Legislative Studies PDF

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The Oxford Handbook of Legislative Studies
Edited by Shane Martin, Thomas Saalfeld, and Kaare W. Strøm
Print Publication Date: Jun 2014 Subject: Political Science

Online Publication Date: Sep
2014
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Acknowledgments
Acknowledgments

2014
Acknowledgments
OUR sincere thanks to the authors for agreeing to contribute and for their cooperation
throughout. This Handbook is their work, and without their timely and professional
collaboration, it would have been an impossible task. Thanks also to Dominic Byatt,
Commissioning Editor at Oxford University Press, for so wholeheartedly supporting the project.
Our respective institutions, Dublin City University, the University of Bamberg, and the
University of California, San Diego, hosted a number of editorial meetings, and we are grateful
for the many ways in which they have supported our efforts. In addition to our home
institutions, we thank the London School of Economics for hosting several editorial meetings at
critical stages of the project. Martin gratefully acknowledges support for work on the Handbook
from the Norwegian Research Council (FriSam Project No. 222442) and from the School of Law
and Government and the Vice-President for Research, Dublin City University. We thank
Matthias Bahr, Eric Bientzle, Wolfgang Goldbach, Margret Hornsteiner, Erik Jäger, David Ruß,
and Akisato Suzuki for help in preparing the manuscript. (p. vi)
Page 1 of 1
About the Contributors


2014
Rudy B. Andeweg is Professor of Political Science at Leiden University.
Audrey André is Post-Doctoral researcher at the Vrije Universiteit, Brussels.
Josephine T. Andrews is Associate Professor of Political Science, University of

California, Davis.
André Bächtiger is Swiss National Science Research Professor at the University of

Lucerne.
Stefanie Bailer is Assistant Professor for Global Governance at ETH Zurich.
Heinrich Best is Professor of Sociology and Chair of Social Science Research

Methods/Structural Analysis of Modern Societies at the Friedrich Schiller University of
Jena.
Anne Skorkjær Binderkrantz is Professor of Political Science at Aarhus University.
Page 1 of 5
Diana M. Branduse is Doctoral Candidate in the Department of Political Science,

Binghamton University.
Royce Carroll is Associate Professor of Political Science at Rice University.
Gary W. Cox is William Bennett Munro Professor of Political Science at Stanford

University.
Brian F. Crisp is Professor of Political Science at Washington University in St Louis.
Sam Depauw is Assistant Professor and Post-Doctoral Researcher at the Department of

Political Science, Vrije Universiteit Brussel.
Daniel Diermeier is IBM Professor of Regulation and Competitive Practice, Kellogg

School of Management, Northwestern University.
William Downs is Professor of Political Science and Associate Dean for Social and
Behavioral Sciences at Georgia State University.
James N. Druckman is Payson S. Wild Professor of Political Science and Faculty Fellow
at the Institute of Policy Research, Northwestern University.
Reuven Y. Hazan is Professor and Chair of the Department of Political Science, Hebrew
University of Jerusalem.
(p. xii) William B. Heller is Associate Professor in the Department of Political Science,
Binghamton University.
Simon Hix is Professor of European and Comparative Politics at the London School of
Economics and Political Science.
Page 2 of 5
Bjørn Høyland is Professor of Political Science at the University of Oslo.
Christopher Kam is Associate Professor in the Department of Political Science at the

University of British Columbia.
Thad Kousser is Professor of Political Science, University of California, San Diego.
Amie Kreppel is Jean Monnet Chair (ad personam) and Associate Professor in the
Department of Political Science at the University of Florida.
Thomas J. Leeper is Post-Doctoral Researcher in the Department of Political Science

and Government, Aarhus University.
Scott A. MacKenzie is Assistant Professor of Political Science, University of California,

Davis.
Edmund J. Malesky is Associate Professor of Political Science, Duke University.
Lanny W. Martin is Associate Professor of Political Science, Rice University.
Shane Martin is Reader in Comparative Politics, University of Leicester.
Mathew D. McCubbins is Professor of Political Science and Law, at Duke University.
Carol Mershon is Associate Professor, Department of Politics, University of Virginia.
Wolfgang C. Müller is Professor of Democratic Governance at the University of Vienna.
Page 3 of 5
Kevin J. Mullinix is Doctoral Candidate in Political Science and Graduate Fellow at the
Institute for Policy Research, Northwestern University.
Keith Poole is Philip H. Alston Distinguished Chair and Professor of Political Science at
the University of Georgia.
Sven-Oliver Proksch is Assistant Professor of Political Science, McGill University.
Bjørn Erik Rasch is Professor of Political Science and Deputy Dean for Education at the
Faculty of Social Sciences, University of Oslo.
Tapio Raunio is Professor of Political Science, University of Tampere.
Thomas Saalfeld is Professor of Political Science at the University of Bamberg and the
founding Director of the Bamberg Graduate School of Social Sciences.
Sebastian M. Saiegh is Associate Professor of Political Science, University of California,

San Diego.
(p. xiii) Constanza F. Schibber is Doctoral Candidate in the Department of Political

Science, Washington University in St Louis.
Paul Schuler is Doctoral Candidate in the Department of Political Science, University of

California, San Diego.
Matthew S. Shugart is Professor of Political Science, University of California, Davis.
Ulrich Sieberer is Research Group Leader in the Department of Politics and Fellow of
the Zukunftskolleg at the University of Konstanz.
Page 4 of 5
Jonathan B. Slapin is Associate Professor of Political Science, University of Houston.
Kaare W. Strøm is Distinguished Professor of Political Science at the University of

