Understanding the political goals of non-binding resolutions: evidence from the Mexican Chamber of Deputies

By primarily focusing on bill initiatives, the literature on legislatures and parliaments has understudied other important legislative instruments -such as non-binding resolutions, minutes or speeches- which might help parties and legislators achieve their electoral and policy goals. Non-binding resolutions (NBRs) do not carry the force of law and are primarily used for parties or legislators’ position taking and the request of government actions. This article examines the political goals of NBRs by examining these tools in the lower chamber of the Mexican Congress. Employing a novel dataset, we claim that legislators strategically utilise NBRs to strengthen their relationship with their political principals. We find differences on the use of these instruments across political parties, based on the types of policy areas they choose to target. The analysis also indicates that SMD legislators tend to introduce more particularistic NBRs that might further their political careers at the subnational level.     

Does higher level of education of the labor force cause growth? Evidence from Bulgaria

This study tries to give new evidence on the relationship between human capital and output per capita in the former centrally-planned economies. Educational attainment of the labor force is used as a proxy for the human capital stock in Bulgaria. The empirical models are based on the extended Cobb–Douglas production function with labor, human capital as well as physical capital. In addition, the reduced form specifications include export and foreign direct investments. The econometric outcome suggests that an increase of the share of people with upper secondary education in the labor force is not related to the rate of long-run growth. Moreover, it is inversely related to the shortrun changes in real output. On the contrary, a positive impact is derived for tertiary education. In general, the study does not fully support the hypothesis that the higher average educational level of the population fosters growth. Export, physical capital and foreign direct investments turn out to be the driving forces of Bulgaria’s growth. A partial correlation analysis implies that the quality of human capital measured by foreign language proficiency could explain the insignificant effect of secondary education.     

Understanding How Domestic Violence Support Services Promote Survivor Well-being: A Conceptual Model

Domestic violence (DV) victim service programs have been increasingly expected by legislators and funders to demonstrate that they are making a significant difference in the lives of those using their services. Alongside this expectation, they are being asked to describe the Theory of Change guiding how they believe their practices lead to positive results for survivors and their children. Having a widely accepted conceptual model is not just potentially useful to funders and policy makers as they help shape policy and practice -- it can also help programs continually reflect upon and improve their work. This paper describes the iterative and collaborative process undertaken to generate a conceptual model describing how DV victim services are expected to improve survivors’ lives. The Social and Emotional Well-Being Framework guiding the model is an ideal structure to use to describe the goals and practices of DV programs because this framework: (1) accurately represents DV programs’ goal of helping survivors and their children thrive; and (2) recognizes the importance of community, social, and societal context in influencing individuals’ social and emotional well-being. The model was designed to guide practice and to generate new questions for research and evaluation that address individual, community, and systems factors that promote or hinder survivor safety and well-being.     

“It Takes a Coalition”: Coalition Potential and Legislative Decision Making

This article empirically illustrates the value of coalition formation in legislative bargaining. I argue that legislators’ potential to form powerful coalitions, their coalition potential, is essential to their ability to obtain preferred policy outcomes. Using data on the European Union's legislative process, I show that coalition potential significantly increases legislators’ success. Moreover, the value of coalition potential depends on the voting rules used to pass legislation. For example, under the unanimity voting rule, the importance of coalition potential is insignificant because of the veto power held by each legislator.     

Legislative Behavior in Romania: The Effect of the 2008 Romanian Electoral Reform

This article analyzes the impact of electoral rules on legislators’ rate of vote defection from their party position in legislatures while accounting for how party‐leadership strength mediates this impact. To this end it looks at the effect of the 2008 Romanian electoral reform. The reform shifted the electoral system from a closed‐list proportional representation to one in which all candidates run in single‐member districts. The analysis finds that because party leaders have maintained their leverage intact, the impact of the reform was minimal, with legislators being more likely to defect in less important votes only, in which party leaders allow defection. Also, after the reform legislators are more likely to use other means to impress their voters, such as legislative initiation and cabinet questioning. These forms of behavior are more accepted by party leaders.     

