Due North? Do American Theories of Legislative Committees Apply to Canada?

Several theories of legislative organisation have been proposed to explain committee selection in American legislatures, but do these theories travel outside the United States? This paper tests whether these theories apply to data from the Canadian House of Commons. It was found that the distributive and partisan models of legislative organisation explain committee composition in Canada. In many cases, committees in the House of Commons are made up of preference outliers. As predicted by partisan models, it was also found that the governing party stacks committees with its members, but this is conditional upon the strength of the governing party.     

Party Effects in State Legislative Committees

Legislative scholars have theorized about the role of committees and whether they are, or are not, tools of the majority party. We look to the states to gain more empirical leverage on this question, using a regression discontinuity approach and novel data from all state committees between 1996 and 2014. We estimate that majority‐party status produces an 8.5 percentage point bonus in committee seats and a substantial ideological shift in the direction of the majority party. Additionally, we leverage a surprisingly frequent, but as if random occurrence in state legislatures—tied chambers—to identify majority‐party effects, finding similar support for partisan committees. We also examine whether the extent of committee partisanship is conditional on party polarization or legislative professionalism, but we find that it is not. Our results demonstrate that parties create nonrepresentative committees across legislatures to pursue their outlying policy preferences.     

Legislative Bellwethers: The Role of Committee Membership in Parliamentary Debate

Political parties and legislators use legislative debates to establish their reputation, challenge rivals, and engage in coalition management, among many other tasks. Yet, existing theories on parliamentary debates have abstracted away from the need for information and expertise, which are costly to acquire. Drawing on the “informational” perspective on legislative organization, we address this problem by arguing that party leaders use committees as training arenas for their backbenchers. They task their assigned members with acquiring specific expertise and then rely heavily on those members during the corresponding debates. We turn to the Portuguese legislature, from 2000 to 2015, to discuss how saliency, government dynamics, and party size affect the use of experts. We test this theory using a novel approach to classify speeches that leverages the texts of legislation as training data for a supervised approach.     

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.     

Candidate Selection and a Crowded Parliament: The Israeli Knesset, 1988–2006

Candidate selection reform has its consequences. This article examines Israel as a case study in order to understand the changes in parliamentary activity (legislation, parliamentary questions and motions for the agenda) that resulted from the adoption of primaries as a candidate selection reform by the Labour Party in 1992 and later by three more parties: Likud, Meretz and Tzomet. The findings show that there has been a significant increase in parliamentary activity since the 13th Knesset (the first Knesset with Members of Knesset elected through primaries). The research hypothesises that posited reasons for the difference in parliamentary activities in the Knesset terms before and after the introduction of primaries were strongly supported.     

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.     

Mixed Rules,Different Roles? An Analysis of the Typical Pathways into the Bundestag and of MPs' Parliamentary Behaviour

Does the German mixed electoral system produce two types of representatives – MPs elected in the district who aim primarily to represent the interests of their constituencies and list MPs who are primarily loyal to their party or seek to serve ‘functional’ interest groups? The paper addresses this controversial question in two steps. It first uses sequence analysis in order to discover empirically just how prominent the exclusive ‘path into the Bundestag’ actually was by way of either the party list or the electoral district. The empirical basis is a data set covering all 3581 members of parliament from 1949 to 2009. Secondly, after having identified MPs with clear district or list careers, the paper replicates a study on committee membership asking whether district MPs sat more often in committees that are of relevance for their districts while list MPs more often sit in so-called ‘policy’ committees. The paper finds no evidence for a clear ‘mandate divide’ between MPs elected in a district and those numerous MPs entering parliament via the party list but also contesting a district.     

Geographic Representation in Party‐Dominated Legislatures: A Quantitative Text Analysis of Parliamentary Questions in the German Bundestag

Political representation in European democracies is widely considered partisan and collectivist. This article, however, stresses that there is more to the representative process in European democracies than just its textbook version. It emphasizes the role of geographic representation as a complementary strategy in party‐dominated legislatures that is characterized by two distinct features. First, legislators employ distinct opportunities to participate in legislative contexts to signal attention to geographic constituents without disrupting party unity. Second, these activities are motivated by individual‐ and district‐level characteristics that supplement electoral‐system‐level sources of geographic representation. We empirically test and corroborate this argument for the German case on the basis of a content analysis of parliamentary questions in the 17th German Bundestag (2009–13). In this analysis, we show that higher levels of localness among legislators and higher levels of electoral volatility in districts result in increased geographic representation.     

