Making Quotas Work: The Effect of Gender Quota Laws On the Election of Women

Gender quota laws are intended to increase the number of women elected to legislatures, but initial evidence suggests that many laws have had little effect. I present a cross‐national, statistical test that analyzes how three key dimensions of candidate quota laws affect women's representation. My results show that quotas that require more women to be on party ballots lead to the election of more women, independent of placement mandates and enforcement mechanisms, but rules governing where female candidates are listed on the ballot and sanctions for noncompliance amplify that effect. Candidate quotas can increase women's representation, but the quotas' effectiveness depends on their design.     

The Increasing Effectiveness of National Gender Quotas, 1990–2010

National gender quotas—policies that require a certain percentage of women candidates or legislators—are becoming more effective over time. Using data on 145 countries from 1990 to 2010, we document this trend with latent growth‐curve models. Part of the explanation for increasing effectiveness is that countries have ratcheted up targets for women's inclusion and that quotas are increasingly written in ways that make them more effective at achieving stated goals. Activists, political elites, and policy makers have learned over time which quota policies are most effective, resulting in quotas with provisions that more often lead to success. But, changes in rules alone do not account for the increasing effectiveness of quotas over time. It appears that changing norms about women's incorporation in politics are also increasing quota effectiveness regardless of policy design.     

Toward a Theory of Compliance in State‐Regulated Livelihoods: A Comparative Study of Compliance Motivations in Developed and Developing World Fisheries

This article addresses the question of how states can best promote citizens' compliance with laws that regulate livelihoods. Based on ethnographic data from fishing communities in three countries—Norway, Canada, and South Africa—the article compares compliance motivations that exist under different socioeconomic and political conditions. The comparisons give rise to a typology of three compliance motivations: deterrence, moral support for the law's content, and the legislator's authority. This article then identifies three governable preconditions—enforcement, empowerment of citizens, and civic identity—that respectively explain these motivations. The article argues that the compliance discourse in a given type of state must be framed such that it includes at least the governable preconditions for compliance that have not been met in that state. Consequently, a functional compliance strategy would vary between different state types. The article thus questions the transferability of the developed world's compliance discourses to the developing world.     

Family Law and Social Change: Judicial Views of Joint Custody, 1998–2011

Rapid changes in family life over the last forty years have led to substantial alterations in family law policy; specifically, most states now endorse joint custody arrangements for divorcing families. However, we know little about how lower court judges have embraced or resisted this change. We conducted in‐depth interviews with judges in twenty‐five Indiana jurisdictions in 1998 and 2011. Our findings suggest that judges' views of joint custody dramatically changed. Judges in Wave II indicated a strong preference for joint custody—a theme that was relatively absent in Wave I. The observed change in judicial preferences did not seem to be related to judicial replacement, gender, age, or political party affiliation. Although our conclusions are exploratory, we speculate that shifts in judicial views may be related to changing public mores of parenthood and, relatedly, Indiana's adoption of Parenting Time Guidelines in 2001.     

论党法关系的规范性原理

党法关系(政党和法治的关系)是现代政党政治下各国法治建设面临的普遍性议题.习近平法治思想是考量党法关系的最佳理论框架,深刻揭示了党法关系的基本原理.从当代中国和世界的情况看,党法关系可分解为政党和国家机关、政党政策和国家法律、政党规章和国家法律三组关系.政党和国家机关关系的规范性原理包括外部领导、内部执政、党政机构融合...     

Hobbes on Political Authority,Practical Reason and Truth

The role of sovereign authority in Hobbes' political philosophy is to establish peace and stability by serving as a definitive and unambiguous source of law. Although these broad outlines of Hobbes' account of political authority are uncontentious, matters quickly become more complicated once one seeks its normative basis. This much is evident from recent debates on the normative status of the laws of nature and the related issue as to whether Hobbes is better categorised as an incipient legal positivist or as a heterodox natural law thinker. In this paper I argue that although the positivist and natural law commitments in Hobbes' theory of political authority can be partially reconciled, such a reconciliation points to the need for more substantive theories of practical reason and truth than are to be found in Hobbes' official statements on these topics. Section II examines the positivist and natural law dimensions in Hobbes' thought and suggests that the role of sovereign authority in providing the definitive interpretation of the laws of nature allows a partial reconciliation to be effected. In section III, I consider the tension between this reconciliation and Hobbes' instrumentalism about practical reason and equivocal separation of authority and truth.     

