Legislative voting in the pork-dominant parliament: evidence from the Philippine House of Representatives

In this paper I investigate how legislators behave in extremely pork-oriented, or pork-dominant, systems where virtually no party-line voting takes place and politicians strive to deliver individual/local benefits instead of national public policies. I argue that, in the pork-dominant context, most legislators vote with the president, who controls access to the pork pipeline, irrespective of their party affiliations. Thus, the president’s party legislators should have little incentive to vote against the president, regardless of voter demands for pork or policy; however, sometimes opposition-party legislators elected particularly from more-developed districts (where voters often desire policy over pork) should have strong incentives to vote against the president. These arguments are supported with quantitative studies of the post-authoritarian Philippine House of Representatives. It is found that, in the highly homogeneous legislature dominated by pork-seeking politicians, (1) most bills are passed with unanimous or near-unanimous consent, (2) governing-party legislators almost always vote with the majority of the members of the parliament, regardless of voters’ socio-economic conditions, and (3) opposition-party legislators, especially in more-developed areas, tend to vote against the parliamentary majority. These findings indicate that voters’ high socio-economic status promotes programmatic accountability, leading their representatives to undermine voting unity within the extremely cohesive pork-dominant legislature.     

Campaigns and the Selection of Policy-Seeking Representatives

Can voters learn meaningful information about candidates from their electoral campaigns? As with job market hiring, voters, like employers, cannot know the productivity of candidates, especially challengers, when they elect them. The real productivity of representatives only reveals itself after the election. We explore if the information revealed during the “hiring process” is a good signal of the legislative effort of elected representatives. In the incomplete information environment of election campaigns, candidates should turn to credible signals to indicate their “type” to voters. Campaigns—and campaigning—are means by which candidates can, in principle, signal their motivations to voters. Is a candidate’s behavior on the campaign trail informative about his or her behavior and effort as a legislator? Does it, for example, reveal whether a candidate will be more hard working and legislatively active? Using evidence from the European Parliament, we show that campaign activity prior to the election is not related to policy-seeking behavior in the legislature post-election. The finding also holds in two national-level settings and across a variety of measures of legislative effort. Those who campaign harder do seem more likely to win the election, but campaign effort seems to provide a poor guide to what the winner does once elected.     

The Effects of Term Limits on State Legislatures: A New Survey of the 50 States

Term limits on legislators were adopted in 21 states during the early 1990s. Beginning in 1996, the limits legally barred incumbents from reelection in 11 states, and they will do so in four more by 2010. In 2002, we conducted the only survey of legislators in all 50 states aimed at assessing the impact of term limits on state legislative representation. We found that term limits have virtually no effect on the types of people elected to office—whether measured by a range of demographic characteristics or by ideological predisposition—but they do have measurable impact on certain behaviors and priorities reported by legislators in the survey, and on the balance of power among various institutional actors in the arena of state politics. We characterize the biggest impact on behavior and priorities as a “Burkean shift,” whereby term‐limited legislators become less beholden to the constituents in their geographical districts and more attentive to other concerns. The reform also increases the power of the executive branch (governors and the bureaucracy) over legislative outcomes and weakens the influence of majority party leaders and committee chairs, albeit for different reasons.     

The Strategic Use of Prisons in Partisan Gerrymandering

The census data used to redraw legislative districts counts the country's nearly 2 million prisoners in the location of their incarceration, rather than their previous place of residence. By drawing these phantom populations into districts that lean heavily toward the majority party, legislators can free up eligible voters from those districts to be distributed among neighboring marginal ones, thereby increasing that party's likelihood of winning additional seats in the state legislature. An analysis of state senate district finds that prison populations shift systematically from districts controlled by one party to districts controlled by the other following a switch in partisan control.     

Cultivating Votes in Rural Chile

In Chile's two‐member legislative districts we show there are two groups of swing voters, one group for the first seat won by the governing coalition, another for the second. We build a model that allows us to identify the relative prevalence of these voters across communities. Using data on the allocation of discretionary agricultural loans, we find that communities with relatively many voters pivotal for the first seat receive more loans than they otherwise would have, but we find no systematic advantage for districts that are pivotal for the second seat.     

Do Term Limits Restrain State Fiscal Policy? Approaches for Causal Inference in Assessing the Effects of Legislative Institutions

Scholars of state politics are often interested in the causal effects of legislative institutions on policy outcomes. For example, during the 1990s a number of states adopted term limits for state legislators. Advocates of term limits argued that this institutional reform would alter state policy in a number of ways, including limiting state expenditures. We highlight a number of research design issues that complicate attempts to estimate the effect of institutions on state outcomes by addressing the question of term limits and spending. In particular, we focus on (1) treatment effect heterogeneity and (2) the suitability of nonterm‐limit states as good counterfactuals for term‐limit states. We compare two different identification strategies to deal with these issues: differences‐in‐differences (DID) estimation and conditioning on prior outcomes with an emphasis on synthetic case control. Using more rigorous methods of causal inference, we find little evidence that term limits affect state spending. Our analysis and results are informative for researchers seeking to assess the causal effects of state‐level institutions.     

