Senator Scott Brown has been a member of the National Guard since 1979. He completes annual training every year, and this year did his training in Afghanistan. In the Senate he represents Massachusetts, a state whose population is only 8.3% veterans, notably less than the national average of 9.8%. Thus it seems that his constituents would not have particularly strong preferences with regard to veterans’ affairs. However, Sen. Brown serves on the Senate Committee of Veterans’ Affairs.
Weingast and Marshall’s discussion of committees implies that committee members are generally preference outliers. That is, states whose preferences are particularly strong with respect to agriculture are more likely to have a representative on the agriculture committee. The Committee on Veterans’ Affairs does not seem to follow this logic. Only five of the fifteen members of this committee come from states in which veterans comprise at least 12% of the population (of which there are nine), and Sen. Brown comes from the state with the sixth lowest veteran population percentage.
An alternative theory on committee membership presents expertise as a leading factor. As for Sen. Brown this explanation seems to fit. Sen. Brown is also a member of the Committee on Armed Services and the Committee on Homeland Security, both of which require some knowledge of the military. It seems that Sen. Brown has a comparative advantage in military knowledge that makes him a suitable member for these committees. Whereas other senators might need to learn quite a bit to function on these committees, Sen. Brown already has an applicable base of knowledge and opportunities to gain more, such as his training in Afghanistan. In addition to comparative advantage, Sen. Brown also gets to take advantage of intellectual economies of scope through his membership on these particular committees since some of the knowledge they each require separately is common to all of them. Sen. Brown’s committee membership is one example of inconsistency with Weingast and Marshall’s theory.
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