Agenda setting in the US House: A majority-party monopoly?

How strongly does the majority party control the agenda in the U.S. House of Representatives? In this article, I contrast two spatial models of U.S. House committees-one in which each committee's agenda is set by the full committee, one in which it is set by the committee's majority-party contingent. These two models lead to clearly different predictions about(l) who dissents on final passage votes in committee and (2) who tiles dissents to committee bill reports. Data from the 84th through the 98th Congresses gibe with the partisan model. Majority-party members with a given ideological location dissent substantially less often than do minority-party members with comparable ideological locations. And majority-party dissent rates are extremely low on an absolute scale, with over 50% of majority-party members never dissenting.