Legislative Studies Quarterly最新文献

Previous studies have demonstrated the common occurrence of constituency focus in parliamentary questions, which is most often attributed to electoral incentives. If an electoral system makes use of a single nationwide district, however, these district-oriented electoral incentives do not apply. MPs may still substantively represent a geographical region, because they are motivated to stand up for a specific region for other reasons. This article explores the extent to which Dutch MPs pay attention in parliamentary questions and debates to specific regions. We find that those with stronger ties to a region, and especially MPs who reside in a region, are more likely to mention it in parliamentary questions and speeches. In addition, we find that this effect is stronger for provinces where regional attachment among residents is relatively stronger.

Most research on corruption attitudes focuses exclusively on voters, despite the strategic role of political elites in anticorruption efforts. To fill this research gap, we study the drivers of perceptions of corruption among legislators, using comparative longitudinal survey data of over 3000 policymakers in 18 Latin American countries. We develop a novel theoretical framework based on the influence of motivated reasoning and the moderating effect of the economic context. Our results suggest that legislators supporting the government systematically perceive lower levels of corruption in contexts of economic growth. Conversely, opposition legislators consistently consider corruption an important issue, regardless of the macroeconomic situation. Since the perceptions of corruption for legislators supporting the government are dependent on the economic context, our results show that both government and opposition legislators are likely to perceive corruption as a relevant issue during economic downturns, suggesting that economic crises can open windows of opportunity for anticorruption reforms.

Women in political office outperform men in legislative activity and constituent services. Scholars have identified two potential explanations for this overperformance: women are higher quality candidates when they run for office and women face elevated voter expectations to win elections. We use the presence of term limits to examine how these two justifications for women's overperformance produce downstream effects. While designed to strike a blow to entrenched systems of power, term limits reduce the time that legislators spend on constituent service and legislative output, including bill sponsorship, votes, and committee work. We use the effects of term limits as a tool for understanding the two paths to women's overperformance, using data on over 6000 legislators serving in term-limited states. We find more evidence for the quality candidate hypothesis than the voter expectations hypothesis. While term limits degrade men's performance in office, women officeholders continue to overperform even under this institutional constraint. Our findings that women's overperformance is more likely due to their higher quality have implications for efforts to increase the representativeness of political bodies, the quality of representation in state legislatures, and the gendered consequences of institutional reforms.

While African legislatures have been receiving increasing academic attention in recent years, efforts to expand our understanding of these institutional bodies have been hampered by a dearth of reliable quantitative data regarding their activity and output. To rectify this issue, we have collected and issue-classified data on the legislative agenda in 13 African countries. We leverage this new dataset to explore how democratic development affects the legislative agenda. We show that legislatures in more democratic countries have a larger, broader, and more dynamic agenda, and we propose an extensive future research agenda for legislative politics in Africa.

Gender quota laws, which require political parties to include women among candidate lists, now exist at the subnational level in 15 European countries. Do they increase the inclusion of women in local legislative processes and facilitate the representation of women's interests? To make progress on these questions, we leverage data from the “most similar” Italian region of Campania, which implemented a quota law in 2010, and Calabria, which had no quota law. Using a mixed-method approach, we pair quantitative analysis of all legislative bills proposed and passed in both regional councils from 2007 to 2017 with qualitative interviews with regional councillors. We find that Campania's gender quota law increased women's inclusion in the legislative process, but little evidence that this translated into substantive policy gains for women. Our qualitative evidence suggests that arcane legislative processes, male-dominated leadership roles, and a masculinist culture prevent women's policy interests from being prioritized.

Congressional staff have often been called the “invisible force” behind members of Congress, earning themselves the title of “unelected lawmakers.” In this paper, I explore the link between United States Senate committees' level of productivity and the experience of their staff. Utilizing publicly reported data on Senate staff experience and a new measure of committee productivity I find that a committee's average years of staff experience is a significant predictor of committee legislative effectiveness. I find, however, that greater levels of staff experience only increase committee effectiveness when assessing the experience of senior or high-ranking staff. As non-senior staff experience increases, however, committees become less effective. These findings suggest that when making hiring decisions, Senate chairs and ranking members should prioritize years of experience in their senior staff while foregoing experienced general and administrative staff in order to achieve greater levels of committee productivity.

Trust is a key part of any political system. Given the very different experiences of Black people and White people in the United States, it is likely that the nature and contours of political trust varies widely from one racial group to the other. In this article, we take advantage of a specially commissioned 2018 survey to compare Black and White trust in American legislative institutions (Congress and the state legislatures). Thanks to an oversample, we also are able to zero in on variations across Black respondents, making it possible to identify the variables that push legislative trust up or down within that demographic. Our findings indicate that, relative to Whites, Black individuals are significantly more trusting of Congress and that Black people who go to church tend to be more trusting of legislative institutions while those who have experienced racism in their lives are less trusting.

Studies of ambition often frame decisions to run for reelection, seek higher office, or retire in terms of the nature of those opportunities and the risks associated with them. However, career decisions can also be framed in terms of the value of one's present position, which depends on what we refer to as institutional attachments. In contrast to institutional positions (leadership, committee chairs), institutional attachments relate to social position in the legislature. In this article, we explore how factors related to institutional attachments influence career decisions. Specifically, we ask whether a legislator's cohort, including its size, compatibility, and experience in possessing majority status affect the propensity to exhibit static ambition. Looking at a sample of more than 5500 state legislative open-seat opportunities in 47 states between 2003 and 2016, we find some but not all these traits are predictive of career decisions.