Self‐selection or Socialization? A Dynamic Analysis of Committee Member Preferences

Theories on committee power assert that legislators self‐select to committees and therefore have preferences regarding the policy issues under the committees' jurisdictions that differ from the preferences of noncommittee members. I argue that preference outliers may be shaped both by processes of self‐selection and by endogenous processes within committees. Contrary to previous examinations of committee member preferences, the study utilizes a dynamic approach to examine the development of preferences over time in order to separate self‐selection from endogenous processes. Analyzing the development in the spending preferences of 859 Danish local politicians over three different election periods, I find that politicians increasingly prefer spending on their committees' jurisdictions over time, but their preferences do not change to the same extent on policy issues beyond their committees' jurisdictions. The findings point to the importance of endogenous processes in committees. Hence, committees may be outliers for very different reasons than those proposed by mainstream theory.     

Less Democracy, More Courts: A Puzzle of Judicial Review in Russia

This article explores why, throughout the 1990s, some Russian regions created their own constitutional courts and others did not. Contrary to current theories that assert that politicians create a strong and independent judiciary to protect them from the tyranny of election-winners in the context of political uncertainty, my analysis finds that constitutional courts emerged only in those regions where governors virtually guaranteed their re-election by consolidating their political power vis-à-vis federal and local governments. The article argues that both federal and regional politicians used the process of creating subnational constitutional courts to legitimize their federalism and judicial reforms. The changes in the balance of power between those governors, who aspired to have their own judicial system, and the federal government that insisted on a single federal judicial system, determined the variation in the process of court-building across Russian regions.     

Political Ethics Online: Parliamentarians' Use of Email in Europe

Through a comparative study of parliamentarians' use of email, this article aims to investigate such issues as how important email is perceived to be by parliamentarians; to what extent and for what purposes politicians make use of email; and what key ethical issues are being raised by parliamentarians' email communication. We find that the positive view of politicians on the potential of email communication has not been matched with active use of this new medium in their interaction with citizens. Parliamentarians are left on their own in managing emails, rather than being guided by parliamentary codes of conduct. Data used in this article include the results of a questionnaire survey, content analysis of parliamentary websites and face-to-face interviews with parliamentarians and parliamentary ICT staff.     

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 Effect of the Electoral Calendar on Politicians' Selection into Legislative Cohorts and Legislative Behavior in Argentina, 1983–2007

How do electoral opportunities affect politicians' career strategies? Do politicians behave strategically in response to the opportunities provided by the electoral calendar? We argue that in a legislature that combines nonstatic ambition with a staggered electoral calendar, different kinds of politicians will have dissimilar preferences towards running in concurrent or midterm elections. More specifically, politicians with no previous executive experience should strategically run in midterm legislative elections in order to increase their visibility among voters, while more experienced politicians should opt for concurrent elections. We support these claims with data from the Argentine Chamber of Deputies between 1983 and 2007.     

Submissive Lobby Fodder or Assertive Political Actors? Party Loyalty of Career Politicians in the UK House of Commons, 2005–15

Are career politician members of parliament (MPs) more or less likely to vote against the party line than their peers? Despite growing interest in the behavior of career politicians across parliamentary systems, answers to this question are marked by considerable theoretical and empirical uncertainty. I derive the two most common (but opposing) behavioral predictions before testing them over all legislative votes of two UK House of Commons terms (2005–15) using multilevel modeling of new and disaggregated data on MPs' occupational backgrounds. The finding that career politicians are more likely to rebel challenges conventional wisdom and provides an important empirical foundation for the ongoing debate.     

Toward a theory of jurisdictional competition: the case of the Japanese FTC

The Japanese antitrust agency (the J-FTC) holds a jurisdictionalmonopoly over most issues. Because overlapping jurisdictionswould enable politicians to gauge relative bureaucratic performance,this monopoly prevents politicians from monitoring the agencyon most issues. In response, J-FTC bureaucrats have chosen notto enforce those statutory provisions like criminal penaltiesthat firms might contest, and firms face virtually no criminalsanctions for antitrust violations. Most Japanese markets arestill competitive—but primarily because they are large,fluid, and easy to enter. The J-FTC enforces the law only inareas where politicians can monitor its performance, and politicianshave the information they need to monitor only on issues aboutwhich they care deeply. Although monopolist agencies will regulateless actively than competitive agencies, politicians do notwin elections by creating agencies they cannot control, andeven monopolist agencies will regulate actively when politicianscan gauge their performance. In equilibrium, therefore, politicianswill grant agencies a jurisdictional monopoly over electorallyimportant issues only when they have access through other sourcesfor information by which they can monitor their bureaucrats.     

Term Limits and Legislative‐Executive Conflict in the American States

State governments have experienced considerable institutional change in the last several decades. None appeared at first glance to be as far‐reaching as the legislative term limits that were adopted by over 20 states in the 1990s. The evidence to date suggests that term limits have indeed changed the character of many of the states' legislatures, if not always as predicted by their advocates. We report data on veto dynamics over the period 1989–2008 to determine how term limits have impacted legislative‐executive relations. Our data both challenge and support what has become the conventional wisdom, i.e., that term limits will weaken legislatures relative to their governors. States with more stringent term limits experienced fewer gubernatorial vetoes but proved more likely to override those vetoes when they were issued. Taken together the evidence suggests that the relationship between governors and legislatures in the wake of term limits is more complex and variable than scholars and others had previously thought.     