California, San Diego.
Michelle M. Taylor-Robinson is Professor of Political Science, Texas A&M University.
Georg Vanberg is Professor of Political Science at Duke University.
Lars Vogel is Research Fellow at the Department of Sociology, Friedrich Schiller Jena
University of Jena, Germany.
Joachim Wehner is Senior Lecturer (Associate Professor) in Public Policy at the London
School of Economics and Political Science.
(p. xiv)
Page 5 of 5
Introduction
Introduction
Shane Martin, Thomas Saalfeld, and Kaare W. Strøm
Print Publication Date: Jun 2014 Subject: Political Science, Comparative Politics, Political
Institutions
Online Publication Date: Sep DOI: 10.1093/oxfordhb/9780199653010.013.0001
2014
Abstract and Keywords
This book is about legislatures and legislative studies. It outlines theoretical approaches in legislative studies,
including formal modeling and, in particular, game-theoretic approaches. It examines the social relations within
parliaments (insider relations) and the relations between parliaments and society (insider-outsiderrelations), as well
as the historical evolution of legislative typologies and classification schemes, the rapidly evolving methods and
techniques employed in the study of legislatures, political behavior and legislative roll-call voting, the role of debate
and deliberation within legislatures, and the use of surveys and interviews in legislative studies. It also discusses
candidate selection and its consequences for legislative politics, the relationship between electoral systems and
legislative behavior, the psychological effects of electoral institutions, how legislative careerism affects legislative
capacity, the internal organizational structure and rules of legislative organization, bicameralism and the
significance of legislative committees, the connections between party cohesion and discipline, and the relations
between interest groups and legislators. In addition, the book looks at the evolution of the European Parliament,
legislative politics in Latin America, and the strength of legislatures in the new democracies of Central and Eastern
Europe.
Keywords: legislatures, legislative studies, parliaments, political behavior, legislative politics, electoral institutions, legislative careerism,
bicameralism, European Parliament, Latin America
1.1 Introduction
LEGISLATURES are ubiquitous political bodies. In a recent survey, Loewenberg (2011, 18) counted 191 such national
assemblies. Many thousands could be found at the sub-national level. And at least in the case of the European
Parliament, we have seen the slow but steady rise of a transnational assembly. In the broadest sense of the word, a
legislature could be defined as “a body created to approve measures that will form the law of the land” (Norton
2013, 1). This definition focuses on law-making as the main purpose of a legislature and can be derived from the
word’s etymological root, namely legis, the genitive of the Latin word for “law” (lex) and lator meaning “proposer”
or “carrier” conjugated from the Latin verb ferre. The local names for legislatures include (in English translation)
“Assembly,”“Diet,”“Congress,”“Parliament,” and many more. The term “parliament,” which is sometimes used
interchangeably with “legislature,” has a different etymological root and points to a different set of activities with
which legislatures tend to be associated—public deliberation, debate, transparency, and accountability. The
French word parlement appeared in the twelfth century to denote an assembly or court where French monarchs
(or their representatives) spoke to subjects, listened to their grievances, and explained policies. From the thirteenth
century onward, the term parliamentum was used in medieval England for formal meetings between the monarch
and representatives of the estates, which emanated from the Curia Regis of the eleventh century (Marschall 2005,
24–6).
Page 1 of 18
Introduction
In his classic study of The English Constitution, Bagehot (1867) described these communicative activities under
the rubrics “expressive,” “teaching,” and “informing” functions of the British Parliament. Yet, the most important
function Bagehot ascribed to the nineteenth-century House of Commons as an “efficient part” of the English
constitution is not captured in the terms “legislature” or “parliament” at all, namely the legislature’s “elective
function.” The making, breaking, and maintaining of governments in (p. 2) office is peculiar to legislatures in
parliamentary systems of government, but does not exist in presidential systems based on a stricter separation of
the executive and legislative branches. In parliamentary systems of government, the majority leadership controls
the process of legislation via its majority and its powers to determine the agenda. In presidential systems, by
contrast, the power to set the agenda does not rest with the executive. As a result, the executive needs
congressional cooperation to get its legislation on the statute book. In parliamentary systems, the ultimate sanction
of dismissing a government turns the communicative functions highlighted by Bagehot potentially into a very
effective device to hold the executive accountable, both within the majority party (or parties) and in the permanent
election campaign between majority and minority parties, between government and opposition (King 1976).
In the past 50 years, legislative studies have become one of the major subfields of political science. Many national
and international political science associations (e.g. the American Political Science Association, the [British] Political
Studies Association, the International Political Science Association, or the European Consortium for Political
Research) have standing sections on legislative studies. The number of articles on legislatures or legislators in
leading international journals in the discipline is substantial. And there are a number of established academic
journals specializing in legislative studies in political science (e.g. Parliamentary Affairs [founded in 1947], the
Zeitschrift für Parlamentsfragen [since 1969], Legislative Studies Quarterly [since 1976], the Australasian
Parliamentary Review [since 1986], or The Journal of Legislative Studies [since 1995]), and in other disciplines
(e.g. Parliaments, Estates and Representation [since 1981], or Parliamentary History [since 1982]).
Not only are legislatures ubiquitous bodies, they present political scientists with numerous intriguing puzzles, which
have motivated research with implications for institutional analysis beyond the field of legislative studies itself. Why,
and how, have these ancient assemblies, established in pre-democratic times and often characterized by
aristocratic forms of behaviour, procedures, and symbols, survived the transition to mass democracies? How have
they adapted? Why do they still exist, after all the diagnoses of anachronism, decline, irrelevance, and
dysfunctionality? Why have they not been abolished in the light of widespread popular indifference even in those
democracies that look back at a long-standing history of parliamentary government? What explains the similarities
and differences in legislative rules, powers, and recruitment? What explains the inconsistency between the
organizational and procedural structures they have developed and the original notion of an “assemblage of
notables of equal status” (Loewenberg 2011, 14)? And, perhaps most intriguingly, what are the policy and other
consequences of variation in how legislatures are organized and function?
In short, legislatures pose a number of non-trivial puzzles. At the same time, they have always been relatively
public and transparent bodies offering good opportunities to researchers interested in questions of institutional
design, institutional adaptation, as well as rule-bound and strategic behaviour. A great deal of information is
available to researchers about the legislatures’ constitutional powers and internal rules as well as about their
members’ backgrounds, public statements, revealed preferences, (p. 3) and behaviour in and around the
chamber. Today, many legislatures provide excellent on-line access to records of plenary meetings, committee
sessions, and the entire legislative process. This may explain why legislative studies have become such an
important and increasingly dynamic sub-field of political science.
1.2 Legislatures Matter
Some scholars have claimed the decline of parliaments in modern democratic politics. Such claims are not new.
Lowell’s (1896), Ostrogorski’s (1902), and Bryce’s (1921) analyses of the effect of the rise of organized political
parties in the nineteenth century led them to conclude that the power of legislatures had been undermined by
partisanship (Ostrogorski, Bryce) and a decline in the quality of representatives (Bryce). This critique was echoed
by foes of liberal democracy such as Schmitt (1988 [1923]) in the 1920s as well as by supporters of a more
rational and democratic form of discourse in legislative decision-making, such as Habermas (1992 [1962]) in the
1960s. While political scientists have gradually come to understand how political parties can enhance the
decisional efficiency and impact of legislatures (see, for example, Cox 1987; Aldrich 1995; or Cox and McCubbins
Page 2 of 18
Introduction
2005), the claim that legislatures are declining has remained. What has changed have been the external
developments believed to cause this downturn: after the Second World War, a number of authors identified the
growth of welfare states and executive agencies as causes for the alleged decline of European legislatures, as the
growth of these programs and agencies has exacerbated the informational asymmetry between bureaucrats and
elected politicians. In the 1970s, a variant of this causal argument was extended to the tendency for governments
in some (again, mostly European) democracies to strike bargains with major producer groups in neo-corporatist
arrangements. Richardson and Jordan (1979) thus spoke of a “post-parliamentary democracy.” In recent years,
the narrative of declining legislatures has continued on two levels: some authors consider Europeanization (within
Europe) and globalization (more generally) as crucial exogenous developments undermining the power of
legislatures. Andersen and Burns (1996, 229) thus claim: “Western societies have become highly differentiated
and far too complex for a parliament or its government to monitor, acquire sufficient knowledge and competence,
and to deliberate on.” Parliamentary representation, they argue, is organized territorially, rendering legislative
oversight ineffective in the contemporary world. In a recent article on the implications of the European rescue
packages between 2010 and 2013, Zürn (2013, 10) restated the argument from the vantage point of transnational
governance: “The crisis of parliamentary democracy in the West and the emergence of political authority beyond
the nation state lead to a shift within the set of established justifications of legitimate authority.” His assessment has
been echoed by students of public attitudes. Dalton (2004, 1), for example, observes that citizens “have grown
distrustful of politicians, skeptical about democratic institutions, and disillusioned about how the democratic
process functions.” And the available evidence (p. 4) suggests that despite the relative transparency of
legislative chambers, they are poorly understood and appreciated by democratic publics across the world
(Loewenberg 2011, 92–103).
Yet, the contributions to this handbook will provide overwhelming evidence that legislatures matter, and how they
matter; how they have adapted to changes such as globalization, regional integration, judicialization; and how
they have coped with the declining support base for the central agents of legislative politics, political parties. A few
simple but striking examples corroborate our claim that legislatures are indeed consequential. In March 2013, the
government of the Republic of Cyprus concluded an economic bailout agreement with the European Union, the
European Central Bank, and the International Monetary Fund. This so-called troika imposed harsh conditions,
including a loss of up to 10 percent of money held in Cypriot bank accounts. While all parties to the agreement
expected negative reactions, neither the Cypriot government nor the troika considered the reaction of the
parliament of Cyprus, through which the necessary enacting legislation would have had to be passed. Banks in
Cyprus had to remain closed while the government tried to persuade Members of the House of Representatives to
back the deal.
On 19 March 2013 Cypriot MPs rejected the bailout terms, with more than half of the country’s 56 legislators voting
against, and 19 MPs choosing to abstain. Amidst an atmosphere of crisis, the Cypriot finance minister then went to
Moscow to seek help from Russia, and the European Central Bank threatened to withdraw the supply of cash to
Cypriot banks. Finally, following new negotiations with the troika, a multiweek shutdown of banks, and much protest,
Cyprus’s House of Representatives approved a different, and more favourable, bailout agreement at the end of
April, by a majority of just two votes. Thus, even these powerful transnational actors had to take into account the
preferences of legislators of a small state in an utterly weak bargaining position.
Although the above account reminds us of the central role that legislature plays in times of crisis, legislatures are
also central to the normal business of governing. In parliamentary systems, parliaments make and break
governments (Bagehot 1867; Wheare 1963; Kluxen 1983; Laver and Shepsle 1996; Müller et al. 2003; Strøm
2003). The Federal Republic of Germany is a powerful illustration of this point. Between 1949 and 2013, only one
complete transfer of power between government and opposition parties was triggered exclusively by a popular
vote at elections—in the general election of 1998, the coalition of Christian Democrats and Liberals under Federal
Chancellor Helmut Kohl was thrown out by the voters and replaced with a new coalition of Social Democrats and
Greens led by Gerhard Schröder. All other governmental transitions (Adenauer to Erhard in 1963, Erhard to
Kiesinger in 1966, Kiesinger to Brandt in 1969, Brandt to Schmidt in 1974, Schmidt to Kohl in 1982, and Schröder to
Merkel in 2005) effectively resulted from negotiations between the parties in the legislature. This provides powerful
evidence for the importance of Bagehot’s elective function in parliamentary systems of government.
Although in presidential regimes legislatures tend not to make or break governments, their policy influence remains
significant. As the passage of the Patient (p. 5) Protection and Affordable Care Act of 2010 (often referred to as
Page 3 of 18
Introduction
the ACA, or Obama-care) in the United States exemplifies, the detail of legislative rules and procedures matter
greatly. President Obama had identified healthcare reform as a policy priority of his first term in office. Yet,
healthcare reform divided Americans (Brady and Kessler 2010). Normally, such divisive legislation would stand little
chance of passing in the United States Senate, where individual Senators can filibuster bills—unless 60 percent of
the members oppose the filibuster. Due to an embarrassing loss in a Senate by-election in Massachusetts, the
president’s party did not have the filibuster-proof Senate majority required to pass the ACA. To circumvent a
filibuster, the Democrats instead employed a little-known and arguably arcane parliamentary maoneuvre. Senate
procedures allow proposals directly affecting the budget to be considered under a special budget reconciliation
process. The healthcare bill had both legislative and budgetary components and it was therefore unclear which
procedure would be used. The Parliamentarian (the Senate’s nonpartisan advisor on the interpretation of its rules,
procedures and, critically, precedents) must decide whether bills are budgetary or legislative. Legislative bills can
lead to long debates with the possibility of a filibuster, which can only be broken by a supermajority of 60 senators.
In contrast, if a bill is budgetary, debate is limited to 20 hours with no opportunity to employ a filibuster. The
interpretation of the Parliamentarian, Alan S. Frumin, was thus critical to the eventual passage of the ACA. As
Oleszek (2013, 432), later noted: “Members [of the United States Congress] find new uses for old rules, employ
innovative devices, or bypass traditional procedures and processes altogether to achieve their political and policy
objectives.” And in this case, the fate of a very large and hotly contested bill depended on this arcane
parliamentary ruling. As all of the above stories indicate, it is difficult if not impossible to study the politics of any
established democracy without reference to its legislature or legislatures, and as some of the later chapters in this
volume will suggest, legislatures sometimes play a critical role even where democracy has not been solidly
entrenched.
1.3 The Evolution of Legislative Studies
Legislative studies have always been a rich and pluralistic field of inquiry in political science. We want to offer
three observations on the history of this field. Firstly, the study of legislatures pre-dates the evolution of political
science as a discipline. Philosophers, historians, and lawyers were the first scholars to analyse legislatures. This
has influenced the way legislatures have been—and are—studied. Political science does not have a monopoly on
the study of legislatures, and in a number of countries, legal-constitutional and historical traditions retain a strong
influence. Secondly, while pluralistic in its methodology and methods, legislative studies in political science have
followed a general trajectory from (a) the “old” institutionalism prevalent between the late nineteenth century and
the end of the Second World War, through (b) a neglect (p. 6) of political institutions and a focus on individual
behaviour in the 1950s and 1960s, to (c) more sophisticated macro-micro-macro perspectives from the mid-1980s
onwards when the “new” institutionalism became a dominant force in contemporary political science. Thirdly,
legislative studies have benefitted greatly from the growth of political science as a discipline after 1945, especially
in the United States of America. The vast majority of scholars working in the field have always been based at US
universities. This includes US-based scholars who have made significant contributions to research on non-US
legislatures (e.g., Beer 1966; Huber 1996; Loewenberg 1967). As a result of the critical mass in US academia and
other fortuitous circumstances, legislative studies have received major impulses from America.
Our first point relates to the long history of studies of legislatures and the variety of academic disciplines that have
covered legislatures and their activities. Scholarship about the process of law-making has a long and venerable
tradition in a number of disciplines including philosophy, history, law, and, since the second half of the twentieth
century, political science. Early typologies of government (including assemblies) can be found in ancient Greece in
the Politics of Aristotle and Plato and, later in the Roman republic, in Cicero’s De Republica. We have fragmentary
evidence of philosophical works on laws by Plato (Nomoi) and Cicero (De legibus), which were both primarily
concerned with the content of laws rather than with the process of legislation. Throughout the Middle Ages authors
such as Thomas Aquinas (1225–74) harked back to Greek (mainly Aristotelian) and Roman political thought in
treatises on divine, natural, and man-made law. In early modernity, authors such as Bodin, Grotius, Hobbes, and
Pufendorf took up questions of natural law and sovereignty in modern states, reflecting on the balance of power
between sovereign monarchs and the various estates. The contractarian ideas of Hobbes and Locke, in particular,
strongly influenced the understanding of the relationship between citizens and monarchs in subsequent liberal
political thought. Locke in his Second Treatise on Government (1690) and Montesquieu in De l’esprit des Loix
(1748) argued for a separation of power between the executive and legislative branches of government, an idea
Page 4 of 18
Introduction
later taken up by the founding fathers of the US Constitution in the Federalist Papers (1787–8). In eighteenth-
century Britain, Burke and Hume theorized about political parties in legislatures (which they saw largely as divisive
expressions of particularistic interests), and Bolingbroke formulated a theory of legitimate, “patriotic” opposition (on
Burke, Hume, and Bolingbroke see Mansfield, 1965). This list is far from exhaustive but suffices to demonstrate the
importance of key areas of legislative studies in political theory for more than 2,000 years.
In addition to its roots in philosophy, legislative studies owe a great deal to legal-constitutional scholarship. Until the
eighteenth century, legal, theological, and philosophical works were hard to separate. Two developments favoured
the “constitutionalization” of legislative politics: firstly, and most obviously, there was the rise of constitutionalism
from the American and French Revolutions onwards. Combined with the rise of legal positivism, this development
provided a major impetus for legal research. Secondly, with the growing volume and complexity of legislative
business in some chambers, procedural rules had to be introduced to avoid chaos. Initially, these (p. 7) rules
were written by politicians or clerks. Vice President Jefferson (1812) famously compiled his Manual of
Parliamentary Practice for the US Senate when he held the office of vice president between 1797 and 1801. This
influential statement of parliamentary law was informed by Hatsell’s (1818 [1718]) procedural manual for the British
House of Commons and later “became a supplement to the rules of procedure that evolved in the U.S. House of
Representatives and in territorial and state legislatures throughout the United States” (Loewenberg, 2011, 17).
While such procedural rules have increasingly become a focus of research for political scientists (see the chapter
