Committees and Legislative Strengthening: The Growing Influence of Committees in Ukraine's Legislative Process

The Ukrainian legislature is in the process of transforming from a ‘rubber stamp’ institution of the Soviet type into an ‘institution that matters’ in a new democratic state. The practice of democratic institution building in the post-Soviet countries presents multiple examples of powerful executives who gained dominance in legislative processes. What path has Ukraine taken and what can explain its specific characteristics? This article charts the growth of committees here as a marker of legislative institutionalisation in Ukraine. The study finds that Ukrainian legislative committees defy prevalent regional trends and, contrary to expectations, have asserted independent roles. It then discusses factors that may account for this unique regional development – the role of a dual executive structure and the Ukraine party system.     

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.     

Legislative Oversight in the Ukrainian Rada: Assessing the Effectiveness of Parliamentary Committees

This study analyses factors associated with the perceived effectiveness of committee oversight in the Ukrainian Rada. Based on two waves of original survey data, it attempts to discern whether Ukrainian MPs view the committee oversight process primarily as an extension of partisan politics, a forum for constituency representation and resource distribution, or a politically independent process of information acquisition and regulation. The findings of the analysis suggest that partisan political considerations do not play a significant role in shaping MP attitudes towards committee oversight. Rather, deputy evaluations of the oversight process are influenced mainly by distributional and informational factors, suggesting that committee oversight is one area in which legislative institutionalisation appears to be taking root in post-communist Ukraine.     

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.     

Ideology and Polarization Among Women State Legislators

In early work on women in Congress, scholars consistently identified a tendency among women legislators to be more liberal roll‐call voters than male copartisans. Recent changes in Congress point to the polarization of women, where Democratic women remain more liberal than Democratic men but Republican women are no different from, or more conservative than, Republican men. We use newly available state legislative roll‐call data to determine whether women state legislators are more liberal or polarized than male copartisans. We find that while Democratic women state legislators remain consistently more liberal than male copartisans in most state chambers, Republican women legislators are growing more conservative. Thus, women state legislators are increasingly polarized in most U.S. states. Legislator replacement and increasing polarization among state legislators in office contribute to this effect. We argue that polarization among women legislators has implications for the representation of women in the states.     

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.     

Bonding in Pursuit of Policy Goals: How MPs Choose Political Parties in the Legislative State of Nature

How do MPs in nascent legislatures choose a political party? We argue that MPs self‐select into groups of like‐minded colleagues to achieve favored policy outputs. MPs identify colleagues with similar preferences based on observed behavior and informative signals such as socioeconomic status, cultural background, and previous political experience. We test this explanation in the first democratically elected German parliament, the Frankfurt Assembly of 1848, that developed a differentiated party system in the absence of electoral and career incentives. Our statistical analysis shows that MPs were significantly more likely to join parties that were similar to them with regard to ideology, age, regional provenance, confession, noble status, and previous parliamentary experience. Qualitative evidence suggests that major changes in the party system were driven by disputes over policy. Our findings are particularly important for countries with more turbulent paths towards parliamentarization than those witnessed by archetypical cases like Britain or the United States.     

The Impact of Partisan Gerrymandering on Political Parties

The relationship between votes and seats in the legislature lies at the heart of democratic governance. However, there has been little previous work on the downstream effects of partisan gerrymandering on the health of political parties. In this study, we conduct a comprehensive examination of the impact of partisan advantage in the districting process on an array of downstream outcomes. We find that districting bias impedes numerous party functions at both the congressional and state house levels. Candidates are less likely to contest districts when their party is disadvantaged by a districting plan. Candidates that do choose to run are more likely to have weak resumes. Donors are less willing to contribute money. And ordinary voters are less apt to support the targeted party. These results suggest that gerrymandering has long-term effects on the health of the democratic process beyond simply costing or gaining parties seats in the legislature.     

刑法中的国家工作人员之立法与司法解释评析

刑法中的国家工作人员的界定是长期困扰刑法理论界和司法部门的一个难题。国家立法机关和最高司法机关虽对其作过多次立法解释和司法解释,但却仍然存在内涵不清、外延不明,难予认定的问题。为此,本文对历次刑事立法和司法解释中关于国家工作人员的解释之得失进行了回顾、比较与评析,旨在为准确理解和把握本概念提供有益的思路。     

国家立法赔偿的逻辑

现实中有立法赔偿的需求,但在学理上却无法提出完整的逻辑论证,应当在纷繁的论争中分清事实与逻辑,通过审视事实背后的逻辑来完成对立法赔偿的理论论证。对于针对特定主体的违宪处分行为或明显过错下的不作为所造成的实际损害应进行国家赔偿,其过错由议会集体承担。     

From a Top-Down to a Bottom-Up Approach to Legislative Oversight

Over the years there have been several studies of oversight in the context of the US Congress; much less attention, however, has been paid to the study of oversight in parliamentary systems. Comparative studies spearheaded by several international organisations in recent years offer a different perspective of legislative oversight. They emphasise a new concept, oversight potential, and suggest that strengthening this potential would help promote good governance, fight corruption and improve democracy. This study examines the concept of oversight potential in a pure parliamentary system – the Israeli Knesset. It shows that low potential impairs actual oversight in a parliamentary system that uses mainly police-patrol techniques as defined by the 1987 work of McCubbins and Schwartz. It suggests that increasing oversight potential will help improve the oversight outputs of the legislature. Finally, it develops a bottom-up legislative approach for measuring oversight potential, and by doing so it enriches this neglected field of research.     

