State-based Representation and National Policymaking: The Evolution of the Australian Senate and the Federation

Ostensibly, Australia's constitutional framers designed the upper house as the ‘guardian of states' interests', ensuring that the smaller states were adequately represented in the federation. In recent decades the Senate has positively reinvented itself as a guardian of democracy, and is commonly known as the ‘house of review’. This study examines the changing representative role of senators and the Senate through surveys and interviews of current and former senators. The Senate has also become more of a guardian of the national interest, with proportional representation, larger constituencies and longer terms being the key institutional factors.     

The Italian Senate

This article analyses the composition and the functions of the Italian Senate. There are 315 senators, three-quarters of them elected in single-member constituencies through a first-past-the-post system, the remaining ones are elected according to the additional member system among the best losers. The voting age for the Senate is 25 and only Italian citizens who are 40 years or older can be elected. All former Presidents of the Italian Republic are life senators - at present two. Moreover, the President may appoint additional life senators among outstanding Italian citizens - at present five. The Italian Senate has the same powers and performs the same functions as the House of Deputies. According to some scholars and politicians, this system accounts for a better legislation; according to the critics, the Italian model of bicameralism is simply old, cumbersome and useless. The Senate provides a number of ministers commensurate to its size, but only one Prime Minister has ever held a seat in the Senate. The most important debates take place in the House of Deputies, but the government may be defeated in the Senate because all Italian governments must enjoy the confidence of both chambers. Though several proposals for the reform of the Senate have been entertained, none has been approved so far. It is unlikely that even the transformation of the Senate into a Chamber representing the regions, along the model of the German Bundesrat, will take place.     

Iraq Casualties and the 2006 Senate Elections

Prior scholarship on the effects of war casualties on U.S. elections has focused on large‐scale conflicts. For this article, we examined whether or not the much‐smaller casualty totals incurred in Iraq had a similar influence on the 2006 Senate contests. We found that the change in vote share from 2000 to 2006 for Republican Senate candidates at both the state and county level was significantly and negatively related to local casualty tallies and rates. These results provide compelling evidence for the existence of a democratic brake on military adventurism, even in small‐scale wars, but one that is strongest in communities that have disproportionately shouldered a war's costs.     

The Punctuated Origins of Senate Polarization

This article uses a new dynamic ideal‐point estimation method that incorporates smoothing techniques to construct a more detailed account of Senate polarization. The results reveal that the Senate polarized in two distinct phases. Member replacement accounts for nearly all of the increase from the early 1970s through the mid‐1990s after which ideological adaptation emerges as the dominant force behind polarization. In addition, I find that a few brief periods of intensified partisanship account for most of the increase in polarization since the mid‐1990s, suggesting that these episodes have had significant and lasting effects.     

Circumventing Legislative Committees: The US Senate

Committees have been established to improve legislation and make expert recommendations. However, many bills do not appear in committees, and how they reach the Senate floor varies in style and strategy. We develop and test expectations for when, as well as how, bills bypass Senate committee proceedings. The procedures legislators use to circumvent committees and what makes committee bypassing more probable are explored. The findings clearly demonstrate that bills introduced by ideologically extreme minority-party members are more likely to bypass committees. We also show a clear shift in the procedural choices senators make as the Senate becomes increasingly polarized. This article highlights the procedural choices members make, how these choices produce differing outcomes, and suggests evidence of positive agenda power for individual minority-party senators.     

Effort,incentives, and culture in the Czech Senate

This paper uses the natural experiment of seat allocation in the first Czech Senate to assess the effects of incentives on legislative effort. Contrary to previous work using similar research designs, the incentive of longer terms has little effect on the effort levels of legislators. This may reflect the parliamentary context, the newness of the Czech Senate, or, most interestingly, political culture.     

