Women's Substantive Representation: Defending Feminist Interests or Women's Electoral Preferences?

To what extent does the inclusion of marginalised groups in policymaking institutions influence policy outcomes? This article examines whether and under which conditions female legislators are more likely to represent women's interests compared with male legislators. Building on the literature on women's substantive representation, it is argued that the advocacy of women's interests by female representatives depends on a number of factors, namely party affiliation, contact with women's organisations, electoral district, and seniority. This argument is evaluated using vote-level fixed-effect models based on a unique data set from a direct democratic context that combines representatives' voting behaviour, women's voting preferences, and recommendations from feminist groups. The findings show that female legislators defend feminist interests more than their male colleagues but that they only marginally respond to women's electoral preferences. Moreover, gender has its most visible effect within the populist party.     

Public Opinion and Representation of Women in National Legislatures: An Analysis of Cause and Effect

Studies of female representation in national legislatures have claimed that the gender attitudes of a country's population have an effect on female representation in that country's parliament. This claim is based on the assumption that there is a unidirectional effect of public attitudes on female representation. This article tests that assumption, and hypothesises that in countries with multi-member electoral districts the effect is likely to flow in the opposite direction. When women are nominated, and to some extent elected to parliament, their presence in national politics affects public attitudes towards women in that role. Granger tests of causality in eight European countries and in the United States generally support these hypotheses. The effect flows from public attitudes to female representation in countries with single-seat districts, and in the opposite direction in countries with multi-member districts.     

Constitutional‐Electoral Reforms and Politics in Singapore

Abstract The existence of a dominant one‐party system in Singapore makes legislative passage of constitutional and electoral system reforms easy. Such a system has enabled the ruling People's Action Party (PAP) government to formulate and implement sweeping reforms with little difficulty, however controversial they are. Since 1980, the Singapore government has instituted nonconstituency MPs, nominated MPs, group representation constituencies, and an elected presidency. Although not necessarily intended, one consequence of these reforms has been the consolidation of the government's power.     

Women's Representation in the Scottish Parliament and National Assembly for Wales: Party Dynamics for Achieving Critical Mass

The new Scottish Parliament and National Assembly for Wales elected in May 1999 were notable for the high levels of women's representation amongst their membership. This article examines the decisions taken by the main political parties about candidate selection and specifically the promotion of women candidates, exploring some of the inter and intra party dynamics influencing this result. The most significant changes were achieved in those parties that adopted rigid policies of positive action in favour of women. The decisions to adopt such systems were influenced by party ideology, degree of centralised leadership control and presence of women in positions of power within party elites. The environment in which such measures were considered was also highly influenced by the new electoral system and the presence of women activists in the design of the new institutions, particularly in Scotland. Together, these factors made women's representation a central feature in party competition.     

The Parliament of Bangladesh: Representation and Accountability

This article is inspired by a recent debate in Bangladesh about the representative credentials of members of parliament (MPs) who have started to assert a pre-eminent and exclusive role for themselves as people's elected representatives. It investigates three dimensions of their representative role. Political representation is analysed by fairness of the electoral process and the space for opposition. Representation of social diversity is evaluated by gender, religion, ethnicity and socio-economic background of MPs. Constituency representation is explored with a particular focus on parliamentarians' involvement in local development work. Provision of constituency services by the MPs, through control and partisan distribution of public resources, has led to allegations of corruption and conflict of interest. Adoption of a code of parliamentary conduct is essential to establish a formal mechanism to hold MPs accountable to citizens.     

Presidential Support in the Russian State Duma

Recent comparative research on presidential systems has analyzed the ways in which presidents build majorities for their legislative agendas. Through an analysis of roll‐call votes from the 2000‐03 Russian State Duma on a set of issues reflecting President Putin's legislative agenda, I examine the impact of parliamentary party affiliation, policy preferences, issue type, and electoral mandate type on structuring floor support for the president. I also assess the implications of a mixed electoral system for building legislative coalitions in multiparty legislatures. Further, my findings shed light on Putin's recent reforms of the Duma's rules and procedures and the country's electoral system.     

