they have attracted the interest of legislative scholars for several decades, leading to the development of a robust field of research and a substantial body of knowledge about their functioning across different political systems, and what the broader implications are of some of the variations. However, much of this research has focussed on externally observable characteristics of legislative committees, e.g. their formal powers, constitution and composition, that offered relatively straightforward quantification which is a cornerstone for empirically driven comparative research. As a result, the study of the inner political dynamics and processes of legislative committees has been largely ignored. In this panel, we welcome papers that will collectively push forward the state of the art on legislative committee research by “opening up the black box of legislative committees” from the inside and examine how their internal characteristics are linked to their overall strength, performative efficiency and effectiveness in different political systems. In other words, we want to explore the internal, i.e. committee-level, determinants of what makes legislative committees stronger, or weaker institutions in different political systems. Although cross-national comparative work is welcome, we prioritize proposals that analyse the legislative committee system of national cases, or even the case of particularly important single committee. The types of committee characteristics that we would like to explore should ideally include but are not limited to i) the role of the committee chairperson’s political affiliation, experience and interest; ii) the significance of the personal make-up of committee’s composition; iii) and iii) the committees’ internal procedures and decision-making processes.