EMPIRICAL ANALYSIS OF REFERRAL ISSUES AND “ULTIMATE ISSUE” RECOMMENDATIONS FOR PARENTS IN CHILD PROTECTION CASES*

Mental health professionals frequently respond to requests for clinical information on parents in child protection cases; however, little data exist on the issues precipitating requests or on the controversial practice of offering “ultimate issue” recommendations in forensic clinical reports. We investigated 243 requests for clinical information on parents and 204 clinician reports submitted for use in child abuse and neglect proceedings in a large, urban juvenile court system. We coded 56 objective and qualitative characteristics regarding referral questions, pending legal issues, and four levels of recommendations. We found that the most common referral questions related to service planning, parenting ability, and/or parents' mental health functioning, and the most common pending legal issues were selection or change of a permanency goal and visitation arrangements. Levels of recommendations varied with type of legal decision, in that clinicians always offered direct recommendations for narrow, statute‐based issues (e.g., termination of rights, adoption) and less so for other issues. Community‐based evaluators were more likely to offer direct recommendations than court‐based clinicians. Based on the findings, we offer practice recommendations and directions for further research in forensic parenting assessment.     

Decentralizing Pork: Congressional Roll‐Call Voting,Decentralized Administration,and Distributive Politics

Congress packages pork‐barrel spending in complicated proposals that belie theories of distributive politics. We theorize that roll‐call voting on such bills depends on grant programs' administrative centralization, party ties with presidents or home‐state governors, and differences in geographic representation between chambers. Analyzing votes between 1973 and 2010 using a within‐legislator strategy reveals that House members are less likely to support decentralized spending when they are copartisans with presidents, while senators support decentralization regardless of such party ties. When House members or senators share affiliation with only governors or with neither chief executive, the likelihood of support rises with decentralization.     

State‐Level Institutional Effects on Legislative Coalition Unity in Brazil

How do subnational factors affect the proclivity of legislators from the same party or coalition to vote together? We estimate the effects of two institutional forces operating at the state level—intralist electoral competition and alliance with governors—on voting unity among coalition cohorts to the Brazilian Chamber of Deputies. Larger cohorts, in which the imperative for legislators to distinguish themselves from the group is stronger, are less unified than smaller cohorts. We find no net effect of alliance with governors on cohort voting unity. Governors are not dominant brokers of legislative coalitions, a result suggesting that the net gubernatorial effect is contingent on factors that shape governors' influence relative to that of national‐level legislative actors.     

The Limits of Electoral Control: Evidence from Last‐Term Politicians

In modern democracies, politicians' accountability is often linked to the disciplining mechanism of electoral control. For politicians in their final term, this mechanism is impaired. Using a novel data set covering 910 members of the UK House of Commons active within the period 1997–2010, we investigate how reduced electoral control affects last‐term MPs' trade‐off between work effort inside parliament, leisure, and outside interests. Our main contributions lie in providing the first explicit consideration of (1) MPs' final‐term intra‐/extraparliamentary work balance and (2) MPs' reasons for leaving parliament (i.e., retirement, career change, electoral defeat). These extensions provide important fresh insights concerning the boundaries of elections' disciplining power.     

Asking the Sovereignty Question in Global Legal Pluralism: From “Weak” Jurisprudence to “Strong” Socio‐Legal Theories of Constitutional Power Operations

The article examines recent theories of legal and constitutional pluralism, especially their adoption of sociological perspectives and criticisms of the concept of sovereignty. The author argues that John Griffiths's original dichotomy of “weak” and “strong” pluralism has to be reassessed because “weak” jurisprudential theories contain useful sociological analyses of the internal differentiation and operations of specific legal orders, their overlapping, parallel validity and collisions in global society. Using the sociological methodology of legal pluralism theories and critically elaborating on Teubner's societal constitutionalism, the author subsequently reformulates the question of sovereignty as a sociological problem of complex power operations communicated through the constitutional state's organization and reconfigured within the global legal and political framework.     

Tunisia's “Revolutionary” Lawyers: From Professional Autonomy to Political Mobilization

On January 14, 2011, after twenty‐three years in power and one month of popular protest demanding his resignation, President Ben Ali fled Tunisia. Lawyers, wearing their official robes, had marched frequently in the uprising's demonstrations. By engaging with and supporting the uprising, lawyers—both the profession in general and the bar's leadership—gained considerable symbolic influence over the post‐uprising government that replaced Ben Ali's regime. This article outlines the various forms of political lawyering undertaken by Tunisian lawyers and their professional associations from Tunisia's independence to post‐uprising transitions. We demonstrate that economic concerns, professional objectives, and civic professionalism contributed to the collective action of Tunisian lawyers before and after the uprising. Tunisian lawyers moved beyond the realm of their profession to adopt a role as overseers of the post‐uprising government.     

