Bundled Power: How Donors Value Procedural Powers in U.S. State Legislatures
2026-06-15
I examine the extent to which interest groups attend to institutional rules and procedures of lawmaking by assessing how they reward legislators who hold different forms of procedural authority in U.S. state legislatures. Revisiting an influential attempt to gauge interest group interest in procedural power, I reassess how “committee assignment power” has been measured and interpreted and ask what donors reward when they give to legislators coded as holding appointment authority. The analysis focuses on contributions directed toward actors involved in committee organization rather than direct access to committee members. I show that the contribution premium associated with assignment authority is composition sensitive and concentrated in a subset of chambers and leadership positions rather than uniformly observed across legislatures. Because offices involved in committee organization frequently bundle multiple procedural capacities, estimated assignment effects are difficult to attribute to appointment authority alone. The results suggest that donors reward bundled leadership capacities that structure the legislative agenda rather than committee appointment authority in isolation. More broadly, commonly used institutional measures may collapse multiple levers of power into a single indicator, and campaign finance may reinforce procedural centralization within legislatures as well as shape policy outcomes.