Committee Assignments in a Nascent Party System: The Case of the Turkish Grand National Assembly

Abstract

In the USA, scholars have developed theories to explain the role of legislative committees, but these theories have not been widely tested outside the USA. This ambivalence results from the perception that the strength of political parties in parliamentary systems undermines the importance of other legislative institutions, including the committees. We surveyed members of the Turkish parliament during a period of considerable party-system turmoil to test the applicability of the prominent theories of committee organization (the distributive, informational, and partisan theories) to a parliamentary system. We found strong support for the distributive and partial support for the informational specialization and partisan theories. We consider the implications of these results for our understanding of the role of committees in parliamentary democracies and the study of parliamentary politics.