Disentangling the Relationship between Legislative Professionalism and Government Spending

Recent movements to deprofessionalize American state legislatures have been driven partly by the notion that professional legislators spend more than their citizen counterparts. This article explores the relationship between legislative professionalism and government spending, a connection complicated by the possibility that legislators in high‐spending states may choose professional institutions to handle their responsibilities more effectively. I employed propensity score matching, an increasingly used technique of causal inference, to disentangle the relationship. Contrary to previous academic work and popular notions, I found that professional legislatures do not spend significantly more than part‐time bodies do, if one accounts for the fact that legislatures in high‐spending states have a greater need to be professionalized and therefore select those structural frameworks. These findings have important implications for the study of the effects of legislative institutions on public policies more generally and attest to the utility of recently developed techniques of causal inference to disentangle these relationships.     

Informative Committees and Legislative Performance in the American States

The information theory of legislative organization suggests that legislative committees are designed to provide their parent chamber with necessary information to legislate. Despite empirical evidence for various aspects of the theory, we have limited knowledge of committees’ influence on legislative outputs. I argue that informative committees are more than information providers, that they also substantively impact legislative outcomes. With supportive evidence from the US state legislatures, this article shows that the presence of an informative committee system not only lowers the number of bills introduced to the legislature but also enhances the chamber's efficiency in transforming legislative proposals into laws.     

In Search of Killer Amendments In the Modern U.S. House

Numerous studies have examined the incidence of killer amendments in Congress, but most of these studies have been either case specific, focusing on the legislative maneuverings around a single issue or bill, or temporally limited, focusing on strategic activity in only one or two Congresses. In this article, we present the beginning of a comprehensive research agenda for the systematic study of killer amendments. Using roll‐call data from the 83d through the 108th U.S. House (1953–2004), we identified those bills that (a) were successfully amended and (b) subsequently went down to defeat, a necessary condition for the existence of a killer amendment. We then examined these cases in greater detail, using both spatial analyses and case studies. Our analysis uncovered five cases, four of which are new, that appear to have the characteristics of true killer amendments, thus setting the stage for future analyses across time and legislative chambers and bodies.     

我国备案审查制度的若干缺陷及其完善——兼与法国的事先审查制相比较

随着<立法法>的出台和2004年5月全国人大法工委法规审查备案室的成立,预示着备案已经从一种程序性的登记制度演变为一种对立法的审查方式,即"备案审查".但是备案审查制度面临着不少的缺陷备案机关缺乏审查权;备案审查决定的冲突;备案审查性质的模糊;备案机关缺乏上位法解释权等等.对此,我们可以借鉴法国的事先审查制度来予以完善.     

Opportunity Costs and Outside Careers in U.S. State Legislatures

Cost‐benefit models of career choice predict that potential legislators choose legislative careers when they expect greater utility from legislative service than from other options. In state legislatures, the utility of legislative service includes the monetary value of outside careers. I hypothesize that legislators are more likely to pursue outside careers when financial opportunity costs are higher or when they derive less non‐monetary value from legislative service. In particular, I posit that individual characteristics that predict labor market value (such as age, education, race, and sex) and legislative salary predict outside careers. I test this model employing a new dataset of individual outside‐career activity derived from financial disclosure reports. The findings strongly support the hypothesis that outside‐career behavior is a function of the financial opportunity costs of legislative service. In addition, I find that Republicans are more likely to hold outside careers than are Democrats. This research has important implications for the study of state legislative participation, legislative organization, and the Democratic bias hypothesis.     

Invisible Politics: Institutional Incentives and Legislative Alignments in the Russian Duma, 1996–99

Previous analysis of legislative voting has focused on the behavior of nominal legislative parties, regardless of whether the country under examination was an established democracy or a newly democratized country. This approach is inadequate for countries with young party systems. To establish the extent to which legislative coalitions are party based, scholars must allow for the possibility that institutional incentives predominate over party influence. For this study, I applied a Bayesian discrete latent variable method to identify the legislative coalitions in the 1996‐99 Duma. I found that legislative alignments cut across party lines: electoral incentives and support for the president contribute to divides within parties that lack coherent platforms. Here I present a novel methodological approach to the identification of intraparty divisions and the major determinants of legislative coalitions in many legislative settings. This approach allows a comparison of the importance of party influence relative to other institutional incentives. It is especially useful for analyzing legislative voting in young party systems and where constitutional frameworks and electoral systems subject legislators to competing pressures.     

