Government alternation and legislative agenda setting

Recent studies of the legislative process have put forward a number of plausible hypotheses regarding the distribution of agenda‐setting power. These hypotheses have guided scholars in identifying those conflicts and actors that are crucial to explaining legislative change and the wording of legislation. However, this has not yet led to a better understanding of the choice of specific agenda‐setting rules. Why does the cabinet in some parliamentary democracies enjoy an undisputed role, while in others the parliament continues to play the role of co‐protagonist? This article attempts to answer this question by looking at some well‐known features of party systems. It is argued that in pivotal party systems, with limited government alternation, it is much more difficult to strengthen the government vis‐à‐vis the parliament. One factor prevents the procedural and institutional predominance of the cabinet under these circumstances: the lack of opportunities for, and expectations of, large and controversial policy change.     

When Are Agenda Setters Valuable?

Why do industries donate money to legislative campaigns when roll‐call votes suggest that donors gain nothing in return? I argue that corporate donors may shape policy outcomes by influencing powerful agenda setters in the early stages of lawmaking. On the basis of a new data set of more than 45,000 individual state legislator sessions (1988–2012), I document how agenda control is deemed valuable to legislators and groups seeking influence on policy. Employing a difference‐in‐differences design, I assess the revealed price, as measured by campaign contributions, that firms are willing to pay for access to committee and party leaders and document how this price varies across industries and institutions. The results indicate that industries systematically funnel money to the legislative agenda setters by whom they are regulated, and to those endowed with important procedural powers. I document that the value of agenda‐setter positions has increased dramatically in recent years. Finally, exploiting changes in state laws, I show that relaxing contribution limits significantly benefits committee chairs and party leaders more so than it does other legislators, suggesting that agenda setters have strong incentives to obstruct restrictive campaign finance reforms.     

Coalition Government and Committee Power

Recent research suggests that committees in parliamentary democracies may, at least partly, be endogenous to the prevalence of coalition government. In this article, I examine the conditions under which parliamentary majorities reform legislative rules to expand or reduce committee power. I expect that, ceteris paribus, the greater the conflict inside the governing coalition, the higher the probability that parties in government will adopt reforms expanding committee power and the lower the chance that they will implement changes reducing such power. These expectations are tested using original new data on the reforms of committee agenda powers undertaken in eight European states within 20 years from democratic transition. I find some evidence to support the endogeneity of committee power to the ideological heterogeneity of parliamentary government.     

Ideological Competition and Conflict in the Judicial Hierarchy

Circuit splits, or conflicting rules across multiple U.S. Courts of Appeals, have important policy implications and dramatic effects on Supreme Court case selection, yet we know little about the incentives ideological lower courts face when deciding whether to initiate conflict. This article develops a formal model of a judicial hierarchy where lower court judges are subject to review by a high court with distaste for unresolved conflict, termed “split-intolerance,” and with uncertain preferences over policy. Lower courts may compete by investing costly effort in legal quality to make their rules more attractive. In equilibrium, lower courts may initiate conflict even when the odds of success before the high court are remote. Surprisingly, lower courts grow more likely to create conflict as the high court's split-intolerance increases; however, split-intolerance can also incentivize greater lower court effort. I present qualitative evidence illustrating the model's explanatory power.     

Dynamics of Policymaking: Stepping Back to Leap Forward,Stepping Forward to Keep Back

We study dynamic policymaking when today's policy agreement becomes tomorrow's status quo, agents account for the consequences of today's policies for future policy outcomes, and there is uncertainty about who will hold future political power to propose and veto future policy changes. Today's agenda setter holds back from fully exploiting present opportunities to move policy toward her ideal point whenever future proposer and veto players are likely to be aligned either in favor of reform or against it. Otherwise, agenda setters advance their short‐run interests. Optimal proposals can vary discontinuously and nonmonotonically with political fundamentals.     