Time,Term Limits,and Turnover: Trends in Membership Stability in U.S. State Legislatures

Increases in legislative professionalization along with the implementation of term limits in about one‐third of the American states raise significant questions about the path of state house and senate turnover. We first update turnover figures for all states, by chamber, from the mid‐1980s through 2002. We then compare turnover rates in states with and without term limits. We find that turnover rates, overall, continued to decline through the 1980s but that the long downward trend abated in the 1990s as a result of term limits. The effects of term limits vary depending on the length of the term limit and the opportunity structure in the state. There is also a strong relationship between the presence of term limits and interchamber movement. In addition to term limits, professionalization levels, redistricting, the presence of multi‐member districts, and partisan swings explain differences in turnover rates between states.     

Different Houses: The Distribution of Earmarks in the U.S. House and Senate

Nearly all studies of pork‐barrel politics in the U.S. Congress focus on the House, biasing our conception of how politics influences federal spending and skewing our attention toward factors that are active in the House. This article highlights differences between the Senate and House in how pork is allocated. We identify four important differences between the House and Senate, generate hypotheses regarding how each difference should influence the distribution of pork projects, and test these hypotheses using data from earmarks in the Appropriations bills passed by the two chambers for fiscal year 2008. The results support three of our four hypotheses, suggesting that senators are driven by different motivations than House members. These results imply that theoretical accounts of pork‐barrel spending need to account for these interchamber differences. Our findings also highlight how studies of legislative behavior, more generally, need to account for important differences in legislative structure and organization.     

Electoral Institutions and Legislative Particularism

How do electoral institutions affect legislative behavior? Though a large body of theoretical scholarship posits a negative relationship between multimember districting and the provision of particularistic goods, empirical scholarship has found little evidence in support of this expectation. Using data on the provision of US post offices from 1876 to 1896, a period during which many states elected congressional representatives from at‐large districts, and a differences‐in‐differences approach, I find that counties represented by at‐large representatives received approximately 8% fewer post offices. The results have important implications for studying how electoral institutions affect incentives for legislative behavior.     

The Color of Their Skin or the Content of Their Behavior? Race and Perceptions of African American Legislators

Abstract: Previous studies have shown that, because of their race, African American candidates for public office are often evaluated less favorably than their colleagues by voters. Does this dynamic continue when black candidates become elected officials? Using data on the North Carolina General Assembly, I address this question by examining the effects of race on perceptions of legislative effectiveness. When the dependent variable is the average effectiveness rating given by three groups—lobbyists, journalists, and other legislators—there is evidence that African American representatives are evaluated negatively because of their race. When the dependent variable is disaggregated into the separate effectiveness ratings given by each of the respondent groups individually, these negative perceptions of blacks on account of race remain on the part of lobbyists and other legislators, but not for journalists. Moreover, the negative perceptions of black representatives are not mitigated by these representatives possessing certain characteristics (e.g., seniority and leadership positions) that previous studies have found to be correlated with positive effectiveness evaluations. The presence of an African American Speaker in one legislative session did, however, seem to attenuate the negative perceptions.     

Reelection and Legislative Power: Surprising Results from Brazil

A diverse and growing literature ties legislative professionalization and power to career paths. In particular, higher rates of reelection and longer legislative careers should produce more professional, competent, and high‐quality legislatures. Legislators have more incentives to strengthen their own institution when they intend to remain there for a long career. Using data from the most recent constitutional convention in Brazil, we show that legislators with greater prospects for long careers were actually less likely to support strengthening the legislative branch. We explain this as part of a local equilibrium where career legislators’ short‐term need for pork trumped their long‐term interest in a stronger institution.     

Government Redistribution in the Shadow of Legislative Elections: A Study of the Illinois Member Initiative Grants Program

We study an Illinois state government program called “member initiative spending” and examine the extent to which three competing theories can explain the program's allocations among Illinois's 118 House districts. We show that member initiative monies distributed before the 2000 general election were disproportionately allocated to districts that were politically competitive, represented by legislative leaders, or represented by moderate legislators. Our analysis supports theories that claim budgetary decisions made by elected officials are tactical, and it shows that the Illinois decision makers who allocated member initiative funds sought to distribute them in a way that would be most beneficial in the sense of vote buying.     