Face mask mandates: Unilateral authority and gubernatorial leadership in US states

During the first year of the COVID-19 pandemic in the United States, the coordination and cooperation between the federal government and the states failed. American governors were thus tasked with making critical public health policy choices—under extreme uncertainty—with varying institutional capacities, partisan pressures, and state demographic differences. Yet most of the nation's governors chose to impose a face covering or mask mandate to limit the spread of cases. We collected each governor's executive order that mandated the conditions under which their residents would be required to wear a mask and employed a sentiment analysis program to extract key qualities of crisis leadership communication. Our analyses provide insights into the institutional and partisan factors that determined a face mask mandate as well as the institutional, demographic, and leadership communication qualities that affected the total number of cases per capita in the states. Our findings have important implications for post-pandemic policy recommendations with respect to the effectiveness of policies that seek to lower the transmission of viruses in public spaces and the characteristics of impactful public health messaging by government leaders.     

Some determinants of internal judicial independence: A comparative study of the courts in Chile,Peru and Ecuador

This article explores the primary determinants of internal judicial independence in three Latin American countries. Considering the relative absence of research focused on this dimension of judicial life, this article is innovative in demonstrating how it is affected by two variables: the quality of judges' training and respect for their judicial careers as criteria for promotions or transfers. While these variables explain why some countries enjoy greater internal judicial independence than others, this article also shows – contrary to popular wisdom – that judicial activism does not have a strong influence on internal judicial independence. Conducting a comparison of the courts in Chile, Peru, and Ecuador using surveys and semi-structured interviews, this study also shows that judges' autonomy from politicians does not necessarily follow the same path as the lower-court judges' independence from their hierarchical superiors.     

Machiavelli,Guicciardini and the “Governo Largo”

Niccolò Machiavelli's support for what he calls governo largo, or popular government, is usually contrasted with the diffidence towards it of Francesco Guicciardini, the Florentine aristocrat. The article argues that both these authors grounded their vision on Polybius' theory of “mixed government,” though adapting it in different directions. In examining this difference, the article reaches the conclusion that it concerns far less the degree of popular participation in political decision‐making and government than the value that Machiavelli and Guicciardini respectively ascribe to it in comparison with that of safety‐liberty (or legal certainty). In this respect, their theories may be viewed as anticipating the tensions between democracy and the rule of law, the co‐presence of which provides the essential foundation of the structure of present‐day constitutional democracies.     

“Critical Legal Histories Revisited”: A Response

The author responds to comments reappraising “Critical Legal Histories” (CLH) (1984). CLH critiqued “evolutionary functionalism,” the idea that law is a functional response to a typical modernizing process. CLH argued that “society” was partly constituted of legal elements and that law was too indeterminate to have reliably regular functional effects. CLH has been misinterpreted as calling for a return to internal histories of “mandarin” doctrine: all it said was that some doctrinal histories were valuable, without privileging them. This response clarifies that the relations of law to society and social change, and of high‐level official law to everyday local law are distinct issues. CLH is mostly moot today, since social‐legal historians have incorporated its insight that legal concepts are embedded in everyday social practice. But other fields have revived deterministic Whiggish accounts of progressive development and of law functional to it—to which CLH's critique still seems relevant.     

The Constitutional Court of the Republic of Austria 1918–1920

Abstract.   Constitutional review was the most original idea stemming from the Austrian Federal Constitution of 1920. It is argued that the politician Karl Renner gave birth to the idea of a constitutional court. Hans Kelsen played the predominant role in the drafting of constitutional provisions. The new Constitutional Court provided for a centralized system of review, with an eye to a number of politically important issues. Owing to the pressure that stemmed from various discussions between and among the politicians of the national state and the Länder , Kelsen was obliged to depart from the German model of the federal state and to develop in its place a new theory.     

Libertarian Paternalism,Externalities, and the “Spirit of Liberty”: How Thaler and Sunstein Are Nudging Us toward an “Overlapping Consensus”

In their 2008 book Nudge: Improving Decisions about Health, Wealth, and Happiness, Richard Thaler and Cass Sunstein use research from psychology and behavioral economics to argue that people suffer from systematic cognitive biases. They propose that policy makers mitigate these biases by framing people's choices in ways that help people act in their own self‐interest. Thaler and Sunstein call this approach “libertarian paternalism,” and they market it as “the Real Third Way.” In this essay, I argue that the book is a brilliant contribution to thinking about policy making but that “choice architecture” is not just a solution to the problem of cognitive biases. Rather, it is a means of approaching any kind of policy making. I further argue that policy makers must take externalities into account, even when using choice architecture. Finally, I argue that libertarian paternalism can best be seen as motivated by what Sunstein has celebrated in his work on constitutional theory: a humility about the possibility of policy‐maker error embodied in Learned Hand's famous aphorism about the “spirit of liberty” and an attempt to reduce social conflicts by searching for what John Rawls called an “overlapping consensus.”