Congressional committees represent the heart of congressional activity and the core of Congress’s influence–yet we still know far too little about the way they work. Contrary to most generalizations about them, the committees are not all alike. They differ, and differ systematically, in important ways–and Congressmen in Committees demonstrates how and why.
With research and insight, Richard F. Fenno, Jr. takes a close look at six committees of the House of Representatives–Ways and Means, Appropriations, Foreign Affairs, Education and Labor, Interior and Insular Affairs, and Post office and Civil Service–and their Senate counterparts, and then develops a comprehensive analytic scheme for explaining how they work. He isolates five key variables in their makeup–member goals, environment constraints, strategic premises, decision-making processes, and decisions–and shows how these have a crucial and systematically varying effect on a committee’s autonomy, its influence on the congressional decision-making, its success on the chamber floor, its expertise, the control exercised by its chairman, and its domination by the executive branch. The result is a precise and effective description and analysis of committee structure that is essential to the understanding of Congress and congressional procedure today.
