Legislative Studies Quarterly最新文献

Do coalition parties in presidential systems shadow one another with an eye on reducing agency loss? Our knowledge of intra-coalitional delegation under presidentialism remains limited to a few case studies. This article addresses that question using an original data set of committee chairs in eight multiparty presidential systems around the world. It shows that shadowing—the appointment of chairs from one coalition party to committees overseeing portfolios controlled by another coalition party—is a function of the degree of agency loss the coalition expects to a specific party, operationalized in terms of ideological distance as well as the salience of portfolios. However, the data also tentatively suggest that powerful committees reduce rather than increase the incidence of shadowing, which may be attributed to the risk of intraparty agency loss under separation of powers.

The principle that democracies give all citizens an equal voice is challenged by scholarly work showing that policies tend to be biased in favor of the more wealthy citizenry. One reason for such unequal representation lies in representatives being less responsive to the preferences of lower compared to higher-income citizens in their policy actions. Drawing on surveys with local elected representatives in Belgium and Sweden, this study zooms in on two potential drivers of unequal responsiveness. We look at the possibility that politicians have less incentives to be responsive to the less affluent, and less accurate information to do so in the first place. Concretely, we question politicians about the anticipation of accountability from lower- versus higher-income citizens (incentives) and make them estimate the policy positions of lower- and higher-income citizens (information). Moreover, we explore whether descriptive representation factors into these two possible drivers of unequal responsiveness by leveraging variation in politicians’ backgrounds. First, we find that representatives anticipate significantly less electoral accountability from lower-income than from higher-income citizens. Moreover, politicians with a lower-class background hold less unequal accountability beliefs, hinting at the importance of more equal descriptive representation in mitigating inequality in responsiveness. Second, unequal responsiveness does not seem to be a matter of representatives having less accurate information about the opinions of lower-income citizens; politicians’ estimations of different income groups’ policy preferences are equally inaccurate.

It is often argued that bipartisan lawmaking depends on minority legislative parties controlling institutional veto points through divided government and/or supermajority pivots. Using a new dataset of state legislative rollcall votes on tax increases—an issue where states vary in whether they require majority or supermajority votes—I assess (1) whether minority control of veto points is necessary for bipartisan policymaking and (2) whether there are greater levels of partisan governance when the majority controls all veto points. I find that partisan governance is more likely when the majority controls all vetoes. However, bipartisan policymaking is still the most common outcome even when institutional conditions are seemingly ideal for partisan governance. Interviews with state policymakers uncover various noninstitutional reasons for bipartisanship regardless of veto control. My findings suggest that while institutional rules can compel bipartisanship, they are just one of many reasons why the minority party participates in lawmaking.

This article investigates the effectiveness of potential partisan gerrymandering of the US House of Representatives across a range of states. We use a heuristic algorithm to generate district maps that optimize for multiple objectives, including compactness, partisan benefit, and competitiveness. While partisan gerrymandering is highly effective for both sides, we find that the majority of states are moderately biased toward Republicans when optimized for either compactness or partisan benefit, meaning that Republican gerrymanders have the potential to be more effective. However, we also find that more densely populated and more heavily Hispanic states show less Republican bias or even Democratic bias. Additionally, we find that in almost all cases we can generate reasonably compact maps with very little sacrifice to partisan objectives through a mixed-objective function. This suggests that there is a strong potential for stealth partisan gerrymanders that are both compact and beneficial to one party. Nationwide, partisan gerrymandering is capable of swinging over 100 seats in the US House, even when compact districts are simultaneously sought.

Does money in politics affect democratic performance? I study the effect of the Supreme Court's 2010 landmark decision in Citizens United v. FEC, which struck down existing state bans on independent campaign expenditures, on democracy in the U.S. states. Results from a difference-in-differences design indicate that the Citizens United ruling had a substantial negative effect on state democratic performance and that this effect is largely independent of the effect of Republican party control identified by previous research. The results suggest that unlimited political spending may pose a threat to the health of democracy in the United States.

Extant literature has shown that political parties that form a coalition government face one major dilemma; that is, they must govern together but fight elections separately. Thus, coalition members tend to commit to a differentiated strategy as an election approaches. However, existing research has mainly focused on empirical findings from countries with proportional representation and few measures for direct criticism from partners. In order to test the theory, this study examines parliamentary speeches from Japan's mixed member majoritarian context. It uses a supervised machine learning method for measuring confrontational attitudes toward governments irrespective of their ideologies. The results of this study show that on average, while a coalition partner may present a slightly hostile attitude toward governments in parliamentary speeches, this effect is not influenced by election proximity. This may imply that incentives for managing coalitions could differ in majoritarian-centered electoral systems.

The article investigates roll-call request and its effects on opposition-voting behavior. It argues that parties use roll-call votes (RCVs) as a position-taking instrument to boost public attention for issues they care about. This argument implies that RCVs are requested strategically but opposition behavior should not differ systematically between recorded and nonrecorded votes. Studying all voting activities of the 19th German Bundestag (2017–21), the analysis shows that RCVs are more likely on high-salience issues, more important motion types, and to some extent opposition motions. Voting conforms to the position-taking model as opposition parties are less likely to vote with the government on their own motions and more important motion types. However, opposition behavior does not differ systematically between recorded and nonrecorded votes suggesting that parties act consistently across all votes. Thus, RCVs provide valid measures for studying interparty competition in parliament despite their selective sampling properties.

How does rhetoric about the filibuster inform people's views of political figures? We argue that support or opposition to eliminating the filibuster conveys information to citizens that they can use to assess a politician's ideological position. This information can also be used when citizens form affective evaluations of politicians, but its effects depend on people's partisan identities. We use a preregistered survey experiment—along with a secondary analysis of cross-sectional survey data—to show that a candidate who says that the filibuster should be eliminated is viewed as being more liberal than a candidate who says that it should be protected or who says nothing. We further show that Democrats like candidates who use elimination rhetoric more than protection or no rhetoric while Republicans react in the opposite way. These results suggest that elite messaging about salient political institutions can fundamentally shape people's views of political figures.

One particularly striking difference between parliamentary democracies is the length of time it takes to form a government after a general election, with consequences for governability and democratic accountability. This study contributes to the literature on government formation duration by exploring whether parties find it more difficult to form a government when parliament has greater control over what the executive can do. All else equal, parliamentary control reduces cabinet autonomy, meaning parties face greater uncertainty as to whether they will be able to achieve their policy goals if they enter government. This institution-generated incomplete information exacerbates bargaining uncertainty and ultimately increases bargaining delays during government formation. Using newly collected data on two measures of parliamentary control – committee powers and budgetary powers – covering 36 non-presidential countries, we find that post-election government formation tends to take more time in countries where parliamentary control of the cabinet is stronger.

Committees can use oversight hearings to collect and communicate the information Congress needs to oversee the bureaucracy, but many worry that members instead focus on scoring political points by lambasting witnesses. We leverage the collective judgment of congressional staff to measure how exchanges between legislators and witnesses vary on two separable dimensions: information and confrontation. Contrary to the conventional wisdom that confrontation crowds out information, we show that members of the president's party engage in less confrontational oversight and reveal no more or less information than their peers.