by Müller and Sieberer in this volume), they have long been the territory of constitutional lawyers. In some
countries the body of law pertaining to legislatures (such as in the German word “Parlamentsrecht”) have become
a sub-field of public law (e.g., Schneider and Zeh 1989; Jack 2011).
As democratic legislatures have evolved from medieval assemblies in Europe, many archaic procedures, symbols,
and myths have continued to shape legislative practice despite the modernization and “rationalization” of
legislatures since the nineteenth century (Manow 2010). Apart from a number of influential studies by eminent
historians, there have been major attempts to coordinate and institutionalize historical research on legislatures
through organizations such as the History of Parliament Trust in the United Kingdom (established in 1940), the
International Commission for the History of Representative and Parliamentary Institutions set up by a number of
European historians (1936), the German Kommission für Geschichte des Parlamentarismus und der politischen
Parteien (1952), the Dutch Centrum voor Parlementaire Geschiedenis (1970), and the French Comité d’Histoire
Parlementaire et Politique (2003).
In short, political science is only one of several disciplines dealing with legislatures, and inter-disciplinary
cooperation has often been lacking (Loewenberg 2011, 6). From the 1950s onwards and again from about 1980,
legislative studies have nevertheless become a very dynamic sub-field of political science, especially in the United
States. Our second main observation is that the history of legislative studies in political science is strongly
influenced by the ebb and flow of institutionalism in political science and the social sciences more generally. Most
early publications on legislatures are characterized by the attributes Peters (1999, 3–11) and others have identified
as “old institutionalism” of the nineteenth and early twentieth centuries. This traditional form of institutional analysis
is too diverse to have a coherent theory, methodology, or research program. Yet it is generally characterized by a
strong focus on the formal institutions of government, constitutional law, and constitutional history. Loewenberg
(2011, 108) thus observes that, some notable exceptions notwithstanding, US congressional research from the
1880s to the 1950s had been dominated by “a large volume of work on its constitutional powers, rules of
procedure, and legislative enactments, as well as proposals for its reform.”
“Old” institutionalists believed that structures had a clear causal influence on behaviour. In methodological terms
their works tended to be holistic (rather than individualistic) with an emphasis on macro-level analyses. They also
stressed the historical foundations of institutions both for an adequate understanding of their origins and the
interpretations of the actors influenced by those institutions. Finally, and in line with the intellectual roots (p. 8) of
political science, there was a strong normative element in “old” institutional analysis, focusing on the institutional
conditions for “good government.” In this sense, Tocqueville’s early description of the United States Congress in
De la démocratie en Amérique (first published in French in 1835) may be a less-than-perfect example of the “old
institutionalism” as the book reveals a great deal of interest in the fabric of American society, its relative
egalitarianism, and the consequences of these social factors for the country’s political institutions. Nevertheless,
Chapters V and VI present an early institutionalist account of Congress (Tocqueville 2000). Wilson’s (1885) study
of Congressional Government half a century later can be considered to be a clear-cut early example of the “old”
Page 5 of 18
Introduction
institutionalism in the United States. His focus on the formal institutions of Congress was coupled with the normative
impetus of a practitioner who sought to influence behaviour through institutional reform. In Europe, the studies of
Bagehot (1867), Bryce (1921), Jennings (1957), or Wheare (1963) are further examples. Wheare was unusual
inasmuch as he dealt with more than one single legislature. However, systematic, theory-driven comparative
analyses did not become widespread until the 1990s. Old institutionalism was largely a matter for area specialists,
although a few scholars such as Polsby (1974), Mezey (1979), or Lijphart (1984) contributed greatly to the
development of typologies that could be used for comparative studies (see also Mershon’s contribution to this
volume).
Even the most cursory review of some older institutionalist literature, however, would be incomplete without
reference to a large body of institutional analysis, especially during the 1920s and 1930s, that was deeply
skeptical of legislatures and parliamentary democracy (e.g. Schmitt 1988 [1923]). In their most general form, these
arguments—for example, the claim that legislatures had lost their character as public arenas for rational political
discourse, or that they were ineffective and inefficient as decision-making bodies—continued to inform institutional
debates after 1945. The literature on discourses and deliberative democracy are but two examples of the former
theme (see Bächtiger’s contribution to this volume), whereas the institutional analysis of chaos results in
parliamentary voting exemplify the latter (see Rasch’s chapter in this volume).
In the 1960s, political scientists imported systems theory and structural functionalism from other social sciences to
move beyond the old institutionalism of legislative studies both in the United States and elsewhere. The theoretical
perspective underpinning systems theory proved to be a promising candidate for a general theory of political
systems. Almond and Powell (1966), for example, saw legislatures as sub-system of a “political system” which
helped to convert political inputs arising in the system’s environment into outputs. It is typical of this perspective
that a great deal of scholarship was devoted to systemic “functions” legislatures might perform—Packenham
(1970), for example, identified three main functions: (1) legitimation; (2) recruitment, socialization, and training of
political leaders; and (3) decisional functions including law-making. This functionalism seemed to provide a
framework for more analytic and comparative perspectives. Ultimately, however, systems theory and its
derivatives in legislative studies remained abstract and highly aggregated and did little to address the growing
criticism that “macrobehaviour” needed to be explained in terms of actors’ (e.g., legislators’) “micromotives”
(Schelling 1978).
(p. 9) In another departure from the “old” institutionalism, the 1950s and 1960s witnessed a growing interest in
legislators and their individual perceptions and behaviour. This involved a radical shift to the micro level of
analysis, which was inspired by the general rise of behaviourism in the social sciences. The interest in institutions,
by contrast, declined: What really mattered in this view of politics was voting, interest group activity, and even less
legal forms of articulations, which were then processed into “outputs.” In this conception of a political system the
formal institutions of government were reduced to the “black box,” where the conversion of inputs into outputs
occurred, almost magically it appeared to “critics of the approach” (Peters 1999, 14). Such criticism
notwithstanding, modern legislative studies owe much, both substantively and methodologically, to a series of
micro-level studies, such as a seminal study of representational role orientations among American state legislators,
in which Wahlke and his collaborators (1962) interviewed 474 members of four such assemblies. With appropriate
adjustments, their work inspired a large number of related studies across the world (Badura and Reese 1976; Chee
1976; Narin and Puri 1976; Converse and Pierce 1979; Hagger and Wing 1979; Maier et al. 1979; Clarke and Price
1981; Andeweg 1992; Searing 1994; Judge and Ilonszki 1995; Müller and Saalfeld 1997; Blomgren and Rozenberg
2012). Similarly, Fenno’s (1978) participant observation of the “home styles” of US Representatives generated
interesting insights into the way US legislators carry out their work on Capitol Hill and also influenced international
studies (e.g. Patzelt 1993; Brack et al. 2012), albeit not to the same extent as for research on role orientations.
Despite the impressive amount of information that has become available on legislators, the micro-political approach
to the study of legislatures had some deficiencies, which its leading proponents readily recognized. This
behavioural research contributed to a host of legislature-specific in-depth studies; yet the question remained
whether the fascinating results of these studies could be generalized beyond their specific samples. Furthermore,
there was little leverage to explain the effect of institutional variation. Eulau (1996), one of the key proponents of
the micro-political approach, saw this problem very clearly and emphasized the need to bridge the micro-macro
divide. Finally, the data from such behavioural studies often made it difficult to draw clear causal inferences.
Searing (1994, 6–7), a leading scholar in the field of legislative role analysis, thus conceded that the ideas
Page 6 of 18
Introduction
underpinning much of his work were a descriptive framework rather than a theory from which causal explanations
could suitably be derived.
The “new” institutionalism that gradually came to dominate legislative studies from the 1980s onwards was not a
renaissance of the structuralism and methodological holism of the “old” institutionalism. It was strongly informed by
three decades of empirical research on the attitudes and behaviour of individual representatives in the US and
elsewhere. In the language of Coleman’s (1986) macro-micro-macro model of (social) action, it benefitted from
vastly increased knowledge of how legislators perceived macro-level constraints and incentives in their respective
political environments (Coleman’s “macro-to-micro problem”). It therefore offered scholars some confidence in
their respective micro-level assumptions.
(p. 10) Nor was the new institutionalism all of one kind; in fact it came in two distinct main varieties: one
committed to rational choice analysis and the other much more sociological and norms-oriented. These rational-
choice and sociological varieties largely differed in terms of their assumptions and explanatory strategies at the
individual level. Rational-choice theorists were strongly influenced by the rise of formal modeling since the 1960s.
The micro-level research of the past three decades had reassured Riker and his followers that their assumption of
strategic, calculating actors was reasonable in the context of legislative institutions (Shepsle 2002). Loewenberg
(2011, 116), though not a scholar of this tradition, conceded that Riker’s game-theoretic “approach was ideally
suited to research on legislatures because they could readily be conceptualized as institutions composed of self-
interested, purposeful members taking strategic actions within a set of rules to achieve their purposes.”
Sociological institutionalists, by contrast, assumed that legislators and other political actors follow a “logic of
appropriateness” (March and Olsen 1984), which they took to be acquired in the process of political socialization.
Strategies and purposive behaviour exist, but political actors’ assessments of costs and benefits are influenced by
the social norms that are prevalent within their communities and organizations. With its emphasis on voting
procedures and other rules, the rational-choice variety of the “new institutionalism” came to dominate, as it offered
interesting and often counter-intuitive explanations of legislative outcomes, addressing the “micro-to-macro
problem” identified by Coleman (1986).
Unlike the “old” institutionalists, behaviourists, or systems theorists, rational- choice institutionalists, in particular,
had a clear (and often fairly realistic) model of individual motivations. Unlike the first generation of rational-choice
models of legislative politics (see, for example, Riker, 1962), however, institutions were not strictly endogenous to
their models. Using fixed behavioural postulates about the motivations and preferences of relevant actors and the
game-theoretic logic of institutions, they sought to derive propositions about observable behaviour and test
hypotheses based on these propositions (Diermeier and Krehbiel 2003, 131). One crucial advantage of rational-
choice institutionalism over its sociological “competitor” was that it lent itself much better to comparative analyses.
Concepts such as “voting games,”“veto players,” or “agenda control” allowed researchers to strip a multitude of
different institutions down to their institutional core logic. Veto-player models (e.g. Tsebelis 2002) or pivotal-player
models (Krehbiel 1998) were general enough to be applied to and tested in a large number of different settings. The
growing availability of cross-national data on legislative powers and procedures (e.g. Döring 1995; Fish and
Kroenig 2009; Sieberer 2011) has allowed more sophisticated comparative analyses of the impact of legislative
institutions.
Although the rational-choice approach has provided the most influential neo-institutional approach in legislative
studies, there have been other influential schools of scholarship, especially the sociological exploration of
legislative roles, as well as historical approaches. The historical approach to the study of institutional development
—including a much stronger cooperation between rational-choice theorists and historical institutionalists (e.g.
Katznelson and Weingast 2005)—is a recent development (p. 11) and has largely remained confined to
Congressional scholarship in the United States thus far (Katznelson 2011). Sociological institutionalism in legislative
studies has its roots in the micro-political work on legislative roles cited above. The study of legislative roles
continues to produce a number of fascinating findings on individual legislatures (see, for example, Blomgren and
Rozenberg 2012), even though its proponents realized that “role theory is not a theory” (Searing 1994, 6–7).
Nevertheless, sociological analyses, too, have experienced a certain revival in the context of the “new”
institutionalism and have contributed to a much better understanding of the longer-term changes in the offices and
profession of legislators cross-nationally (Best and Cotta 2000; Cotta and Best 2008; see also the contribution of
Best and Vogel in this volume).
Page 7 of 18
Introduction
Our third general observation on the field of legislative studies relates to the dominance of US scholars. This is not
surprising given the size of the US political science community and the fact that both Congress and the US state
legislatures are amongst the most powerful legislative bodies world-wide with a long and uninterrupted history of
democratic government. As a result of this strength, Shepsle (2002, 390) was able to claim with a high degree of
plausibility that “American politics has served the wider political science community by forging scientific tools and
producing a laboratory in which they are tested, perfected and prepared for export.” The story told in this
introduction supports Shepsle’s claim. While legislative studies were multi-disciplinary and multi-polar until the
Second World War and while European research, in particular, may still be strong in areas such as the legislative
history, the most important innovations since 1945 have emanated from research carried out in the United States.
This has always included non-American researchers who had found an intellectual home there, and increasingly
comparative research collaborations across the Atlantic and the Pacific oceans, as well as across the border
between North and Latin America (e.g. Alemán 2013).
1.4 The Handbook
Our handbook reflects the richness and promise of legislative studies and is therefore divided into a number of
sections that survey and discuss various key themes and issues in the field. We begin with basics, with accounts
of the different traditions in which insights about legislative politics have been aggregated and developed into
theoretical bodies of knowledge concerning this aspect of political deliberation. The handbook contains three such
chapters, to which we now turn.
1.4.1 Theoretical Approaches in Legislative Studies
Like political science in general, scholars of legislatures approach the topic from different and, at least partially,
competing theoretical perspectives. Diermeier (Chapter 2) (p. 12) suggests that formal modeling and, in
particular, game-theoretic approaches, are well suited to the comparative study of legislatures. Almost all formal
models of legislatures fall into this tradition. Rational choice theory contends that political outcomes and decisions
are to be explained as the aggregate results of the decisions of rational individuals, variously informed. Variants of
rational choice theory differ in their view of how to model such collective choice processes. Social choice theoretic
approaches model a collective choice process by its voting rule. A series of impossibility theorems, suggesting the
collective choice should typically be chaotic, led many theorists to the conclusion that the sparse social choice
theoretic approach was underspecified. This led to the development of institutionalist models, which add structure,
such as committees or procedural prerogatives, to formal models of legislatures, to explain stabilities and biases
that seem to exist in the real world of legislative politics. Early models of such structure-induced equilibrium have
been increasingly replaced by ever more sophisticated game-theoretic approaches. As Diermeier argues, this
framework not only allows for the representation of complex institutions but can also address questions of stability
and the choice of institutions.
Despite the dominance of rational choice, the sociological approach provides an alternative theoretical framework
through which legislatures and legislators can be studied. The sociology of legislators and legislatures has two
main units of analysis: legislators as social actors on the one hand, and legislatures as social institutions on the
other. Best and Vogel (Chapter 3) focus on the social relations within parliaments (insider relations) and on the
relations between parliaments and society (insider-outsider relations). They suggest that three types of social
interaction manifest themselves: competitive struggle for votes; antagonistic cooperation; and hierarchical
principal–agent relations.
Kreppel (Chapter 4) provides a review of the historical evolution of legislative typologies and classification
schemes, with particular attention to the implicit and explicit connections between the role and influence of
legislatures and the broader political system. Her chapter includes an effort to clarify the terminology of legislatures
and to identify various subtypes that exist based on their relationship with the executive and the relative emphasis
they are likely to place on the primary activities of legislatures (including representation, linkage, control, and
policy-making). Kreppel explores the implications for comparative legislative studies of the transition from the broad
comparative “macro” typologies dominant in the 1970s and 1980s toward the micro analyses focused primarily on
specific aspects of internal organization, including the shift from US-centred analysis to a more comparative lens.
Kreppel concludes by introducing an alternative conceptual scheme based on the core concepts of institutional
Page 8 of 18
Introduction
and individual autonomy.
1.4.2 Methods of Legislative Research
Our second set of five chapters reviews the rapidly evolving methods and techniques that are currently deployed
in the study of legislatures. Contemporary legislative studies thus make use of an increasingly diverse and
sophisticated set of empirical tools to test (p. 13) an ever-increasing number of theory-driven hypotheses. Carroll
and Poole (Chapter 5) explore what is arguably one of the most empirically studied aspects of legislative
behaviour: voting. Scaling methods to evaluate the latent dimensions of political behaviour and choice have had a
substantial impact on our understanding of the properties of legislative roll-call voting. As interest in spatial models
of legislatures has grown, these methods have been employed to operationalize theories of the role of preferences
and ideology in legislative politics. Scaling procedures and ideal point estimation have enabled scholars to assess
the spatial properties of voting and to conduct numerous empirical investigations of preference-based theories of
legislative politics. With the advent of new techniques and more computational power, such methods have become
even more widespread in comparative politics. Carroll and Poole provide an overview of these methods and
applications with a discussion of methodological challenges and recent developments in the field.
Yet, legislator behaviour consists of much more than voting. As we noted in our introduction, the term “parliament”
refers to the discursive aspects of politics in representative assemblies, and legislators leave a long record of
recorded words in the form of legislative debates, parliamentary questions, and committee hearings and
deliberations. Slapin and Proksch (Chapter 6) discuss recent technological advances that have provided scholars
with the ability to analyse the vast amounts of textual data that legislatures produce each year. Researchers have
taken advantage of these new tools to answer questions about constituency representation, agenda control, and
party cohesion, among many other topics. Using texts as data has allowed researchers to develop a more
nuanced understanding of ideology and position-taking in legislatures. However, a careful consideration of the
data-generating process behind the text data is equally important as content analysis of that data. Just as with
other forms of observational legislative data, text data is often generated by strategic interactions among