Re-election isn't everything: legislators’ goal-seeking and committee activity in Japan

A number of political scientists have explained legislators’ behaviour as a function of their re-election, influence, and policy goals, but these goals are sometimes incompatible. This study seeks to explain under what conditions legislators emphasise the goals of building influence or shaping policy over re-election. The study focuses on Japanese legislators’ Diet committee attendance as a proxy for their attention to an influence or policy goal. It shows that legislators elected from an open-list proportional representation seat are most likely to emphasise building influence or shaping policy, while legislators elected from a district using a single non-transferable vote system are least likely to do so. Legislators are more likely to do so in a non-election year than in an election year. In addition, electorally stronger legislators are more likely to focus on influence or policy goals in an election year, while electorally weaker legislators are more likely to do so in a non-election year.     

Re-election and political career paths in the Uruguayan Congress, 1985–99

Given the presumed marginal – or at best the ‘rubber-stamp legitimising’ – character of Latin American legislatures, they ‘have escaped careful scrutiny’. Even in cases where legislatures are supposed to play a much more significant role than the continental average, such as Chile, Costa Rica and Uruguay, knowledge of legislative politics is still far from conclusive. This article studies re-election patterns of legislators in Uruguay during the four post-authoritarian elections. During these elections in Uruguay, we observed a decreasing but still high rate of turnover of legislators. These high rates of legislative turnover are affected by a significant number of legislators who do not seek re-election. While inter-party electoral volatility strongly influences the rates of incumbent re-election, intra-party volatility does not seem to have an impact on this phenomenon. Lastly, the closed and blocked lists in conjunction with the Uruguayan multiple simultaneous vote, and the fact that a legislator belongs to the Senate, are additional institutional features that help to explain the turnover and incumbent re-election in the legislature.     

东星航空的事还没完

由于发迹过程中存在太多不足与外人道的东西，许多中国私营业主都私下拿了外国护照，一边利用在海外注册的公司到国内享受外资优惠，一边利用自己没有依法放弃的中国护照突破国内对外资准入的一些限制，通吃一切，万一出事就一逃了之。     

Does Legal Semiotics Cannibalize Jurisprudence?

Does Duncan Kennedy successfully cannibalize jurisprudence? He attempts to do it by demonstrating the inexistence of rightness in legal argumentation. If there is no right legal argument, then there is no right answer in adjudication, adjudication is not a rational enterprise and legal doctrine cannot be said to be a science. It can be shown that skepticism is self-defeating. Duncan Kennedy can avoid self defeat only because he actually believes in a lot of legal arguments. His thesis that judges decide questions of policy without any methodology that distinguishes them from legislators does not hold. Judicial reasoning is subject to constraints that do not affect legislators. It must be based on the sources of law and is limited by rules of procedure. Even when the judges have ‘interstitial’ legislative powers they are, unlike the legislator, bound to fit the system and their decisions are considered in procedure from the perspective of the right answer doctrine. The only work that can convincingly refute the skeptic argument against legal science is the reconstruction of jurisprudence as a scientific enterprise. Such work is beyond the scope of any single paper. The article aims to give some inspirations for such a task.     

Equating U.S. Tax Treatment of Dividends and Capital Gains for Foreign Portfolio Investors

The U.S. tax law equates the tax rate on dividends and long‐term capital gains on stock owned by U.S. citizens and residents. However, the taxation of these two types of rewards in the hands of foreign portfolio investors remains dramatically different from each other, with the capital gain being fully exempt. Several reasons support this article's proposal to no longer exempt these gains. Extending finance theory and prior normative tax research, this article argues that foreigners’ portfolio dividends and capital gains should be taxed in the same manner because they are economically equivalent and emanate from the same source. Three recent empirical developments also support repeal of the foreigner's exemption. First, there is now extensive use by U.S. corporations of stock repurchases—which are taxed to selling shareholders as capital gain—as a form of corporate payout that was in the past primarily accomplished through dividends. Second, foreign ownership of U.S. stocks has continued to increase, with an estimated one‐third of these stocks owned by foreigners. Third, the modern tax compliance environment—including aspects of the Foreign Account Tax Compliance Act that apply to foreigners—reduces past congressional and academic concerns about enforcing the taxation of foreigners’ portfolio gains.     

