Anthony King: His Intellectual Legacy. Introduction

The Department of Government at Essex University provided a favourable environment for the development of Anthony King's work. While his primary interest was the UK, his intellectual interests were far broader in scope and informed by comparative insights. His key work was on political leadership, but he also made crucial contributions on other issues such as ungovernability. He had a particular concern with the quality of government, reflected in the Blunders book he wrote with Ivor Crewe.     

Explaining Explanations: How Legislators Explain their Policy Positions and How Citizens React

Legislators claim that how they explain their votes matters as much as or more than the roll calls themselves. However, few studies have systematically examined legislators’ explanations and citizen attitudes in response to these explanations. We theorize that legislators strategically tailor explanations to constituents in order to compensate for policy choices that are incongruent with constituent preferences, and to reinforce policy choices that are congruent. We conduct a within‐subjects field experiment using U.S. senators as subjects to test this hypothesis. We then conduct a between‐subjects survey experiment of ordinary people to see how they react to the explanatory strategies used by senators in the field experiment. We find that most senators tailor their explanations to their audiences, and that these tailored explanations are effective at currying support—especially among people who disagree with the legislators’ roll‐call positions.     

The Strange Revival of Bicameralism

The turn of the twenty-first century witnessed a surprising reversal of the long-observed trend towards the disappearance of second chambers in unitary states, with 28 countries – all but one of them unitary – adopting the bicameral system. This article explores this development by first setting it in the context of the historical evolution of second chambers and the arguments that support bicameralism, and then exploring the characteristics that distinguish today's second chambers from first chambers. A ‘census’ of second chambers in 2014 is used to provide data on second chambers in federal and unitary states, to facilitate comparison with earlier data, and to distinguish between ‘new’ and longer-established second chambers. The article concludes that newly established second chambers are concentrated predominantly in political systems where liberal democratic principles are not established, suggesting that the debate over their role in democratic states is set to continue.     

Los Congresos Estatales y la Política Federal en México: state legislatures and federal policymaking in Mexico

The Mexican Constitution, in the Poder Legislativo, grants state legislatures the authority to introduce legislation (iniciativas de ley) in the federal congress. In this paper the authors examine this powerful mechanism through which the Mexican state legislatures can directly influence policymaking at the federal level. Using a new data set of state-led initiatives, this work: describes the frequency with which iniciativas are introduced; describes the substance, timing, and final disposition of these state-led initiatives; and explains which factors affect the probability of presenting a state-led initiative. The authors find that party competition and partisan divisions at the state and federal levels play a significant role in the use of iniciativas de los congresos estatales. The authors’ study of this peculiar authority granted to the Mexican states contributes to the rich discussion of the changing role of the states in the era of Mexico’s nuevo federalismo.     

Doubling Down: Inequality in Responsiveness and the Policy Preferences of Elected Officials

Is bias in responsiveness to constituents conditional on the policy preferences of elected officials? The scholarly conventional wisdom is that constituency groups who do not receive policy representation still obtain some level of responsiveness by legislators outside of the policy realm. In contrast, we present a theory of preference‐induced responsiveness bias where constituency responsiveness by legislators is associated with legislator policy preferences. Elected officials who favor laws that could disproportionately impact minority groups are also less likely to engage in nonpolicy responsiveness to minority groups. We conducted a field experiment in 28 US legislative chambers. Legislators were randomly assigned to receive messages from Latino and white constituents. If legislators supported voter identification laws, Latino constituents were less likely to receive constituency communications from their legislators. There are significant implications regarding fairness in the democratic process when elected officials fail to represent disadvantaged constituency groups in both policy and nonpolicy realms.     

