The Portuguese Parliament and Public Opinion: A Case for Reform?

During the past decade, the Portuguese political system has been under close scrutiny. As in other Western democracies, the topic of citizens' dissatisfaction with democratic institutions has been at the centre of a wide debate amongst public opinion and politicians. This debate has focused on parliament and parliamentary reform has often been seen as a way of enhancing parliament's image. However, as this note will show, there is no clear evidence that the Portuguese are dissatisfied with this institution. Indeed, this is still an under-researched area. Why is there an assumption that the Portuguese parliament has a negative image? And why should this have consequences for parliamentary reform? In the context of the creation of a Portuguese Election Study, this note aims to raise questions for future research on this topic. The note will look into the concept of legislative support, assess the evidence available on the Portuguese parliament's popularity and suggest indicators that would help to clarify the Portuguese views on this. It will also explore the connection between legislative support and the role of parliament, to enquire whether popularity indicators can make a case for parliamentary reform.     

Democratic consolidation and parliamentary reform in Russia, 1990–93

It is a commonly held view that the Russian parliament, created in the late period of perestroika, possessed powers and structures that were incongruous with the process of democratic consolidation.’ It is a mistake, however, to suggest that parliamentary deputies failed to appreciate the problems that hampered both the parliament's work and its relationship with executive organs. Many deputies in both the All Union and Russian assemblies were committed to the creation of a ‘professional parliament’, and numerous reforms were put forward to resolve what some deputies called the ‘crisis of parliamentarism’ in Russia. These reforms, proposed by democrats and conservatives alike, raise new questions about the aims and objectives of deputies in Russia's first post‐Soviet parliament. What did deputies understand by the notion of a ‘professional parliament'? In what form did deputies envisage the new system of government? Were the many, often competing, proposals for parliamentary reform conducive to the achievement of democratic consolidation in Russia? This article will attempt to answer these questions by examining the proposals for parliamentary reform in the Russian parliament between 1990 and 1993.     

Campaign War Chests and Challenger Quality in Senate Elections

This article presents the first comprehensive analysis of the role of war chests in U.S. Senate elections. Using data on races from 1980 to 2000, I demonstrate the effect of an incumbent senator's war chest on a campaign. War chests do not deter strong general‐election challengers and have an insubstantial or insignificant effect on primary elections, challenger spending, and other electoral variables. Also, war chests are not raised in anticipation of a tough electoral battle but are instead the result of money left over from the previous campaign.     

Presidential Support in the Russian State Duma

Recent comparative research on presidential systems has analyzed the ways in which presidents build majorities for their legislative agendas. Through an analysis of roll‐call votes from the 2000‐03 Russian State Duma on a set of issues reflecting President Putin's legislative agenda, I examine the impact of parliamentary party affiliation, policy preferences, issue type, and electoral mandate type on structuring floor support for the president. I also assess the implications of a mixed electoral system for building legislative coalitions in multiparty legislatures. Further, my findings shed light on Putin's recent reforms of the Duma's rules and procedures and the country's electoral system.     

Presidential Campaigning in the 2002 Congressional Elections

Theories involving coattails, surge and decline, presidential popularity, and the economy ascribe little importance to presidential efforts to influence congressional elections. Since such efforts do occur, we ask: What happens when a president campaigns for fellow partisans? We examined President George W. Bush's decisions to campaign for certain House candidates in 2002, and we assessed the effect of his visits on Republicans' electoral successes. Both the competitiveness of a race and the president's electoral self‐interest increased the likelihood of a visit on behalf of a candidate. Neither party loyalty nor presidential support in Congress had an effect. We conclude that presidential campaign visits significantly enhance candidates' electoral prospects.     

Proportional Representation and Female Parliamentarians

This article asks, “What effect does the choice of a nation's electoral system have on the gender composition of its parliament over time?” I find that the electoral system has an important part to play, but previous work has overstated, by factors of between two and three, how much of a difference an electoral system can make. This article contributes an updated nonlinear theory of female representation, an improved dataset on women's representation across space and time, and more modern statistical techniques than previously used in research on this question.     

