Decentralized

Parliamentary Committees have figured significantly in organizing the working center of legislatures in most countries of the world. In this expanding committee family, the US congressional committees occupies the strongest end of the spectrum, compared to their Westminster cousins on the other side.The committee system in the US Congress are oriented by standing committees, which have fixed memberships and jurisdictions over an entire legislative term. The committee members are selected by both the consideration of political parties and the senority criteria. Most important of all, the standing committee enjoy the upper hand in legislative process, have the ability to obstruct the bills and play the role of "gatekeeper".Formal researches of congress have isolated three models of congressional committee, and they are distributive theory, informational theory and party dominate theory, which separatedly refer to three different ideal types:independent committees, chamber-dominated committees and party-dominated committees. All these three perspectives are based on rational choice theory, aiming to solve the collective action and informational asymmetry problem.Unlike the rational choice theory, the following dissertation will employ the historical institutionalism to illustrate the emergence and fuction of the House committee system in the period between1789-1828. In this way, critical juncture will be checked, historial figures will be depicted and stories will be told. By all of this, we hope to make a compromise between complexity and brevity in viewing the development of House committees.Besides the "Introduction", the dissertation contains four parts plus conclusion, and each part is organized in chronical way. The first part redefines the idea of "separation" and "fusion", and illustrate the dilemma of the separation system in United States; based on the framework built in the former part, the second part focus on the transformation from large committees to small ones in the first20years after the1st Congress, and this illustration will reflect the dilemma between separation and fusion in committee level; after that, figures and records will be given to show the critical change of committee role both in idea and institution level in the year between1810-1828; the following forth part will carefully consider all the factors motivate the outburst of committees in the era of good feelings, and the interaction between committees and the new bipartisan system on the advent of Jacksonian era.After all these discusses, the dissertation have two basic positions. First, the emergence of the House committees were not only to meet the demand for separation but also for fusion; that is to say, House committees have been played two contradictory roles. In addition, political parties and committees in the US congress are not in a zero-sum relation; instead, they have been enhanced each other at least in the early congress.