Beyond committees: parliamentary oversight of coalition government in Britain

Abstract

A legislature’s ability to engage in oversight of the executive is believed to derive largely from its committee system. For example, powerful parliamentary committees are considered a necessary condition for the legislature to help police policy compromises between parties in multiparty government. But can other parliamentary instruments perform this role? This article suggests parliamentary questions as an alternative parliamentary vehicle for coalition parties to monitor their partners. Questions force ministers to reveal information concerning their legislative and extra-legislative activities, providing coalition members unique insights into their partners’ behaviour. In order to test our argument, we build and analyse a new dataset of parliamentary questions in the British House of Commons covering the 2010?2015 coalition. As expected, government MPs ask more questions as the divisiveness of a policy area increases. Legislatures conventionally considered weak due to the lack of strong committees may nevertheless play an important oversight role through other parliamentary devices, including helping to police the implementation of coalition agreements.     

Rethinking the ‘presidentialism debate’: conceptualizing coalitional politics in cross-regional perspective

The democratization literature has increased our understanding of the role of institutional variables in the study of democratic sustainability. Debates about the dangers of presidentialism have been central to this body of research. In more recent times the presidentialism literature has focused on the capacity of presidents to overcome the conflict-inducing nature of the separation of powers through successful coalition formation. This review article moves this research agenda forward by examining how presidents build legislative coalitions in different regional contexts. Based on the extant analysis of presidential systems in Latin America, sub-Saharan Africa and the former Soviet Union, the article develops the idea that presidents use a toolbox of five key tools when constructing legislative coalitions: agenda power, budgetary authority, cabinet management, partisan powers, and informal institutions. We find that presidents typically utilize more than one tool when they act; that the combinations of tools they employ affects the usage and strength of other parts of the presidential toolkit; and that the choice of tools can create negative consequences for the wider political system. Our findings reveal the limitations of the univariate bias of much of the early presidentialism literature and the need for greater cross-regional research into the effects of presidential rule.     

How legislatures work – and should work – as public space

In a democracy, legislatures are not only stages for performances by elected representatives; they are also stages for performances by other players in the public sphere. This article argues that while many legislatures are designed and built as spaces for the public to engage with politics, and while democratic norms require some degree of access, increasingly what are termed “purposive publics” are being superseded by groups who are only publics in an aggregative, accidental sense. The article begins with a conceptual analysis of the ways in which legislatures can be thought of as public spaces, and the in-principle access requirements that follow from them. It then draws on interviews and observational fieldwork in eleven capital cities to discover whether the theoretical requirements are met in practice, revealing further tensions. The conclusions are that accessibility is important; is being downgraded in important ways; but also that access norms stand in tension with the requirement that legislatures function as working buildings if they are to retain their symbolic value. The article ends with two “modest proposals”, one concerning the design of the plazas in front of legislatures, the other concerning a role for the wider public in legislative procedure.     

The inconsequence of negative statehouse evaluations on ballot measures: Evidence from survey experiments

Existing scholarship about ballot measure voting and elite cuegivers suggests that the express endorsement of an unpopular legislature on a statewide ballot measure will depress voter support. Despite seven tests across two decades on both high- and low-profile measures, it did not. This null finding is in keeping with macro-level patterns of strong public support for the more than 4000 legislative referrals approved by voters in the past century. Consequently, we propose that the influence of an elite endorsement on voter behavior is more complicated than past research suggests. Specifically, in keeping with the seminal observation made by Hibbing and Theiss-Morse (1995) that American political cynicism is more a matter of distaste for certain political practices than for actual political institutions, we suspect that when voters are overwhelmed by policy proposals that are both unfamiliar and complex, they may find assurance in the imprimatur of their General Assembly.     

Get in line: Do part-time legislatures use sunset laws to keep executive agencies in check

Sunset provisions are clauses embedded in legislation that cause a piece of legislation or a regulatory board to expire on a certain date unless the legislature takes affirmative action to renew the legislation or board. Supporters and legislators offer several reasons why sunset laws are valuable and useful. An article by Baugus and Bose (2015), reported on the king-and-council model of Congleton (2001), suggests that sunset laws are a key tool legislatures use in asserting themselves against an executive branch that often dominates state government. We investigate this possibility using empirical analysis, which suggests that part-time legislatures, specifically, a form of part-time legislature referred to as hybrid legislatures, are more prone to use sunset legislation as a tool to keep the executive preferences in check.