The View from the Hill: Legislative Perceptions Of the District

This article addresses legislative perceptions of constituents' interests and develops a theory of perception that highlights the role of information accessibility in the formation of legislative offices' views of their districts. I used original data regarding health policy in the U.S. House to analyze perceptions of constituents' interests. I found that legislators do not see all constituents in their district, nor do they see the largest constituencies. Rather, legislators are more likely to see active and resource‐rich constituents. These findings provide unique evidence of the influence of money in Congress and suggest that legislative misperception is both common and systematically biased.     

The Effects of Election Proximity on Participatory Shirking: The Staggered‐Term Chamber as a Laboratory

This study discusses a downside of electoral pressure. As elections approach, legislators reduce their effort in legislative activities, albeit while increasing their efficiency. To show this, we propose a new, natural experimental design exploiting staggered legislative election calendars to identify the effect of approaching elections. Two‐way natural blocking improves the balance of pretreatments and an instrumental variable approach addresses noncompliance by retirees. Our analysis of the Japanese House of Councillors demonstrates that legislators up for election show up in the chamber less often than those not facing election; however, when they do show up and speak, they tend to speak longer.     

It Takes a Coalition: The Community Impacts of Collaboration

Members of Congress frequently collaborate on policy initiatives, reaching out to colleagues in both parties to find common ground on solutions for the problems faced by their constituents. Using a novel dataset of over 30,000 “Dear Colleague” letters sent by members of the 111th Congress, I use the collaborative relationships that exist in the earliest stages of the policy process to measure the social influence of legislators. I demonstrate that districts represented by members of Congress who are better connected to their colleagues receive a greater share of federal grant money. I argue that this is because collaborative legislators are well‐positioned to be influential allies to strategic bureaucrats who want to maintain a broad base of support for their programs in Congress. Thus, devoting resources to building relationships with their colleagues is one way members of Congress can more effectively support the communities they represent.     

Outward FDI from Central and Eastern European Countries

In Central and Eastern Europe, outward foreign direct investment (FDI) has not yet become as a prominent factor in the region’s reintegration into the world economy as trade liberalisation used to be in the early 1990s or inward foreign direct investment is currently. In the terminology of the investment–development path, with the notable exception of the Russian Federation, the region is in stage 2, whereby inward flows are still growing faster than outward flows. This article argues that a combination of the latecomer status of the region’s transnational corporations and the transition shock can explain most of that laggard situation. It hypothesises that the enlargement of the European Union (EU) would give a major push to the outward foreign direct investment flows of Central and Eastern Europe (CEE), on condition that adequate government policies to promote those investments are put in place. The impact on the investment–development path, however, is uncertain, because accession to the EU is often accompanied by a surge in foreign direct investment inflows, too. Finally, the article also looks at the options available to deal with the specific problems of the Russian Federation in relation to capital flight, including ways of regularisation and potential return to the home economy.     

Do female legislators have different policy priorities than their male colleagues in an undemocratic/semi-democratic legislature? The case of Hong Kong

This article investigates the impacts of democratic transition on gender outcomes in Hong Kong, which has a unique path of transition. The author studies whether democratic transition in Hong Kong since the mid-1980s has brought positive gender outcomes. Specifically, this article examines the extent to which Hong Kong’s female legislators acted for women’s interests from 1970 to 2012. The study finds that after the introduction of legislative elections, female legislators were more likely to represent women’s interests than male legislators. Apart from gender, the study also finds that political orientation of a legislator significantly affected legislator policy priorities and/or gender outcome. Liberal legislators proposed significantly more motions related to women’s interests than conservative legislators. Finally, the study highlights that as the legislature was transited from an undemocratic to a semi-democratic body, legislators were significantly more likely to propose motions related to women’s interests.     

