Legislative Studies Quarterly最新文献

We introduce and seek to explain a new and surprising fact about members of the US Congress: since at least the 1980s, Congresswomen have been substantially wealthier than Congressmen serving in the same party and decade. We articulate three mechanisms that could explain this gender wealth gap, and use new data on the backgrounds and families of members of Congress to evaluate each mechanism. We find no evidence that the wealth gap arises because districts likely to elect women also elect wealthier members, or because women had more lucrative pre-Congressional careers. We do find evidence that the gap can be explained by women facing steeper challenges that wealth helps them overcome—particularly related to caregiving—and by Congresswomen's spouses earning more money than Congressmen's spouses. Our analysis sheds light on how obstacles facing ambitious women can lead to apparently counterintuitive advantages among the women who manage to succeed.

Legislators sometimes vote on bills that fail but, in the process, allow lawmakers to take an extreme position before ultimately voting to compromise. We call these proposals Cover Bills. Through two survey experiments, we show that primary voters are more supportive of a compromiser if that legislator first votes for a cover bill. Through a causal mediation analysis, we show that cover bills are effective not because they prove that the compromise was the best deal the legislators could get, but because they demonstrate that the legislator shares the voter's ideological commitments. They reduce the punishment associated with compromising even if respondents find out about the cover bill from legislators who opposed the compromise.

This article examines the effect of electoral system reform on legislative speech-making by Members of Parliament (MPs), focusing on the case of Denmark's 1918 shift from single-member districts (SMD) to proportional representation (PR) in elections to the lower chamber. While the relationship between electoral systems and MP behavior is well established, few studies have been able to isolate causal effects using a natural control group. Leveraging the unique institutional configuration of Denmark's bicameral parliament—where the upper chamber remained unaffected by the reform—this study applies a difference-in-differences design to assess how reform shaped parliamentary behavior. Using a novel dataset covering all MPs between 1901 and 1939, the analysis compares both the absolute number of speeches delivered and the relative speech frequency of MPs across 1 electoral periods. The results demonstrate that MPs in the reformed lower chamber spoke significantly less following the introduction of PR, aligning their behavior more closely with that of MPs in the unreformed upper chamber. These findings hold across both outcome measures and after accounting for relevant controls, including seniority, party affiliation, and chamber-specific institutional differences. The analysis provides strong support for the argument that PR enhances party control over individual legislators and reduces incentives for personal vote-seeking via speech-making. The article contributes to the broader literature on electoral systems and legislative behavior, and offers new historical insight into the institutional development of representative democracy in early twentieth-century Europe.

Why do members of Congress collaborate on legislation in an era of intense partisan polarization? This paper argues that shared exposure to pressing, district-level policy problems can motivate cross-party collaboration, particularly in a policy area that cuts across traditional ideological divides. Focusing on the case of the opioid crisis, I develop the importance of shared problem status in driving cosponsorship of opioid-related legislation. That is, when legislators represent similarly affected constituencies, they are more likely to cosponsor opioid-related legislation, even when they differ in party or ideology. While existing research often treats cosponsorship as a function of social networks or institutional proximity, there are clear incentives for members to respond to issue areas that reflect local problem severity. Using dyadic data on bill cosponsorship in the House and Senate from portions of the 112th through the 116th congresses (2012–2019), I find that member pairs with each legislator representing districts with high opioid death rates are significantly more likely to collaborate on opioid legislation. These findings suggest that geographically distributed policy crises can open space for bipartisan cooperation, even in an otherwise gridlocked Congress.

Does parliamentary seating affect parliamentary behavior? In this paper, we dig into the question of whether spatial proximity affects the behavior of elected representatives. Using data from the 50th legislative period of the Swiss parliament and an inferential network model, we estimate the effects of different operationalizations of seating proximity and find that direct and indirect left and right neighbors tend to support each other's legislative work. However, when ideological and regional closeness (among other factors) is controlled for, the proximity effect remains small, pointing to the limited effects of seating proximity on legislative behavior.

In this article, I focus on an understudied aspect of the cabinet formation process in parliamentary democracies: the caretaker periods associated with it. Building on the existing literature on government formation, I discuss conceptualization and measurement of caretaker periods, defined as periods during which a government is no longer or cannot be tolerated by a majority in the legislature, and encompassing the process of formation of a new government that is and can be tolerated by the same or a different majority. I leverage a dataset of parliamentary events that, on the basis of this conceptualization, allows me to separate full-power cabinets from caretaker periods rigorously and systematically according to a country's specific constitutional arrangements. Using survival analysis, I examine over 900 caretaker spells across 34 countries between 1945 and 2020. My goal is to assess how institutional and contextual differences account for variation in the duration of caretaker periods, as well as the government formation processes taking place during these periods, across countries and over time. The evidence helps paint a more refined picture of how new cabinets emerge and the occurrence of delays under different sets of conditions in the context of caretaker periods.