Legislative Studies Quarterly最新文献

Why do some legislators continue to obstruct despite public support for compromise? We suggest that legislator gender and voter partisanship are key but often overlooked determinants of how voters process obstructive behaviors by legislators. Since Republicans value masculinity more than Democrats, and obstruction is a masculine behavior, we theorize that Republicans are more likely to reward obstructive behavior, especially from women legislators who are presumed to be less masculine. Using a conjoint experiment, we find evidence supporting our theory. Republicans evaluate women legislators more negatively until the perceived obstructiveness of their behavior increases. Meanwhile, perceived obstructiveness has no gendered effects among Democrats. These results suggest that Republican women should be more likely to endorse obstruction, which we find evidence of by analyzing email newsletters issued by members of the US House and Senate from 2009 to 2020. These findings explain partisan and gendered asymmetries in obstructive behaviors that counter conventional notions that women are disproportionately consensus builders.

Spatial models of legislative organization predict that elected leaders will be moderates with respect to their constituency, the party caucus. However, empirical studies of leader positioning in Congress find mixed evidence that this is the case. This paper expands the analysis to state legislatures, using an original dataset of 2056 top chamber and party leaders in 50 states from 1999 to 2023. Simulations reveal that state legislative leaders are consistently moderate relative to their caucus. Furthermore, while Democratic leaders consistently occupy the moderate left side of their caucus, Republican leaders do not show the same pattern, with some even positioned to the left of their caucus median. Beyond this overall pattern, there is substantial variation in leader-caucus ideological divergence. The analysis shows that increasingly distinct and homogeneous majority parties—fulfilling the conditions of conditional party government theory—are consistently associated with leader moderation. However, this effect is stronger for Republicans than for Democrats, which is inconsistent with the theory's predictions of party symmetry. Finally, using a new dataset on majority party roll rates, the spatial divergence of majority party leaders from their caucuses is found to lead to significant failures of agenda control, with a substantial increase in majority party rolls for moderate Republicans but not for Democrats. This finding contradicts the predictions of party cartel theory, which suggests no differences in agenda control based on leader ideology or party. The evidence consistently shows substantial asymmetry between Republican and Democratic leaders.

Research on lawmaking suggests enactments are constructed in various ways. Although multiple approaches are documented in the literature, political scientists do not know which are used more often. In this paper, I examine how laws are created by studying seven modern landmark laws enacted during various policymaking windows. I use a text reuse approach to recursively trace each policy idea in these enactments to the original version proposed in Congress. My results show that (1) laws vary dramatically in how they are constructed, even within similar bill types; (2) when ideas linger on Congress's agenda, it is usually only for a few years, and (3) about 15% of ideas are added at the end of the legislative process where tracking the sponsor is impossible. These findings highlight the dynamism in bill construction. Among these laws, there is no “typical process,” many members contribute at many stages, and some of the largest, most consequential enactments have portions with unknown origins. The results contribute nuance to our understanding of legislative effectiveness, how it might be measured, and insight into how members engage in the legislative process when they anticipate a policy window opening.

Negotiations in bicameral settings face the risk of gridlock when veto players' preferences diverge on the ideological (left–right) dimension. In the European Union (EU), a high proportion of legislation appears gridlocked yet is nevertheless adopted. We argue that ideological gridlock is resolved through the supply of and trust in legislative concessions. These are made to uphold supranational cooperation, to use issue linkage, and under “permissive consensus” across EU member states. We test our argument using a new dataset on amendments and repeals of existing EU laws (1999–2015). Our results demonstrate that elites' preferences on supranational cooperation as well as the potential for issue linkage help explain legislative success despite gridlock. High public Euroskepticism decreases the likelihood of compromise because lawmakers fear domestic electoral backlash to EU-level concessions. We contribute to established debates about legislative bargaining under complexity and propose that politicized cooperation can diminish problem-solving capacity across federations, multi-level states, and international organizations.

Delegation of powers from the legislature to the executive branch is a nearly ubiquitous feature of modern lawmaking. However, much of what scholars know about delegation is gleaned from an exclusive focus on landmark legislation. We introduce a method to identify delegating language across a larger universe of legislation. Using an active learning convolutional neural network on bill text, we classify bill sections by their delegation content, applying an iteratively improving coding scheme that enhances existing supervised learning approaches. We develop a novel dataset that allows us to answer important questions about interbranch relations. First, we find that legislator ideology, partisanship, and institutional position affect the delegatory content of introduced legislation. We then explore the role of delegation in the advancement of bills through the legislative process. Finally, we evaluate the ally principle, finding that variation in delegation is driven by cross-agency differences in ideology and structural independence.

Pre-electoral coalitions are common across diverse political contexts. In this letter, I examine their impact on one of the most consequential functions of political parties: the candidate selection process. Focusing on Mexican state legislators, I analyze how pre-electoral coalitions shape incumbent renomination decisions. I outline a multi-stage process in which parties assess district characteristics, incumbent attributes, and the electoral competition. Using fixed-effects penalized maximum likelihood logistic regression, I find that parties prioritize different factors at different stages. The results show that while vote share and candidate characteristics do not influence renomination decisions in coalition districts, they are crucial in determining whether a party retains nomination rights. In contrast, in non-coalition districts, candidate characteristics play a key role in renomination decisions. These findings demonstrate how coalition dynamics can reshape parties' renomination strategies.