legislators and legislative parties. Slapin and Proksch warn that when they consider how best to use available text
data, researchers must be cognizant of the processes that generated the text.
Bächtiger (Chapter 7) explores the role of debate and deliberation within legislatures. In the past two decades,
scholars have begun to refine and challenge the conventional view that debate is a verbal contest between
government and opposition without any direct policy impact. Bächtiger explains that parliamentary debate is more
varied and consequential than commonly assumed. In trying to understand such debate, scholars have adopted
three approaches: (1) a strategic and partisan-rhetoric approach, anchored in rational choice theory; (2) a
deliberative approach which tries to identify institutional and issue-based conditions under which legislative
speech can inform decisions; and (3) a discourse approach focused on the constitutive features of parliamentary
debates which examines its norms and conventions. Bächtiger’s analysis of the contours of parliamentary debate
compliments the previous chapter on text as data and will be of interest not just to scholars of deliberation but also
to those who develop or employ the tools discussed by Slapin and Proksch in Chapter 6.
(p. 14) Surveys and interviews, which were so influential during the heyday of behaviourism, arguably continue
to dominate empirical research designs in legislative studies. For one thing, they help give meaning to what
legislators do within the legislative arena (voting and words). They also shed important light on legislators’ extra-
legislative work, such as constituency activity and service. Arguably, surveys and interviews deliver the most
direct measure of the thoughts and intentions of politicians, so that they are one of the most valuable sources of
data for the study of legislative behaviour. Bailer (Chapter 8) reviews the use of surveys and interviews in
legislative studies and offers specific guidance for drafting questionnaires and surveys questions, for conducting
legislative surveys, and for tackling specific problems that may arise in elite interviews. Bailer discusses the major
challenges of legislative interviews (quality control) and of legislative surveys (low response rates and selection
bias), and offers potential remedies.
The challenges of quality control and selection bias ultimately require that scholars consider alternative, or at least
complementary, empirical strategies. The increasing popularity of experiments in political science suggests one
possible avenue. While early work on legislative coalitions occasionally employed experiments, the bulk of
progress in legislative research has been made with non-experimental work. This is likely to change quickly.
Page 9 of 18
Introduction
Druckman, Leeper, and Mullinix (Chapter 9) argue that experiments provide unique strengths in legislative
research. During the past decade, political science has experienced a mounting tide of experimental research
directed at topics such as voting in legislatures, parliamentary coalitions, and legislative responsiveness.
Druckman, Leeper, and Mullinix discuss variations in experimental design and their applications before concluding
with a discussion of future challenges and opportunities for experimental work in legislative settings.
1.4.3 Representation and Legislative Careers
As the five methodologically focused chapters will demonstrate, legislative scholars have a rapidly growing tool
box of increasingly sharp instruments at their disposal. They can, and no doubt will, employ these tools to address
a range of important questions. Regardless of theoretical orientation and empirical strategies, researchers in the
field of legislative studies have produced an impressive body of substantive knowledge, which is explored in the
next series of chapters in this handbook.
Our analysis of this body of work begins, as do political campaigns, with the candidate selection process. Hazan
(Chapter 10) argues that candidate selection has significant consequences for legislative politics. The rules and
practices that govern this process open doors for some politicians and close them for others. Moreover, candidate
selection rules may induce legislators to modify their behaviour, regardless of their fundamental preferences.
Hazan argues that the behaviour of legislators is significantly influenced by their desire to be reselected, and that
in order to fulfill this goal they will try to satisfy and respond to the selectorate. For example, if party cohesion has a
positive (p. 15) effect on reselection, legislators will focus on party-centred activities and exhibit high levels of
party unity. If more individualistic behaviour is valued in order to be reselected, legislators will engage in
candidate-centred behaviour, leading to lower levels of party unity. Hazan is especially interested in the shift
toward more inclusive candidate selection methods and argues that this will have a significant impact on legislative
behaviour.
André, Depauw, and Shugart (Chapter 11) review what has become a central topic in comparative politics—the
relationship between electoral systems and legislative behaviour. Much research indicates that electoral
institutions shape the behaviour of legislators and thereby strengthen or weaken their incentives to cultivate their
personal reputation rather than that of their party. But research has largely missed the “theoretical link” tying
legislators’ behavioural repertoires to the formal rules. In response, and by focusing on patterns of accountability
as well as the competitiveness of electoral races, André, Depauw, and Shugart set out to examine how the
mechanical effects of electoral institutions translate into incentives for legislators to cultivate a personal vote. They
then turn to the psychological effects of electoral institutions, examining how personal vote incentives translate
into behaviour such as initiating particularized legislation, undertaking constituency casework, and breaking with
party discipline. The effects of electoral institutions on legislative behaviour should not be overstated, however.
The electoral calculations of legislative candidates may thus be upset by the selective benefits (such as legislative
particularism or mega-seats) handed out by party leaders, as well as the voters’ preferences regarding
representation.
Research on the representation of women in legislatures continues to uncover fundamental information of interest
to legislative scholars and to scholars of gender and politics. Taylor-Robinson (Chapter 12) explores how
institutional design may facilitate or hinder the election of women; how women and men legislators define their job
and their constituents; how female and male legislators perform their constituency service, propose bills, and
participate in deliberation. She also analyses the representation of women in legislative leadership positions. The
author then proposes focus areas for future research, particularly whether and how descriptive representation is
linked to substantive representation of women’s interests. She argues the need for greater attention to the diversity
among women legislators and to how this diversity impacts substantive representation. More broadly she
encourages research on the political opportunity structure that may promote or inhibit the promotion of women’s
interests by either male or female representatives.
In no other area of political science is the concept of “roles” as important as it is in legislative studies. It is
sometimes argued that role analysis is currently regaining importance in this field in response to the dominance of
institutionalist approaches. Andeweg (Chapter 13) is more skeptical, advocating the need for a move from mere
description to theoretically grounded explanation. Roles make political institutions such as legislatures subjective:
they are related to positions, but not identical to them. Perceived expectations, personal motivations, and strategic
Page 10 of 18
Introduction
calculations are assumed to differentiate roles from positions. Eulau and Wahlke’s typology of representational
roles, inspired by Burke and based on a study of US state legislatures, has long dominated the study of (p. 16)
legislative roles. Andeweg criticizes this conception on both theoretical and empirical grounds, in particular for its
lack of predictive power. Searing’s typology, based on an inductive study of the UK House of Commons, has
attracted the most attention as an alternative. Andeweg argues that both seminal studies are lacking due to the
ambiguity of their treatment of political parties.
Scholars have long recognized the theoretical link between political institutions and legislative careers.
Nonetheless, questions remain about how basic institutional factors influence career development within legislative
settings. Kousser and MacKenzie (Chapter 14) argue that addressing these questions can help scholars
understand how legislative careerism affects legislative capacity. The institutional turn in this field, particularly work
by Schlesinger (1966) and Polsby (1968), highlights the importance of roles and institutions to career choices.
Subsequently, scholars have developed elaborate theoretical and empirical models to elucidate legislators’ career
choices. Kousser and MacKenzie review research on term limits to illuminate how attending to the link between
institutions and legislative careers can inform research on legislative capacity.
1.4.4 Organization and Rules
The next section of the handbook is devoted to understanding the internal organizational structure and rules of
legislative organization. Legislative rules are the universe of formal procedures governing the conduct of
parliamentary business. In some cases (e.g., Jefferson’s Manual, see this chapter, section 1.3 entitled “The
Evolution of Legislative Studies”), they have been surprisingly enduring. In most cases, they structure and
constrain the behaviour of legislative actors. Rules emerge to avoid the plenary “bottleneck” problem, to
economize proceedings, and to disentangle procedural and substantive issues. Historic cases show that legislative
gridlock or regime collapse can happen when rules are absent or badly designed. Müller and Sieberer (Chapter 15)
review the state of our knowledge of Western European parliaments with regard to rules governing elections in
parliament, agenda-setting and voting, control of the executive, and reaching out to the public. The authors argue
that research has been very unevenly distributed across these areas. While much is known about the rules that
govern processes leading to authoritative decisions (cabinet inauguration, passage of legislation), much less is
known about rules concerning other core functions of legislatures.
The number of chambers in national legislatures has been the subject of much theoretically and empirically rich
research. Arguably, bicameralism is one of the most common organizational features understood by the general
political science profession. Heller and Branduse (Chapter 16) begin by noting that bicameralism is easy to identify
but hard to measure. The fact that a constitution specifies two legislative chambers often obscures rather than
illuminates the relative influence of the respective chambers, the effects of intercameral negotiations, or the extent
to which consideration in a second chamber might alter legislative content. Moreover, studying bicameralism is
problematic because, as with most political institutions, its effects emerge from processes that (p. 17) often are
invisible to observers. Consequently, it can be difficult to identify whether or how bicameralism matters. Heller and
Branduse build on previous studies of bicameralism and its effects to propose, first, areas of research that require
more careful consideration of bicameralism and, second, an index of bicameralism based on second-chamber
powers—that is to say, the extent to which bicameralism should matter.
Virtually no democratic national legislature is without at least one committee. Legislative scholars have long sought
to understand the origins, design, role, and significance of legislative committees. Today, the conventional notion is
that a strong system of committees is a necessary if not sufficient condition for the legislature to operate
effectively. Martin (Chapter 17) focuses on the exact reason for committees’ popularity as a form of legislative
organization, reviewing the four most prominent theories of legislative organization in the United States: the
distributional theory; the informational theory; the cartel-party theory; and the bicameral-conflict theory. Martin
argues that examining committees in multiple systems represents an opportunity to reinvigorate the Congressional
and comparative study of legislative organization and institutional research more generally.
1.4.5 Parties in the Legislature
Along with committees, political parties are the most common and consequential substructure of most democratic
legislatures. The next section of our handbook therefore explores the hows and whys of legislative parties, and
Page 11 of 18
Introduction
coalitions of parties. Saalfeld and Strøm (Chapter 18)show that legislative parties are not only virtually ubiquitous,
but also highly institutionalized, typically having well-developed structures of leadership as well as specialization.
The authors review various explanations of political parties, including functional theories as well as the
explanations based on the incentives of individual legislators. They also discuss challenges to these theories such
as the influential work of Keith Krehbiel on US Congressional parties. Saalfeld and Strøm argue that it is meaningful
to differentiate between various degrees of partyness among parties, and even among coalitions of parties, and
review the institutional sources of variations in partyness, including the agenda control available to party leaders
and the rewards and sanctions they control.
Students of the United States Congress have long debated whether party cohesion is largely a function of leaders’
successful efforts to impose discipline on their followers or merely a product of party members’ shared
preferences. Recent comparative contributions to this debate show that legislative institutions can and do supply
party leaders with the capacity to enforce discipline even when their members’ disagree, and that discipline is a
necessary aspect of party cohesion in any multiparty setting. Reviewing this literature, Kam (Chapter 19) suggests
that political scientists should focus their efforts on understanding the connections between party cohesion and
discipline, on one hand, and that the politics of candidate and leadership selection, on the other. After all, party
leaders exercise their influence over a group of people who have chosen to join the party, whom the party has
agreed to accept, and on whose support the leader may rely.
(p. 18) Legislative candidates and incumbent legislators can and sometimes do change party affiliation. Mershon
(Chapter 20) highlights how the study of legislative party switching offers important lessons about parties,
legislatures, and democratic politics more generally. For example, when we take seriously politicians’ willingness
and ability to switch party, we shed fresh light on the wisdom that politicians treat parties as vehicles for winning
votes, securing office, and wielding policy influence. An analysis of party switching provides new insights into
legislative institutions as constraints on representatives’ behaviour and as resources in the hands of strategic
politicians.
Under parliamentary democracy, coalition governance requires multiple parties with conflicting policy goals to
govern jointly. The need to compromise, coupled with their separate electoral accountability, introduces tensions
into multiparty cabinets that are muted in single-party governments. Martin and Vanberg (Chapter 21) review
recent scholarship that explores how parties that participate in coalitions make use of legislative institutions to
confront these challenges. In particular, the legislative process can allow parties to engage in position-taking to
distinguish themselves from their coalition partners, and to scrutinize and amend legislation introduced by
ministers associated with other parties. The precise nature of legislative institutions—most importantly, the strength
of the committee system—is crucial to these efforts. Martin and Vanberg provide cross-national data on the
strength of legislative institutions and discuss the broader implications for the importance of legislatures in
parliamentary systems. This chapter, combined with the authors’ earlier work on how legislative institutions play a
critical role in facilitating multiparty governance, reminds us that legislatures are central players in the policy
processes of law-making as well as oversight of the executive. It is to these themes that we turn next.
1.4.6 Policy-Making and Oversight
Legislative agenda control consists in the scheduling of issues and timetable management, the ability to generate
proposals, the ability to avoid or block proposals, and, finally, the ability to sequence or order options on the
legislative floor. As Rasch (Chapter 22) demonstrates, work on agenda-setting is central to legislative research and
the number of studies on the subject is large and rapidly growing, stimulated in part by important theoretical works
such as McKelvey’s global cycling and agenda theorems and Romer and Rosenthal’s setter model. Pointing to the
importance of procedural rights and various institutional mechanisms, Rasch shows that agenda-setting discretion
in real-world assemblies is typically much more restricted than theoretical models would tend to suggest. Rasch
argues that the agenda-setter in general seems to be less powerful, and the mechanisms by which the setter gains
influence, are often subtle and intricate.
One of the ultimate aims of legislative agenda manipulation is to control the enactment of laws. Indeed, law-making
is perhaps the defining feature of national legislatures, which, to varying degrees, hold or share authority over
what becomes or does not become law. Law-making is particularly complex under presidential government, (p.
19) where the separation of powers may add to the complexity of law-making. Such institutional variations might
Page 12 of 18
Introduction
significantly affect the ability of political chief executives to get their legislative proposals enacted. Saiegh (Chapter
23), however, argues that variations in legislative passage rates flow from differences in uncertainty, and not from
variation in partisan support. In particular, he identifies two major factors that shape law-making: the
unpredictability of legislators’ voting behaviour, and whether buying votes is a feasible option. This explanation of
the variation in governments’ legislative performance expands our understanding of law-making, agenda control
under uncertainty, and party discipline in legislatures.
The study of the effects of legislatures on public finance has become more explicitly comparative since the 1990s.
Most research focuses on the budget approval function of legislatures, while there has been less research on the
ex-post financial scrutiny in which they may engage. The comparative literature reviewed by Wehner (Chapter 24)
highlights substantial differences in legislative budget authority and procedures, and shows that electoral systems
and party majorities help explain when formal powers translate into legislative activism. Political economists have
shown that powerful legislatures are associated with less disciplined fiscal policy outcomes. Yet, other possible
impacts of legislative financial scrutiny, for instance on accountability and democracy, have been asserted but not
yet rigorously examined. Moving forward, Wehner suggests that the comparative study of legislative financial
scrutiny would benefit from expanding its geographical coverage and time horizon. The field should also
investigate a broader array of potential impacts, and examine how these may result from more subtle differences in
institutional design.
Both law-making and budgetary politics are heavily influenced by interest groups and lobbyists. Congressional
lobbying has always been central to American interest group studies. European scholars have traditionally focused
more on corporatist structures that allow groups to interact primarily with civil servants. As Skorkjær Binderkrantz
(Chapter 25) highlights, the last decades have seen a remarkable shift in attention with legislatures assuming a
more central arena for interest groups across Europe—and, consequently, for scholars who study interest groups.
There is still much to gain from studying the relations between interest groups and legislatures, including placing
the legislature at the centre in studies of interest groups and their political influence, as well as investigating the
complex set of (observable or less observable) linkages between interest groups and legislators.
It is conventionally believed that foreign policy is very much dominated by the political executive, with legislatures
wielding marginal or at best limited influence. Foreign policy is hence said to be determined by political and
bureaucratic elites. Raunio (Chapter 26) provides a critical re-evaluation of such arguments, providing evidence
that legislatures are definitely not—and have hardly ever been—marginalized in foreign policy. The United States
Congress and European legislatures have several mechanisms to influence foreign policy and regional integration,
from setting ex-ante limits on executive behaviour to holding the ultimate veto power in treaty ratification. By all
accounts, the level of executive drift in foreign policy has decreased over the decades, perhaps in (p. 20) part
through the growing interdependence of domestic and foreign policy agendas. Raunio argues that, as foreign
affairs have gained clearer and more varied domestic distributional consequences, legislators also have more
incentives to engage themselves in this policy area.
In all democracies—presidential or parliamentary—the chain of political delegation is complex where there is a

