The Partisan Basis of Procedural Choice: Allocating Parliamentary Rights in the House, 1789–1990

1996 ◽  
Vol 90 (1) ◽  
pp. 8-20 ◽  
Author(s):  
Sarah A. Binder
Keyword(s):  
Statistical Model ◽  
Minority Rights ◽  
Institutional Development ◽  
Original Data ◽  
Short Term ◽  
Data Set ◽  
Majority Party ◽  
Party Leaders ◽  
Procedural Rights ◽  
Procedural Choice

Conventional accounts of the institutional development of Congress suggest that expansion of the size and workload of the House led members to distribute parliamentary rights narrowly: Majority party leaders accrued strong procedural powers while minority parties lost many of their parliamentary rights. I offer an alternative, partisan basis of procedural choice. Using an original data set of changes in House rules, I present a statistical model to assess the influence of partisan and nonpartisan factors on changes in minority procedural rights in the House between 1789 and 1990. I find that short-term partisan goals—constrained by inherited rules—shape both the creation and suppression of rights for partisan and political minorities. Collective institutional concerns and longer-term calculations about future parliamentary needs have little impact on changes in minority rights. The findings have important theoretical implications for explaining both the development of Congress and the nature of institutional change more generally.

Subverting the Organizational Cartel: Explaining Cross-Party Leadership Selection in U.S. State Houses

2019 ◽  
Vol 48 (4) ◽  
pp. 475-483
Author(s):  
Matthew N. Green
Keyword(s):  
House Of Representatives ◽  
State Legislatures ◽  
State Level ◽  
Original Data ◽  
Data Set ◽  
Leadership Selection ◽  
Majority Party ◽  
Party Ideology ◽  
Level I ◽  
Selection Of

In the U.S. House of Representatives, the majority party constitutes an organizational cartel that monopolizes the selection of chamber leaders. But in state legislatures, that cartel power is sometimes circumvented by a bipartisan bloc that outvotes the leadership preferences of a majority of the majority party. Drawing from an original data set of instances of cross-party organizational coalitions at the state level, I use statistical analysis to test various hypotheses for when these coalitions are more likely to form. The analysis reveals that party ideology does not adequately explain the violation of these cartels; rather, violations depend on the costs associated with keeping the party unified and the benefits that come from selecting the chamber’s top leadership post. This finding underscores the potential vulnerability of organizational cartels and suggests that governing parties are strategic when deciding how fiercely to defend their cartel power.

scholarly journals Do party primaries punish women? Revisiting the trade-off between the inclusion of party members and the selection of women as party leaders

2021 ◽  
pp. 135406882198896
Author(s):  
Javier Astudillo ◽  
Andreu Paneque
Keyword(s):  
Original Data ◽  
Ongoing Debate ◽  
Data Set ◽  
Leadership Selection ◽  
Trade Off ◽  
Party Leaders ◽  
Female Candidates ◽  
Party Members ◽  
Mixed Gender ◽  
Selection Of

This paper examines the effect of party primaries on women’s chances of winning a leadership contest in eight Western parliamentary countries since 1985. By doing so, we revisit an ongoing debate about a possible trade-off between the democratic values of ‘inclusion’ of party members and ‘representation’ of excluded groups that this type of selection method may involve. Using an original data set consisting of 608 candidates who participated in 168 leadership mixed-gender contests at the national or regional level, we show that female candidates perform worse under party primaries. This finding holds even after controlling for the type of candidate competing. We therefore sustain the argument that this leadership selection mechanism, in its current format, involves a trade-off between ‘inclusion’ and ‘representation’.

Portugal

2021 ◽  
pp. 675-691
Author(s):  
Jorge M. Fernandes ◽  
Miguel Won
Keyword(s):  
Empirical Analysis ◽  
Sharp Increase ◽  
Institutional Design ◽  
Electoral System ◽  
Original Data ◽  
Legislative Organization ◽  
Data Set ◽  
Party Leaders ◽  
Party Members ◽  
Positive Effect

In this chapter, we examine the Portuguese case whose institutional design makes it a paradigm of party-centered legislative debates. Together with the closed-list proportional representation electoral system, the rules-induced centrality of parties in legislative organization creates strong incentives for party leaders to keep tabs on party members on the floor. In this chapter, we describe the formal and informal rules of legislative debate in Portugal. Using an original data set from 1999 through 2019, our empirical analysis yields three key results. First, women continue to be sidelined from floor access, not only in the opportunities to take the floor but also in the length of speeches they deliver. Second, seniority has a positive effect in increasing the likelihood of taking the floor. Third, our results point out to a sharp increase in the likelihood of taking the floor and making long speeches, which corroborates our general theoretical expectations in the volume.

