Agendas and the Control of Political Outcomes

1987 ◽  
Vol 81 (1) ◽  
pp. 179-199 ◽  
Author(s):  
Peter C. Ordeshook ◽  
Thomas Schwartz

A considerable theoretical literature argues that if everyone votes sincerely, then an agenda setter has near dictatorial influence on final outcomes, whereas if everyone votes strategically, then an agenda setter's power is considerably reduced. This literature assumes that all feasible agendas are of a special type called amendment agendas. But actual legislative and committee agendas—notably those found in Congress—often are not of this type. Once we expand the domain of feasible agendas to include all types allowed by common parliamentary practice, the influence of agendas on legislative outcomes expands, even with strategic voting. Besides showing with counterexamples that previous results do not extend to a more realistic domain of agendas, we prove some theorems that specify the limits (such as they are) of an agenda setter's power.

1999 ◽  
Vol 93 (3) ◽  
pp. 535-552 ◽  
Author(s):  
John D. Wilkerson

For more than three decades, social choice theorists and legislative scholars have studied how legislative outcomes in Congress can be manipulated through strategic amendments and voting. I address the central limitation of this research, a virtual absence of systematic empirical work, by examining 76 “killer” amendments considered during the 103d and 104th congresses. I trace the effects of these amendments on their related bills using archival sources, test for strategic voting using NOMINATE as the baseline measure of legislator preferences across a range of issues, and explore with OLS regression why some killer amendments are more strategically important than others. The findings indicate that successful killer amendments and identifiable strategic voting are extremely rare. In none of the cases examined could the defeat of a bill be attributed to adoption of an alleged killer amendment.


2006 ◽  
Vol 100 (1) ◽  
pp. 85-97 ◽  
Author(s):  
MATIAS IARYCZOWER ◽  
PABLO T. SPILLER ◽  
MARIANO TOMMASI

This paper links the theory of interest groups influence over the legislature with that of congressional control over the judiciary. The resulting framework reconciles the theoretical literature of lobbying with the negative available evidence on the impact of lobbying over legislative outcomes, and sheds light to the determinants of lobbying in separation-of-powers systems. We provide conditions for judicial decisions to be sensitive to legislative lobbying, and find that lobbying falls the more divided the legislature is on the relevant issues. We apply this framework to analyze supreme court labor decisions in Argentina, and find results consistent with the predictions of the theory.


Author(s):  
Wendy J. Schiller ◽  
Charles Stewart

This chapter integrates findings on indirect elections with current scholarship on the impact of the adoption of the Seventeenth Amendment and onset of direct elections. It constructs a comprehensive counterfactual analysis that helps demonstrate what the political outcomes would have been with direct elections in place since the founding, and in contrast, what Senate elections would look like after 1913 if indirect elections were still in place. It also addresses the question of whether U.S. senators represented states as units and responded to state governmental concerns more under the indirect system than they do under direct elections. It argues that indirect election had little impact on the Senate's overall partisan composition prior to 1913. Contrary to widespread belief, had direct election been in effect during the years immediately preceding the Seventeenth Amendment's passage, Republicans, not Democrats, would have benefited.


2017 ◽  
Author(s):  
Blair Brackin Marquardt ◽  
Brett W. Myers ◽  
Xu Niu

Author(s):  
Julia Partheymüller

It is widely believed that the news media have a strong influence on defining what are the most important problems facing the country during election campaigns. Yet, recent research has pointed to several factors that may limit the mass media’s agenda-setting power. Linking news media content to rolling cross-section survey data, the chapter examines the role of three such limiting factors in the context of the 2009 and the 2013 German federal elections: (1) rapid memory decay on the part of voters, (2) advertising by the political parties, and (3) the fragmentation of the media landscape. The results show that the mass media may serve as a powerful agenda setter, but also demonstrate that the media’s influence is strictly limited by voters’ cognitive capacities and the structure of the campaign information environment.


2020 ◽  
Vol 9 (5) ◽  
pp. 94
Author(s):  
Khalid Ayad ◽  
Khaoula Dobli Bennani ◽  
Mostafa Elhachloufi

The concept of governance has become ubiquitous since it is recognized as an important tool for improving quality in all aspects of higher education.In Morocco, few scientific articles have dealt with the subject of university governance. Therefore, we will present a general review of the evolution of governance through laws and reforms established by Moroccan Governments from 1975 to 2019. The purpose of the study is to detect the extent of the presence of university governance principles in these reforms.This study enriches the theoretical literature on the crisis of Moroccan university and opens the way to new empirical studies to better understand the perception of university governance concept in the Moroccan context and to improve the quality of higher education and subsequently the economic development of the country.The findings of this study show an increasing evolution of the presence of university governance principles in reforms and higher education laws.


2021 ◽  
pp. 251484862110249
Author(s):  
Jessica C Barnes ◽  
Jason A Delborne

Innovations in genetics and genomics have been heavily critiqued as technologies that have widely supported the privatization and commodification of natural resources. However, emerging applications of these tools to ecological restoration challenge narratives that cast genetic technoscience as inevitably enrolled in the enactment and extension of neoliberal capitalism. In this paper, we draw on Langdon Winner’s theory of technological politics to suggest that the context in which genetic technologies are developed and deployed matters for their political outcomes. We describe how genetic approaches to the restoration of functionally extinct American chestnut trees—by non-profit organizations, for the restoration of a wild, heritage forest species, and with unconventional intellectual property protections—are challenging precedents in the political economy of plant biotechnology. Through participant observation, interviews with scientists, and historical analysis, we employ the theoretical lens provided by Karl Polanyi’s double movement to describe how the anticipations and agency of the developers of blight-resistant American chestnut trees, combined with chestnut biology and the context of restoration, have thus far resisted key forms of the genetic privatization and commodification of chestnut germplasm. Still, the politics of blight-resistant American chestnut remain incomplete and undetermined; we thus call upon scholars to use the uneven and socially constructed character of both technologies and neoliberalism to help shape this and other applications of genetic technoscience for conservation.


2021 ◽  
Vol 180 ◽  
pp. 110979
Author(s):  
Adam K. Fetterman ◽  
Tim Wildschut ◽  
Constantine Sedikides

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