Legislative Studies Quarterly最新文献

Do private interests predict politicians' rhetoric? Focusing on housing policy, we compare issue emphasis and positions of landlord politicians and politicians who do not own multiple properties. Ireland provides a unique opportunity to study legislating landlords' behavior as housing has become one of the most important political issues. We construct a novel dataset of politicians' homeownership status between 2013 and 2022, a period characterized by rising rent and property prices. We fine-tune a transformer-based machine learning model and apply text scaling and sentiment analysis to identify issue salience and positions on housing in over 870,000 tweets and parliamentary questions. Contrary to our expectations, landlord politicians do not avoid the topic of housing, nor do they take different positions. We also find that government status does not influence this relationship. The results imply that private financial interests do not influence rhetoric on housing policy.

Members of the US Congress held over 25,000 town hall meetings over the last eight years, and yet we know very little about the role that these events play in American politics. In this article, we present new data on congressional town hall meetings held in the 114th to 117th Congresses (2015–2022) to explore why politicians hold such meetings. In short, we do not find consistent evidence that electoral vulnerability drives legislators to their districts. Nor do we find support for claims of a zero-sum tradeoff between lawmaking and district representation. However, members of the president's opposition party clearly and consistently host more town hall meetings, suggesting that party messaging may be at the heart of this often-overlooked congressional behavior.

While existing studies have addressed the importance of political profile for media visibility, far fewer works have examined how speaking in parliament is associated with media attention—an important mechanism in reaching out to voters. This paper tests how the amount and particularly the style of parliamentary speech are related to media attention. We employ a unique data set that covers all parliamentary transcripts for the 2011–2015 and 2015–2019 parliamentary terms in Estonia and online media content from that period (~ 2.7 million news articles). We assume that MPs can use parliamentary speech as a tool to foster personal attention. First, the results show that MPs who speak in parliament receive more media attention than those who do not, and speaking more means more media visibility. Second, the media pays more attention to rank-and-file MPs who use more negative, complex language and more singular and plural first-person pronouns.

Although legislative brawling is a common occurrence—with 365 cases reported across the world between 1990 and 2018—we have a limited understanding of why members of representative bodies engage in violence. Does the lack of institutionalization or the violent nature of some legislators cause such behavior? This article argues that legislators with intense policy preferences engage in costly actions, such as brawling, as a means of signaling their policy commitment. To validate this claim, this article examines legislators' participation in legislative brawling and filibusters in Korea before and after the adoption of a filibuster procedure. I find that extreme members engaged in brawling before the adoption of procedural reform, while they engaged in filibusters after the adoption. This transformation of brawlers into filibusterers suggests that legislative brawling does not necessarily indicate a violent nature of some legislators but rather a desire by legislators to signal their policy commitments.

Even before its founding, town hall meetings have been woven into the fabric of American politics as a quintessential tool in a representative democracy. We might expect legislators would host these events with routine frequency; however, our research shows this conventional wisdom is inaccurate. While town halls may strengthen the legislator-constituent relationship, they also carry risk, especially in our polarized political climate. We argue the decision to engage with constituents in this way is a two-step process: first, legislators decide whether to participate in town halls or not; second, they determine the frequency (and modality) of these interactions. We consider several factors to explain the variation of town hall participation among members of Congress, including partisanship and gender, as well as several electoral and district-level factors. By combining a unique data set of nearly 11,000 congressional town hall meetings from 2017 to 2022 (115th–117th Congresses) with biographical and political information about legislators and their districts, we uncover compelling evidence to suggest legislators make strategic calculations of whether to participate in town hall meetings and how to do so. In the end, our work adds to the growing literature on the modern electoral connection.

Party unity is central to studying legislative politics and explaining the organization of legislative chambers, passage of policy, and even electoral outcomes. Its effect has been shown at the subnational, national, and international levels. While party unity has been used to explain many phenomena in legislative politics, there is much less known about the determinants of party unity, especially at the subnational level. We leverage a dataset of party unity in 95 U.S. state legislative chambers from 2002 to 2014, to test the impact of party structures, institutional rules, and contextual factors on the level of party unity. We find that majority status, party seat share, and the other party's unity impact party unity similarly for both parties, but the effect of inter-party heterogeneity differs by party. These findings offer a new and unique insight to how partisan theories operate differently within state legislative versus Congressional parties.

What drives MPs' constituency focus in party-centered systems? Party-centered systems are expected to offer fewer incentives for constituency-focused behavior as it is parties rather than candidates that primarily drive competition. However, MPs in these systems may find good reason to cater to constituents’ interests as it allows them to attain multiple goals and satisfy competing principals. This study develops a theoretical model of constituency focus comprising individual, party, and district-level factors and tests it in South Africa, a party-centered system. Drawing on 22,724 questions submitted by MPs to the parliament between 2006 and 2023, as well as biographic data and interviews, it demonstrates that variation in MPs' constituency focus is explained by their level of electoral vulnerability, and to a lesser degree their seniority and local ties. Moreover, whether MPs belong to clientelistic parties and their constituency is a party stronghold are also relevant factors. The findings highlight the importance of incentives that go beyond electoral institutions and reaffirm the relevance of constituency links in party-centered systems.