Cheap talk or incredible commitment? (Mis)calculating transparency and anti‐corruption

Why do “tainted” politicians in high‐corruption countries adopt transparency and anti‐corruption policies that risk exposing their wrongdoing? Using the cases of freedom of information and public asset disclosure in Romania, we assess three explanations: that these policies are meant to be mere window dressing, facilitate bottom‐up monitoring, or ensure access to information for the ruling party if it loses power. We find that decision makers adopt transparency and anti‐corruption policies because they want to signal their integrity and because they underestimate their consequences. Because they assume they will be able to control implementation, decision makers discount the potential costs of damaging information being released. Sustained political competition can keep corruption and lack of transparency on the public and political agenda, shifting attention from policy adoption to implementation and leading to increased compliance. Since politicians miscalculate the consequences of their actions, signals that are intended to be cheap can end up being quite costly.     

The Three As of Government Formation: Appointment,Allocation, and Assignment

How does the Prime Minister organize her government so that she can implement her policy agenda? In our model, a Prime Minister appoints individuals to her cabinet, allocates their portfolios, and assigns their policy tasks—that is, she decides the relevant jurisdiction of departments and the type of proposals a minister can make. Upon appointment, ministers obtain expertise on policies specific to their jurisdiction and strategically communicate this information to the Prime Minister before a policy is implemented. Assignment allows the Prime Minister to implement her agenda even when she is constrained to appoint ministers whose policy preferences are far from her own. A Prime Minister weakly prefers a diverse cabinet. In equilibrium, the Prime Minister is indifferent between delegating policy or implementing policy herself.     

How Do Interest Groups Seek Access to Committees?

Concerns that interest groups use their financial resources to distort the democratic process are long‐standing. Surprisingly, though, firms spend little money on political campaigns, and roughly 95% of publicly traded firms in the United States have never contributed to a political campaign. Do interest groups seek political access through their modest contributions, or are these contributions only a minor and forgettable part of the political process? In this article, we present comprehensive evidence that interest groups are extremely sophisticated in the way they make campaign contributions. We collect a new data set on U.S. state legislative committee assignments and legislator procedural powers from 1988 to 2014, merged with campaign finance data, in order to analyze over 440,000 candidate–committee observations across 99 legislatures. Using a series of difference‐in‐differences designs based on changes in individual legislators' positions in the legislature, we not only show that interest groups seek out committee members, but we also show that they value what we call indirect access. When a legislator gains procedural powers, interest groups reallocate considerable amounts of money to her. The results reveal how interest groups in a wide range of democratic settings seek to influence the policy process not only by seeking direct access to policy makers but by seeking indirect access to legislative procedure as well.     

The Tax Reform Agenda in Australia

This paper applies concepts developed in the Policy Agendas Project (PAP) literature to an analysis of Australian tax policy over the post war period. It argues that a major turning point in the Australian tax policy agenda occurred during the second term of the Hawke Government (1984‐87). Beyond this turning point, and despite the fierce partisan conflict concerning tax policy over the past two decades, there has been remarkaly little difference between Australia's two major parties at the level of substantive policy content. The Australian tax policy agenda over the post war period can be characterised by remarkable policy continuity punctuated by a period of change in the mid 1980s when structural change in the international political economy precipitated unprecedented domestic liberalisation.     

Ministerial Responsiveness in Westminster Systems: Institutional Choices and House of Commons Debate, 1832–1915

In Westminster systems, governments enjoy strong agenda‐setting powers but are accountable to an inquisitorial opposition. This article provides insights into the origins of this arrangement from the British House of Commons, drawing primarily on a new data set of a half million parliamentary speeches. We show that, according to a novel measure we develop, government ministers became more responsive to opposition members of parliament in the same period that the government's agenda power was most conclusively strengthened—roughly, the two decades culminating in Balfour's “railway timetable” of 1902. We argue that this increase in responsiveness helps to explain why opposition members of parliament acceded to reductions in their procedural power. We thus highlight a link between government strength and opposition scrutiny in the historical development of the Westminster system.     