Procedural Change in the UK House of Commons, 1811–2015

Recent research has shown an increasing interest in the historical evolution of legislative institutions. The development of the UK Parliament has received particularly extensive attention. In this article, we contribute to this literature in three important ways. First, we introduce a complete, machine-readable data set of all the Standing Orders of the UK House of Commons between 1811 and 2015. Second, we demonstrate how this data set can be used to construct innovative measures of procedural change. Third, we illustrate a potential empirical application of the data set, offering an exploratory test of several expectations drawn from recent theories of formal rule change in parliamentary democracies. We conclude that the new data set has the potential to substantially advance our understanding of legislative reforms in the United Kingdom and beyond.     

Legislative Efficiency and Political Inclusiveness: The Effect of Procedures on Interest Group Mobilization in the European Parliament

This paper contributes to discussions surrounding interest group representation in the European Parliament. Drawing from conceptualizations of legitimacy, and theoretical work on information-access we argue that different procedures bestow a different type of authority to parliamentary committees affecting their legitimacy orientation, in turn impacting the balance between private and public interests mobilised. We assess a population of 10,000 accredited lobbyists, and the procedural output across the 7th legislature’s committees (2009–2014). Our analysis indicates that committees with a higher ratio of Ordinary Legislative Procedures to Own Initiative Reports see greater private interest mobilisation. Conversely, in committees where the procedures’ ratios are inverse we observe greater public interest mobilisation. Theoretically, we provide a novel approach for framing the committee’s nature from a procedural perspective, bridging discussions on interest group mobilisation and the democratic deficit. Empirically, the results overturn the premise of business dominance across the institution’s committees through a unique dataset.     

论我国建立民事诉讼快速审判程序的立法选择

我国的民商事纠纷的不断增加,便人民法院受理的民商事案件数量也快速增长。为了应对不断增长的诉讼潮,关键在于健全我国的民事审判程序体系,增设一个独立于现有审判程序的,全新而又高效的审判程序就是重中之重。根据现代民事诉讼法理,综合考量我国历史文化因素和现实状况。在民事诉讼中,建立快速审判程序是我国民事诉讼法的应然选择。     

论中国民法典婚姻家庭编的立法理念与制度新规

《民法典》婚姻家庭编的编纂,根据加强国家对婚姻家庭的保护、倡导重视家庭文明建设、尊重婚姻家庭当事人的意思自治、注重夫妻婚姻家庭地位的平等、注重儿童最大利益原则的贯彻、注意保护婚姻家庭弱者的权益等立法理念,新增或修改补充了24项制度或规则,主要包括:在"一般规定"章中,新增婚姻家庭受国家保护原则,增设婚姻家庭文明建设的倡导性规定,确立最有利于被收养人原则,界定亲属的种类、近亲属和家庭成员的范围;在"结婚"章中,减少禁止结婚和无效婚姻的法定事由,修改补充可撤销婚姻制度,新增重大疾病的如实告知义务、婚姻无效或被撤销无过错方的损害赔偿请求权;在"家庭关系"章中,新增夫妻家事代理权及其限制规则、夫妻共同债务认定规则、婚内析产规则、亲子关系的确认与否认之诉规则;在"离婚"章中,新增离婚冷静期、婚姻关系解除的时间,补充诉讼离婚准予离婚的法定事由、离婚时处理子女抚养问题规则、离婚夫妻共同财产分割原则,修改离婚经济补偿、离婚经济帮助的适用条件,增加离婚损害赔偿法定事由的兜底条款;在"收养"章中,放宽被收养人的年龄和收养子女的人数限制,修改收养人的条件,增加收养评估规则等。