Legislative Studies Quarterly最新文献

Politicians differ in their policy positions, but also in their behavior in parliament and the constituency. While research has shown that personal characteristics of politicians matter for voter evaluation, we have little knowledge as to which activities inside and outside parliament have the greatest impact on voters' evaluation of their representatives. Based on survey experiments conducted in the UK, Poland, the Netherlands, France, and Belgium, we show that voters clearly reward politicians for engaged behavior, in particular time spent in the constituency. These findings carry significant implications for the type of information conveyed to voters during election campaigns.

This article is the first to take a global perspective on parliamentary administrations, which are vital for democratic governance. Basic facts like what drives the number of parliamentary staffers are unknown to political science. Drawing from a functionalist framework, we propose that staff plays different roles which lead to different possible drivers: if staff primarily serves to relay information from and to the population, population size is likely a major driver. If staff primarily serves to advise MPs in their oversight work, stronger parliaments will have more staff. If staff primarily serves to assist MPs in their day-to-day work, assembly size drives staff size. As an alternative, we apply the notion of institutional isomorphism. Parliaments in shared networks will likely emulate each other. We analyze data from 144 countries. We find that staff size reflects assembly size, population size and parliamentary power.

Political short-sightedness is commonly considered a problem for democracies struggling with long-term challenges, but few proposed cures for political myopia have been implemented. We study the world's first and only genuinely institutionalized legislature-based “future committee”, Finland's Committee for the Future (CF). Our outcome variable is a novel and unobtrusive speech-based measure of individuals’ temporal focus that is measured at the MP level over time. When comparing individuals before, during and after their service on the CF, we find a statistically significant but modest impact of CF membership on how much committee members talk about the future in the plenary. Compared to non-members, committee members utter roughly one more future-focused sentence every three hundred sentences. Such institutions can thus induce more future-oriented thinking into legislatures.

Legislatures worldwide have played a decisive role in enabling and preventing democratic backsliding. Although most research has focused on the formal legislative role of parliaments in the backsliding process, this study focuses on the behavior of individual legislators and their discursive support for executives. We argue that government parties are likely to enhance pressure on government party legislators to support the executive during periods of backsliding. Using a new dataset of over 152,000 speeches from parliaments in Malawi and Zambia, we show that in both Malawi and Zambia, government party MPs were significantly more positive vis-à-vis the executive in parliamentary speeches during periods of backsliding. However, opposition MPs were not more critical of the executive in periods when democracy was eroding. The findings have important implications for understanding the institutional role of parties and legislatures in the process of backsliding.

Distinguishing between personal and party votes is inherently challenging, and it remains unclear to what extent they function in each country. This study employs the ballot of a private member's bill as an instrumental variable to examine whether legislative behavior influences electoral outcomes in the United Kingdom, which has a highly institutionalized party system. The findings reveal that legislative behavior increases the vote share of Conservative MPs by 2.6 percentage points compared to the previous election. However, given the high prominence of the party vote, this increase is only large enough to change the electoral winner in just under 10% of the constituencies. Furthermore, for opposition MPs, legislative behavior had no effect in any respect. Nevertheless, this result suggests that personal votes exist even in an unlikely case—when party competition is intense and MPs have limited autonomy in Parliament.

Policymaking in democratic governments requires compromise, yet polarized legislators face mixed incentives around compromise. These incentives also vary by gender and party, with women and Democrats facing greater pressure to express support for compromise. I investigate how legislators handle this situation by revealing both how often legislators openly report supporting compromise and legislators' willingness to oppose compromise when they can do so in secret. Drawing on original surveys of local and state legislators, I find that many legislators rhetorically support compromise but oppose compromise surreptitiously. Further, while women and Democrats are equally or more likely than men and Republicans to report supporting compromise when asked directly, this pattern reverses with women and some Democratic legislators opposing compromise more than men and Republicans when they can do so secretly. Evidence suggests this is due, in part, to women and Democrats being more likely to seek office due to policy issue motivations.