Job Approval and Senate Election Outcomes In the United States

A growing body of congressional scholarship investigates variation in the incumbent electoral advantage that depends on factors such as competence, political skill, and ideological extremity. This article contributes to this line of work by providing analysis of the relationship between senators' home‐state approval ratings and their electoral fortunes using newly available data from the Job Approval Ratings (JAR) collection. The findings show that senatorial job approval affects retirement, quality‐candidate emergence, campaign spending, and outcomes. The myriad indirect effects suggest that strategic political actors are central to the process by which incumbents are held accountable for the reputations they develop in their constituencies.     

Examining Legislative Cue‐Taking in the US Senate

We examine congressional cue‐taking theory to determine its extent, conditionality, and various forms in the US Senate. Using a novel data‐collection technique (timed C‐SPAN footage), we focus on temporal dynamics via event history analysis. Examining the effects of senator characteristics across 16 votes from the 108th Congress, we find that committee leadership and seniority generally predict cue‐giving, while other types of characteristics predict cue‐giving on certain types of votes. Our results underscore the importance of considering the order and timing of voting when studying congressional behavior.     

Staggered Terms for the US Senate: Origins and Irony

This article provides the first detailed study of the origins of staggered Senate terms, which typically have been interpreted as part of the framers’ intent to create an insulated, stable, and conservative Senate. I draw upon three sources of evidence—the meaning and application of “rotation” in revolutionary America, the deliberations and decisions at the Constitutional Convention, and the arguments during Ratification—to show that the origins of and intentions behind staggered terms offer little support for the dominant interpretation. Instead, staggered terms, a mechanism to promote “rotation” or turnover of membership, were added to the Constitution as a compromise to offset, not augment, the Senate's longer terms by exposing a legislative chamber with long individual tenure to more frequent electoral influence and change.     

The Calculus of Cosponsorship in the U.S. Senate

We investigated why a legislator would be willing to vote “yea” on final passage of a bill but would choose not to cosponsor that bill. We tested a series of hypotheses regarding the cosponsorship decisions of individual senators, using a dataset that includes every major initiative that was introduced and received a floor vote in the Senate between 1975 and 2000. We found that senators are more likely to cosponsor bills when their preferences diverge from the Senate median but are closer to those of the bill's sponsor. Also, senators are more likely to cosponsor bills when they sponsor a higher number of bills overall, when they become more connected with colleagues, and when their constituents increase demand for legislation within particular policy areas. Senators are less likely to cosponsor bills if they received a higher percentage of the general election vote in their most recent election.     

Senate Apportionment as a Source of Political Inequality

Political scientists have long known that the equal representation of states in the U.S. Senate and the placement of state lines might disadvantage politically relevant groups, granting some citizens greater voting weight in the chamber. Yet we lack systematic, longitudinal evidence that identifies the groups disadvantaged by Senate malapportionment, the sources of this disadvantage, and probes the policy consequences. In this article, I compare each state's liberalism and racial composition with its relative voting weight in the Senate over time. Additionally, I examine whether roll‐call coalitions in the Senate map onto these patterns of state ideology and racial composition.     

Bicameralism and Geographic Politics: Allocating Funds in the House and Senate

Because they represent different kinds of constituencies—states versus parts of states—senators and House members have different incentives in constructing federal distributive programs. In order to claim credit for providing particularized benefits, House members need to use policy tools—earmarks and narrow categorical programs—that target funds to their constituencies. Senators, by contrast, are able to claim credit for the large formula grants that distribute the bulk of intergovernmental grant money. Examining House‐Senate interactions in one of the largest distributive programs, federal aid to states for surface transportation, I show that the different bases of representation in the House and Senate structure the chambers' preferences on distributive programs and affect the outcomes of interchamber conflicts.     

Campaign War Chests and Challenger Quality in Senate Elections

This article presents the first comprehensive analysis of the role of war chests in U.S. Senate elections. Using data on races from 1980 to 2000, I demonstrate the effect of an incumbent senator's war chest on a campaign. War chests do not deter strong general‐election challengers and have an insubstantial or insignificant effect on primary elections, challenger spending, and other electoral variables. Also, war chests are not raised in anticipation of a tough electoral battle but are instead the result of money left over from the previous campaign.