Legislative Studies Quarterly最新文献

How does political experience affect the issues that men and women politicians prioritize? Gender stereotypical expectations dictate that women focus more on traditionally “feminine” policy areas. While past findings broadly support this, they do not examine how policy priorities shift with increased experience. Focusing on the United Kingdom, I argue that gender differences in the extent to which politicians raise issues traditionally associated with women will be most pronounced among junior politicians who lack experience in the eyes of the public and their colleagues, but will decline with increased political experience. To test this, I study parliamentary debates between 1997 and 2019 and leverage novel quantitative text approaches to measure politicians' issue priorities. I show that, among junior politicians, women talk significantly more about “feminine” issues, however this gap decreases markedly with increased seniority. These findings have important implications for the representation of women's voices and perspectives within the policymaking process.

Do electoral institutions matter for subnational legislators’ career choices in a multi-level polity? The paper considers this question by analyzing candidacies of sitting German State MPs for the Federal parliament (“level-hopping attempts”), leveraging cross- and within-legislature variation in electoral rules (due to the widespread adoption of mixed-member systems in Germany's subnational parliaments). State MPs elected via list PR can be expected to be more likely to attempt level-hopping than those elected in the single-member districts (SMD) tier, as the former face lower re-election rates and the latter are more directly accountable to their constituency's voters. Empirical evidence from a novel dataset of over 8000 State legislators spanning 10 Federal elections (1987–2021) confirms this hypothesis. It is also shown that the difference in behavior across tiers is more marked when State MPs run for insecure Federal candidacies than when they are offered secure candidacies. The findings suggest that subnational electoral institutions play a role in enabling or constraining legislators' progressive ambition. Moreover, they highlight a previously overlooked dimension of the “mandate divide” between MPs belonging to different electoral tiers of mixed-member systems.

Recent scholarship has shown that legislators with deeper local roots and other preexisting place-based attachments to their districts enjoy far-reaching electoral advantages over their more “carpetbagging” colleagues. In this article, we consider how local roots, and its intersection with legislative polarization, influences legislative behavior, using a dataset of nearly 5,000 state legislators and novel measures of their local roots. We hypothesize that state legislators with deep local roots in their districts should be less ideologically polarized than their less-rooted colleagues. This is precisely what we find. Using Shor-McCarty ideology measures, we show that the most locally rooted legislators are 16% less ideologically extreme than their unrooted counterparts. These effects are comparable to or exceed those of district partisanship, chamber seniority, or other legislator characteristics. Collectively, these findings show that legislators’ local roots not only affect their electoral fortunes, but also have major implications for legislative activity and party polarization.

We study the effects of increasing the transparency of parliamentary speeches on polarization and other types of MP behavior. We utilize the 1989 introduction of TV broadcasting to the Finnish government's parliamentary question hours held on the first Thursday of every month. By contrast, the question hours held on other Thursdays of the month were not televised until 2007, allowing us to use a difference-in-differences design. We find a positive effect on government–opposition divides, but no evidence that the TV broadcasting of question hours would affect left–right polarization, differences between individual parties, or within-party group differences. We also observe an increase in attendance and a negative effect on the number of speeches, but no effects on topics discussed, speech length or interruptions. Our results suggest there is no trade-off between increased transparency and left–right polarization. However, the presence of TV cameras can fuel other political divides and increase politicians’ effort.

Members of Congress reveal their preferences on an issue, not only in how they vote, but also how they spend their time. I introduce and validate a new measure of Congressional engagement in national defense, based on the amount of time and legislative energy a member spends on defense issues. I demonstrate the utility of this index through the reexamination of two key puzzles in the literature on Congressional defense preferences: how veterans and members with military interests vote relative to their peers. Using the National Defense Engagement Index (NDEI) I find that both veterans and members who have military industry in their districts are much more likely to be engaged with defense than other members of Congress. These results help to resolve discrepancies in previous literature and suggest the benefit of investigating member engagement as a key part of research on Congressional behavior.

Diversity in representation is a necessary component of legislatures, both normatively and for the best policy outcomes. Recently, women legislators have received more attention, as has their role in office. While scholars have examined the importance of recruiting more women to office, there is less emphasis on the retention of women as legislators. The key to expanding women's representation in state legislatures rests in both the recruitment and retention of women. We theorize that variation in institutional and personal support affects whether women choose to stay in the state legislature long term. To test this, we examine the turnover rates for women from all 50 US states to identify the barriers to service and how to mitigate them. Our analysis contributes an understanding of how to create a more supportive environment to aid the retention of women in office and speaks to institutional capacity and performance in the workplace.

We argue that legislators’ trade attitudes reflect constituents’ economic interests. Concretely, we expect that legislators from districts that are highly competitive in international trade should be more supportive of trade agreements than legislators from noncompetitive districts. The strength of this relationship should be lower in multimember districts and for right-wing legislators. Data based on surveys with 3,576 legislators from 16 Latin American countries and 48 legislative periods between 2005 and 2019 allow us to test these expectations. The surveys captured legislators’ attitudes towards trade agreements between their countries and the United States and the European Union, respectively, and the Pacific Alliance. We measure districts’ trade competitiveness with an innovative combination of household survey and trade data. The evidence supports all three expectations. The findings contribute to research on trade policymaking, public opinion towards trade, and legislator behavior.

We use data from Canadian legislatures to examine how legislative pension rules affect the propensity of incumbents to seek re-election. We predict that legislators with defined-benefits pensions are more likely to seek re-election than legislators without pensions. Once the legislator is vested (i.e., qualified) in the pension, however, this incentive disappears; indeed, pensions that accrue value quickly and can be collected at an early age, induce legislators to retire rather than seek re-election. Difference-in-differences estimates bear out these predictions: on average, legislators with defined benefits pensions are 11 percentage points more likely to seek re-election than legislators without pensions, whereas legislators who on vesting immediately qualify for a pension of 50% of their salary are 11 percentage points less likely to do so. These results show that legislative pensions alter the value that legislators place on re-election and, in doing so, they affect the accumulation of legislative professionalism and the strength of democratic accountability.