The Mask of Neutrality: Judicial Partisan Calculation and Legislative Redistricting

Do judges ruling on redistricting litigation increase electoral competition in congressional races while simultaneously drawing districts favoring their party's congressional candidates? I offer a novel theory of judicial partisan calculation, arguing that judges draw more competitive districts than legislatures or commissions, but that judge‐drawn districts favor the electoral interests of their copartisans. These claims are reconcilable because judges target districts held by contrapartisan legislators to maximize their copartisans’ fortunes. I find that Democratic judges draw competitive districts by adding Democratic voters to Republican‐held House constituencies. Court‐administered redistricting increases competitiveness, ostensibly due to judicial neutrality. This mask of neutrality, however, conceals sophisticated partisan calculation.     

我国人力资本出资的若干法律问题

我国人力资本出资在法律上是否具有可行性,理论界一直持否定态度,认为人力出资存在评估上的困难,以及无法保障交易安全从而损害债权人利益。应当说,以此为理由是片面的,因为这种状况在其他出资方式上同样是存在的,但并没有影响法律对此加以肯定。至于人力资本出资者的有限保证责任,则违背了公平原则。人力资本出资者应当享有有限责任,同时可用公示制度来平衡出资者与债权人的利益。     

Legislative voting in the pork-dominant parliament: evidence from the Philippine House of Representatives

In this paper I investigate how legislators behave in extremely pork-oriented, or pork-dominant, systems where virtually no party-line voting takes place and politicians strive to deliver individual/local benefits instead of national public policies. I argue that, in the pork-dominant context, most legislators vote with the president, who controls access to the pork pipeline, irrespective of their party affiliations. Thus, the president’s party legislators should have little incentive to vote against the president, regardless of voter demands for pork or policy; however, sometimes opposition-party legislators elected particularly from more-developed districts (where voters often desire policy over pork) should have strong incentives to vote against the president. These arguments are supported with quantitative studies of the post-authoritarian Philippine House of Representatives. It is found that, in the highly homogeneous legislature dominated by pork-seeking politicians, (1) most bills are passed with unanimous or near-unanimous consent, (2) governing-party legislators almost always vote with the majority of the members of the parliament, regardless of voters’ socio-economic conditions, and (3) opposition-party legislators, especially in more-developed areas, tend to vote against the parliamentary majority. These findings indicate that voters’ high socio-economic status promotes programmatic accountability, leading their representatives to undermine voting unity within the extremely cohesive pork-dominant legislature.     

Why are some foreign-born workers more entrepreneurial than others?

Foreign-born workers have made significant and substantial contributions to economic productivity and new firm creation in the United States. This paper identifies predictors of entrepreneurial participation among foreign-born workers, combining nationally representative survey datasets covering the U.S. resident, college-educated workforce with country-of-origin macro statistics from the Global Entrepreneurship Monitor. Immigrants who come to the U.S. after earning university degrees abroad are more likely to own businesses than other college-educated, U.S. resident workers. However, much of their higher rate of business ownership can be attributed to differences in demographic characteristics, such as years of postgraduate work experience and marital status. By contrast, science and engineering-based business ownership is most common among immigrants who came to the U.S. to pursue higher education. Furthermore, after controlling for differences in human capital, U.S.-trained adult immigrants have higher propensity to own businesses than other foreign-born workers and native U.S. citizens, overall. U.S.-trained immigrants’ higher probability of business ownership is not explained by differences in human capital or other demographic characteristics, but does seem partly attributable to differences across foreign-born workers’ countries-of-origin. Specifically, adult immigrants and foreign temporary residents from countries that offer entrepreneurs lower levels of cultural support are more likely to start and own U.S. businesses.     

‘I just drifted into it’: constraints faced by publicly funded family lawyers

This paper draws on interviews with English family lawyers who do publicly funded work, and examines their reasons for entering family law. Generally, lawyers did not deliberately choose to enter family law, and instead explained that they ‘drifted’ into the field. On closer inspection, however, rather than ‘drifting’ into family law, it would appear that the careers of publicly funded family lawyers are strongly constrained by structural and cultural factors. These findings have important implications for attracting and retaining family lawyers.