Public Rewards and Innovation Policy: Lessons from the Eighteenth and Early Nineteenth Centuries

There has been renewed interest in recent years in using prizes and rewards to promote innovation. History has played a central role in public debates in the UK about the merits of such interventions, with the Longitude Prize 2014 being self‐consciously modelled on its eighteenth century precursor. Similarly, historical case studies have been used extensively in the scholarly literature in this area. However, it is striking that there has been little engagement with parliament's role generally in rewarding inventors in the eighteenth and early nineteenth centuries and how this formed part of a broader system of rewards. The article explores how this system operated and demonstrates that it formed an established part of the legal landscape for many decades. It considers the extent to which a more complete understanding of the historical use of prizes and rewards during the key period of Britain's industrialisation might inform current debates.     

Women's Substantive Representation: Defending Feminist Interests or Women's Electoral Preferences?

To what extent does the inclusion of marginalised groups in policymaking institutions influence policy outcomes? This article examines whether and under which conditions female legislators are more likely to represent women's interests compared with male legislators. Building on the literature on women's substantive representation, it is argued that the advocacy of women's interests by female representatives depends on a number of factors, namely party affiliation, contact with women's organisations, electoral district, and seniority. This argument is evaluated using vote-level fixed-effect models based on a unique data set from a direct democratic context that combines representatives' voting behaviour, women's voting preferences, and recommendations from feminist groups. The findings show that female legislators defend feminist interests more than their male colleagues but that they only marginally respond to women's electoral preferences. Moreover, gender has its most visible effect within the populist party.     

How the Party Can Win in Personal Vote Systems: The “Selectoral Connection” and Legislative Voting in Lithuania

Electoral rules can motivate politicians to cultivate a “personal vote” through their legislative voting records. However, I argue that candidate‐selection procedures have the ability to overpower these electoral incentives. This study—the first systematic study of how candidate selection and electoral rules interact—takes advantage of Lithuania's unique mixed electoral rules and fortuitous candidate‐selection procedures. Regardless of electoral rules, MPs whose future careers depend on getting renominated by central party leaders vote against the party less than those whose careers do not. This evidence of a “selectoral connection” suggests candidate‐selection procedures must be studied much more seriously.     

Integrating the view of the public into the formal legislative process: public reading stage in the UK House of Commons

Recent years have seen increasing calls to integrate the public's voice into the parliamentary process. This article examines the impact of public reading stage (PRS) on the UK Parliament's scrutiny of a bill. A new stage of the legislative process piloted by the House of Commons in February 2013, PRS invited the public to comment on a bill undergoing parliamentary scrutiny (the Children and Families Bill). The PRS was designed to encourage members of the public to participate in the scrutiny of legislation through a specially designed forum on parliament's website. Over 1000 comments were submitted. Drawing on a content analysis of the comments given by the public to the bill, complemented by interviews with members of parliament, key officials and PRS participants, it was found that although the public reading stage had an impressive response, it failed to make much of a tangible impact on the parliamentary scrutiny of the bill. This was largely due to the choice of bill being used for the pilot and its lack of appropriate integration into the formal legislative process.     

Constructing a New Scottish parliament for the ‘Europe of regions’: Can institutional engineering assure subsidiarity?

The creation of an elected parliament in Scotland raises questions for legislative scholars, among them how a parliamentary body representing a stateless nation within a member state of the European Union can influence and implement European legislation. One version of the ‘principle of subsidiarity’ states that decisions are taken as closely as possible to the citizen, encouraging assemblies throughout the EU to articulate and implement their own preferences in key policy areas. Reporting findings from a survey of the Scottish parliament's first cohort of legislators, this article identifies conflicting perceptions of subsidiarity, charts how best to pursue it, and evaluates the institutional norms, rules and procedures put in place to help secure it. Data demonstrate that preferences vary by level of MSP knowledge about European policy, by party membership and by method of election. Low levels of legislator knowledge combined with internal divisiveness constitute barriers to institutional strength in the pursuit of subsidiarity.     

Position Taking and Cosponsorship in the U.S. House

Bill cosponsorship has become an important part of the legislative and electoral process in the modern House of Representatives. Using interviews with congressional members and staff, I explain the role of cosponsorship as a signal to agenda setters and a form of position taking for constituents. Regression analysis confirms that cosponsoring varies with a member's electoral circumstances, institutional position, and state size, but generally members have adapted slowly to the introduction of cosponsorship to the rules and practice of the House.     

