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.     

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.     

“It’s the politics, stupid!”. The politicization of anti-corruption in Italy

This article aims to analyze the relationship between judicial activism against political corruption and electoral accountability. The judiciary plays a pivotal role in enforcing anti-corruption legislation, and, in many countries, courts have moved closer and closer towards that kind of working. In the article, we analyze the conditions under which a judicial prosecution of corrupt practices can also lead to electoral punishment of political misconducts by voters, or to a failure of accountability mechanisms. The latter outcome is more likely to occur if judicial activism is politicized. The ‘politicization’ of anti-corruption initiatives is here defined as an increase in the polarization of opinions, interests, or values about judicial investigations and the extent to which this polarization is strategically advanced towards the political debate by parties, political leaders, and media. By crystallizing a new dimension of political conflict, political actors can negatively affect electoral accountability, diminishing the risk of electoral punishment. We study this phenomenon by analyzing the case of Italy, a country which has experienced high levels of politicization of anti-corruption. However, whether and to what extent anti-corruption policies can be politicized is a question open for many other countries that can take a similar path.     

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.     

The electoral connection of ministerial selection in the UK

Many studies have examined the determinants of ministerial selection. However, the effect of electoral incentives on government post allocation has so far not been studied in the literature. Drawing on data from the United Kingdom over the period 1992–2015, this article investigates the relationship between the selection of ministers and the electoral interests of the actors in this selection process – party leaders and members of parliament (MPs). The findings demonstrate that the greater the electoral safety of constituencies, the more likely are MPs to have a higher office. The results reveal a broader conception of party strategy in government formation than previously documented. The paper thus suggests that electorates can affect the allocation of ministerial positions in the UK.     

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.     

Uncivic Society as a Sociopolitical Phenomenon in Ukraine: Reflections of the Social Character of the "Average" Ukrainian in the Electoral Process

Among the many remarkable peculiarities of the electoral process in Ukraine during the eighteen-month electoral cycle (from the parliamentary elections in March 1998 to the presidential elections in October-November 1999), the features of most interest to political scientists are those that, if properly explained, will enable us, first, to outline the basic parameters of citizens' behavior under the political regime that has evolved during the last ten years and, second, to determine the value orientations and the potential of the principal social and political actors. Above all, I have in mind the sociopolitical and sociocultural components of the elections or, to use a term of Erich Fromm's, the social character [1] of what is called the mean statistical (average) Ukrainian.     

The Electoral Connection and Legislative Committees

This article examines whether the career needs of legislators – to be re-elected or to move on to another political post – allow us to explain the rules governing committee structures and the committee assignments individual legislators obtain. It uses the institutional variations provided by Argentina, Costa Rica, and Venezuela to test hypotheses about committee assignments and committee assignment mechanisms. It finds that incentives created by candidate selection procedures and electoral rules show some relationship to committee assignments, but with a good deal of variation across national cases and individual careers.     

The Conditional Effect of Electoral Systems and Intraparty Candidate Selection Processes on Parties' Behavior

How do electoral systems and intraparty candidate selection procedures affect party unity? In this article, I distinguish theoretically and empirically between electoral systems and candidate selections and argue that the influence of selection processes on parties' behavior is conditional on electoral system (and vice versa). Measuring parties' unity using Rice and weighted Rice scores, and applying hierarchical models to a new data set of 249 parties in 24 countries, I find support for the claim that the influence of selection processes on behavior is greater under electoral systems that encourage personal vote‐seeking incentives than under electoral systems that encourage party centeredness.     

Electoral Budget Cycles in Legislatures

This article examines electoral cycles in legislative budget decisions. Where local structures play an important role in candidate selection and election, legislators' incentives to amend the executive spending proposal can depend on the proximity of elections, leading to more spendthrift behavior in the run‐up to popular votes. However, stringent budget institutions can counteract this tendency. Using a unique dataset of executive spending proposals and approved budgets in Sweden, I find strong empirical support for these predictions. Future studies of electoral cycles should pay greater attention to separating the contributions of the legislative and executive stages of the budgetary process and the conditions that foster electoral cyclicality in legislatures.     

Social-Nationalists in the Ukrainian Parliament

Disillusionment with the leaders of the Orange Revolution and their successors, combined with rhetorical and symbolic adjustments made by the ultraright party Svoboda, led to its electoral success in the 2012 parliamentary elections in Ukraine. As a result, xenophobia and anti-Semitism have become part of the public political discourse.     

