Electoral Institutions,the Personal Vote,and Legislative Organization

What is the relationship between electoral institutions and the internal organization of legislatures? Existing research on the U.S. Congress suggests that electoral incentives shaped by the candidate‐centered nature of congressional elections explain the emergence of strong committees in that legislature. Exploring the issue from a comparative perspective, it is argued that the impact of ballot structure on committee system structure is dependent on how legislators cultivate personal votes. Committees will be stronger when legislators supply fiscal legislative particularism (pork), but weaker when legislators cultivate support by delivering extra‐legislative constituency service. Statistical analysis, combining original data on committee design in 39 democratic legislatures with measures of ballot structure and mechanism to cultivate a personal vote (MCPV), confirms the expectation.     

Electoral Strategy,Committee Membership,and Rent Seeking in the Taiwanese Legislature, 1992–2001

While the electoral system undoubtedly influences legislative behavior, it does not necessarily have a uniform effect on all legislators. In this article, I argue that the different strategies that candidates choose in the quest for office result in differing incentives once the candidates have been elected. In the Taiwanese context, candidates who adopt a campaign strategy based on organization will tend to engage in more rent‐seeking activities once in the legislature, in order to offset the heavy financial burden of this strategy. From 1992 to 2001, Taiwanese legislators whose votes were highly concentrated in a small number of precincts tended to serve significantly more time on committees with the most rent‐seeking opportunities than did legislators with far less concentrated support. Legislators whose votes were spread more evenly across the entire electoral district and legislators elected from the party lists tended to serve more time on committees with little rent‐seeking potential.     

Enfranchisement,Malapportionment, and Institutional Change in Great Britain, 1832–1868

This article examines why after 35 years of repeatedly rejecting the secret ballot, the British House of Commons enacted it with the Ballot Act of 1872. Drawing on roll‐call votes, I show that parliamentary opposition to the secret ballot was invariant between 1832 and 1867. In 1867, however, the Second Reform Act significantly extended the electoral franchise and substantially redistributed parliamentary seats; the House elected immediately following these changes to pass the Ballot Act of 1872. I show that a key reason for the change in the House's attitude on the ballot was that anti‐ballot MPs whom the redistribution threatened to expose to electoral competition were disproportionately likely to retire prior to the 1868 election. These results imply that it was the anticompetitive effects inherent in the gross malapportionment of the older electoral system rather than the restricted nature of the franchise that insulated MPs from public pressure and kept parliamentary opinion on the secret ballot in stasis. This is a useful lesson because while almost all modern democracies operate on a universal adult suffrage, many continue to be marked by significant malapportionment.     

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.     

Who Represents the Constituency? Online Political Communication by Members of Parliament in the German Mixed-Member Electoral System

Members of parliament (MPs) are elected via two different tiers in mixed-member electoral systems—as winners of a seat in a constituency or as party candidates under proportional rules. While previous research has identified important consequences of this “mandate divide” in parliaments, questions remain how this institutional setup affects MPs' political behavior in other arenas. Analyzing more than one million social media posts, this article investigates regional representation in the online communication of German MPs. The results show that MPs elected under a direct mandate refer approximately twice as often to their constituencies by using regionalized wording and geographic references than MPs elected under the proportional tier. The substantive findings provide new evidence for the benefits of mixed-member electoral systems for political representation while the methodological approach demonstrates the added value of social media data for analyzing the political behavior of elites.     

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.     

Electoral Rules and Legislative Parties in the Ukrainian Rada

Critics of Ukraine's single‐member district majoritarian and mixed‐member majoritarian electoral systems argue that they undermined the efficiency of the Supreme Rada by permitting nonpartisan single‐member district deputies to enter the legislature in large numbers. Such deputies changed parties and ignored party positions. This article argues that the effect of the differences in how legislators are elected is dependent upon whether legislators are partisans. The statistical analysis of party switching and party cohesion in the Rada from 1998 to 2002 shows that nonpartisan single‐member district deputies were the most likely to switch parties and the least cohesive.     

Electoral foundations of parliamentary questions: evidence from the European Parliament

Parliamentary questions (PQs) provide a useful tool for members of the European Parliament (MEPs) to control the executive at supranational level and to promote their reputation among relevant groups (party, interest groups and constituency). Previous works have just focused on macro-functions of questions, neglecting the opportunity for MEPs to use them as a re-election and re-selection strategy (micro-functions). In this article, it is argued that PQs are a relevant instrument in the hands of parliamentarians in order to increase their reputation and build up their political image. In particular, it is considered how variation in electoral systems might affect legislative behaviour and, especially, the number of questions asked. Using a new data set on oral and written questions to the European Commission and the Council, the article demonstrates how candidate-centred electoral systems incentivise MEPs to ask more questions than legislators elected under party-centred systems.     

A social and political profile of Canadian legislators, 1996

This research note provides an overview and an update on the social and political backgrounds of all elected Canadian legislators at the federal and provincial/territorial levels of government in 1996. For provincial/territorial legislators data are presented by electoral jurisdiction, and for all legislators by level of government and political party. Relatively few differences in social characteristics were found between the two levels although there were some variations by province, territory and party. Business, education and law are the three most prevalent occupations, although the latter has declined among legislators over time. There is little movement of members from the provincial to the federal level. The most common political experience of both groups lies in municipal governance. Over time women have increased their share of seats at both levels. Even in a polity such as Canada with high rates of legislative turnover at both federal and provincial/territorial levels and with new parties emerging, most changes in social and political experience backgrounds proceed incrementally.     