The Conditional Effect of Electoral Systems and Intraparty Candidate Selection Processes on Parties' Behavior

How do electoral systems and intraparty candidate selection procedures affect party unity? In this article, I distinguish theoretically and empirically between electoral systems and candidate selections and argue that the influence of selection processes on parties' behavior is conditional on electoral system (and vice versa). Measuring parties' unity using Rice and weighted Rice scores, and applying hierarchical models to a new data set of 249 parties in 24 countries, I find support for the claim that the influence of selection processes on behavior is greater under electoral systems that encourage personal vote‐seeking incentives than under electoral systems that encourage party centeredness.     

MPs and their e-Newsletters: Winning Votes by Promoting Constituency Service

Commentators are divided on the electoral effect of constituency service, whether it provides unfair advantage or has limited electoral impact. The arrival of the Internet has added to this debate. This research note considers how pioneering MPs are using e-newsletters effectively to communicate their constituency service. A web-hosted survey of subscribers to two MPs' e-newsletters, with over 1,100 respondents, was conducted. The data suggest that receiving an MP's e-newsletter did have an effect on subscribers' voting behaviour at the 2005 General Election. Rather than something to fear, this vote-winning capacity of an e-newsletter may actually encourage MPs to have more dialogue between MPs and constituents.     

Third Parties,Elections, and Roll‐Call Votes: The Populist Party and the Late Nineteenth‐Century U.S. Congress

What effect do electorally successful third parties have on congressional roll‐call votes? There is widespread belief among scholars that third parties influence the policies of the major parties, but there is little systematic evidence of this influence. I exploit the unique historical context surrounding the Populist Party formation in 1892 to examine the effect of the Populist Party's electoral success on congressional roll‐call votes related to Populist issues. The results are consistent with two claims. First, co‐optation of the Populist Party's issues occurred even before the formation of the party. Second, the co‐optation of Populist policies does not appear to be correlated with the electoral success of the Populist candidates.     

Legislators and interest groups: Some observations on the Israeli scene

Public administration in Britain is expected to operate according to the principles of good administration. However, in a climate of efficiency and value‐for‐money, agreement as to what these principles require can no longer be assumed. In particular, there may be differences between the principles supported by those engaged in the administrative process and the requirements that an increasingly interventionist judiciary see as appropriate. These differences would seem best resolved by a Code of Good Administration, the drawing up of which could be undertaken by the Select Committee on Public Administration and represent parliament's response to judicial/executive tension. Such a code would prevent the erosion of the principles of good administration, act as an authoritative document for the courts and provide select committees with a further mechanism by which to hold government to account.     

Electoral Security as a Determinant of Legislator Activity, 1832–1918: New Data and Methods for Analyzing British Political Development

We consider the relationship between a Member of Parliament's electoral environment and his strategic choice of legislative activities between the First and Fourth Reform Acts in Britain. We argue that voters and party institutions put cross‐cutting pressures on members during this time, and that legislators calibrated their behavior in accordance with the marginality of their seat. We gather a massive new dataset documenting MPs’ biographical information, electoral records, roll calls, and speeches. The extent of MPs’ speech making and voting (our measures of legislative activity) vary with electoral security in ways consistent with our theoretical priors for Westminster systems.     

Uncivic Society as a Sociopolitical Phenomenon in Ukraine: Reflections of the Social Character of the "Average" Ukrainian in the Electoral Process

Among the many remarkable peculiarities of the electoral process in Ukraine during the eighteen-month electoral cycle (from the parliamentary elections in March 1998 to the presidential elections in October-November 1999), the features of most interest to political scientists are those that, if properly explained, will enable us, first, to outline the basic parameters of citizens' behavior under the political regime that has evolved during the last ten years and, second, to determine the value orientations and the potential of the principal social and political actors. Above all, I have in mind the sociopolitical and sociocultural components of the elections or, to use a term of Erich Fromm's, the social character [1] of what is called the mean statistical (average) Ukrainian.     

The Limits of Electoral Control: Evidence from Last‐Term Politicians

In modern democracies, politicians' accountability is often linked to the disciplining mechanism of electoral control. For politicians in their final term, this mechanism is impaired. Using a novel data set covering 910 members of the UK House of Commons active within the period 1997–2010, we investigate how reduced electoral control affects last‐term MPs' trade‐off between work effort inside parliament, leisure, and outside interests. Our main contributions lie in providing the first explicit consideration of (1) MPs' final‐term intra‐/extraparliamentary work balance and (2) MPs' reasons for leaving parliament (i.e., retirement, career change, electoral defeat). These extensions provide important fresh insights concerning the boundaries of elections' disciplining power.