Legislative Studies Quarterly最新文献

Politicians use social media to engage directly with the public using diverse communication styles including aggressive or uncivil language. Yet, little is known about gender differences in politicians' communication styles and their subsequent online reactions. In this study, we investigate whether women politicians who use critical or insulting language on Twitter face disproportionate backlash compared to men politicians. To test our hypothesis, we employ a self-developed supervised language classifier to categorize @-mentions of parliamentarians into two incivility levels: criticism and insults. We find that men and women MPs tweet with a similar level of incivility, including both critical and insulting language. For critical language, we find that both men and women MPs receive more critical responses when sending a higher number of critical tweets. In the case of insulting language, we find evidence of a gendered pattern: Compared to men MPs, women MPs receive a higher number of insulting tweets but can reduce such responses to a small degree when being more insulting themselves. These findings underscore that female MPs navigate a more hostile online environment that compels them to use more insulting language as a means of self-defense.

An important, but poorly understood issue in modern American politics is the conservative wing of the Republican party's interest in repealing legislation. Although existing work shows that conservative Republican elites focus more on repeals than in past decades, it remains unclear what the public thinks about this governance approach. We examine this issue with a survey experiment asking respondents to evaluate four policy proposals in Congress, holding the “ends” constant but randomizing whether they are achieved by enacting a new law or repealing an existing law. Our results show that conservatives favor repeals as a legislative tool more so than liberals and moderates. We also show that this is the result of ideological, rather than partisan considerations. Our findings shed light on both the modern Republican party's approach to governance and a key issue at the nexus of mass attitudes, ideology, and legislative procedure.

Despite a long history of physician service in the U.S. Congress, scholars have not yet provided a systematic study of physician members of Congress (PMCs) behavior once elected. Using publicly available data, the authors built a database of all PMCs, including years served, gender, and party affiliation since 1921, merging these data with information on PMC lawmaking activities since 1973. We show that, relative to other members, PMCs are substantially more likely to sponsor and have their health policies passed relative to other members. Further, PMCs are 66% more legislatively effective on health policy matters relative to other members. We show that these health policy effectiveness gains are isolated to health policy making and are not driven by committee assignments or ideological moderation. This work expands on the literatures related to the descriptive and substantive representation of occupational and economic class groupings as well as lawmaking effectiveness.

Self-presentation in Congress is more nationalized, with digital constituencies on platforms such as Twitter offering new reputation-building opportunities. Digital constituencies transform traditional expectations of constituent communication, challenging Richard Fenno's theory that representatives adopt an “expansionist” style with constituents during early, vulnerable phases of their tenure. In a digital era that encourages a more national approach, we question how Fenno's distinction between expansionist and protectionist phases of connecting with constituents applies to reputation-building with digital constituencies. While electorally vulnerable senators still seek to expand their presentation among geographic constituents, digital platforms, such as Twitter, incentivize them to protect their reputation among a digital constituency. We analyzed senators' Twitter communications from 2013 to 2023. We find the electoral vulnerabilities of Fenno's expansionist local model are associated with a protectionist model of engagement with digital constituencies on Twitter. Our study sheds light on the significance of online reputation management and its implications for representing a media-influenced, modern Congress.

In studies on Populism, extensive discussion has mounted around whether the phenomenon represents a threat to democracy or a corrective force. In line with this concern, we examine whether the populist attitudes held by legislators are related to their opinions on the functioning of and satisfaction with three central aspects of governance: (I) democracy itself; (II) its institutions; and (III) the separation of powers. Using the ideational approach and survey information collected for the PELA-USAL database, we first measure the populist attitudes of legislators in 12 Latin American countries. We then test through multivariate analysis two theoretical arguments: (1) that populism is relatively hostile to democracy and its institutions; and (2) that ideological extremism and the situation of the legislator in the government/opposition dynamic serve as moderators (enhancers) of that hostility. The results suggest that the populist attitudes of these legislators are indeed significantly connected to lower levels of trust and satisfaction with democracy and its institutions and that populism in combination with ideological extremism sharpens that critical perspective, while a legislator's affiliation with the ruling party or coalition in government tends to temper it.