Invisible Politics: Institutional Incentives and Legislative Alignments in the Russian Duma, 1996–99

Previous analysis of legislative voting has focused on the behavior of nominal legislative parties, regardless of whether the country under examination was an established democracy or a newly democratized country. This approach is inadequate for countries with young party systems. To establish the extent to which legislative coalitions are party based, scholars must allow for the possibility that institutional incentives predominate over party influence. For this study, I applied a Bayesian discrete latent variable method to identify the legislative coalitions in the 1996‐99 Duma. I found that legislative alignments cut across party lines: electoral incentives and support for the president contribute to divides within parties that lack coherent platforms. Here I present a novel methodological approach to the identification of intraparty divisions and the major determinants of legislative coalitions in many legislative settings. This approach allows a comparison of the importance of party influence relative to other institutional incentives. It is especially useful for analyzing legislative voting in young party systems and where constitutional frameworks and electoral systems subject legislators to competing pressures.     

The Role of Party: The Legislative Consequences of Partisan Electoral Competition

We examine the proposition that incentives for legislative organization can be explained by the nature of electoral competition. We argue that legislators in environments where parties are competitive for majority status are most likely to have delegated power to their leadership to constrain individualistic behavior within their party, which will in turn increase the spatial predictability of individual voting patterns. Using roll‐call votes and district‐level electoral data from the U.S. state legislatures, we show empirically that increased statewide interparty competition corresponds to more predictable voting behavior overall, while legislators from competitive districts and those in the minority party have less predictable behavior.     

The Cosponsorship Patterns of Reserved Seat Legislators

This study analyzes the bill cosponsorship behavior of reserved seat legislators in the Pakistan National Assembly, where special legislative seats are reserved for women and religious minorities. It offers a critical case because two theories on reserved seat legislators—the theory of electoral incentives and the theory of institutional weakness—lead to opposite predictions about the extent to which such legislators will engage in bill cosponsorship, with the former (latter) predicting the negative (positive) effect of reserved seats. I find that women and minorities in reserved seats initiate a greater number of bills and cosponsor bills with a larger number of peers than nonreserved male legislators. Using network analysis, I also show that reserved legislators tend to play a role in bridging different partisan blocs of legislators within the cosponsorship network. These empirical patterns provide support to the theory of institutional weakness, rather than to the theory of electoral incentives.     

The Consequences of Electoral Institutions for Careerism

Although electoral institutions have been shown to have a variety of effects, scholars have not investigated if certain voting rules enable politicians to enjoy longer legislative careers. I took advantage of a natural experiment—a sudden transition from a semiproportional voting rule to single‐member districts with plurality voting (SMDP)—to measure the effect of electoral institutions on careerism. My analysis revealed that voting rules have a profound influence on the dynamics of legislative careers: politicians elected under SMDP are far less likely to suffer electoral defeat or to retire than those elected via cumulative voting. The findings of this study not only provide additional insight into the seat safety of politicians elected in first‐past‐the‐post systems, but moreover offer new criteria by which to evaluate the choice of electoral institutions.     

What Happens When House Members “Run with Congress”? The Electoral Consequences of Institutional Loyalty

This article characterizes the electoral consequences of messages of institutional loyalty and disloyalty sent by incumbent House members to their constituents. We show that, for the contemporary House, there is variation in these messages—not all incumbents in the contemporary House “run for Congress by running against Congress.” Moreover, we show that these messages can, under the right conditions, have significant electoral consequences, even after controlling for party affiliation and district political factors. In addition to demonstrating the electoral relevance of legislators' presentations, our results show an incumbent‐level link between constituents' trust in government and their voting behavior—a link created by interaction between constituents' perceptions, legislators' party affiliations, and the messages that legislators send to their constituents.     

Multiple Principals and Legislative Cohesion

In many systems, legislators find themselves accountable to multiple principals. This article seeks to further answer how legislators decide between their principals and what factors condition legislators to choose one over the other. We argue that electoral uncertainty, operationalized as electoral volatility, pushes legislators towards the principal that has the greatest influence over their re‐election. Using European Parliament electoral results and roll‐call data from the second to the sixth European Parliaments (1984–2009), we show that increases in electoral volatility decreased European group cohesion and pushed legislators to side more with the positions of their national parties over their European group when the two disagreed.     

Electoral Institutions and Legislative Particularism

How do electoral institutions affect legislative behavior? Though a large body of theoretical scholarship posits a negative relationship between multimember districting and the provision of particularistic goods, empirical scholarship has found little evidence in support of this expectation. Using data on the provision of US post offices from 1876 to 1896, a period during which many states elected congressional representatives from at‐large districts, and a differences‐in‐differences approach, I find that counties represented by at‐large representatives received approximately 8% fewer post offices. The results have important implications for studying how electoral institutions affect incentives for legislative behavior.     

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.     

The Effects of Term Limits on State Legislatures: A New Survey of the 50 States

Term limits on legislators were adopted in 21 states during the early 1990s. Beginning in 1996, the limits legally barred incumbents from reelection in 11 states, and they will do so in four more by 2010. In 2002, we conducted the only survey of legislators in all 50 states aimed at assessing the impact of term limits on state legislative representation. We found that term limits have virtually no effect on the types of people elected to office—whether measured by a range of demographic characteristics or by ideological predisposition—but they do have measurable impact on certain behaviors and priorities reported by legislators in the survey, and on the balance of power among various institutional actors in the arena of state politics. We characterize the biggest impact on behavior and priorities as a “Burkean shift,” whereby term‐limited legislators become less beholden to the constituents in their geographical districts and more attentive to other concerns. The reform also increases the power of the executive branch (governors and the bureaucracy) over legislative outcomes and weakens the influence of majority party leaders and committee chairs, albeit for different reasons.     

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.