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.     

Partisan Stacking on Legislative Committees

One aspect of the partisan model for legislative committee development that is rarely studied is the degree to which the majority party seeks to control legislative committees—and, thereby, chamber decisions—via numerically “overproportional” majority party representation on standing committees. This form of “party stacking” is often mentioned in the literature but has received little systematic examination and hypothesis testing. Using data from state legislative committees for all 49 partisan legislatures in the 2003–04 and 2005–06 sessions, we found support for the partisan model: majority party stacking is associated with a slim majority party advantage in a state legislative chamber.     

Party Effects in State Legislative Committees

Legislative scholars have theorized about the role of committees and whether they are, or are not, tools of the majority party. We look to the states to gain more empirical leverage on this question, using a regression discontinuity approach and novel data from all state committees between 1996 and 2014. We estimate that majority‐party status produces an 8.5 percentage point bonus in committee seats and a substantial ideological shift in the direction of the majority party. Additionally, we leverage a surprisingly frequent, but as if random occurrence in state legislatures—tied chambers—to identify majority‐party effects, finding similar support for partisan committees. We also examine whether the extent of committee partisanship is conditional on party polarization or legislative professionalism, but we find that it is not. Our results demonstrate that parties create nonrepresentative committees across legislatures to pursue their outlying policy preferences.     

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.     

Electoral Rules and Legislative Parties in the Ukrainian Rada

Critics of Ukraine's single‐member district majoritarian and mixed‐member majoritarian electoral systems argue that they undermined the efficiency of the Supreme Rada by permitting nonpartisan single‐member district deputies to enter the legislature in large numbers. Such deputies changed parties and ignored party positions. This article argues that the effect of the differences in how legislators are elected is dependent upon whether legislators are partisans. The statistical analysis of party switching and party cohesion in the Rada from 1998 to 2002 shows that nonpartisan single‐member district deputies were the most likely to switch parties and the least cohesive.     

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.     

Black Political Representation: An Examination of Legislative Activity Within U.S. House Committees

How minority legislators influence policy development in Congress remains a relevant question for those interested in race and political representation. This article addresses this question using evidence from participation in committee work—a vantage point that has received minimal attention in scholarship on black political representation. I interpret racial differences in participation in House committees across a range of policy areas, demonstrating that black members participate at higher rates within committees than whites on both black interest and nonracial bills. The results suggest that race has a substantive effect on members' policy priorities and their legislative activity within committees.     

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.     

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.     

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.     

Ideological Congruence among European Political Parties

Do European political parties represent the ideology of their voters well? This research aims to provide an empirical appreciation of the levels to which Members of Parliament (MPs) ideologically represent their electorate within political parties in 12 European countries. The variable used is left–right self-placement and representation is measured through congruence. Three main hypotheses are tested. First, MPs express greater ideological extremism than voters. Second, MPs have biased perceptions on the positioning of their electorate. Third, New Left parties exhibit higher levels of representation than the other parties. This article's findings reveal that only the second hypothesis can be supported without restrictions.     

Parties and Electoral Performance in the Market for Political Consultants

We investigate whether the hiring relationships of candidates and political consulting firms better resembles the predictions of the “adversarial” or “allied” models of consultant‐party interaction. We find that the highest‐quality consultants are not allocated to the most competitive races, consultant‐candidate relationships persist even as candidates' electoral prospects change, and firms who work for challengers face a higher risk of market exit than firms working for incumbents. The market focuses entirely on win‐loss records and ignores the information on consultant performance available in candidates' vote shares. These findings depict a market driven by individual candidate, rather than aggregate party, goals.     

Russian Political Parties and Movements on Contemporary World Processes

Most of the platforms of Russian political parties and movements devote rather poor coverage to issues related to globalization, Russia's place in the contemporary system of international relations, and Russian foreign policy. More complete are the sections on foreign policy in the platforms of the former Fatherland [Otechestvo] Party and the Liberal-Democratic Party of Russia (LDPR). The Yabloko party platform gives especially short shrift to such issues. In essence, foreign policy gets less than a page, in a section itself entitled "Foreign Security and the Army." As brief and even more declarative were the foreign policy statements of Unity [Edinstvo] (before its merger with Fatherland—All Russia [Otechestvo—Vsia Rossiia]).