Pedophiles and Cyber-predators as Contaminating Forces: The Language of Disgust, Pollution, and Boundary Invasions in Federal Debates on Sex Offender Legislation

As a distinct class of criminals, sex offenders stand out as being particularly subject to the new "risk management" penal strategies that, according to a number of scholars, have come to dominate punishment rhetoric and practices in recent years. Nonetheless, the criminal justice policymaking that targets sex offenders appears to have a more emotionally based underside. In this paper, I examine the emotional drive that appears to undergird contemporary sex offender lawmaking, suggesting that a significant force propelling the current panoply of sex offender containment strategies is a constellation of emotional expressions of disgust, fear of contagion, and pollution avoidance, manifested in a legislative concern about boundary vulnerabilities between social spheres of the pure and the dangerous. To do so, I analyze the lawmaking discourse of U. S. legislators as they debated four proposed legislative bills directed at sex offenders during the late 1990s.     

Religion in the Legislative Arena: Affiliation,Salience, Advocacy,and Public Policymaking

Religion is a complex and multidimensional phenomenon that informs politics in various ways. This article examines the effects of religious affiliation, religious salience, and religious group advocacy on roll‐call voting in the Wisconsin state legislature. Various studies have demonstrated the impact of religious affiliation on legislative politics, but our use of additional religious indicators allows us to model the religious effect in a more accurate and nuanced manner. Using data from an original survey of state legislators, we utilized structural equation modeling to measure the direct and indirect effects of these religious factors on both the general pattern of roll‐call voting and voting on a high‐salience issue, abortion. Ultimately, the findings indicate that, even when we control for political party affiliation, which is a dominant influence on roll‐call voting, conservative Protestant religious affiliation and high religious salience influence legislative voting. We conclude with a discussion of the implications for future studies of religion in the legislative arena.     

The “Tough on Crime” Competition: a Network Approach to Understanding the Social Mechanisms Leading to Federal Crime Control Legislation in the United States from 1973–2014

The increase in punitive sentiment in America over the last four decades is frequently attributed to changes in criminal justice policies and programs. While scholars have studied the impact of legislation and policy on justice system outcomes, less attention has focused on the role of political actors in legislative bodies who are largely responsible for enacting criminal justice legislation. The current study addresses this gap by examining the social organization of federal crime control policy in the U.S. Congress over a forty-two year period (1973–2014). Drawing from research on social network mechanisms, we examine whether crime control legislation was more politically attractive relative to other legislative topics, and whether Democrats and Republicans pursue these policies by working together or competing against each other. Our results provide novel insight into the mechanisms that contributed to the punitive movement at the federal level.     

Legislative Voting Behavior,Seen and Unseen: A Theory of Roll‐Call Vote Selection

The empirical study of legislative behavior largely relies on roll‐call vote analysis, but roll‐call votes in many legislatures represent only a sample of legislative votes. We have good reasons to believe this sample is particularly poor for inferring party effects on legislative behavior. The selection of votes for roll call may be endogenous to exactly the characteristics of voting behavior (for instance, party cohesion) that we want to study. We must understand the roll‐call vote institution and account for its selection effects before we can draw inferences about legislative behavior from roll‐call results. This article develops a game‐theoretic model of roll‐call vote requests predicated on party leaders requesting votes to enforce party discipline. The model offers general and testable predictions about the selection process and how it affects observed and unobserved legislative voting behavior, particularly party cohesion.     

Bypassing Congressional Committees: Parties,Panel Rosters,and Deliberative Processes

Although scholars have examined committee rosters extensively, no study has considered the relationship between the ideological composition of panels and their participation in bill drafting. I thus ask: Which committees are frequently excluded from legislative deliberations? Does the composition of committees affect the degree to which they contribute to bill development? Using DW‐NOMINATE data, I calculate ideological scores for congressional panels between 1989 and 2010 to see whether certain committees are routinely bypassed. I find that moderate panels, polarized panels, and panels with moderate chairs are often excluded, while extreme committees in the majority direction tend to retain bill‐writing duties.     

《行政许可法》对地方立法的影响

行政许可法颁布和施行的意义不仅仅局限于行政法治这一领域,而且以独特的视角为地方立法今后的发展提供了难得的参考。在地方立法理念上的变化体现为:平衡公益和私益,追求效益,立法应务实创新;对地方立法体制及立法技术的影响表现为:地方对行政许可设定具有很强的局限性,地方立法主体需重新认识和定位,注重以立法事项的性质确定立法主体,在权限上既赋予地方一定的专有立法权,同时对地方立法权进行一些具体的禁止作为补充,健全地方立法的具体内容,完善地方立法技术。即便如此,行政许可法仍对地方立法可能造成以下负面影响:首先是借行政许可法留下的可观的立法空间,扩大地方立法权;其次是由于行政审批改革与立法同步,立法中部门利益将会反弹。     

Institutional Change and Legislative Vote Consensus in New Zealand

In this research note, I discuss results from a recent study assessing the impact that New Zealand's electoral and legislative system reforms had on levels of vote consensus achieved in the House of Representatives. Using a new legislative vote data set spanning from 1987 to 2007, I find evidence that the institutional changes fostered an increase in consensual legislative vote outcomes. I also provide a brief theoretical explanation of the developments and address a few issues concerning the measure of consensus used and the interpretation of the data.     