Minority Governments and Pledge Fulfilment: Evidence from Portugal

2016 ◽  
Vol 53 (2) ◽  
pp. 335-355 ◽  
Author(s):  
Catherine Moury ◽  
Jorge M. Fernandes
Keyword(s):  
Original Data ◽  
Economic Conditions ◽  
Elected Officials ◽  
Data Set ◽  
Party Leaders ◽  
Opposition Party ◽  
Opposition Parties

In an age of rampant distrust and disaffection, pledge fulfilment is important for the quality of delegation between voters and elected officials. In this article, we make an empirical appraisal of pledge fulfilment in Portugal. Do Portuguese minority governments fulfil their pledges? How do they fulfil those pledges? What is the role of opposition parties? Using an original data set with over 3,000 electoral pledges for three Socialist governments, as well as interviews with former ministers and party leaders, our evidence suggests that: (1) minority governments fulfil at least as many pledges as their majority counterparts; (2) the main opposition party manages to extract the most policy benefits; and (3) economic conditions and cohabitation situations matter for pledge fulfilment.

Centralized or decentralized personalization? Measuring intra-party competition in open and flexible list PR systems

2019 ◽  
pp. 135406881985571
Author(s):  
Jérémy Dodeigne ◽  
Jean-Benoit Pilet
Keyword(s):  
Original Data ◽  
Party Competition ◽  
Electoral Rules ◽  
Data Set ◽  
Quarter Century ◽  
The Czech Republic ◽  
Party Leaders ◽  
Clear Cut ◽  
Two Measures ◽  
Over Time

This article offers a comparative analysis of electoral intra-party competition in four countries – Belgium, the Czech Republic, Finland and Luxembourg – based on an original data set of 79,621 candidates and 3150 party lists covering the last quarter century (1994–2017). We use two measures to describe the nature of intra-party competition over time, across countries and across party lists: a Gini coefficient and a measure of the effective number of candidates. First, in terms of change over time (personalization) – unlike hypothesized in the presidentialization thesis – there is no concentration of intra-party competition around a few leaders over time. Second, in terms of the dynamics of concentration of votes (personalized politics), the results invite to move beyond the clear-cut divide found in the literature between centralized and decentralized forms of personalized politics. Instead, personalized politics is best described by the concept of ‘elitization’, meaning the concentration of most votes on a medium-sized group of candidates (5–10 per lists). Finally, three sets of factors condition intra-party electoral competition: the electoral rules organizing preference votes, the level of elections (European, national and regional) and the presence on the party lists of incumbent politicians (party leaders, ministers and parliamentarians).

Quotas and Party Priorities: Direct and Indirect Effects of Quota Laws

2018 ◽  
Vol 72 (4) ◽  
pp. 849-862
Author(s):  
Ana Catalano Weeks
Keyword(s):  
Panel Data ◽  
Indirect Effects ◽  
Women In Politics ◽  
Direct And Indirect Effects ◽  
Short Term ◽  
Data Set ◽  
Party Leaders ◽  
Regression Methods ◽  
Gender Quota

In light of increasing numbers of women in politics, extant research has examined the role of women in the parliamentary party on agenda-setting. This paper complements that literature by exploring the effect of a gendered institution theorized to promote both numbers of women and awareness of women’s interests: gender quota laws. I suggest that after a quota law, parties could have incentives to either reduce ( backlash effect) or increase ( salience effect) attention to women’s policy concerns. Using matching and regression methods with a panel data set of parties in advanced democracies, I find that parties in countries that implement a quota law devote more attention to social justice issues in their manifestos than similar parties in countries without a quota. Furthermore, the paper shows that this effect is driven entirely by the law itself. Contrary to expectations, quota laws are not associated with increases in women in my (short-term) sample; it is thus no surprise that no evidence of an indirect effect through numbers of women is found. I interpret the findings as evidence of quota contagion, whereby quotas cue party leaders to compete on gender equality issues.

scholarly journals Committee chair selection under high informational and organizational constraints

2017 ◽  
Vol 25 (4) ◽  
pp. 547-558 ◽  
Author(s):  
Mihail Chiru ◽  
Sergiu Gherghina
Keyword(s):  
Fixed Effects ◽  
Original Data ◽  
Logit Models ◽  
Data Set ◽  
Privileged Access ◽  
Committee Chair ◽  
Party Leaders ◽  
Conditional Logit ◽  
Members Of Parliament ◽  
Organizational Constraints

This article draws on major theories of committee organization to explain committee chair selection in contexts with high informational and organizational constraints. We test our theoretical expectations through a series of fixed effects conditional logit models run on an original data set which includes all legislators who have served in the Romanian Chamber of Deputies from 1992 to 2012. The findings indicate that sector knowledge matters more for committee chair selection in the first post-communist terms, while chair seniority and party credentials acquire relevance later on. The effect of sector knowledge is stronger than that of chair seniority for the committees that the members of parliament perceive to be the most important, while party leaders have privileged access to the chair position irrespective of how salient the committee is.