Within‐party Allocation of Committee Seats: Evidence from Danish Local Elections

This article examines two traditional and four new explanations of committee composition. Using survey data on 541 Danish local politicians' pre‐election committee seat preferences and their actual post‐election committee seats, it is found that politicians are more likely to have their committee seat preferences fulfilled the less their preferences for the committees' policy domains differ from those of their fellow party members and the more specialised they are within the jurisdiction area of their preferred committee. Thus, the ex ante control of committee members sometimes observed in the American context is also relevant in the very different institutional setting of Danish local government. Moreover, a number of other explanations are found to be of equal relevance. In particular, individual‐level popular support is important to politicians' committee seat preference fulfilment and seats are distributed among party members in order to assure that everybody, at least to some extent, obtains a post that they find attractive. The findings thus suggest that ex ante control of committee members is but one of many concerns of parties. Accordingly, scholars should broaden their attention to other aspects of committee seat allocation, such as fair share norms and the popular support of politicians.     

Valence politics and electoral choice in a new democracy: The case of Taiwan

After two peaceful alternations of political power in a single decade, Taiwan is a democratic success story, demonstrating levels of party competition, turnout rates and patterns of civic engagement similar to those in mature Western democracies. What factors drive electoral choice in Taiwan's new democracy? This paper addresses this question by testing rival models of voting behavior using the Taiwan Elections and Democratization Study (TEDS) 2008 presidential election survey data and the 2010 mayoral election survey data. Analyses show that, similar to their counterparts in mature democracies, Taiwanese voters place more emphasis on the performance of political parties and their leaders in delivering policies designed to address valence issues concerning broadly shared policy goals than on position issues or more general ideological stances that divide the electorate. Findings demonstrating the strength of the valence politics model of electoral choice in Taiwan closely resemble the results of analyses of competing models of voting behavior in Western countries such as Great Britain and the United States.     

How mass media attract political elites’ attention

Political agenda‐setting research has shown that policy makers are responsive vis‐à‐vis media priorities. However, the mechanisms behind this effect have remained understudied so far. In particular, agenda‐setting scholars have difficulties determining to what extent politicians react to media coverage purely because of the information it contains (information effect), and to what extent the effect is driven not by what the media say but by the fact that certain information is in the media (media channel effect), which is valued for its own sake – for instance, because media coverage is considered to be a reflection of public opinion. By means of a survey‐embedded experiment with Belgian, Canadian and Israeli political elites (N = 410), this study tests whether the mere fact that an issue is covered by the news media causes politicians to pay attention to this issue. It shows that a piece of information gets more attention from politicians when it comes via the media rather than an identical piece of information coming via a personal e‐mail. This effect occurs largely across the board: it is not dependent on individual politician characteristics.     

Agenda‐Setting at the Energy‐Water Nexus: Constructing and Maintaining a Policy Monopoly in U.S. Hydraulic Fracturing Regulation

Despite calls to increase federal oversight of hydraulic fracturing (HF), the U.S. Congress has maintained a regulatory system in which environmental regulatory authority is devolved to the states. We argue that this system is characterized by a long‐standing “policy monopoly”: a form of stability in policy agenda‐setting in which a specific manner of framing and regulating a policy issue becomes hegemonic. Integrating theories on agenda‐setting and environmental discourse analysis, we develop a nuanced conceptualization of policy monopoly that emphasizes the significance of regulatory history, public perceptions, industry–government relations, and environmental “storylines.” We evaluate how a policy monopoly in U.S. HF regulation has been constructed and maintained through a historical analysis of oil and gas regulation and a discourse analysis of eleven select congressional energy committee hearings. This research extends scholarship on agenda‐setting by better illuminating the importance of political economic and geographic factors shaping regulatory agendas and outcomes.     

Winnowing in Environmental Policy: Jurisdictional Challenges and Opportunities

While scholars developed an understanding of the processes moving issues from the systemic to the institutional agenda, we know little about the inner workings of the institutional agenda. Winnowing theory addresses this gap by examining the leadership, bill sponsor, and contextual factors helping bills move through the institutional agenda. By expanding winnowing theory to incorporate a fragmented policy domain, the environment, we find that multiple referral status actually helps a bill's chances of receiving attention and passing through the committee.     

