Ethnicity as political cleavage: the political agenda of the Polish national minority in Lithuania

This article examines the role of ethnicity in the formation of political cleavage and is based on the analysis of the political agenda of the Polish national minority in Lithuania after the re-establishment of the independent state in 1990. It analyzes the political performance of the Electoral Action of Poles in Lithuania (EAPL), an ethnic-based “niche” political party that tends to keep a monopoly over the representation of interests of the Polish minority in Lithuania and collects a vast majority of the votes of citizens of Polish origin. The article considers how specific in comparison to the titular nation the interests of the Polish national minority are, and how different in comparison to the political agendas of other political parties the political agenda of the EAPL is.     

Más allá de la representación y del clientelismo: hacia un lenguaje de la intermediación política

This paper proposes rethinking conceptual scopes of the term “political mediation”, in order to illustrate the analytical scope of indirect politics, whose range of possibilities has usually been thought of as if contained between the extremes of political representation and patronage. An analytical exercise is offered as one possible and tentative path to specify not only a vocabulary which is more sensitive to the demands of the present but to –in the words of Bunge– allow the initial reinterpretation of old symbols of our political vocabulary. To this end, in addition to a linguistic and conceptual journey of the term “intermediation”, three analytical dimensions of indirect policy are developed; thus facilitating dialogue with theories of representation, and leading to an analytical model that we call “cube of indirect politics”. We conclude with a brief case classification exercise intended to show the displacements produced by this model in understanding certain indirect political experiences.     

The choice of electoral systems in new democracies: a case study of South Korea in 1988

Most theories about electoral system choice are based on the experiences of Western European countries, many of which shifted from majority/plurality rule to proportional representation (PR) at the turn of the twentieth century. This article aims to explain the choice of the South Korean legislative electoral system in 1988 as an example of electoral institution choices in new democracies, which may be different from those in the Western European countries. Through analysing multiple steps leading to the choice of a single-member district plurality voting system, this article suggests three potentially generalizable findings. First, in new democracies, labour parties can only induce old parties to shift to a proportional representation system if they have mobilized the working class prior to democratization. Secondly, parties in the developing world at times face unusual systems that are neither majoritarian nor fully PR. Under such unusual systems, party size would not be a reliable predictor for the party's preference over electoral institutions. Finally, when parties choose a legislative electoral institution in a presidential system, parties tend to prefer an institution that helps them in the subsequent presidential election even though the institution might harm them in the upcoming legislative election.     

Legislators as Lobbyists

Public policy is produced by elected and unelected officials and through the interactions of branches of government. We consider how such interactions affect policy implementation and representation. We argue that legislators try to influence bureaucratic decisions through direct communication with federal agencies, and that such contact is effective and has consequences for policy outcomes. We provide empirical evidence of this argument using original data about direct communication between members of Congress and the U.S. Department of Labor (DOL) along with decisions made by the DOL regarding trade and redistributive policies. We find that direct contacts influence DOL decisions, and the agency is more likely to reverse previous decisions when requested to do so by legislators. Our results challenge key assumptions and findings in the previous literature and have important implications for interbranch relations and informal means of control over the implementation of national policy.     

Representation and resistance in Restoration Scotland: the political thought of James Stewart of Goodtrees (1635–1713)

This article presents a Scottish case study of early modern ideas on parliamentary representation and popular political participation. By scrutinizing the context and content of a treatise published in 1669 by the lawyer James Stewart of Goodtrees, the article seeks to demonstrate that views had shifted on the nature of the Scottish Parliament. In addition, it is argued that the promulgation of Scotland's covenants – that is, the National Covenant (1638) and the Solemn League and Covenant (1643) – unwittingly created space for the development of popular political engagement. However, the implications of this were not fully realized until a group of middling and lower class men rose in arms to uphold the Covenants after their rescission in law by parliamentary statute in 1661.     

The impact of candidate selection rules and electoral vulnerability on legislative behaviour in comparative perspective

Legislators are political actors whose main goal is to get re-elected. They use their legislative repertoire to help them cater to the interests of their principals. It is argued in this article that we need to move beyond treating electoral systems as monolithic entities, as if all legislators operating under the same set of macro-rules shared the same set of incentives. Rather, we need to account for within-system variation – namely, candidate selection rules and individual electoral vulnerability. Using a most different systems design, Germany, Ireland and Portugal are leveraged with both cross-system and within-system variation. An original dataset of 345,000 parliamentary questions is used. Findings show that candidate selection rules blur canonical electoral system boundaries. Electoral vulnerability has a similar effect in closed-list and mixed systems, but not in preferential voting settings.     

Gender quotas and placement mandates in open and closed lists: Similar effects,different mechanisms

In this paper, we argue that placement mandates, that is, regulations for gender ordering in party lists, enhance gender quotas' effectiveness in proportional representation electoral systems, independently of list type. In closed-list systems, placement mandates increase women's representation automatically as a result of the electoral rules, and, for this reason, we call this effect mechanical. In open-list systems, the effect is also strong due to systematic patterns of electoral behavior. We call this effect psychological. In order to demonstrate this, we analyze 140 Latin American legislative elections carried out between 1990 and 2018. Then, we compare the two most similar cases of open-list systems with different rules for placement mandates to illustrate the occurrence of the psychological effect. This is the first article to argue that placement mandates have similar effects in both kinds of lists as a function of distinct mechanisms.     

Strengthening the local representative system: the importance of electoral and non-electoral representation

Local democracy has increasingly faced problems such as declining voter turnout and decreasing trust in political parties. Certain forms of participatory democracy have been introduced to address political disengagement. Often these efforts do not deliver the envisaged results, as they exacerbate existing inequalities by attracting only certain groups of citizens. This paper takes a close look at representation to find out if and how it can strengthen local democracy. Non-electoral representation, as manifested by representative claims based on non-electoral grounds, such as identity and expertise, made by local councillors, as well as non-elected individuals and organisations, might serve to mitigate democratic problems. We empirically study manifestations of electoral and non-electoral representation and their interactions. We conclude that non-electoral representation can strengthen local democracy, but its relationship with electoral representation can also be problematic. We make suggestions as to how these problems might be overcome in an effort to strengthen the local representative system.     

Do young female candidates face double barriers or an outgroup advantage? The case of the European Parliament

While intersectionality is a recurrent theme in the literature on women's political representation, few studies empirically disentangle who are the women who get elected to parliaments. An argument on biases in recruitment practices suggests that those who are members of more than one outgroup, such as young women, benefit from an ‘outgroup advantage’. In elections, a candidate with two outgroup features might attract more voter support than a candidate with just one outgroup feature. Hence, nominating a candidate that is both young and female could be a rational move by (male) elites in political parties that allows them to open fewer seats to newcomers. These expectations are tested on data for all members of the European Parliament since 1979. Not only is it found that women's presence increased steadily throughout the parliament's history, but also that women's representation is consistently highest among the group of young representatives, lower among middle-aged Members of the European Parliament and lowest among older representatives.