Who Wins? Party Effects in Legislative Voting

Political scientists have long attempted to measure and describe the modest and contingent effects of party on the behavior of members of Congress. Recent efforts have extended the debate to the more specific question of whether or not party influences are sufficiently strong to move policy outcomes away from the median position. In this article, we specify four theories of legislative behavior. One is a preference‐based, or partyless, theory of behavior. This theory posits that there are no party effects independent of preferences and that equilibrium outcomes are located at the chamber's median. The other theories rely on different conceptions of the foundations of party effects and yield distinctive predictions about the legislators who will support bills on final passage votes. After testing, our conclusion is that strong party influences can be found in final passage voting in the House: the partyless theory receives little support, but a model based on majority party agenda control works well. Legislative outcomes are routinely on the majority party's side of the chamber median.     

Electoral Influences on Legislative Behavior in Mixed‐Member Systems: Evidence from Ukraine's Verkhovna Rada

Abstract: This article addresses how mixed‐member systems that combine proportional representation (PR) and single‐member districts (SMD) into a single election can influence legislators' voting behavior. Scholars have generally extended standard expectations of behavior to mixed‐member systems by assuming that legislators occupying PR seats in mixed‐member parliaments should be more cohesive than those occupying SMD seats. I argue that controlling for seat type alone does not take into account the interaction between PR and SMD in mixed‐member systems. Using voting data from Ukraine's Verkhovna Rada, I show that controlling for dual candidacy and the “safety” of the deputy's district or list position increases our understanding of the factors motivating legislative cohesion.     

Disentangling the Role of Ideology and Partisanship in Legislative Voting: Evidence from Argentina

We present a novel approach to disentangle the effects of ideology, partisanship, and constituency pressures on roll‐call voting. First, we place voters and legislators on a common ideological space. Next, we use roll‐call data to identify the partisan influence on legislators' behavior. Finally, we use a structural equation model to account for these separate effects on legislative voting. We rely on public opinion data and a survey of Argentine legislators conducted in 2007–08. Our findings indicate that partisanship is the most important determinant of legislative voting, leaving little room for personal ideological position to affect legislators' behavior.     

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.     

The Sound of Rebellion: Voting Dissent and Legislative Speech in the UK House of Commons

Using data on the content of debate associated with votes in the UK House of Commons from 1992–2015, this article examines how government party MPs employ language in legislative speech when they vote against the party line. We find a robust statistical association between dissent on votes and the use of first-person pronouns, simpler language, and giving longer speeches. Using a random forest algorithm for classification, we find that these language covariates are predictive of rebellion. The use of simpler, first-person language has implications for political representation and offers new insight into how MPs use votes to distinguish themselves from their party, perhaps reflecting attempts to connect with constituents.     

Bicameralism and Minority-Party Influence on Legislative Development: Evidence from House Standing Committee Votes

The ability of the minority party to influence legislation in Congress is debated. Most bills are passed with large bipartisan majorities, yet the House, where most legislation is developed, is seen as a majority-party-dominated institution. I develop a theory of House minority-party influence at the committee markup stage as a result of the Senate’s institutional rules. An original data set of congressional committee votes shows that minority-party support in House committees predicts House and Senate passage. During unified party control of the chambers, an increase in Senate majority-party seats results in lower minority-party support for the legislation in the House committee, while during divided party control of Congress, the House majority passes more extreme bills as the chambers polarize. Even in the majority-party-dominated House, the minority’s preferences are incorporated into legislation, and the Senate’s institutional rules moderate bills to a significant degree.     

Limiting Party Representation: Evidence from a Small Parliamentary Chamber

Parties are seen as vital for the maintenance of parliamentary government and as necessary intermediaries between voters and legislators; an elected parliamentary chamber not controlled by parties is highly anomalous. This study contrasts the party‐controlled Tasmanian lower house with its Independent‐dominated elected upper house and finds that the major source of constraints on party representation is not a clientelistic style of politics but the persistence of a distinctive institutional design and electoral rules based on fixed terms and annual staggered elections. The consequences of these rules are explored for their effects on voter choice and legislative behaviour.     