Democratic Incongruities: Representative Democracy in Britain

This essay discusses the rationale guiding legislation dealing exclusively with political parties. The analysis is based on examination of party laws in Austria, Finland, Germany, Israel, Poland, Spain and Venezuela. The manner by which a particular legislature applies the general features of party law‐ legislation (general declaration regarding the role of parties in democracies, definition of parties, registration requirements, the democratic character of association in parties, regulation of party finance, legal sanctions) is demonstrated in reference to the Israeli party law, the most recent case of an established democracy whose legislature passed a parties law in 1992.

Throughout the analysis, the study addresses a question of principle: should a legislature comprised of representatives of political parties undertake to legislate laws regulating the activities of political parties in a democratic parliamentary system? It is suggested that a partial response to this question is found in the fact that, with the exception of Finland and Israel, democratic polities that have chosen to legislate party laws had previously experienced a collapse of their democratic systems. In the process of reforming their democratic structures, the legislatures in these polities enacted parties laws that would ensure that political parties perform functions commensurate With the goals and practices of modern democracies.     

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.     

Law and the Building Blocks of the Familiar

This article draws on the insights offered by Francesca Polletta, Calvin Morrill, and Elizabeth Chiarello in their comments on my book, Caring for Our Own: Why There Is No Political Demand for New American Social Welfare Rights ( 2014 ) to further specify the conditions that unleash the emancipatory potential of law. I argue that much of law's emancipatory power lies in its capacity to “construct anew”—to demonstrate new solutions to social problems by connecting the familiar with the strange. Drawing on the case of child care, I find that laws do not automatically provide the cultural resources to construct new claims for state intervention, but that existing laws—and the symbols, narratives, and norms that we associate with them—serve as grist for the political imagination and can be transposed to new contexts or institutions. In the absence of cultural resources in one institution (such as work), advocates can use legal discourse to strategically shift responsibility for a social problem to a new institution (such as education), opening up possibilities for new models, organizational actors, constituencies, and frames.     

How Dispute Resolution System Design Matters: An Organizational Analysis of Dispute Resolution Structures and Consumer Lemon Laws

This study demonstrates how the structure of dispute resolution shapes the extent to which managerial and business values influence the meaning and implementation of consumer protection law, and consequently, the extent to which repeat players are advantaged. My analysis draws from, links, and contributes to two literatures that examine the relationship between organizational governance structures and law: neo‐institutional studies of law and organizations and socio‐legal studies of repeat players' advantages in disputing. Specifically, I compare an instance where powerful state consumer protection laws are resolved in private dispute resolution forums funded by automobile manufacturers but operated by independent third‐party organizations (California) with one where consumer disputes are resolved in public alternative dispute resolution processes run and administered by the state (Vermont). Through in‐depth interviews and participant observation in the training programs that dispute resolution arbitrators undergo in each state, I show how different dispute resolution structures operating in California and Vermont give different meanings to substantially similar lemon laws. Although my data do not allow me to establish a causal relationship, they strongly suggest that the form of the dispute resolution structure, and how business and state actors construct the meaning of lemon laws through these structures, have critical implications for the effectiveness of consumer protection laws for consumers.     

