Comparing Cosponsorship and Roll‐Call Ideal Points

We use bill cosponsorship and roll‐call vote data to compare legislators' revealed preferences in the U.S. House of Representatives and the Argentine Chamber of Deputies. We estimate ideal points from bill cosponsorship data using principal‐component analysis on an agreement matrix that included information on all bills introduced in the U.S. House (1973–2000) and Argentine Chamber (1983–2002). The ideal‐point estimates of legislators' revealed preferences based on cosponsorship data strongly correlate with similar estimates derived from roll‐call vote data. Also, cosponsorship activity in the U.S. House has lower dimensionality than cosponsorship has in the Argentine Chamber. We explain this lower discrimination as a function of individual‐ and district‐level factors in both countries.     

The Contribution of Comparative Research to Measuring the Policy Preferences of Legislators

Comparative legislative research has contributed to an examination of the validity of roll‐call votes as measures of legislators' policy preferences. It has prompted an awareness of the influence of legislative structure on the composition of the voting record. Comparative research on members' ideal points has confronted the problems of selection effects, abstentions, the influence of the agenda setter, and the effect of party strategy. It has encouraged the search for alternate measures of members' preferences, including members' speech, cosponsorship, survey responses, and party manifestos. In the non‐American setting, ideal points have been regarded as group‐level, as well as individual‐level, variables. The game‐theoretic approach to the study of legislatures has led to the formulation of hypotheses relating legislative structure to members' ideal points.     

Position Taking and Cosponsorship in the U.S. House

Bill cosponsorship has become an important part of the legislative and electoral process in the modern House of Representatives. Using interviews with congressional members and staff, I explain the role of cosponsorship as a signal to agenda setters and a form of position taking for constituents. Regression analysis confirms that cosponsoring varies with a member's electoral circumstances, institutional position, and state size, but generally members have adapted slowly to the introduction of cosponsorship to the rules and practice of the House.     

Using Cosponsorship to Estimate Ideal Points

Ideal point estimates based on roll‐call vote results have provided leverage for a variety of theory testing efforts. Recently, scholars have suggested using cosponsorship data as a proxy for roll‐call votes. Conceptually similar to roll‐call votes, cosponsorship data are appealing for a variety of reasons. However, the data‐generating process for cosponsorship is untheorized and little studied. We examine the properties of ideal point estimates from cosponsorship data. We find that the ability to estimate ideal points from cosponsorship data is contingent on the underlying data‐generating process; reliance on such measures requires strong and often unrealistic assumptions.     

Divided Government and Congressional Investigations

This article explores the political determinants of congressional investigatory activity. Using Mayhew's list of high‐profile probes updated through 2006, we developed five measures of the frequency and intensity of investigative oversight. Contra Mayhew, we found that divided government spurs congressional investigatory activity. A shift from unified to divided government yields a five‐fold increase in the number of hearings held and quadruples their duration. Conditional party government models also offer explanatory leverage because homogeneous majorities are more likely to investigate the president in divided government and less likely to do so in unified government. This dynamic is strongest in the House, but analyses of the Senate also afford consistent, if muted, evidence of partisan agenda control.     

The Two Faces of Law and Inequality: From Critique to the Promise of Situated,Pragmatic Policy

Over the course of my career, I have navigated a research agenda that moves between scholarly and policy‐oriented research. Building on this experience, I argue that it is time for law and society scholars to take seriously a commitment to engaged scholarship that speaks to a wider audience of stakeholders and policymakers. Three themes frame my proposal to get back in the game of advocacy and policy. First, I consider why we need to rekindle this commitment at this historical moment: inequalities in wealth, income, and social mobility and the rise of mass incarceration and its collateral consequences diminish the foundation required for effective democratic governance to thrive. Second, what our scholarship has to say is key to the framing of pragmatic policy: law and society's focus on law in action and the culture of law are key to understanding the ways in which most policies tend to deliver unintended consequences. Finally, we need to consider how to go about the next step to make our work visible to a wider audience of stakeholders?     

The Development of Special Orders and Special Rules in the U.S. House, 1881–1937

The modern Committee on Rules plays a critical role in structuring the agenda of the U.S. House of Representatives. In fact, resolutions from the Committee on Rules are the primary means through which controversial legislation reaches the House floor. But the Committee on Rules did not play a role in shaping the floor agenda until the 1880s and, despite intense scrutiny of episodes such as the institution of the Reed rules and the revolt against Speaker Cannon, our understanding of the role of the Committee on Rules is limited and skewed heavily toward the post‐World War II era. This limitation is unfortunate, because special rules play a starring role in major theories of legislative organization. In this article, I present analysis of the usage and historical development of special rules in the House, and I offer findings from my empirical analysis of the determinants of rule choice from 1881 to 1937. A nuanced interrogation of new data on special rules in this era reveals support for committee specialization and conditional party government as motives for rule choice in this era.     