Corruption,Party Leaders,and Candidate Selection: Evidence from Italy

Research indicates that voters are not particularly effective at removing corrupt politicians from office, in part because voters make decisions on the basis of many competing factors. Party leaders are much more single-minded than voters and will choose to deselect implicated legislators if it means maintaining a positive party reputation and improving the odds of winning a legislative majority. We examine renominations to Italy’s legislature in two periods marked by corruption. We compare these renomination patterns with those from the prior legislature, when corruption lacked political salience. Our analysis shows that incumbent renominations are negatively associated with the number of press mentions that link the incumbent to corruption—but only when corruption is salient to the public. Our study highlights the importance of party leaders in forcing malfeasant legislators out of office—and reducing corruption—and redirects attention from voters to political elites as a critical channel in enforcing democratic accountability.     

韩国小额诉讼的立法宗旨与制度特色

韩国于1973年制定了单独的《小额案件审判法》,该法的立法宗旨是实现诉讼迅速和诉讼经济,为此,法律规定了具体制度和技术性操作规范以保障宗旨达成。韩国小额诉讼的制度特色包括:立法体例上独立于《民事诉讼法》;小额诉讼标的额较大,在实践中发挥着简易程序的功能;当事人享有双重的权利救济机制;程序设计中引入督促程序,创设了建议履行制度;规定了被告缺席时的拟制自认制度。其中,缺席拟制自认、建议履行不适合我国国情。     

Regional Innovation Systems: General Findings and Some New Evidence from Biotechnology Clusters

This paper focuses on interactive innovation. It starts by operationalising Regional Innovation in the context of multi-level governance. It shows how regional and external innovation interaction among firms and other innovation organizations is important for regional innovation potential. The ability to access and use funding for innovation support for regional firms and organizations is crucial for regional innovation promotion. Equity investment funding is more important than public funding, which tends to be cautious and otherwise risk avoiding, except in circumstances of market arrest or failure to develop. Regional systems of innovation are broader than single sectors or clusters but some of these will be strategically privileged recipients of policy support because of their growth performance or potential, rather than, as in the past, their uncompetitiveness. The paper devotes space to exploring biotechnology clustering from a regional innovation systems viewpoint, as an instance of rather strong sectoral, regional innovation systems capabilities, though integrated also to global knowledge supply and markets. Illustration is provided of the way such sectoral innovation systems work at local regional level by reference to cases from Cambridge, Massachusetts and Cambridge, England.     

Political structure,legislative process,and corruption: comparing Taiwan and South Korea

Taiwan and South Korea have the same constitutional system, approximate economic scale, and similar cultural backgrounds, yet they differ in degree of corruption. What political structures and legislative processes cause this outcome is the major question posed in this paper. The political structure in South Korea is a centralization-of-power model, while that in Taiwan is a separation-of-powers model. This paper proposes that Taiwan and South Korea have different types of corruption and different political structures, and the legislative process in South Korea is more compromising than that in Taiwan. These factors contribute to greater corruption in South Korea than in Taiwan. This study clarifies how particular institutional dynamics reduce or enhance the prospects for democratic governance and help to better understand how political structure and legislative process channel different types of corruption into different degrees of corruption. Studies on the relationship between constitutional structure and corruption have concluded that parliamentarism can help reduce corruption more than presidentialism. This thesis argues that a country with centralized power tends to be less corrupt than a country with separation of powers. If this argument and the rationale behind it hold true for countries with both parliamentary and presidential systems, we can expect that semi-presidential countries with a centralized system are less corrupt than those with a decentralized system, all else being equal. However, by comparing these two semi-presidential countries, we find that South Korea, with its centralized model, was more corrupt than Taiwan, with its decentralized model. This comparative case study provides a counterargument to the conventional wisdom of constitutional structure and governance.     

Government Redistribution in the Shadow of Legislative Elections: A Study of the Illinois Member Initiative Grants Program

We study an Illinois state government program called “member initiative spending” and examine the extent to which three competing theories can explain the program's allocations among Illinois's 118 House districts. We show that member initiative monies distributed before the 2000 general election were disproportionately allocated to districts that were politically competitive, represented by legislative leaders, or represented by moderate legislators. Our analysis supports theories that claim budgetary decisions made by elected officials are tactical, and it shows that the Illinois decision makers who allocated member initiative funds sought to distribute them in a way that would be most beneficial in the sense of vote buying.     

Confucian Constitutionalism? The Emergence of Constitutional Review in Korea and Taiwan

This paper documents the recent emergence of constitutional review of legislative and administrative action in Korea and Taiwan, two East Asian countries seen to be historically resistant to notions of judicial activism and constitutional constraint. It argues that the ability to draw from foreign legal traditions, especially those of the United States and Germany, empowered judges in these countries and therefore helped to alter the structure of public law away from executive-centered approaches of the past. This is consistent with viewing judicial review as essentially a foreign transplant. Nevertheless, the institution of judicial review has some compatibilities with Confucian legal tradition, a point that has implications for how we think about institutional transfers across borders. By constructing a locally legitimate account of what is undeniably a modern institution of foreign origin, the paper argues that constitutional constraint should not be viewed as an imposition of Western norms, but as a more complex process of adaptation and institutional transformation.     