Binding Morality and Perceived Harm as Sources of Moral Regulation Law Support Among Political and Religious Conservatives

Conservatives—both political and religious—are more likely than liberals to support laws regulating traditional or religious morality. The current study applies a moral psychological framework to argue that the association between conservatism and moral regulation law support can be explained in part by binding morality, or a moral orientation that privileges group needs above individual needs and includes concerns about absolutism, collectivism, and purity. Binding morality may directly promote support for moral regulation laws, which enforce traditional rules, discourage deviance, and require adherence to customs regarding bodily and spiritual purity. Binding morality may also indirectly promote support for moral regulation laws by motivating perceptions that “immoral” behaviors are harmful to innocent victims. I test these hypotheses using three analytic samples drawn from the General Social Survey (N = 3669, 7120, 369). Results show that, as expected, binding morality (especially purity) mediates the effects of political and religious conservatism on laws regulating pornography, marijuana, abortion, and euthanasia. Additional analyses exploring views about pornography show that binding morality (especially collectivism) is associated with perceptions of immorality as harmful, which in turn is associated with support for regulation.     

International Law and Administrative Insulation: A Comparison of Refugee Status Determination Regimes in the United States,Canada, and Australia

International law provides nations with a common definition of a refugee, yet the processes by which countries determine who should be granted refugee status look strikingly different, even across nations with many institutional, cultural, geographical, and political similarities. This article compares the refugee status determination regimes of three popular asylum seeker destinations—the United States, Canada, and Australia. Despite these nations' similar border control policies, asylum seekers crossing their borders access three very different systems. These differences have less to do with political debates over admission and border control policy than with the level of insulation the administrative decision‐making agency enjoys from political interference and judicial review. Bureaucratic justice is conceptualized and organized differently in different states, and so states vary in how they draw the line between refugee and nonrefugee.     

International human rights and the collegiation of journalists: The case of Costa Rica

This article examines the controversial Latin American practice of requiring colegio membership for journalists. The focus is a ruling by the Costa Rica Supreme Court that declared the obligatory‐membership requirement of the Costa Rica College of Journalists—one of Latin America's strongest colegios—to be unconstitutional because it violated the free expression clause of the American Convention on Human Rights. The courts incorporation of the American Convention's standard of press freedom is considered for its reliance on a provision of the Costa Rica Constitution that requires human rights protections of international treaties be held superior to national laws. The rationale's significance for the entire region—where 13 countries have colegio laws—is weighed by analyzing comparable clauses in the constitutions of other Latin American countries.     

Strategic Challenger Entry in a Federal System: The Role of Economic and Political Conditions in State Legislative Competition

Over a third of state legislators do not face challengers when seeking reelection. Existing analyses of state legislative contestation almost exclusively focus on the stable institutional features surrounding elections and ignore conditions that change between elections. I remedy this oversight by investigating how political contexts influence challenger entry. State legislators—particularly members of the governor's party—more often face opposition during weak state economies, but the president's copartisans are even more likely to receive a challenger when the president is unpopular. My findings suggest that both national‐ and state‐level political conditions have an important impact on challengers' entry strategies.     

THE ROLE OF SOLICITORS IN DIVORCE PROCEEDINGS*

“I was walking down the boulevard one day with my sister who was down for a week's holiday. She said off the cuff ‘When are you going to get divorced?’ I said ‘I don't know.’ Seeing a solicitor's office, I said ‘ I'll pop in here’—just the job, just like going in the shop for a loaf of bread. So I sees the receptionist. She said ‘ I'll see if he can see you straight away.’ Well, he gave me an interview straight away. Within an hour everything was done. He told me to bring all the gen I could in a couple of weeks time, which I did and then we got on with the job.”     

Law and the political stakes of global crises: Lessons from development practice for a coronavirus world

Law has translated the coronavirus crisis into politically salient forms in people's lives, from states of emergency, to border closures, to mask mandates. Yet political theory work on these forms has focused on constraining arbitrary state power. In this paper, I try to broaden this focus. Substantively, I argue that policy and its implementation also matter to how we theorize the role of law in crises, in terms of how we understand the political power of society and its relationship to the state. Methodologically, I argue that thinking about law in this way is more than a complement to or replacement for thinking about constraints on arbitrariness. Rather, different forms of thinking about law and crisis should constantly be used to critique each other in order to pursue the sorts of legal innovations required by geomobile and interconnected crises. Given that the current pandemic and its broader consequences are still unfolding, I turn to development policy and practice to demonstrate the process and consequence of such ongoing critique in action. Studying rule of law reforms—including during the West African Ebola crisis—I show how practitioners continually reimagined law in ways that facilitated ongoing legal innovation that could adapt to the politics of the crisis.     