multitude of principals, many of which are frequently replaced. Bureaucrats and politicians hence face common
agency problems—i.e., they commonly have to answer to multiple principals. Because of the fractured and
temporally unstable nature of democratic leadership, political oversight of the bureaucracy is a particularly
problematic link in the process by which citizens control the government. As McCubbins (Chapter 27) notes, these
problems have been recognized for a long time. Societies have long sought to create institutions that would
strengthen oversight of the executive without simultaneously sacrificing the resoluteness of policy. McCubbins
reviews the positive and normative literature on delegation and oversight and discusses the ways in which the
contemporary legislative studies are attempting to understand these age-old problems.
1.4.7 Expanding the Scope of Legislative Analysis
Studying national legislatures in advanced democracies has a long and venerable tradition, as the themes and
research agendas discussed above demonstrate. Increasingly, however, scholars are expanding their horizons—
both by studying legislatures in different, “non-traditional” settings or by looking back to the emergence of
parliamentarism and parliamentary power in what are now well-established democracies.
Page 13 of 18
Introduction
The European Parliament (EP)—the parliament of the European Union—has transformed from an unelected
consultative assembly to a directly elected supranational legislature. The EP looks like a normal national parliament,
albeit with stronger committees and somewhat weaker parliamentary political groups (parties) than most national
legislatures in Europe. Moreover, its members are elected under different electoral formulas from country to
country, providing intriguing opportunities to test theories concerning the effects of electoral institutions. Hix and
Høyland (Chapter 28) consider the evolution of the European Parliament in three vital areas: (1) recruitment; (2)
the formation of political groups and committees; and, finally, (3) the impact that parties and committees have on
member behaviour, noting that the competition between and cohesion within parties has increased in tandem with
the increase in the EP’s powers.
Across the Atlantic, research on United States state legislatures both challenge and confirm many of the
conventional theories of federal legislative behaviour. Downs’ (Chapter 29) analysis of sub-national legislatures
charts the development of research on regional, provincial, cantonal, and other local-level assemblies by
disaggregating the field into three core areas: recruitment and elections;legislative behaviour; and institutional
design. Once treated as nominal institutions, sub-national legislatures are now the subject of studies characterized
by increasing theoretical rigor and more frequent (p. 21) cross-national comparisons. The extant literature uses
sub-national legislatures to test prevailing theoretical explanations of representation, deliberation, law-making, and
supervision. It also specifically addresses the effects of the location of sub-national legislatures in systems of multi-
level governance with respect to protections against central intrusion, countering executive dominance, and
congruence of party alignments with those at national level. Downs points to promising research frontiers, including
post-election government formation, the international activities of sub-national institutions, and the use of media
technology and e-democracy in sub-state assemblies.
Perhaps one of the most promising research frontiers of the last decade has involved the increasing attention
shown to legislatures throughout Latin America. Much of the work on legislative politics in Latin America has taken
advantage of theories about legislative politics originally developed to study other parts of the world. Crisp and
Schibber (Chapter 30) review this scholarship, identifying 31 books and 151 journal articles focused on the study of
legislative politics in Latin America. Their review groups articles based on their substantive focus on the electoral
connection, on cameral politics, or on legislative-executive relations. Crisp and Schibber highlight how scholars
working in the region have stretched theories or made entirely original contributions of their own—as well as
amassing impressive amounts of systematic, empirical research.
The fall of communism in Central and Eastern Europe and the creation of new institutions of democracy have
provided scholars with unique opportunities to observe in real time the origin and early evolution of legislative
bodies. Andrews (Chapter 31) reviews scholarship on the strength of legislatures in the new democracies of
Central and Eastern Europe, focusing on three important lines of research: (1) the constitutional powers attributed
to the legislature versus the executive; (2) the partisan structure of the legislative membership and its implications
for policy-making and government stability; and (3) the institutional capacity implied by these legislatures’ internal
organizational features. Andrews creates a unique scale of legislative strength based on constitutional powers and
finds that, contrary to many accounts, legislatures in Central and Eastern Europe are as powerful as those in
Western Europe, even considering the popularity of the dual executive in this newly democratic region. For the
legislatures’ powers to be fully realized, however, more time is needed for party systems to stabilize and for the
development of more structured legislative organization.
Clearly, legislatures are central to modern representative democracy and, as we have seen above, to the process
of democratization. But what role, if any, do legislatures play in non-democracies? As Schuler and Malesky
(Chapter 32) note, both the number of authoritarian states with active legislatures and the role those bodies play in
policy-making have increased dramatically over time. Yet, the costs and risks to autocrats of maintaining a
permanent assembly are high, so the growth of such assemblies is puzzling. Leading scholars have offered
answers that employ innovative theories and creative methods for analysing some of the world’s most opaque
polities. At the same time, others have been critical of this endeavor, characterizing the work as functionalist, and
criticizing empirical approaches that have difficulty separating the role of assemblies from other institutions, such
as regime parties. Schuler and Malesky review the (p. 22) history of how institutions have been conceived by
authoritarian scholars, before summarizing the theoretical arguments specific to authoritarian legislatures. They
then survey the empirical evidence on the preconditions and effects of legislative institutions under autocracy.
Page 14 of 18
Introduction
Many rulers embrace the institutional trappings of democracy—elections and legislatures—only under domestic
and international pressure. In the final essay in this volume, Cox (Chapter 33) considers how such reluctant
democrats manage their legislatures, arguing that most have re-engineered the budgetary reversion to defang
their legislature’s power over the purse. Cox provide examples of budgetary reversions, develops concepts to
analyse their differences, and explores some of the institutional and behavioural correlates of executive-favouring
reversions—viz., weaker confidence procedures, weaker control of executive decrees, less credible sovereign
debt, and more frequent use of extra-constitutional means to attain power. He argues that unless the budgetary
reversion point favours the legislature, its powers, and ultimately the prospects for democracy, are fragile. Thus, as
much as legislatures are ubiquitous and their functions in advanced societies seem secure, this fascinating
chapter reminds us that popular sovereignty exercised through such representative bodies can never be taken for
granted.
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Shane Martin
Thomas Saalfeld
Thomas Saalfeld is Professor of Political Science at the University of Bamberg and the founding Director of the Bamberg Graduate
School of Social Sciences.
Kaare W. Strøm
Kaare W. Strøm is Distinguished Professor of Political Science at the University of California, San Diego.
Page 18 of 18
Formal Models of Legislatures

