Legislative Studies Quarterly最新文献

The 60-vote end-debate threshold is a key institution in the United States Senate. Most winning coalitions require 60 votes, effectively giving veto power to a minority of senators. But do supermajority debate rules necessarily translate into minority veto power? We examine this in state legislatures, where there is far more variation in whether chamber rules require a majority or a supermajority of legislators to cut off debate. Across multiple analyses and data sources, we fail to find systematic evidence that supermajority debate rules are associated with several outcome variables, including the size of bill passage coalitions, news coverage of obstruction, and the success of major proposals. The lack of evidence indicates that, in many cases, debate rules do not translate into legislative “pivots” and that case-specific knowledge is necessary for understanding the influence of legislative rules.

The degree of party control of parliamentary debates influences which MPs take the floor. However, we do not know whether floor access rules matter also for the content of speeches. Drawing on a corpus of speeches delivered in bill debates in the Italian lower house over 10 years, I investigate how variation in floor access rules across comparable debates shapes MPs' geographical representation in their legislative speeches. The findings reveal that open-access rules increase the intensity of geographical representation compared to when parties allocate speaking time, pointing to a tension between party control and dyadic representation. Additionally, this study demonstrates that the effect of open rules on geographical representation is consistent across MPs with different electoral incentives and degrees of alignment with party leadership, as well as across topics varying in their potential for geographical representation.

Congress relies heavily on congressional staff to function and, as such, members have raised alarms about staff departures and their impact on the institution's capacity. We examine patterns of congressional staff exit to understand the severity of this problem. We document differences in departure rates among staff from certain demographic groups, as staff diversity shapes substantive representation. Using comprehensive congressional staffing employment data over the past two decades, we show turnover rates vary by race and gender, with minorities more likely to exit their positions and women, despite being less likely to be promoted, more likely to stay. Lastly, while overall turnover rates are high, we find that staff with higher education and committee experience (whose departures are more likely to affect brain drain) are more likely to remain in Congress. These results hold important implications for ongoing policy reforms and for descriptive representation in congressional policymaking.

Existing work documents how senators use their official communications to explain their Washington activities and build support in the district. However, relatively little remains known about how senators communicate about one of their most important constitutional duties—providing advice and consent on Supreme Court nominees. In this paper, we investigate how senators discuss Supreme Court nominations with their constituents, focusing on one common rhetorical strategy: highlighting the descriptive traits of nominees. Using a new dataset of press releases about nominee race and gender, we demonstrate that senators of both parties frequently discuss the descriptive traits of nominees. Next, we systematically investigate the determinants of this rhetoric, finding that shared characteristics with the nominee, copartisanship, and institutional position predict discussion of descriptive representation. Then, we use the CES to demonstrate the impact of these messages on constituent evaluations of senators; we find a modest boost in using such messages. Finally, we conduct a preliminary investigation of discussion of nominee religion using our framework. Our findings provide important insight into how senators use rhetorical appeals to appeal to constituents and make the case for diversity in governing.

We investigate whether the differing population sizes of legislative districts affect the ability to engage in partisan gerrymandering. We conjecture that larger populations facilitate partisan gerrymandering by providing mapmakers with more “raw material” to manipulate, and this might make such districts less compact. Evidence based on measures of partisan bias, district population, and compactness suggests that more populous districts encourage partisan distortion and do so partly through violations of compactness. Regression analysis of lower and upper chamber state legislative maps shows that more populous districts lead to more partisan bias in maps even after accounting for other aspects of districts and Voting Rights Act requirements that affect how states draw district lines.

This article examines legislative behavior in the lower house of the Imperial Austrian Reichsrat, a historical legislature representing a multinational society. The coincidence of economic and center-periphery cleavages in that democratizing state presents an excellent opportunity to examine the influence of multiple competing principals on representatives' legislative behavior. Drawing on an original dataset, we test under which conditions representatives voted against their parliamentary party group between 1907 and 1914. We find relatively high levels of unity, especially for the transnational Social Democrats. Where deviations occur, they are associated with the ethno-national and economic composition of representatives' electoral districts and initially with membership in parliamentary professional associations. The findings highlight the importance of the center-periphery (respectively transnational) cleavage as an additional driver of legislative behavior in parliaments, like the European Parliament or the parliaments of Spain or the United Kingdom, that represent multiple nations.