Congressional Oversight Hearings and Policy Control

Oversight hearings should be an important congressional tool for controlling recalcitrant agencies, but it is not clear that this should always be equally true. The logic of principal‐agent models of legislative policy control implies that oversight might sometimes, but not always, be superfluous to said control. Here, I reintroduce oversight hearings to theories of policy control and argue that congressional committees conduct oversight hearings primarily as a response to the extent to which agencies have different policy preferences from them and as a function of their capacity to conduct hearings cheaply. I test these hypotheses using committee hearings data (Policy Agendas Project) from both the U.S. House of Representatives and the Senate from 1947 to 2006 and provide support for theoretical arguments about the institutional nature of legislative policymaking strategies and ultimately help clarify the role of oversight in legislative‐executive relations.     

The Impact of Bicameralism on Legislative Production

It is generally accepted by scholars, as well as by cameral partisans, that adding a second chamber to an otherwise unicameral legislative process will decrease the volume of laws that a legislature enacts. This study challenges the conventional wisdom. First, I offer a simple theoretical argument that shows that when second chambers can originate as well as reject legislation, bicameralism will have an indeterminate impact on legislative production. Second, I provide historical data gathered from the four U.S. states that have experienced cameral transitions. Although very rudimentary, the historical evidence, when coupled with the theoretical argument, raises serious doubt regarding the traditional claim that bicameralism reduces the production of legislation.     

Professionals' Contribution to the Legislative Process: Between Self,Client, and the Public

How may professionals be made to contribute to legislative processes so that their expertise redounds to the public interest, despite the legislative product being likely to have a negative impact on their clients' wealth? Drawing on a case study of the legislative process that gave birth to Israel's recent (2002–2008) trusts taxation regime, based on five years of participant observation among the trust professional community, I find that to obtain the benefit of private‐sector professionals' expertise under such circumstances, government should have legislation drafted in a dispassionate, exclusive environment of experts rather than in the political arena; it should build professionals' trust in government by adopting an explicitly collegial approach; it should focus reform efforts on elements of the existing law so clearly inequitable as to make a refusal to contribute difficult to justify; and take care that the new regime creates a compliance practice lucrative enough to compensate for any loss to professionals consequent on its enactment. Once professionals' interests are suitably safeguarded, their loyalty to clients appears surprisingly brittle and government can successfully combine with them in the public interest.     

Men Idle,Women Network: How Networks Help Female Legislators Succeed

Why do some lawmakers form denser professional networks than others? We extend existing theories of gendered networks, arguing that legislators use networking as a strategy to compensate for a challenging institutional environment. Using original data from Brazil, we provide survey‐based evidence that female representatives in the Chamber of Deputies engage in higher rates of intragender networking and have more profuse and diverse legislative networks than male deputies. We also provide suggestive evidence that these profuse legislative relationships pay off for women in the form of higher vote shares at election time.     

Dimensions of Legislative Conflict: Coalitions,Obstructionism, and Lawmaking in Multiparty Presidential Regimes

This article addresses central issues in multiparty presidential systems: the functioning of legislative coalitions and the dynamics of legislative conflict. Since electoral competition has elements of both positive‐sum (increase in common support) and zero‐sum (exact division of the support) qualities, lawmaking in coalitional systems presents unique challenges. Using legislative data from Brazil, we examine how coalition management and unity affect legislative delay and obstructionism. We find, among others, that: (1) coalition management is pivotal for both faster legislative approval and less obstructionism, but its effect depends on coalition size; and (2) cohesive opposition impedes the legislative process.     

我国法定继承制度的立法构想

值此我国《继承法》正在讨论修改之际 ,本文分析了我国法定继承制度存在的不足 ,借鉴国外立法经验 ,结合我国实际 ,试拟法定继承制度的立法建议稿 ,并对立法理由予以分析说明 ,以供我国立法机关参考     

Stop,Collaborate, and Listen: Women's Collaboration in US State Legislatures

Collaboration plays a key role in crafting good public policy. We use a novel data set of over 140,000 pieces of legislation considered in US state legislatures in 2015 to examine the factors associated with women's collaboration with each other. We articulate a theory that women's collaboration arises from opportunity structures, dictated by an interaction of individual and institutional characteristics. Examining the effect of a combination of characteristics, we find support for an interactive view of institutions, where women's caucuses accelerate collaboration in Democratic‐controlled bodies and as the share of women increases. Collaboration between women also continues in the face of increased polarization in the presence of a caucus, but not absent one. Our findings speak to the long‐term consequences of electing women to political office, the importance of institutions and organizations in shaping legislative behavior, and the institutionalization of gender in politics.