Can young pups teach an old Dog new tricks? Lessons for British reformers from eastern Europe's new constitutional democracies

This article analyses the process of constitutional reforms in eastern Europe and draws lessons for similar reforms in British politics. It looks, first, at electoral engineering and shows how political actors, pursuing their particular interests, try to turn proportionality back into majoritarianism, and how and why such moves do not necessarily result in their projected outcomes. In a similar vein, it then goes on to analyse parliamentary formal rules, such as standing orders, and demonstrates how attempts to manipulate them can be offset, not just by counter‐manipulation, but by underlying informal rules and cultural norms. Overall, we argue that, because constitutional change is an ongoing and crucially political process, its results are neither wholly predictable nor always welcomed. On the basis of the eastern European experience, we also suggest that constitutional change does not necessarily lead to increased legitimacy of the system, thus undermining one of the major hopes of reformers in Britain.     

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.     

Minority Status,Ideology, or Opportunity: Explaining the Greater Retirement of House Republicans

Republicans in the U.S. House of Representatives tend to retire at a higher rate than Democrats—a fact with potentially important electoral and policy ramifications—but research on the possible explanations for this partisan disparity has been scarce. I test various explanatory hypotheses using multilevel statistical analyses and find that Republicans are more likely to retire—not because they have been the predominant minority party, had more political opportunities, or had different private‐sector experiences, but because they harbor more conservative ideologies than their Democratic colleagues.     

Parties and Electoral Performance in the Market for Political Consultants

We investigate whether the hiring relationships of candidates and political consulting firms better resembles the predictions of the “adversarial” or “allied” models of consultant‐party interaction. We find that the highest‐quality consultants are not allocated to the most competitive races, consultant‐candidate relationships persist even as candidates' electoral prospects change, and firms who work for challengers face a higher risk of market exit than firms working for incumbents. The market focuses entirely on win‐loss records and ignores the information on consultant performance available in candidates' vote shares. These findings depict a market driven by individual candidate, rather than aggregate party, goals.     

The Dynasty Advantage: Family Ties in Congressional Elections

Political dynasties, families in which multiple members have held elected office, commonly feature in the U.S. Congress. I explored the electoral origins of this phenomenon and determined that members of political dynasties have a significant advantage over first‐generation politicians in open‐seat House elections. Using an original dataset containing candidate‐ and district‐level covariates for all candidates in open‐seat House contests between 1994 and 2006, I found that dynastic politicians enjoy “brand name advantages,” giving them a significant edge over comparable nondynastic opponents. In contrast, hypotheses concerning potential advantages stemming from past political experience and fundraising ability yield null results.     

Construction of a policy arena: the case of public health in France

In this article we examine the transformation over the past two decades of public health as a policy arena in France from a backwater of little interest to politicians, bureaucrats, the media, and the public into a central preoccupation of the state. Recent dramatic health crises (the scandal over HIV-contaminated blood, mad cow disease, etc.) have substantially raised the political profile of (and corresponding state investment in) public health in France, offering opportunities and incentives for political actors not traditionally associated with public health to enter the field and challenging more traditional actors to galvanize themselves and compete for this newly attractive policy terrain. We use the occasion of the passage of a public health law in 2004, labeled by its proponents as the "first" public health law in one hundred years, to show how, in a context of national struggle to contain both risks and costs, "public health" -- chameleonlike -- has taken on various meanings and forms to serve highly conflicting political interests.     

MPs and electoral redistribution controversies in Canada, 1993–96

The political careers of members of the Canadian House of Commons are filled with uncertainties and are comparatively short. One of the sources of political uncertainty is that which results from the periodic readjustment of electoral boundaries. The constituency boundary readjustment process following the 1991 census led to a particularly acrimonious conflict. This paper analyses MPs’ reactions to both the process and the ridings established by the boundary commissioners. Two main data sets are employed: a survey of English Canada backbench MPs to inquire into MPs’ attitudes about electoral redistribution and the record of MPs appearing before the Commons sub‐committee charged with hearing objections to the electoral map in the autumn of 1995. The two different analyses both point to a conclusion that MPs’ self‐interest, rather than principle or constituency characteristics, appears to determine MPs’ satisfaction with the process and their propensity to take action by objecting to the proposed boundaries during the House committee stage of hearings.     

Collateral damage: do gender quotas undermine party discipline?

Quotas are the most disputed instrument to promote equal representation of women. Today, political parties in more than 90 democracies apply them. Essentially, gender quotas are a manipulation of the electoral rules. Scholars of legislative politics have created an impressive knowledge of the effect of electoral rules on political behaviour. So far, this literature remains unconnected to the literature on gender quotas. Our study contributes to closing that research gap.     

Electoral reform and the British MEP

After many years in which the subject was of marginal concern, electoral reform has recently become of central importance to politics in the UK. In this paper we examine the consequences for political representation of the electoral reform introduced in Britain for the 1999 elections to the European Parliament. We find that the immediate consequences of reform for the partisan balance and ‘representativeness’ of the British contingent in the EP were very much as expected. However, both qualitative and quantitative evidence suggest that the impact of reform on the representative priorities of British MEPs has been more partial, as parliamentarians have sought to adapt to the challenge of representing multi-member regions.