A God of Vengeance and of Reward? Voters and Accountability

Theories of democratic politics prize congruence between citizens’ preferences and their elected representatives’ actions in office. Elections are a critical means for achieving such policy congruence, providing voters the opportunity to chasten representatives who are out of step with constituent preferences and to reward the faithful. Do voters act this way? Recent studies based on observational data find they do, but these data are somewhat limited. We employ a survey experiment to estimate the extent to which information about policy congruence affects voters’ evaluations of representatives. We informed some subjects how often their member of Congress’s voting decisions match their own stated preferences on the same policies. We find that information about congruence enhances accountability by affecting constituent evaluations of representatives and may also affect citizens’ propensity to participate in upcoming elections.     

Pork‐Barreling without Reelection? Evidence from the Mexican Congress

Previous research on term‐limited legislators suggests they have few incentives to engage in pork‐barreling. Using the case of Mexico, where all legislators are term‐limited, I find legislators participate in federal budget negotiations despite the lack of a reelection incentive. I argue term‐limited legislators are progressively ambitious and use interventions into the budget process to further their careers. I find legislators elected in single‐member districts submit more budget amendments than those elected through proportional representation, conditional on where they intend to pursue future office. I also find governors and gubernatorial elections influence the submission of budget amendments, which is related to gubernatorial influence over political careers.     

Casework,issues and voting in state legislative elections: a district analysis

Congressional research has addressed questions regarding the electoral consequences of service and policy responsiveness, as well as whether service responsiveness eliminates the need for policy responsiveness. However, less is known about the criteria by which constituents reward their state representatives. Part of the problem with resolving these questions at the state level has been the absence of data, since individual-level data on state legislative districts are hard to find and are unlikely to combine measures of both kinds of responsiveness. This study utilises data gathered in a particular state legislator's district (both data on actual member–constituent contacts and survey data) to discern more explicitly whether ombudsman service and constituent issue proximity to the incumbent affects vote choice. Our findings support the proposition that like their counterparts in Congress, state representatives prosper when paying attention to both service and policy responsiveness; however, we find convincing evidence that casework enables state legislators to gain support from constituents who otherwise would not vote for them.     

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.     

代表与选民的关系

代议制民主是由选民选出的代表行使权力的间接民主。因此，代表与选民的关系就成为代议制民主不能回避的一个问题。本文通过对代表与选民关系的各种学说的分析与评价，提出委托说更符合代议制民主机理的观点，并认为委托说同样适用于我国人民代表大会制度。     

Fewer politicians and smaller assemblies: how party elites rationalise reducing the number of seats in a legislature – lessons from Canada

Scholars are unable to rationalise the number of elected representatives in legislative assemblies. This study offers some insights into the political arithmetic by examining the rare event of reducing seats in a legislature. It is hypothesised that a policy of cutting electoral districts occurs during a search for cost efficiencies and a burst of populism. Interviews with party elites involved with seven seat reduction events in Canadian provinces establishes that the primary reason for the policy is its symbolic value. The message of fewer politicians sets an example for belt-tightening across government that will assist the executive branch with its austerity agenda. In these situations, the final number of members of a legislature matters little to a cabinet and most legislators compared with the broader symbolism of a smaller legislative branch.     

Term Limits and Legislative‐Executive Conflict in the American States

State governments have experienced considerable institutional change in the last several decades. None appeared at first glance to be as far‐reaching as the legislative term limits that were adopted by over 20 states in the 1990s. The evidence to date suggests that term limits have indeed changed the character of many of the states' legislatures, if not always as predicted by their advocates. We report data on veto dynamics over the period 1989–2008 to determine how term limits have impacted legislative‐executive relations. Our data both challenge and support what has become the conventional wisdom, i.e., that term limits will weaken legislatures relative to their governors. States with more stringent term limits experienced fewer gubernatorial vetoes but proved more likely to override those vetoes when they were issued. Taken together the evidence suggests that the relationship between governors and legislatures in the wake of term limits is more complex and variable than scholars and others had previously thought.     

Delegation and Defensive Legislative Strategies in Brazil

In the course of the legislative process, legislators choose how much policy discretion to delegate to the executive branch. Uncertainty about policy outcomes and bureaucratic intentions weighs heavily in such decisions. In Brazil, executive control over the budget creates uncertainty about the availability of discretionary spending, which results in comparatively high levels of delegation in the legislature's direct‐spending decisions. I demonstrate that sidelining the legislature from the budget in order to insulate government spending from political pressures diminishes the value of legislative work in Brazil and reinforces historical patterns of policymaking centered on the federal executive.