Streams and stages: Reconciling Kingdon and policy process theory

Use of metaphors is a staple feature of how we understand policy processes – none more so than the use of ‘policy stages’/'cycles’ and ‘multiple streams’. Yet even allowing for the necessary parsimony of metaphors, the former is often criticised for its lack of ‘real world’ engagement with agency, power, ideology, turbulence and complexity, while the latter focuses only on agenda‐setting but at times has been utilised, with limited results, to understand later stages of the policy process. This article seeks to explore and advance the opportunities for combining both and applying them to the policy‐formation and decision‐making stages of policy making. In doing so it examines possible three, four and five stream models. It argues that a five stream confluence model provides the highest analytical value because it retains the simplicity of metaphors (combining elements of two of the most prominent models in policy studies) while also helping capture some of the more complex and subtle aspects of policy processes, including policy styles and nested systems of governance.     

The Separation of Powers and Supreme Court Agenda Setting

This study employs the first systematic, empirical analysis that relies on archival data to examine whether the separation of powers influences justices' agenda votes. It spatially models how justices set the Court's agenda under a sincere approach as well as an SOP approach and compares the competing expectations derived therefrom. The results suggest that legislative and executive preferences fail to influence justices' votes. Across every model tested, the data show justices uninfluenced by the separation of powers. These results provide a strong rejoinder to SOP models, since the Court's agenda stage is the most likely stage of the decision‐making process to show signs of an SOP effect.     

The Conditional Effect of Specialized Governance on Public Policy

What are the policy consequences of creating functionally specialized venues for decision making? This study directly compares special districts with general purpose local governments to evaluate how specialization influences responsiveness and policy choice. Previous theorizing has assumed that specialization should have the same effect across all policy contexts. The findings presented here show instead that its effect is conditional on the status of public problems. Objective conditions related to a policy issue more strongly influence the responsiveness of multipurpose legislatures than that of special districts; thus the institutional effect of functional specialization varies with the severity of the public problem. The result is that governing structure matters most where problems are least severe. The findings demonstrate the importance of considering policy context when analyzing the effects of political institutions.     

“A Beckon to the Makings,Workings and Doings of Human Beings”: The Critical Pragmatism of John Forester

John Forester's important research project of developing a critical pragmatist approach to planning and policy analysis now spans two decades. Common themes that give direction and coherence to his project are, first, a new view of public planning as the restructuring of communication between stakeholders with divergent and conflicting interests and large inequalities in power and influence; second, a redefinition of the role of the planner away from a handmaiden of power to a hands‐on professional who fosters inclusive, participatory forms of collective action; and, finally, a deliberate concern with the micropolitics of planning that enables participants to broaden their full potential for democratic transformation within the context of strong, enduring inequalities in agenda‐setting and decision‐making power. This review traces the roots of Forester's project in pragmatist thought and in particular themes from Emersonian moral philosophy, adding a notion of “critical” to Forester's radical pluralist stance. Forester subscribes to John Dewey's argument for democracy, which inherently requires diversity to arrive at warranted truth. For Forester, the core task of a planner is to safeguard the participation of those normally excluded from decision making by institutionalized inequalities.     

Influencing the Penal Agenda? The Justice Select Committee and ‘Transforming Justice’, 2010–15

This article assesses the policy influence of the House of Commons Justice Select Committee, established to oversee the work of the Ministry of Justice following its creation a decade ago. The committee has, from the outset, overseen many contentious policy and legislative developments in the penal field, although none so extensive as those introduced following the formation of the Conservative–Liberal Democrat coalition government in 2010. Despite the newsworthy nature of its business, the committee has, to some extent, operated in the shadows of its high‐profile sister, the Home Affairs Select Committee, and has received surprisingly limited attention from criminologists and political scientists alike. Forming part of a wider investigation into the work of the committee, this article examines the extent to which it was able to influence penal developments during the coalition years. This period is of particular interest given that it heralded the end of the New Labour administration and welcomed the ‘fresh thinking’ of a coalition leadership keen to emphasise its progressive attitude towards law and order. While the committee was able to influence the direction of penal policy on several occasions, this mostly occurred as a result of its proactive or niche inquiries. The committee had less impact when conducting inquiries that assessed the government's flagship policy agenda, however. Such findings brought into question the ability of the committee to influence the most significant justice transformations in this era of new penal governance.