Political Dynamics in Committee Decision-Making Processes over Public Hearings

In principle, legislative committees hold hearings to gather and provide information to the floor, but some hearings are characterized as political showcases. Indeed, hearings offer not only the opportunities to participate in legislative process to the public but also an open platform for legislators to communicate their opinions to their constituents. There are some empirical studies that explore when committees hold hearings for information acquisition and when they grandstand. However, existing rational choice models of legislative committees suggest that committees only hold costly hearings in order to gain information, and the efforts to address this question is absent. Thus, my dissertation fills this gap by highlighting internal decision-making process and political competition within a committee in holding a hearing and selecting witnesses and finds additional conditions that encourage committee members to hold informative hearings by focusing on institutional and political contexts. The dissertation is composed of three related studies. Each study presents a novel lab experiment of public hearings and witness selection and a simple game-theoretic model that generates testable hypotheses. I specifically analyze committee chairs' decisions to hold hearings, committee members' selection of witnesses, and legislative floors' policy choices after hearings. The factors I propose to explain these decisions are the level of policy disagreement between committee members, political gains from posturing in a hearing, the chair's power in selecting witnesses, and the floor's policy preference. The first study considers a floor pivot that is indifferent between policy alternatives ex ante; the second assumes a biased floor that shares a partisan policy preference; the third examines hearing decisions and policy outcomes when the public is a target audience. Findings demonstrate when and which type of committee chair is likely to hold a hearing; when a hearing is likely to be informative; how behavioral patterns of the majority and the minority members of a committee differ in selecting witnesses depending on institutional and political conditions as well as policy types. I also illustrate empirical evidence from previous literature that is consistent with my findings. The dissertation makes important contributions to the existing literature on legislative committees. First, it provides new insights to political dynamics in committee hearings by investigating internal decision-making process within a committee. Second, while the quality of information transmitted in a hearing was exogenously given in previous works, it is the first study to endogenize its level by allowing committee members to choose a set of witnesses with information of varying qualities. Thus, it emphasizes the discretion that committee members have as information mediators. Third, given the parsimony of research design, implications of the findings can be broadly applied to any fact-finding committees that hold public hearings beyond a legislative context.