In Search of Killer Amendments In the Modern U.S. House

Numerous studies have examined the incidence of killer amendments in Congress, but most of these studies have been either case specific, focusing on the legislative maneuverings around a single issue or bill, or temporally limited, focusing on strategic activity in only one or two Congresses. In this article, we present the beginning of a comprehensive research agenda for the systematic study of killer amendments. Using roll‐call data from the 83d through the 108th U.S. House (1953–2004), we identified those bills that (a) were successfully amended and (b) subsequently went down to defeat, a necessary condition for the existence of a killer amendment. We then examined these cases in greater detail, using both spatial analyses and case studies. Our analysis uncovered five cases, four of which are new, that appear to have the characteristics of true killer amendments, thus setting the stage for future analyses across time and legislative chambers and bodies.     

Commitment and Consequences: Reneging on Cosponsorship Pledges in the U.S. House

We argue that bill cosponsorship in Congress represents an institutional arrangement that provides credibility to commitments of support. We predict that if cosponsorship fosters legislative deals, MCs will only rarely back out on their pledges to support a bill if it comes up for a floor vote, and when they do, these choices will reflect strategic calculations. Further, legislators who violate their cosponsorship agreements will face punishment from colleagues, compromising their ability to gain support for their own bills. We explore the causes and effects of MCs' choices to renege on a pledge by voting no on a bill for which they were a cosponsor, focusing on all cosponsorship decisions in the 101st–108th Houses. The results reveal that patterns of reneging and its consequences are consistent with the idea that cosponsorship functions as a commitment mechanism.     

COMMUNITY STRUCTURE AND ADOLESCENT DELINQUENCY IN ICELAND: A CONTEXTUAL ANALYSIS*

The current study examines the contextual effects of community structural characteristics on adolescent delinquency in Iceland, focusing on how specific individual‐level mechanisms work to mediate the contextual effects. Using multilevel data on 68 school communities and 6,458 adolescents, we find a contextual effect of community social instability (residential mobility, family disruption) on delinquency. Moreover, the findings indicate that specific individual‐level social control mechanisms (Coleman, 1988) explain a part of this effect, namely, embeddedness in community‐based social ties linking parents and adolescents and normlessness. Also, the findings indicate that the individual‐level effect of unsupervised peer activity on delinquency is contingent on embeddedness in social ties as well as on community social instability. The findings have bearing on the cross‐societal generalizability of social disorganization theory.     

Personal Characteristics of MPs and Legislative Behavior in Moral Policymaking

Theoretical and empirical models of legislative decision making in parliamentary democracies typically neglect the policy preferences of individual MPs and instead focus on political parties and possible institutional constraints. We argue that MPs actually make judgments and decisions on the basis of their preferences, which are shaped by their personal characteristics. However, given the strength of parties in most parliamentary systems, the impact of personal characteristics on legislative behavior is rarely visible. Therefore, we examine a moral issue. Looking at cosponsorship, parliamentary speeches, and votes in the German Bundestag, we analyze the legislative procedure on the regulation of preimplantation genetic diagnosis (PGD) in Germany in 2011. We show that the legislative behavior of MPs does not only reflect partisan conflict but is also influenced by the preferences of the constituents and MPs’ own personal characteristics such as: religious denomination, gender, and parental status.     

Moving prison health promotion along: towards an integrative framework for action to develop health promotion and tackle the social determinants of health

The majority of prisoners are drawn from deprived circumstances with a range of health and social needs. The current focus within ‘prison health’ does not, and cannot, given its predominant medical model, adequately address the current health and well-being needs of offenders. Adopting a social model of health is more likely to address the wide range of health issues faced by offenders and thus lead to better rehabilitation outcomes. At the same time, broader action at governmental level is required to address the social determinants of health (poverty, unemployment and educational attainment) that marginalise populations and increase the likelihood of criminal activities. Within prison, there is more that can be done to promote prisoners’ health if a move away from a solely curative, medical model is facilitated, towards a preventive perspective designed to promote positive health. Here, we use the Ottawa Charter for health promotion to frame public health and health promotion within prisons and to set out a challenging agenda that would make health a priority for everyone, not just ‘health’ staff, within the prison setting. A series of outcomes under each of the five action areas of the Charter offers a plan of action, showing how each can improve health. We also go further than the Ottawa Charter, to comment on how the values of emancipatory health promotion need to permeate prison health discourse, along with the concept of salutogenesis.     