In this paper, we investigate the determinants of contact between citizens and Members of Parliament (MPs) in Africa by combining theories of contact developed in advanced Western democracies with theories of clientelism developed in the Global South. Based on Afrobarometer data matched with constituency-level electoral data, we provide a first analysis of the determinants of citizen–MP contact in 32 African countries, encompassing a broad range of regime types. We find that smaller districts and single-member districts strengthen contact across regime types, while electoral competitiveness is only positively associated with contact in more democratic settings. In line with clientelist theories of public resource access, district links to national ruling coalitions are positively associated with contact, but we find little evidence of partisan bias. Overall, we find that contact theories travel remarkably well across regions and regime types, and we caution against interpreting clientelistic contacts as harmful for democracy.

This paper explores how legislators use social media, specifically investigating whether their posts reflect the concerns expressed by their legislative party peers in an anonymous survey. Utilizing data from Twitter (now X), we compare legislators' social media posts with their responses in a survey of legislators in Latin America. We propose a novel and scalable method for analyzing political communications, employing OpenAI for topic identification in statements and BERTopic analysis to identify clusters of political communication. This approach enables a thorough and detailed examination of these topics over time and across political parties. Applying our method to statements made by members of the Chilean Congress, we observe a general alignment between the preferences stated in surveys by elites and the prominence of these issues on Twitter. This result validates social media platforms (particularly Twitter) as a tool for predicting politicians' preferences. Our methodological approach offers a scalable tool for analyzing political rhetoric over time.

Today, rank-and-file members are increasingly removed from the legislative process and often rely on congressional leaders for information to discuss major legislative decisions with constituents. As a result, preparing constituent communication materials has become an institutionalized responsibility for party and committee leaders, leading to a partisan discussion of legislation. Using a mixed-methods approach of computational text analysis and elite interviews, I demonstrate how members of Congress use leader-led, partisan messages for constituent communication. Echoing prior work on asymmetric partisanship, I find that Republican leaders are more likely to encourage party-centric messaging, and rank-and-file Republicans, particularly in the House, are more likely to adopt party messaging. The findings illustrate the institutional power of party leaders in a centralized Congress, as well as the role that constituent communication plays in encouraging and maintaining asymmetric polarization.

Centralized agenda control is a feature of many parliaments, with important consequences for the conduct and outcomes of legislative politics. Much previous work has thus sought to understand the emergence of centralized agenda-setting rules. We extend this literature by studying the “Balfour reforms”, which centralized agenda control in the early twentieth century UK House of Commons. Our aim is to probe a conventional claim in the existing literature: that the opposition supported these reforms. This is a counter-intuitive claim, which rests on relatively little direct evidence. We analyze historical roll-call data from 1902 to assess how far the opposition supported agenda centralization. We complement this analysis by examining attempted amendments and speech contributions to parliamentary debates. Contrary to the standard view, we find that the primary opposition party consistently resisted these reforms. This evidence of controversy rather than consensus revises our understanding of a key milestone in the development of the Westminster parliament, and contributes to the wider literature on the choice of agenda-setting procedures.

Classic theories of political ambition assume relatively stable and programmatic party systems. However, in many parts of the world, ‘fluid’ or ‘inchoate’ party systems do not provide ambitious legislators with the electoral benefits associated with stable party brands. In this paper, we examine ambition in fluid party systems: What is the frequency of party switching for legislators who seek re-election, and what are their characteristics? What incentives do parties create to push away or retain legislators? And which parties do ambitious legislators seek out? Using a systems approach, we argue that in fluid party systems, legislators' office-seeking behavior is driven by their attitudes towards parties and their constituents, their prospective evaluation of party performance, and ideology. Incentives for politicians to switch parties act as negative feedback mechanisms which keep the party system stuck in a fluid state. We test the determinants of party switching using two data sources from Ecuador: a public records dataset of every legislator who earned re-election from 1979 to 2021, and the Parliamentary Elites in Latin America (PELA) surveys of all legislators from 1994 to 2017. Both sources distinguish between switchers and non-switchers. The results support the conclusion that ambitious legislators in fluid party systems are strategic actors that seek or keep parties to maximize their probability of re-election—and thereby further exacerbate the party system's fluidity.