Examining the appointment of women to ministerial positions across Europe: 1970–2015

2019 ◽  
pp. 135406881987866
Author(s):  
Dee Goddard
Keyword(s):  
Negative Binomial ◽  
Negative Binomial Regression ◽  
Original Data ◽  
Right Wing ◽  
Left Wing ◽  
Data Set ◽  
Party Leaders ◽  
Women Ministers ◽  
Binomial Regression ◽  
Original Insight

Under which circumstances are women appointed to ministerial positions? In this article, I provide a theoretical framework for the role of gender in ministerial selection by considering the policy, office, and vote-seeking motivations of party leaders. I present an original data set which details, at the party level, the appointment of female cabinet ministers in 30 European countries between 1970 and 2015. Using negative binomial regression models, I find that left-wing party leaders appoint more women than leaders of right-wing parties. Female party leaders appoint more women ministers than their male counterparts. Women are better represented in governments in gender-progressive countries, and survey data analysis shows that party leaders appoint more women when their supporters have more progressive gender attitudes. This analysis provides an original insight into how gender has shaped the partisan dynamics of ministerial selection across Europe over 45 years.

Rotational Characteristics of the Green Solar Corona: 1947-1991

1994 ◽  
Vol 144 ◽  
pp. 139-141 ◽  
Author(s):  
J. Rybák ◽  
V. Rušin ◽  
M. Rybanský
Keyword(s):  
Solar Corona ◽  
World Wide ◽  
Rotation Period ◽  
Original Data ◽  
Coronal Emission ◽  
Time Intervals ◽  
Data Set ◽  
The World ◽  
Coronal Emission Line ◽  
Homogeneous Data

AbstractFe XIV 530.3 nm coronal emission line observations have been used for the estimation of the green solar corona rotation. A homogeneous data set, created from measurements of the world-wide coronagraphic network, has been examined with a help of correlation analysis to reveal the averaged synodic rotation period as a function of latitude and time over the epoch from 1947 to 1991.The values of the synodic rotation period obtained for this epoch for the whole range of latitudes and a latitude band ±30° are 27.52±0.12 days and 26.95±0.21 days, resp. A differential rotation of green solar corona, with local period maxima around ±60° and minimum of the rotation period at the equator, was confirmed. No clear cyclic variation of the rotation has been found for examinated epoch but some monotonic trends for some time intervals are presented.A detailed investigation of the original data and their correlation functions has shown that an existence of sufficiently reliable tracers is not evident for the whole set of examinated data. This should be taken into account in future more precise estimations of the green corona rotation period.

Electing the Senate

2017 ◽  
Author(s):  
Wendy J. Schiller ◽  
Charles Stewart III
Keyword(s):  
Original Data ◽  
State Legislators ◽  
Internal Conflict ◽  
Data Set ◽  
Senate Elections ◽  
Political Actors ◽  
The Public ◽  
Seventeenth Amendment ◽  
The People ◽  
Election Process

From 1789 to 1913, U.S. senators were not directly elected by the people—instead the Constitution mandated that they be chosen by state legislators. This radically changed in 1913, when the Seventeenth Amendment to the Constitution was ratified, giving the public a direct vote. This book investigates the electoral connections among constituents, state legislators, political parties, and U.S. senators during the age of indirect elections. The book finds that even though parties controlled the partisan affiliation of the winning candidate for Senate, they had much less control over the universe of candidates who competed for votes in Senate elections and the parties did not always succeed in resolving internal conflict among their rank and file. Party politics, money, and personal ambition dominated the election process, in a system originally designed to insulate the Senate from public pressure. The book uses an original data set of all the roll call votes cast by state legislators for U.S. senators from 1871 to 1913 and all state legislators who served during this time. Newspaper and biographical accounts uncover vivid stories of the political maneuvering, corruption, and partisanship—played out by elite political actors, from elected officials, to party machine bosses, to wealthy business owners—that dominated the indirect Senate elections process. The book raises important questions about the effectiveness of Constitutional reforms, such as the Seventeenth Amendment, that promised to produce a more responsive and accountable government.

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