Candidate Selection in British Second Order Elections: A Comparison of Electoral System and Party Strategy Effects

Whilst most UK political parties have now accepted the need to increase the number of women representatives, the stark reality is that women remain under-represented. The under-representation of women in UK politics is not just evident in the national legislature but is a pattern repeated, to varying degrees, in second order elections at local, devolved and European levels. Recent developments in political recruitment processes allow us to explore the extent to which political parties take advantage of different electoral systems to promote women candidates in second order elections. Providing analysis of (s)election data from across second order elections, this article explores the interaction between systemic and institutional strategies, questioning which combination of electoral system and party strategy is most beneficial for increasing levels of women's representation.     

Bicameralism and policy performance: The effects of cameral structure in Comparative Perspective

This article addresses the relationship between cameral structure and policy performance in the member states of the OECD for the time period from 1971 to 1996. The empirical analysis shows that bicameral structures act as a significant brake on government intervention and on the expansion of the welfare state. Furthermore, bicameralism is a powerful veto player to block reforms in economic and financial policy. With the exception of the over-representation of small and sparsely populated areas, none of the advantages that classical political theory ascribes to second chambers has actually been confirmed. Bicameral structures pose no barrier to executive dominance, nor do they promote stability within political systems or improve the quality of democracy or economic performance. On the contrary, with regard to social representation, they have a strong negative effect: in comparison to systems with a single chamber, bicameralism significantly reduces women's electoral success.     

Imposing a neo-liberal theory of representation on the Westminster model: A Canadian case

The Conservative government in office in the Canadian province of Ontario between 1995 and 2003 offers a lesson in how the Westminster model can accommodate different interpretations of the role of the elected parliamentarian. The Conservatives espoused a vision of parliamentary representation, rooted in neo-liberal ideology, which held that the primary obligation of elected members was to respect their constituents' interest as taxpayers, superseding attention to any of their other multiple identities traditionally considered to be worthy of representation in the Legislature. The legitimacy of representative democracy was compromised when governments strayed from this norm. This analysis of the purposes of representation provided the intellectual framework for an ambitious restructuring of the Westminster model, most notably an unprecedented reduction in the size of the provincial legislature, as well as the elimination of the Legislature's historic control over its own electoral boundaries and composition.     

From Theory to Practice: Citizens’ Attitudes about Representation in France

French institutions, political culture and history have favoured a very abstract conception of representation: MPs are expected to embody collectively the French Nation, but little is known about citizens’ concrete views on representation. In this paper, data gathered through a citizen mass survey are used. To overcome the usual abstract considerations on representation, respondents were asked their opinion on an MP who would endorse amendments proposed by an interest group. In the questionnaire, two features were changed randomly: the MP's political leaning and the type of interest group. It is shown by means of an original experiment that the ‘general’ conception representation has disappeared from citizens’ attitudes: despite the enduring legitimacy of the general will approach in the public sphere, French citizens appear to promote a conception of representation close to the Madisonian views on pluralism involving a strong attachment to the logic of territorial electoral linkage.     

Campaign War Chests and Challenger Quality in Senate Elections

This article presents the first comprehensive analysis of the role of war chests in U.S. Senate elections. Using data on races from 1980 to 2000, I demonstrate the effect of an incumbent senator's war chest on a campaign. War chests do not deter strong general‐election challengers and have an insubstantial or insignificant effect on primary elections, challenger spending, and other electoral variables. Also, war chests are not raised in anticipation of a tough electoral battle but are instead the result of money left over from the previous campaign.     

Integración de las autoridades electorales: (re)construcción jurisdiccional de un derecho por el tepjf

This article offers a diagnosis about the jurisdictional protection of the right to be a member of the local electoral authorities, which was included on the law since the 2008’s electoral reform. It presents also, an explanation of the different judicial mechanisms to control the processes of renovation of the electoral authorities that exist in the states. The objective of this essay is reconstruct the content of this right, throughout the sentences of the Electoral Court, but also, question the argumentations that the electoral judges have used to solve those cases. Practically, no work in the mexican literature has been written about the right to be a member of the electoral authorities, and that´s why this article represents a first outline to understand this topic.     

The Inefficient Secret Revisited: The Legislative Input and Output of Brazilian Deputies

Shugart and Carey (1992) posit that presidential democracies in which legislators have a parochial focus of representation are electorally inefficient because voters are not offered highly identifiable choices over national policies. Such systems are driven by an inefficient secret, which is essentially a nonpartisan representation of the policy process. To check the propositions of the inefficient secret model (ISM), this article investigates the aggregation level, effect, and subject of Brazilian deputies' legislative input and output. Our empirical analysis indicates that, although some ISM‐related factors drive legislative output, there is partisanship in deputies' legislative input. This result means that the ISM underestimates the prospects for programmatic parties (especially in opposition) to emerge within systems where the electoral and constitutional rules encourage particularism.     