If the State Decertified Gender,What Might Happen to its Meaning and Value?

As jurisdictions reform gender identity laws to accommodate transgender and intersex people, this article speculatively explores a more fundamental shift: eliminating state law's role in determining and assigning gender status altogether. Adopting a feminist perspective, we explore what the meaning and effects of comprehensively reforming legal gender might be upon gender's constitution as a socio‐legal property, differentially recognized and protected by diverse but unequal bodies. Our discussion proceeds along two intersecting paths. The first concerns the different classificatory methods which could enable state law, without assigning gender, to continue to regulate gender identity decisions, thereby allowing state law to remain involved in tackling gender discrimination. The second concerns the changing form gender might take in conditions where state law withdraws its allocative function. These paths converge in a final discussion which considers what legal and political effects might follow from gender becoming a property that is individually and collectively cultivated.     

The Diffusion of Rights: From Law on the Books to Organizational Rights Practices

How does law change society? To gain new leverage on this long‐standing question, this article draws on two lines of research that often ignore each other: political science research on the mobilization of law, and sociological research on the diffusion of organizational practices. Our insights stem from six case studies of diverse organizations' responses to the accommodation provisions in the Americans with Disabilities Act and related state laws. We found that different modes of exposure to the law combined with organizational attributes to produce distinct “rights practices”—styles of standard operating procedures and informal routines that reflect the understanding of legal requirements within an organization. The diversity of the organizational responses challenges simple dichotomies between compliance/noncompliance, change through deterrence/change through norms, and mobilization/nonmobilization, and it underscores the importance of combining political science and sociological perspectives on law and social change.     

The Making and Unmaking of Feminicidio/Femicidio Laws in Mexico and Nicaragua

This article examines the contested process of law‐making related to the killing of women which resulted in the criminalization of feminicide (feminicidio) and femicide (femicidio) in Mexico and Nicaragua, two countries in which feminists engaged in legal activism to increase state accountability for gendered violence. Through comparative analysis, we demonstrate the importance of (1) the interaction between shifting local political conditions and supranational opportunities and (2) the position of feminist actors vis‐à‐vis the state and its gender regime in shaping regional variation in the making of laws concerning gendered violence. In Mexico, the criminalization of feminicidio resulted from a successful naming and shaming campaign by local feminist actors linked to litigation in various supranational arenas, and the intervention of feminist federal legislators. In Nicaragua, the codification of femicidio resulted from the state's selective responsiveness to feminist demands in a moment of narrow political opportunity within an otherwise highly consolidated regime. We also examine the unmaking of these laws through their perversion in practice (Mexico) and their intentional undermining (Nicaragua) at the hands of the state. Our analysis demonstrates how states' decisions to enact legislation against gendered violence does not occur solely because they are invested in international legitimacy, but also in response to states' shifting acceptance of the legitimacy of supranational authority itself.     

中国宪法实施的双轨制

与许多西方国家的宪法实施模式不同,宪法审查并非中国宪法实施的主要方式。中国司法机关不能根据宪法直接审查立法的合宪性,而作为有权机关的全国人大常委会,也没有做出过宪法解释或宪法判断。这是中国宪法实施的真实状况,但不是中国宪法实施的全部。从比较法角度看,中国宪法更像一个政治纲领式的宣言,更多依靠政治化方式实施。伴随着法治化进程,中国的宪法实施逐渐由单一依靠政治化实施,过渡到政治化实施与法律化实施同步推进、相互影响的双轨制格局。宪法的政治化实施体现为执政党主导的政治动员模式,而宪法的法律化实施则是以积极性实施为主、消极性实施为辅的多元实施机制。在比较法的意义上,政治化实施和法律化实施的双轨制,可以为描述中国宪法实施提供一个理论框架。