Daniel Diermeier
Methodology
2014
Formal political theory involves the mathematical representation of a political domain, such as legislative decision-
making. In formal modeling, only the relevant features of apolitical domain are captured. In legislative contexts
those usually include: the possible outcomes of a collective choice process, decision-rules, the decision-makers,
their feasible actions and respective preferences over outcomes. Almost all existing formal models of legislative
decision-making fall into the rational choice theory, which assumes that any explanation of political phenomena
involves rational decision-making by individuals. This article examines the three main formal methodologies used in
the theory of legislatures—social choice theory, structure-induced equilibrium theory, and non-cooperative game-
theory—and each methodology’s respective strengths and weaknesses. It looks at the two main subject domains
where formal models of legislatures have been used: the US Congress and coalition government. It also discusses
some of the attempts to integrate these two domains and create comparative formal models, describes some
desirable features of a general theory of legislatures, and considers therole of formal models in institutionalist
accounts of legislative politics.
Keywords: legislatures, legislative decision-making, formal models, rational choice theory, institutionalism, US Congress, coalition government,
structure-induced equilibrium approach, non-cooperative game theory
2.1 Introduction
SINCE its very beginning, the study of legislatures has been one of the cornerstones of formal modeling in politics
(e.g. Black 1958).1 Formal theory begins with the mathematical representation of a political domain, here legislative
decision-making. The first step consists in specifying the possible states of the political domain in question. These
states may just consist in the outcomes of a collective choice process, e.g. the policies adopted, or may also
contain representation of behaviour by politicians, e.g. who voted for or against a given bill. The formal
representation will set aside all unnecessary detail of the political domain. For example, the set of policies may
simply be represented as a finite set or an interval. In such representations, e.g. the wording of a bill or its length,
are considered unimportant. What is and what is not relevant is, of course, determined by the judgment and intent
of the modeler.
The formal representation may serve various purposes. Many versions of formal political theory attempt to predict
and explain the outcomes of collective decision processes. Others have a systematizing purpose and aim to
derive known models from a more general framework. Others are concerned with normative questions, e.g. policy
and welfare consequences of certain political institutions. And yet others are methodological in nature, trying to
identify problems with a particular formal approach or methodology.
Almost all existing formal models of legislative decision-making fall into the rational choice tradition. Rational choice
Page 1 of 22
theory contends that any explanation of political phenomena must be grounded in the choices of rational
individuals. That is, a complete theory must, at the very least, include a list of actors and a preference profile: a list
of transitive and complete preference relations for every actor.2 Variants of rational choice theory then differ in
their view on what else is needed to explain a political (p. 30) phenomenon. The importance of these modeling
decisions is frequently overlooked by researchers who are not closely engaged with formal theory building, but are
crucially important, especially in domains that are intrinsically comparative in nature such as the study of
legislatures. The reason lies in the very nature of formal modeling. The discipline imposed by mathematical
representations forces the theorists to be very clear about what is assumed and what is not. Moreover, since only
very simple models can be solved analytically, the trade-offs of what can and cannot be included in a model are
typically quite restrictive. This means that the modeler must repeatedly make decisions about which aspects of the
phenomenon should be included and which should be set aside. These constraints, trade-offs, and considerations
are importantly shaped by the underlying formal methodology and may reflect different visions of the purpose of
formal modeling. In the context of a theory of legislatures, a formal methodology that is suitable for applications in
comparative research needs to satisfy at least three criteria3 :
1. Universality. The methodology needs to be able to represent a broad variety of institutional differences
across legislatures.
2. Empirical content. The formal methodology must have empirical content in many applications. There are
two aspects to this criterion:
a. The solution concepts associated with a formal methodology must generally admit a solution; they
cannot be empty or lack existence.
b. The solution concepts must be predictive; they must clearly divide the possible outcomes of the
process into those that are consistent with the theory and those that are not. A theory that is consistent
with every possible outcome does not have much explanatory power.
3. Equilibrium institutions. In a comparative context, formal models will contain representations of the
relevant rules and institutions that shape decision-making. But many of these institutions are themselves
objects of choice. Any satisfactory formal methodology must work at all levels of the collective choice
process—at the level where policies are determined and at the level where institutions are chosen. It must be
able to explain why some institutional features come into existence and persist, while others are either
nonexistent or transient.
Next, we review the three main formal methodologies used in the theory of legislatures are reviewed, and their
respective strengths and weaknesses discussed. We then survey the two main subject domains where formal
models have been used: the US Congress (and, to a much lesser extent, non-US legislatures) and coalition
government. Next, we discuss some of the attempts to integrate these two domains and create comparative formal
models and outline some desirable features of a general theory of legislatures.
Many of these topics are vast and active areas of research. Our goal is not to discuss every, or even most of the
relevant contributions—an impossible task—but to trace the main developments and debates of this vibrant
literature.4 The purpose is to provide a road-map that provides enough structure to locate the various approaches
and also to point out some major gaps. Our hope is that it will provide some orientation for any (p. 31) researcher
who wants to explore this sometimes bewildering, and, occasionally, even intimidating research tradition in more
detail.
2.2 Abstract Properties of Collective Choice
Variants of rational choice models differ by what they add to the common components of any rational choice model
(the set of states, actors, and preferences). The oldest general rational choice methodology, social choice theory,
pioneered by Arrow (1951), adds one more component to its methodological vocabulary: an aggregation function.
Formally, an aggregation rule is simply a function from the set of preference profiles to a single preference relation,
which captures collective preferences. In most cases of interest to legislative scholars, all the information
contained in the definition of an aggregation function is given by its set of decisive coalitions. For example, in the
case of majority rule (with an odd number of legislators), any group at least as large as a majority would constitute
a decisive coalition.5 In these cases, all we need to know to derive the outcomes of a collective decision process
Page 2 of 22
are three things: the set of possible outcomes, a preference profile, and a list of decisive coalitions.
Needless to say, this is a very sparse description of legislative decision-making. For example, any differences
among legislators (constituency, electoral rule, party, age, gender, education, professional background, ethnicity,
wealth, etc.) are set aside unless they are captured by preference orderings over policies. Similarly, institutional
differences such as complex recognition procedures, voting agendas, and committee systems are only captured in
as much as they influence the list of decisive coalitions. Note also, that, strictly speaking, social choice theory
does not predict behaviour (e.g. the voting behaviour of individual legislators or parties) but only policy outcomes.
That is, a given outcome may be consistent with very different voting patterns.
Such sparse representation is not necessarily a flaw. On the contrary, it can be a supreme virtue in as much as it
leads to general results. What matters is whether the formal methodology allows researchers to capture the
relevant details of legislative decision-making. This early age of formal modeling was based on the conviction that
only very few components were relevant to understand political decision-making; its goal was to develop a general
theory of politics, similar to general equilibrium theory in economics. Indeed, in as much as social choice theory is
able to explain legislative decision-making in terms of only a few parameters, it makes a strong case that any
additional details of the choice process, e.g. legislative procedures, simply do not matter as much as they may
appear to; irrelevant institutional complexity would be reduced to a few parameters that were truly essential
(McKelvey 1986).
But this approach quickly ran into severe difficulties. Social choice theory is known for its negative results: from
Arrow’s Impossibility Theorem (Arrow 1951) to the generic (p. 32) emptiness of the core (Plott 1967; McKelvey
1976, 1979; McKelvey and Schofield 1987). Of course, these results have provided tremendous insights into the
nature of political decision-making, but, for an explanatory or predictive purpose, non-existence results are
problematic: they violate the second criterion for formal methodologies (2.a listed earlier). The problem is that,
methodologically, impossibility results fail to generate predictions in many settings. These results, especially
McKelvey (1976), have often been interpreted as “predicting chaos.” But this interpretation is problematic and
certainly does not correspond with the mathematical notion of “chaos” used in chaos theory (e.g. Lorenz 1960,
1993; Poincaré 2007 [1908]). The problem with social choice theory is not that the theory predicts dramatic
instability, but that in many domains it predicts nothing at all.6 This does not mean that social choice theoretic
results are somehow not important; far from it. They investigate the question of how far one can go by just looking
at preference profiles and decisive coalitions. The fact that this research program is most famous for its
impossibility results establishes that these features are not sufficient to explain political outcomes. Indeed, it is
exactly the “negative” results of social choice theory that makes this point most forcefully.
Subsequent work in this tradition has tried to address these problems by changing solution concepts, moving from
the core, the most important solution concept in social choice theory, to concepts such as the top cycle set (Miller
1977), the uncovered set (Miller 1980), and various others. These attempts face various problems (Diermeier 1997,
2014). Either the set of predicted outcomes is too large to be useful—this is the case for the top cycle (McKelvey
1976, 1979)—or the solution concept implicitly imposes a particular agenda structure violating the ambition of
“institution-free properties” (McKelvey 1986). For example, Banks (1984) showed that the uncovered set contains
sophisticated voting outcomes (Farquharson 1969) if voting is conducted according to an amendment agenda. But
this does not hold for other agenda types, such as elimination agendas (Ordeshook and Schwartz 1987) or two-
step agendas (Banks 1989). If voting is conducted according to these agenda types, sophisticated voting
outcomes may lie outside the uncovered set. This means that in the context of legislative decision-making
alternative solution concepts, such as the uncovered set, implicitly assume a particular, quite specific agenda
structure. It does not cover all binary voting agendas, let alone more general agenda structures. But if social
choice theoretic approaches implicitly depend on institutional details, one may want to analyse the institutional
detail directly. This is the path chosen by the (Neo-)Institutionalists.
2.3 The Institutionalist Alternative
The formal analysis of political institutions dates back to very beginning of mathematical modeling in political
science, beginning with Black (1958), Downs (1957), Riker (1962), and Farquharson (1969). These approaches
concentrated on the analysis of specific institutions such as committees (Black), elections (Downs), coalitions
Page 3 of 22
(Riker), and agendas (Farquharson).
(p. 33) Institutionalism, however, is not simply the analysis of institutions. Rather, it constitutes an alternative
methodological approach to the social choice theoretic tradition. In its modern form as “new institutionalism”
(Shepsle 1979), it has become the dominant research area in formal modeling today. What is common across all
versions of institutionalism, is a rejection of the social choice research program of finding institution-freegeneral
theorems of collective choice. Instead the goal is to develop formal methods that enable the comparison of political
institutions in a structured and systematic manner. The theoretical unity of institutionalism thus does not consist in
a hierarchy of ever more general results, but in sets of methods and concepts that make such comparisons
possible. To capture such institutional variation, the formal apparatus of institutionalism needs to be enriched
beyond the list of decisive coalitions. These additional structural parameters, however, are not intermediate steps
on the path to a more general theory, but are necessary to explain political phenomena.7
This view of “institutionalism as a methodology” has been formulated by Diermeier and Krehbiel (2003) as follows:
1. Define and hold fixed behavioural postulates for political actors within the collective choice setting to be
studied.
2. Characterize formally the institutions in effect (as defined in step 1).
3. Deduce the behaviour that arises within the institutional setting given the behavioural postulate, and
characterize the outcome that results from the behaviour.
4. Compare the derived implications with empirical regularities and data.
Steps 1 and 2 are exogenous within the context of a well-specified institutional theory: they are the assumptions of
the theory. They will usually include the set of decisive coalitions, but may contain additional institutional detail.
Steps 3 and 4 are endogenous; they are what is derived, predicted, and explained.
It is crucial that behavioural postulates remain fixed and consistent within and across studies. Since a key element
of institutional analysis is to vary institutional features while keeping the behavioural postulate constant, it is of
great importance that the equilibrium concept is applicable in many collective choice problems. Step 3 captures
the implications of the model. The model’s implications may only pertain to outcomes (e.g. whether a certain bill will
pass) or to behavioural regularities (e.g. which legislator would vote for or against the bill). Step 4 consists of
empirical assessments of the predictions of the model. Although issues of testing are beyond the scope of this
chapter, the testing of institutional theories is essential in the evaluation of institutionalist models as good
explanations for empirical phenomena.
Any institutionalist model, however, immediately faces a serious problem. If it is correct that policy outcomes
depend on the collective decision-making institutions, then different institutions will yield different outcomes. But
this means that rational legislators would anticipate the relationship between institutions and outcomes, and form
preferences over institutions. That is, they will prefer one voting agenda over another, compete over committee
assignments, or fight over who has the right to propose or (p. 34) amend a bill. Of course, this insight is not new to
observers of legislative politics and is frequently expressed by the legislators themselves. Former US House
Minority Leader Robert H. Michel (Republican-Illinois) stated this sentiment as follows: 8
Procedure hasn’t simply become more important than substance—it has, through a strange alchemy,
become the substance of our deliberations. Who rules House procedures rules the House.
This issue is particularly pressing if legislatures can fully determine their own organizational structure by the same
voting rule (e.g. simple majority rule) that is used to pass bills, as is the case in the US Congress and many other
legislatures.9
The question then becomes how these institutions can function as constraints on legislators at all. Riker expressed
this point as follows (1980, 445):
In that sense rules or institutions are just more alternatives in the policy space and the status quo of one
set of rules can be supplanted with another set of rules....If institutions are congealed tastes and if tastes
lack equilibrium, then also do institutions, except for short-run events.
This argument points to an important methodological requirement for institutionalist models: a satisfactory formal
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methodology must work at all levels of the collective choice process—at the level where policies are determined
and at the level where institutions are chosen.
The goal of a theory of institutions is to explain why some institutional features come into existence, and why they
persist. In other words, institutional features that were assumed to be exogenous, e.g. a committee system, need to
be justified as equilibria in some underlying model of institutional choice; the institutions that constitute institutional
equilibria must be equilibrium institutions as well (Shepsle 1986). It was this concern that led to our methodological
criterion No. 3 (equilibrium institutions). To satisfy this requirement, a formal methodology must be applicable at
every stage of institutionalist choice. As we will see in the next section, this turns out to create difficulties for
certain variants of institutionalism.
2.4 Variants of Institutionalism
2.4.1 Structure-Induced Equilibria
Historically, the first version of formal institutionalism was the Structure-Induced Equilibrium (SIE) approach (Shepsle
1979; Shepsle and Weingast 1981). The success of the SIE approach was largely due to the fact that it combined
the powerful tools of formal analysis with a focus on institutional detail, especially in the study of US Congress. SIE
models were able to formalize and analyse phenomena, such as the committee system, that had already been
identified as important features of congressional decision-making.
(p. 35) In his seminal paper, Shepsle (1979) formally introduced institutional structure as a committee system
which assigns each individual to exactly one issue. Intuitively, a committee has exclusive jurisdiction on a given
issue and determines the outcome by majority rule. Given convex and continuous preferences, the majority core is
non-empty for each issue. The explanatory concept of the political system then consists in those outcomes that
are in the issue-by-issue core. Using a fixed-point argument by Kramer (1972), one can then show that for any
committee system, the issue-by-issue core is non-empty.
Notice that in contrast withthe abstract social choice theoretic results discussed above, the theoretical apparatus
of SIE contains an additional argument—an assignment of individuals to issues or dimensions, which ensures that
the model always creates a prediction. While this may at first seem like a minor departure from social choice
theory, it marks a rejection of the reductive research program that underlies it. Rather than searching for general
explanations that apply in many institutional settings, the model is intended to capture a particular institutional
arrangement, here the congressional committee system. A different application, say of cabinet decision-making, for
example, would require a different institutional structure. Indeed, such a model was later proposed by Laver and
Shepsle (1990).
While SIE models avoid the non-existence problem of social choice theoretic approaches, they fall prey to the
institutional choice problem identified by Riker (1980). This was shown in a critique of the Laver and Shepsle (1990)
model of cabinet decision-making by Austen-Smith and Banks (1990). In their model, Austen-Smith and Banks
(1990) ask the following question: Do the assignments of cabinet portfolios to parties constitute institutional
equilibria? Formally, are the jurisdictional assignments themselves in the (majority) core of a model of institutional
choice? Austen-Smith and Banks show that if there are three parties and all parties have Euclidean preferences,
then a portfolio core exists. Intuitively, this means that under these conditions, we can have “stable” portfolio
assignment. More precisely, there exist assignments of portfolios to parties that cannot be beaten by any other
assignment via majority rule.
Unfortunately, none of the conditions can be relaxed. That is, one can easily construct counter-examples for four
parties or for non-Euclidean preferences, where a core does not exist. In other words, other than in the knife-edge
case of three parties and Euclidean preferences, the portfolio core may be empty. Thus, the structure-induced
equilibrium approach cannot escape the Riker critique: the institutions that secure institutional equilibria do not
generally constitute equilibrium institutions.
2.4.2 Non-Cooperative Game Theory
Inthe mid-1980s, a new approach emerged in the study of politics that used a very different methodology: non-
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cooperative game theory. Like Structure-Induced Equilibrium theory, this approach rejects the reductive research
program of social choice theory and, instead, focuses on the institutional details of collective choice. But in
contrast to Structure-Induced Equilibrium theory, it completely abandoned the core (p. 36) or other cooperative
solution concepts. Political interaction was now modeled as a non-cooperative game. Given the known sensitivity
of game-theoretic analysis to the details of the game form, this approach, from the very beginning, precludes any
notion of an “institution-free” theory. Rather, the sensitivity of institutional detail was viewed as a strength that
allows the varying of institutional details in a systematic way while keeping the explanatory concept fixed (Myerson
1996).
The radical departure from existing models can be seen in one of the first and most influential applications of game-
theory to legislative decision-making: the agenda-setting model of Romer and Rosenthal (1978). Originally,
developed to model school-board referenda, it quickly became one of the central building blocks of formal models
of legislative decision-making (Denzau and Mackay 1983). In the basic model, an agenda-setter makes a policy
proposal, which is then pitted against a default alternative in an up-or-down majority vote. This approach captures
a prominent feature in legislative decision-making: there is typically some agent (a chair, committee, party leader,
minister, and so forth) that effectively holds agenda control, yet that agent’s power is nonetheless checked by the
requirement of majority approval.
The model yielded two fundamental insights. First, the existence of the “power to propose” provides an agenda-
setter with the ability to bias policy outcomes in his favour even in the case where a median voter exists, as the
agenda-setter can make a policy proposal to satisfy a bare majority of the “cheapest” voters necessary to ensure
approval and move the outcome away from the median.10 Second, the policy outcome not only depends on voters’
preferences but also on the location of the default policy, which defines the reservation utility of the voters. The
Romer-Rosenthal model was originally developed in a uni-dimensional policy space, where a median voter exists.
However, that does not mean that it is restricted to a uni-dimensional policy space. Indeed, it can be applied in
multidimensional policy environments and general preference configurations without difficulty. In such policy
environments, the preferences of the decisive coalitions define so-called “win-sets” and proposers simply pick
their most preferred point within the win-set. But the application to uni-dimensional case serves an important
theoretical purpose. The model implies that even if a median exists, the predicted policy outcome will (typically)
not be the median. This insight constitutes the fundamental difference between non-cooperative models and the
early formal traditions that emerged from social choice theory. As we will see later, this difference has shaped the
theoretical discussions in formal modeling of legislatures until today. It is at the heart of the most important debates
on the internal organization of the US Congress, the proper models of coalition governments, decision-making in
the European Union, and many others.
The Romer-Rosenthal model is a very stylized model of legislative decision-making. In particular, it makes three
main assumptions:
1. An exogenous status quo.