The Impact of Parliamentary Specialisation on Cosponsorship

This study seeks to establish the effect of parliamentary specialisation on cosponsorship of parliamentary proposals in parliamentary systems with high levels of party unity. Existing studies on presidential systems suggest that cosponsorship is mainly related to legislators’ policy preferences. It is proposed that in parliamentary systems cosponsorship is, in the first place, structured by the division of labour in parliamentary party groups: MPs who do not have overlapping policy portfolios will not cosponsor proposals. Other explanations, such as policy distance and the government–opposition divide, only come into play when MPs are specialised in the same field. This expectation is tested using data from the Netherlands, a parliamentary system with a clear division of labour between MPs. It is found that specialisation has a very large impact on cosponsorship.     

Shadow Writing and Participant Observation: A Study of Criminal Justice Social Work Around Sentencing

The study of decision‐making by public officials in administrative settings has been a mainstay of law and society scholarship for decades. The methodological challenges posed by this research agenda are well understood: how can socio‐legal researchers get inside the heads of legal decision‐makers in order to understand the uses of official discretion? This article describes an ethnographic technique the authors developed to help them penetrate the decision‐making practices of criminal justice social workers in writing pre‐sentence reports for the courts. This technique, called ‘shadow writing’, involved a particular form of participant observation whereby the researcher mimicked the process of report writing in parallel with the social workers. By comparing these ‘shadow reports’ with the real reports in a training‐like setting, the social workers revealed in detail the subtleties of their communicative strategies embedded in particular reports and their sensibilities about report writing more generally.     

Informal social support interventions and their role in violence prevention: an agenda for future evaluation

There is increasing interest among policymakers and practitioners in tapping the potential of family, friends, volunteers, peer support groups, and mutual aid organizations to help prevent violence. The popularity of these informal social support (ISS) interventions stems, in part, from their flexibility, responsiveness to individual needs, and perceived low cost. However, there is still limited understanding of whether and how ISS interventions can improve social support, reduce violence, or save money. Furthermore, mobilizing and sustaining ISS interventions appears to be difficult, particularly for families living in high-risk environments. Rigorous and creative evaluations of ISS interventions are needed to inform policy decisions and refine program development and implementation. Focusing on the field of child maltreatment, we describe different kinds of ISS interventions and outline an evaluation agenda that includes core research questions and evaluation challenges and strategies.     

SIBLING DEVIANCE: IN THE SHADOWS OF MUTUAL AND UNIQUE FRIENDSHIP EFFECTS?*

Drawing on a large sample of genetically related pairs of adolescents from the Add Health, we examine the influence of sibling deviance on adolescents' participation in minor deviance compared to the influence received from mutual friends (i.e., friends shared between siblings) and influence from unique friends (i.e., friends unique to each sibling). Multivariate analyses that control for genetic relatedness using DeFries‐Fulker regression (1985) indicate that after aspects of the shared and non‐shared environment of siblings are accounted for, the heritability effect, capturing genetic relatedness in sibling deviance, is no longer significantly associated with deviance. The deviance of siblings' unique friends accounts for a large portion of the heritability effect of sibling deviance.     

Crime and safety-related concerns in a small community

This research utilizes social context and personal characteristics as determinants of both perceptions and satisfaction with safety in the local neighborhood. Using survey data obtained from residents of a small town, this analysis examines the impact of satisfaction with the environment, victimization, and social integration on attitudes concerning safety. Consistent with past research, results indicate that victimization and satisfaction with the local area are both significant predictors of perceptions of safety. They also share a significant relationship with satisfaction with safety. Two indicators of social integration yielded differing results. Participation in local organizations and associations played a more significant role in attitudes concerning safety than did the number of friends a respondent has in the neighborhood. When controlling for personal characteristics, participation in organizations was a more significant predictor of perceptions of safety than of satisfaction with safety. This project was funded by Midway College and a grant from the Association of American Colleges to the University of Louisville. An earlier version of this research was presented to the American Sociological Association. The authors would like to acknowledge the suggestions of Susan Bennett.     

Representation,Competing Principals,and Waffling on Bills in US Legislatures

Legislators are often placed in the position of representing the interests of their constituents against the preferences of their own party leaders. We develop a theoretical framework indicating that these cross‐pressured legislators are more likely to initially support legislation and subsequently change their minds than are legislators whose constituents and leaders share similar preferences. Moreover, we expect this pattern to be most pronounced among members of majority parties than minority‐party members. We test our expectations using data on bill cosponsorship and final passage votes from 46 lower state legislative chambers and the US House, finding considerable support for our theory.