Intra-party delegation in the Portuguese legislature: assigning committee chairs and party coordination positions

In European parliamentary democracies political parties control candidate selection, maintain cohesion in the legislature and support governments. In addition to these classic functions, parties also organise the legislature delegating power to legislators, specifically as committee chairs and party coordinators. Delegation is inherently dangerous, involving potential agency loss. Parties, however, have ex-ante and ex-post institutional mechanisms to deal with agency problems. In this paper, a case study is made of the Portuguese legislature, arguing that parties make use of their pivotal role in selecting legislators as committee chairs and party coordinators to keep tabs on legislators to thwart shirking from the party line. This paper finds that political parties use incumbency as an ex-ante screening mechanism of committee chairs and party coordinators in looking for reliable signals of past behaviour to decrease uncertainty. Additionally, evidence suggests that extra-parliamentary party structure is used as an institutional arena for ex-post control of party coordinators.     

立法责任引入我国宪政制度建设之思考

立法责任制度是保证各位阶立法质量的预防性机制,也是为公民提供救济的一种制度性保障。立法责任在性质上属于法律责任,其法理基础在于保障公民基本权利的实现,立法责任的成立需要具备一定的要件。在我国的宪政制度中有必要引入立法责任制度。     

党和国家领导制度的改革与完善

江泽民指出:“各级党委要学会在宪法和法律的范围内加强和改善党的领导”。因此,党和国家领导制度的改革和完善,要形成“四权统一、两权平衡”的政治格局,要正确处理执政党和参政党的关系,要理顺党和人大的关系,要理顺党和政府的关系。     

试论立法听证的论辩性—─以重庆市立法听证为例

我国地方人大立法与西方议会立法不同,基本上是抽象行为的立法,其立法听证的核心和灵魂在于论辩性。论辩性也是我国立法听证区别于座谈会、论证会等其他传统的立法民主形式的主要特点。提高立法听证会论辩性要从听证议题的可辩性、双方陈述人的人数、陈述能力,以及陈述的时间、机会的对等性等方面来保障。     

日本“立法不作为”与宪法诉讼

对“立法不作为”的宪法审查涉及到国会与法院的分权问题，日本学术界存在争论，法院则试图在保障当事人救济与避免和国会的冲突中保持平衡，对相关国家赔偿问题长时间内予以否定，违宪确认诉讼则是值得肯定的一种诉讼方式。     

立法权去中心化与立法模式转变

立法权本应属于人民全体,只是交由代议机关行使,但是立法权的所有与行使的分离使其有被滥用的可能,由此导致立法权在行使时出现趋中心化:立法权绝对化、非理性化、将立法权而不是公民作为立法过程的核心。因此,应着力实现立法权的去中心化,实现立法权行使范围和方式的变革。立法模式应该实现由单一政府立法到政府立法与社会立法相结合的转变,更多地发挥公众、社会团体和专家的实质性作用。     

Los Congresos Estatales y la Política Federal en México: state legislatures and federal policymaking in Mexico

The Mexican Constitution, in the Poder Legislativo, grants state legislatures the authority to introduce legislation (iniciativas de ley) in the federal congress. In this paper the authors examine this powerful mechanism through which the Mexican state legislatures can directly influence policymaking at the federal level. Using a new data set of state-led initiatives, this work: describes the frequency with which iniciativas are introduced; describes the substance, timing, and final disposition of these state-led initiatives; and explains which factors affect the probability of presenting a state-led initiative. The authors find that party competition and partisan divisions at the state and federal levels play a significant role in the use of iniciativas de los congresos estatales. The authors’ study of this peculiar authority granted to the Mexican states contributes to the rich discussion of the changing role of the states in the era of Mexico’s nuevo federalismo.     

我国地方立法权扩张的政治后果分析

本文以建国以来中央——地方立法权限演变的历史说明地方立法存在的必要性。认为市场化发展和民主化改革是地方立法权扩张的动力,并以事实和数据剖析了我国地方立法发展的现状,从社会影响角度分析了地方立法权限扩张的政治后果,从保证中央立法权威、党政关系以及国家在经济发展中的作用三个方面论证了目前我国立法分权的发展还不能影响到国家的单一制结构形式,因此,应将注意力从关注"到底放不放立法权"的问题转向"如何放好地方立法权"的问题。