2. Decision-making on a given issue ends when a majority approves a proposal.
3. Complete information.
(p. 37) Each one of these three assumptions was subsequently relaxed, thereby generating extensive sub-
literatures. The assumption of an exogenous status is potentially problematic, as it determines the extent of
possible policy bias. By far the most influential model without an exogenous status quo is the Baron-Ferejohn model
(1989a).11 In all variants of the Baron-Ferejohn model, a proposer is selected according to a known rule (usually
modeled as a probability distribution). The proposer then proposes a policy or an allocation of benefits to a group
of voters. According to a given voting rule (usually majority rule), the proposal is either accepted or rejected. If the
proposal is accepted, the game ends and all actors receive pay-offs as specified by the accepted proposal.
Otherwise, another proposer is selected, etc.12 The process continues until a proposal is accepted or the game
ends. In many applications, the game continues indefinitely until a proposal is accepted.
In equilibrium, proposers select the “cheapest coalition,” i.e. the players with the lowest reservation values that, if
added to the proposer, constitute a winning coalition (proposers randomize if there are multiple coalitions), and
then keep the remainder of the pay-off for themselves. The ability to extract additional surplus rests in the power to
propose (Baron and Ferejohn 1989b). Instead of an exogenously given status quo, as in the Romer-Rosenthal
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model, proposers consider each player’s continuation value, i.e. the expected equilibrium pay-off if bargaining
continues. The winning coalition consists of the non-proposing legislators most eager to be included. Intuitively,
proposers are able to exploit the impatience of non-proposing legislators. This impatience not only follows from the
discounting of future pay-offs, but also includes the concerns of being out of any future coalition (Eraslan and
Merlo 2002).
Note that the Baron-Ferejohn model (as well as the Romer-Rosenthal model) applies to multidimensional
environments, including the paradigmatic “divide-the-dollar” framework, where agents need to collectively decide
on how to divide a fixed, transferable benefit (a “dollar”). The divide-the-dollar problem is the classical formulation
of a collective decision problem with an empty core. Yet, this fact is not even mentioned in the seminal Baron-
Ferejohn paper (Baron and Ferejohn 1989a). Rather, the approach is presented as a free-standing, self-sufficient,
formal methodology capable of modeling complex institutions.
Both Romer-Rosenthal and Baron-Ferejohn models assume that once a majority approves of a proposal, the game
ends. This assumption is appropriate in many domains, e.g. budgetary decision-making, but it needs to be modified
in some important policy domains where default policies persist until they are changed. Examples include
entitlement programs such as social security, allocation of property rights, and regulatory regimes. In a dynamic
policy environment, the passage of a bill does not prevent the legislature from coming back to the same policy
issue at a later date. Rather, the passage of a bill merely sets the default for subsequent rounds of policy-making.
Baron (1996) was the first to explore such a model in the context of a uni-dimensional policy space. Other
approaches include Kalandrakis (2004), Bernheim, Rangel, and Rayo (2006), and Diermeier and Fong (2011).
These papers have yielded important and sometimes surprising insights, but they also highlighted some of
mathematical (p. 38) difficulties of solving sequential bargainingmodels. It is an area with many open questions
including a complete analysis of multidimensional choice environments for general proposal rules.
The third variation introduced incomplete information into the Romer-Rosenthal framework. By far the most
influential approach is due to Gilligan and Krehbiel. In a series of papers, Gilligan and Krehbiel (1987, 1989a,
1989b, 1990) present an informational rationale for granting committees special proposal and amendment
prerogatives. The idea is that legislators are usually unsure about the policy consequences of a bill. Risk-averse
legislators then benefit from reducing such policy uncertainty. To reduce such uncertainty, legislators can
“specialize,” i.e. acquire private information, about the policy consequences of a bill. Specialization is costly, but
provides the legislators with private information that is useful to the legislature as a whole. Gilligan and Krehbiel
model the interaction between the committee (“the proposer”) and the floor as a signaling game. In the case where
the committee has no procedural prerogatives (i.e. where the floor can amend the committee’s proposal without
restrictions), the committee proposal is merely cheap talk and does not convey any credible information to the
floor. Since that is the case, a committee will have no incentive to acquire costly information about policy
consequences. If, however, the floor grants the committee procedural prerogative (e.g. a “closed rule” where no
amendments are permitted), the committee can credibly transmit its private information in equilibrium. This allows
the committee to bias the policy outcome in its direction, but, for a broad set of parameter values, the cost of policy
bias is smaller than the benefits from specialization. Hence, the chamber grants the committee proposal
prerogatives, the committee specializes and credibly transmits its information to the floor, leading to a biased policy
outcome.
When discussing formal models of legislatures, three desiderata for a formal methodology were identified: (1)
universality (i.e. the ability to capture relevant institutional detail); (2) empirical content (i.e. existence and
sharpness of the solution concept); and (3) equilibrium institutions (i.e. institutions must constitute equilibria at the
level of institutional choice).
Universality is not a problem for non-cooperative models. Game forms are very general and flexible frameworks to
capture institutional detail. Indeed, one weakness of non-cooperative game theory is that its models are too
detailed. And the results may depend too much on these details; who moves when, what are the countermoves,
and so forth.
Existence similarly is not a significant problem. Nash Equilibria exist under very broad conditions. Indeed, the
typical reaction to a non-cooperative model where a Nash Equilbrium does not exist is not that this lack of
existence points to a deep theoretical problem, but that the model was poorly designed. Rather, the Achilles’ heel
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of non-cooperative models is their lack of explanatory power: game theoretic analysis does not necessarily lead to
sharp predictions. Multiple equilibria and outcomes are a feature of many games. And in some cases, e.g. the
famous “Folk Theorems” for repeated games, all individually rational outcomes can be supported in equilibrium.
(p. 39) Multiple equilibria already occur in simple voting games. Consider the case of three players with two
alternatives, x and y, where each player strictly prefers x over y. If the winning alternative is chosen by majority
rule, a unanimous vote for y is still a Nash Equilibrium, as no player has an incentive to deviate from the prescribed
strategy “play y.”
To avoid these problems, formal modelers have added additional requirements to Nash Equilibria. Such so-called
“refinements” come in various forms. In legislative models, the two most popular refinements are to iteratively
exclude weakly dominated strategies (this takes care of the problem of voting equilibria that are independent of
legislators preferences) and stationarity (this precludes the Folk Theorem). These assumptions have effectively
become standard modeling practice. That said, they are, strictly speaking, additional assumptions that require
additional arguments. In the area of incomplete information games, these issues are considerably less settled. This
is particularly true in cheap-talk games, as in Gilligan and Krehbiel’s (1987) open rule case. Whatever refinements
are used, however, they must be commonly applied across many situations. Otherwise, it would be impossible to
disentangle the effect of different institutions from assumptions about refinements.
What about equilibrium institutions and the Riker critique? What happens if the choices of institutions, such as
gatekeeping power or committee assignments, are endogenized? Thanks to the power of Nash Equilibrium, an
answer can easily be given. It was first formulated by Gilligan and Krehbiel (1987) as the question of optimal
institutional choice, then broadened by Calvert (1995). The general strategy is straightforward. First, the game form
is extended such that actors can choose institutions. Each institution then corresponds to a subgame. Second, the
equilibria to these subgames are characterized. This allows one to derive (induced) preferences over the
corresponding institutions and solve for the equilibria in the extended game of institutional choice. In the legislative
context, this means that institutions, such as a seniority system or the existence of powerful committees, that were
originally modeled as features of the game form, can now be interpreted as particular equilibria in an underlying
game of institutional choice (e.g. McKelvey and Riezman 1992; Diermeier 1995; Diermeier and Myerson 1999). Of
course, this game of institutional choice itself is governed by (higher-order)institutions, such as the voting or
proposal rules used for deciding on procedure. But again, one can push the analysis one step further and interpret
voting rules or even constitutions as equilibria in some more fundamental game. This approach has been used with
great promise in the study of coalition government (Lupia and Strøm, 1995; Diermeier and Merlo, 2000), the internal
organization of the US Congress (McKelvey and Riezman 1992; Diermeier and Vlaicu 2011a; Eguia and Shepsle
2012), and the comparison between parliamentary and presidential democracies (Diermeier and Feddersen 1998).
To understand these issues in more detail, we now turn to the two main domains of formal theory in legislatures: the
US Congress and coalition government in multiparty democracies.
(p. 40) 2.5 Formal Modeling in Action: Committees and the Internal Organization of the US
Congress
Legislative voting rules are, with few exceptions, anonymous and egalitarian. It does not matter who votes for a
proposal, and each vote counts equally. Yet, actual legislatures are characterized by a variety of organizational
structures that lead to significant differences in the influence of individual members on policy choices. Examples
include committee chairmen, party leaders, and speakers. These institutions, and the norms that support them, are
rarely mandated by a country’s constitution. Rather, legislative majorities choose to setup and maintain their
internal organizational structure. This leads to two questions. First, what are the consequences of these
institutions? Second, why are they stable and persistent? The prime example of this phenomenon is, of course, the
United States Congress, with its elaborate system of powerful committees and norms.
Formal theories of the internal organization of legislatures were largely developed in the context of the United
States Congress, especially the congressional committee system. Structure-induced equilibrium theory, in
particular, was used to provide a distributive explanation of powerful committees (Shepsle 1979; Shepsle and
Weingast 1981; Shepsle and Weingast 1987; Weingast and Marshall 1988).13 Procedural prerogatives of
committees, such as gatekeeping rules, are interpreted as commitment devices that enforce and maintain
distributive agreements between committee members that deeply care about a particular policy dimension. The
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models showed that these agreements, while beneficial for the committees, may lead to inefficient outcomes for the
legislature as a whole. But this raises the question why such arrangements are stable, since, as we saw in our
discussion of structure-induced equilbria, there typically exist alternative committee structures that would be
majority preferred to any current one.
The main alternative to the distributive approach is the informational theory of committees (Gilligan and Krehbiel
1987, 1990, 1997) discussed earlier.14 In this theory, the legislature is willing to commit to granting the committee
restrictive amendment procedures because this induces the committee to acquire and share information. But, as in
the case of distributive approaches, the argument crucially depends on an assumption of “procedural
commitment” (Krehbiel 1991). Without procedural commitment, a majority grants the committee a restrictive
procedure only if it yields a policy outcome similar to that occurring under an open rule (Gilligan and Krehbiel
1989a, 1989b; Banks 1999). But then the committee has no incentive to specialize in the first place. This leads to
the question of how the legislature is able to procedurally commit to not renege on restrictive procedures.15
A comparatively small, usually empirically oriented literature has tried to apply these approaches in other
legislatures (e.g. Huber 1996; Döring and Hallerberg 2004).16 Many other legislatures also exhibit complex
committee systems, among them Germany, (p. 41) Italy, Japan, Norway, and Sweden (e.g. Rogowski 1990).
However, the details of internal organization differ widely. While individual committees are comparatively strong in
Congress, they are weak in most parliamentary bodies (Lees and Shaw 1979; Mattson and Strøm 1995). More
importantly, legislative functions that are exercised by committees in Congress may be fulfilled by other actors in a
different setting (see Martin, this volume). In parliamentary democracies, for instance, ministries rather than
committees acquire policy expertise, and they are the institutions where bills are drafted and markedup. In other
words, while US Congressional committees can be interpreted as the proposers and gatekeepers in the legislative
process, the same cannot be said about parliamentary committees. That role is primarily occupied by the cabinet,
an insight already pointed out by Bagehot (1963 [1867], 66–7): “By [the cabinet] we mean a committee of the
legislative body selected to be the executive body.”
Bagehot’s dictum creates some new problems for a comparative theory of legislatures as it needs to be expanded
to include the study of cabinets, which in the typical case of multiparty democracies is intimately connected with
the study of coalition government.
2.6 Coalition Government
It is the distinctive characteristic of parliamentary democracies that the executive derives it smandate from and is
politically responsible to the legislature. This has two consequences. First, unless one party wins a majority of
seats, a rare case in electoral systems under proportional representation, the government is not determined by an
election alone, but is the result of an elaborate bargaining process among the parties represented in the
parliament. Second, parliamentary governments may lose the confidence of the parliament at any time, which
leads to their immediate termination. Thus, historically, two questions have dominated the study of coalition
government: Which governments will form? And how long will they last?
Much of the early formal research on coalition government was cooperative in nature.17 The focus of this literature
was on which parties ended up in the governments and how they allocated ministries among the members of the
coalition. All this changed in the late 1980s and early 1990s, which witnessed a dramatic shift towards
institutionalist models, paralleling earlier developments in the study of the US Congress. In 1989, Baron published
the first applications of non-cooperative game theory (the Baron-Ferejohn model) to the study of governmental
coalitions. A year later, Laver and Shepsle (1990) used structure-induced equilibrium models to study the formation
and stability of cabinets.
This institutionalist shift was significantly advanced by two empirical contributions: Kaare Strøm’s work on minority
cabinets (1985, 1990) and Browne’s et al. study of cabinet stability (1984, 1986, 1988). Strøm’s work was important
in various respects. First, it focused on a puzzling, but prevalent case of coalition governments—minority
governments, i.e. cabinets where the parties that occupy portfolios together do not control a (p. 42) majority of
seats in the legislature. As Strøm showed, their existence was neither rare nor occurred only during a crisis
phenomenon. Moreover, many of the minority governments were quite stable, though less stable than majority
coalitions. In addition, many countries (e.g. Italy) were usually governed by surplus coalition, i.e. governments
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where certain parties were expendable without losing a chamber majority. The existence of minority and surplus