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.     

MPs and their e-Newsletters: Winning Votes by Promoting Constituency Service

Commentators are divided on the electoral effect of constituency service, whether it provides unfair advantage or has limited electoral impact. The arrival of the Internet has added to this debate. This research note considers how pioneering MPs are using e-newsletters effectively to communicate their constituency service. A web-hosted survey of subscribers to two MPs' e-newsletters, with over 1,100 respondents, was conducted. The data suggest that receiving an MP's e-newsletter did have an effect on subscribers' voting behaviour at the 2005 General Election. Rather than something to fear, this vote-winning capacity of an e-newsletter may actually encourage MPs to have more dialogue between MPs and constituents.     

Geographic Representation in Party‐Dominated Legislatures: A Quantitative Text Analysis of Parliamentary Questions in the German Bundestag

Political representation in European democracies is widely considered partisan and collectivist. This article, however, stresses that there is more to the representative process in European democracies than just its textbook version. It emphasizes the role of geographic representation as a complementary strategy in party‐dominated legislatures that is characterized by two distinct features. First, legislators employ distinct opportunities to participate in legislative contexts to signal attention to geographic constituents without disrupting party unity. Second, these activities are motivated by individual‐ and district‐level characteristics that supplement electoral‐system‐level sources of geographic representation. We empirically test and corroborate this argument for the German case on the basis of a content analysis of parliamentary questions in the 17th German Bundestag (2009–13). In this analysis, we show that higher levels of localness among legislators and higher levels of electoral volatility in districts result in increased geographic representation.     

从平等走向自由——关于城乡人大代表差别选举的理论思考

选举法修正案草案取消了城乡代表权差异化配置的条款,这一显著变化表明我国选举制度向实现公民的完全平等迈出了一大步。但它具有的意义不只如此,它还为进一步实现公民选举权的自由维度提供了基础。从平等方面看,选举法的修改在公民投票权平等的基础上,实现了公民代表权的平等,也就是在＂同票＂的基础上实现了＂同权＂。按照城乡同比例选举,人民代表大会中城乡代表的比例会和社会构成中城乡比例一致起来,从而提高了人大对社会的代表性。当然,按照独立论的解释,过高的官员比例也同样是可能具有高代表性的。但这种争论只涉及到了问题的表层,最重要的问题应该是代表是如何产生的,这是与选举权中的自由向度紧密相连的问题。如果不能实现公民在选举中充分的自由权利,保证代表能够合理、公正地产生,那么平等也只能成为摆设。选举制度的进一步发展应该是在平等的基础上实现公民的自由选举权。这是选举法修改实现选举平等之后带给我们的进一步的理论思考。     

Ethnic Group Representation in a Cross-National Comparison

This paper compares the levels of ethnic group representation in parliament in 95 democracies. The analyses are comparative in nature, breaking with the literature where single country studies are the norm. Considering both electoral and cultural variables, the results cast doubt on whether the role of the electoral system in shaping political representation is dominant. In contrast to what much of the literature suggests, once controlling for the ethnic make-up of society and cultural attitudes, electoral aspects seem of little significance. Levels of ethnic group representation are best explained with cultural variables, in particular liberal attitudes towards marginalised groups in society.     

Enfranchisement,Malapportionment, and Institutional Change in Great Britain, 1832–1868

This article examines why after 35 years of repeatedly rejecting the secret ballot, the British House of Commons enacted it with the Ballot Act of 1872. Drawing on roll‐call votes, I show that parliamentary opposition to the secret ballot was invariant between 1832 and 1867. In 1867, however, the Second Reform Act significantly extended the electoral franchise and substantially redistributed parliamentary seats; the House elected immediately following these changes to pass the Ballot Act of 1872. I show that a key reason for the change in the House's attitude on the ballot was that anti‐ballot MPs whom the redistribution threatened to expose to electoral competition were disproportionately likely to retire prior to the 1868 election. These results imply that it was the anticompetitive effects inherent in the gross malapportionment of the older electoral system rather than the restricted nature of the franchise that insulated MPs from public pressure and kept parliamentary opinion on the secret ballot in stasis. This is a useful lesson because while almost all modern democracies operate on a universal adult suffrage, many continue to be marked by significant malapportionment.     

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.