Survival Rates in Bankruptcy Systems: Overlooking the Evidence

Extensive research on bankruptcy still has not made it possible to end the efficiency discussion concerning the need for a reorganization provision in bankruptcy laws. In this paper, I discuss the pervasiveness of asset sales in bankruptcy procedures and the effect it has on survival rates. Without these figures on going concern asset sales Western countries show astonishingly low firm survival rates. In addition, it becomes clear that the bankruptcy system in the US may be under-researched to such an extent that it seriously confounds our view of bankruptcy resolution.     

东亚福利资本主义的发展:以日本、韩国与台湾为例

论文考察了近年来日本、韩国与台湾的福利国家(welfare state)发展情况。通过仔细观察医疗政策、养老金以及与劳动市场相关的其他社会政策的变化,文章尝试探究在这些领域发生的变化,到底能在多大程度上佐证一个从发展范式向普遍主义范式的重要转变。论文解释了在这些国家和地区社会政策变化的要旨和方向,认为能够解释他们的政策偏离的原因,不仅存在于经济的重组中,同时存在于不断变化的政治形态之中。     

日本、韩国的行政复议制度--行政复议司法化的若干实例

随着我国行政复议制度各种缺陷的逐步显现 ,如何对其加以改进再次成为人们探讨的问题。本文特别以增强行政复议机关及其审查的客观性为重点 ,对日本、韩国的行政复议制度作了简单的介绍 ,以便为我国行政复议制度的完善提供参考。     

Strategic Ticket Splitting and the Personal Vote in Mixed‐Member Electoral Systems

This article examines ticket splitting in five different mixed‐member electoral systems—Germany, New Zealand, Japan, Lithuania, and RussiA—and indicates the shortcomings inherent in any analysis of such ticket splitting that does not take into account the presence of the personal vote. We find that the personal vote plays a central part in shaping ticket splitting in all of our cases except for Germany, a heavily party‐oriented system in which we find evidence of only a weak personal vote but evidence of substantial strategic voting.     

两大法系科学证据采信结构评析——从事实认知的角度

英美法国家具有复杂的科学证据采信结构,其用意在于通过加强法官对科学证据证明力的实质性审查,抵消专家证人由于当事人的聘请而产生的"当事人性"以及对陪审团的误导,这种思路是对英美法系国家特有的二元审判结构以及对抗制的合理反映.但同时这种结构也带来一些问题,在事实认知上表现为"认知错位"与"认知过度".而大陆法国家科学证据采信结构比较简单,科学证据作为一种中立的证据方法,由法官依职权调查和自由心证完成,有利于科学证据以本来面目出现.但这种结构的主要问题是与自由心证奉行的理性原则有一定的冲突,这在事实认知上表现为"认知不足".     

Appeal rate and caseload: evidence from civil litigation in Korea

Courts of modern democratic societies have generally implemented appeal procedures to correct potential errors in ruling. However, considering the time and effort that both litigants spend, availability of an appeal cannot be better than reaching the correct judgment in the original case. This difficulty raises the policy issue of how to reduce the rate of appeals and improve welfare of litigants. In this paper, we assert that lower caseloads allow judges to expend more time and effort on each case, contributing to lower appeal rates. Analysis of court-level data from Korea corroborates our inference.     

海峡两岸保护消费者法律制度比较研究

祖国大陆的《消费者权益保护法》和台湾地区的"消费者保护法"均制定于20世纪90年代,当时联合国《消费者保护准则》业已形成,世界范围内的消费者保护运动和法制建设已广泛开展并走向成熟.祖国大陆和台湾地区在消费者保护法的立法定位、调整对象、立法技术、具体保护措施和手段等方面都有着通性与共识.由于祖国大陆与台湾地区在经济发展水平、立法习惯、市场成熟度、法制基础等方面还是有所不同的,因此,祖国大陆和台湾地区对消费者法律保护的程度方面仍有区别.在海峡两岸各种交流日益密切的今天,对祖国大陆和台湾地区的消费者保护法律制度作具体的比较和借鉴,具有重要意义.