coalitions was inconsistent with most existing theories of coalition formation and reoriented the theoretical
literature. Importantly, it refocused the government formation question from “which government will form?” to
“which type of government will form?”
The second empirical contribution was the study of cabinet stability pioneered by Browne et al. (1984, 1986, 1988)
and then further advanced by Paul Warwick and others (King et al. 1990; Warwick 1992a, 1992b, 1992c, 1994;
Warwick and Easton 1992; Diermeier and Stevenson 1999, 2000). This literature not only focused attention on the
issue of cabinet stability but identified a list of institutional features that correlated with cabinet stability. This line of
research provided rich new empirical regularities. But a compelling theoretical framework was lacking. Competing
candidates for such a framework, however, were being developed independently using different methodological
approaches in their analysis of coalition formation: the Laver-Shepsle model and Baron’s sequential bargaining
models. Both contributions put the role of institutions front and centre.18 The point of this new approach was not
that political institutions had been overlooked as a potentially important object of study. Rather, both approaches
fully embraced the institutionalist credo: a formal theory of politics is a theory of institutions. This shift in
perspective has had a profound effect on the subsequent development of formal models of coalition government.
In a highly influential paper, Laver and Shepsle (1990) apply this methodology to the study of cabinets where
portfolios are interpreted as issue assignments as in Shepsle (1979). In contrast to the application to the US
Congress, where the issue median was decisive, here ministers can unilaterally determine the policy-choice in their
portfolio. Laver and Shepsle then ask under what circumstances such portfolio assignments are stable; i.e. whether
they are in the majority core of a voting game on cabinet assignments. Importantly, this may include minority
governments. The model could also be applied to the issue of cabinet stability, e.g. by considering shifts in the
policy position of the parties represented in parliament.19
Laver and Shepsle’s work proved highly influential, in part due to its institutionalist methodology that linked the
study of the US Congress with the study of coalitions, in part due to its ability to provide institutionalist explanations
for the previously identified empirical regularities. As we have discussed earlier, however, Austen-Smith and Banks
(1990) identified some methodological weaknesses of the Laver-Shepsle approach. These difficulties led to the
development of an alternative modeling approach—the use of sequential bargaining models in the tradition of
Baron and Ferejohn. Due to their reliance on non-cooperative game theory, sequential bargaining models avoid the
non-existence problems associated with structure-induced equilibrium, even in environments (e.g. dividing a fixed
benefit under majority rule) where the core is empty. (p. 43) These features make the model very suitable for
institutional analysis. Compared to the Laver-Shepsle model the Baron-Ferejohn model, however, is much more
difficult to work with, especially if one leaves the purely distributive environment and considers (multidimensional)
policy preferences. Finally, the first applications of the Baron-Ferejohn model (e.g. Baron 1989a, 1991b) could not
account for minority governments and were not designed to address issues of government stability. After all, in the
classic Baron-Ferejohn model, the game ends when an agreement is reached.
These difficulties lead to the development of alternative approaches. These approaches were also formulated in
the language of non-cooperative game theory, but relied on a different bargaining protocol. For our purposes, the
most relevant approach was the “efficient bargaining approach” (Merlo and Wilson 1995; Merlo 1997; Diermeier
and Merlo 2000; Baron and Diermeier 2001; Diermeier, Eraslan, and Merlo 2003). In these models, actors bargain
under unanimity rule until agreement is reached or the game ends. Originally developed in pure game theory, the
approach became influential once it was recognized that such bargaining protocols could capture an old idea from
coalition theory: the concept of a proto-coalition (Axelrod 1970). That is, coalition bargaining processes are often
characterized by multiple government formation attempts, where a party leader (usually called a “formateur”)
selects a proto-coalition that will negotiate to form a new government. This bargaining process continues until
agreement is reached or the parties abandon the coalition formation process. Bargaining within a proto-coalition is
then modeled using efficient bargaining theory.
Efficient bargaining models have many appealing properties. Bargaining outcomes are always efficient even in
cases with randomly changing payoffs (Merlo and Wilson 1995) or a multi-dimensional policy space (Baron and
Diermeier 2001). But more importantly, efficient bargaining models satisfy a separation property: the outcome of
the bargaining game is (at least partially) independent of the identity of the proposer and the exact bargaining
protocol. For example, in the Merlo-Wilson model, the set of states where parties reach agreement must be
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independent of the proposer’s identity. In the Baron-Diermeier model, the policy location agreed upon by the
parties does not depend on the details of the bargaining process such as recognition probabilities or discount
factors but only on the ideal points of the members of the proto-coalition. This is a crucial advantage as it avoids
some of the technical difficulties of the Baron-Ferejohn bargaining protocol. As a consequence, efficient bargaining
models could then be applied to more complex environments such as full equilibrium models that combine cabinet
formation with voting under proportional representation with a static (Baron and Diermeier 2001) or dynamic policy
environment (Baron, Diermeier, and Fong 2012).
Most importantly, efficient bargaining models can address the original questions posed by the empirical research:
government-type (especially the occurrence of minority and surplus majority) and cabinet stability. The approach
was first formulated in a paper by Lupia and Strøm (1995); cabinets were interpreted as equilibria of an underlying
bargaining process that must be sustained over time as the political environment and thus the distribution of
bargaining power among governing parties changes. The long-term impact of the Lupia-Strøm model was mainly
conceptual. The actual (p. 44) bargaining model was too simple to capture dynamics of coalition bargaining.20
What was needed was a fully dynamic model to capture the changing cabinet bargaining environment.
In a first step to provide such a model, Diermeier and Merlo (2000) embeded the Baron-Diermeier efficient
bargaining model in a multi-stage game with random shocks to both electoral prospects and to the parties’
reservation values. Such shocks may lead to the termination of government before the end of the game. In that
case, a new cabinet would take office. On the other hand, cabinets may avoid termination by redistributing
(“reshuffling”) distributive benefits among the incumbent parties in response to external events. Diermeier and
Merlo show that both minority and super-majority cabinets can occur as equilibrium phenomena. Moreover,
minority and surplus coalitions are not rare exceptions, but may form for all parameter values. However, they are
less stable than minimal winning coalition which balance smaller short-term pay-offs with higher stability.
Depending on the parameters of the model, formateurs may thus choose any cabinet type. For some parameter
values, minimal winning cabinets are the best deal. For other parameter values, surplus or minority coalitions are
optimal. So all observed cabinet types can be recovered as equilibrium phenomena.
One important consequence of the Diermeier and Merlo framework is that formateurs anticipate the benefits and
costs of maintaining a given cabinet over time. Both costs and benefits depend on the cabinet type. So, depending
on the parameters, formateurs will choose different cabinet types, including, sometimes, minority cabinets that are
likely to terminate early. The stability and the relative occurrence of different types of governments are thus jointly
determined in equilibrium. This insight has important consequences for the empirical study of cabinet stability,
which had been dominated by regression models, i.e. a suitably defined stochastic process with sets of covariates
that influence termination probabilities. Since Strøm (1985), all these models have contained institutional
characteristics, both of the polity (e.g. constitutional features) and of the cabinet (e.g. its majority status). But once
we model cabinets as equilibria, expectations about cabinet duration influence the choice of initial cabinets;
cabinets and their durations are jointly selected in equilibrium. Empirically, this implies that we cannot treat cabinet-
specific features as proper independent variables in a regression model. Recent papers (Merlo 1997; Diermeier,
Eraslan, and Merlo 2003) have tried to resolve these problems by using a structural estimation approach. The
approach consists in specifying a bargaining model of government formation, estimating the model’s parameters,
assessing the ability of the model to account for key features of the data, and then using the estimated structural
model to conduct (counterfactual) experiments of comparative institutional analysis.
The theoretical developments in the study of coalition government had important consequences for a general
theory of legislatures. Firstly, the models demonstrated how the methodologies developed in the context of the US
Congress can be applied to non-US legislatures and capture coalition government, the crucial phenomenon in
multiparty parliamentary democracies. Secondly, the existing empirical research on cabinet stability and cabinet
types put the question of institutional choice and (p. 45) stability front and centre. While in models of the US
Congress it was not unreasonable to assume that, in the short-run, the institutional structure (e.g. committee
system, seniority norms, etc.) could be considered fixed, such an assumption was simply inappropriate in the study
of governing coalitions. But once cabinets are viewed as legislative institutions (as Bagehot argued) that must be
sustained by majority support, one can ask the same question about powerful committees and legislative
leadership structures.
This question is not only important for comparativists, but lies at the centre of some of the crucial debate among
Page 11 of 22
the leading scholars of the US Congress. Being a member of a powerful committee or of the cabinet bestows
significant procedural advantages to certain legislators. The question then becomes why a chamber majority
bestows such prerogatives to some of its members and why such agreements are stable. In the context of the
debate over parties in the US Congress, Krehbiel (2004, 117)has put this argument as follows21:
Majoritarianism and procedural endogeneity imply that the median voter is pivotal in a procedurally neutral
setting. Why would such a legislative voter consent to procedures whose foreseeable consequences are
tantamount to an abdication of power?
This argument not only applies to the US Congress, but to any legislature. How do we explain the variety and
stability of legislative institutions if such institutions have important distributional and policy consequences?
Thirdly, the review of the literature also pointed out the significant technical difficulties in creating formal models
that can address these problems. Social choice-based models are elegant, but cannot capture sufficient
institutional detail or model dynamics, and face severe existence problems of its solution concepts. Structure-
Induced Equilibrium models can capture more institutional detail, but inherit some of the existence problems of
social choice theory, and dynamic considerations can only be captured as shocks to the system. Non-cooperative
models can capture rich institutional structures as well as dynamics, but are difficult to use.22
It is therefore not surprising that a general theoretical framework to study legislatures is still lacking. In the final
section we discuss some of the existing approaches and conclude with some goals for future research.
2.7 A Comparative Perspective
Existing formal research of legislatures has largely progressed along geographical divisions. The extensive
research on the US Congress has developed in isolation from the equally lively research on coalition government
in parliamentary democracies. While some brave minds have tried to cross the divide between the two research
traditions (p. 46) (e.g. Baron 1989; Laver and Shepsle 1990) a systematic formal approach that can
accommodate not only the two main traditions, but also can accommodate any legislative systems is still lacking.
Currently, there are two approaches that can serve as candidates for such a paradigm: the veto players approach
(Tsebelis 1995, 2002; Tsebelis and Money 1997) and institutional equilibria (Calvert 1995; Diermeier and Feddersen
1998; Diermeier and Myerson 1999; Diermeier and Krehbiel 2003).
Tsebelis (2002) proposed a formal analysis of legislative institutions based on the concept of veto players. Its
purpose is to provide a framework that can represent various political systems in a unified fashion and then use
that representation to study policy consequences, especially with respect to policy stability. A veto player is an
individual or collective actor, such as the House of Representatives, whose agreement is necessary for a policy
change. That is, a veto player has the power to block a change from the status quo policy. Policy change can
occur when there are policies preferred to the status quo by all veto players. These points constitute the win set of
the status quo; the larger the win set, the higher the potential to enact another policy, the lower the stability of the
status quo. Thus, by identifying the veto players and the associated win set and comparing them across polities,
we can make inferences about the relative stability or, conversely, the opportunity for policy change. While in
principle, adding veto players will increase policy stability, this will not hold if veto players are redundant, i.e. if the
win set does not change as a veto player is added.
One of the attractive features of this approach is that it imposes a common structure on political institutions that
facilitates comparative analysis and can create new insights. For example, both a supreme court that can nullify
legislation and the IMF that can block a certain fiscal policy can be modeled as veto players. Similarly, when
comparing constitutions, e.g. presidential and parliamentary polities, all that matters are the resulting veto players.
This means that a parliamentary system with an independent supreme court may behave similarly to a presidential
one where the president can veto legislation.
Methodologically, this approach falls into the social-choice theoretic tradition. That is, the formal representation of
legislative decision-making consists of three elements: the set of possible outcomes (here, a Euclidean,
multidimensional policy space); a preference profile (here, quadratic preferences); and a list of decisive coalitions
(here, the list of individual and collective veto players). It thus inherits all the difficulties of this approach and the
Page 12 of 22
associated solutions concepts such as the uncovered set. This is particularly true of the concept of “collective
veto players.” In addition, the restriction to social-choice theoretic concepts limits the scope of institutional detail
that can be represented formally. For example, while Tsebelis repeatedly discusses the importance of agenda-
setting, his framework does not allow a formal representation of agenda-setting power. Hence, any discussion of
proposal power and agenda-setting must remain informal. Tsebelis utilizes various other solution concepts (the
uncovered set, the “yolk,” the win-circle) but, as he acknowledges, most of the problems remain and theoretical
propositions cannot be obtained. What we are left with are “regularities,”23 that seem to hold in most preference
configurations, but not in general. Finally, the approach cannot account for the stability and equilibrium properties
of veto players. For example, both (p. 47) an independent regulatory commission and a legislative committee can
serve as equivalent veto players, but, in a bicameral system, the committee can be stripped of its powers by a
simple chamber majority, while a regulatory commission can only be abandoned if both chambers (and, if
applicable, the president) concur. More generally, within its formal framework the veto player approach cannot
distinguish between endogenous and exogenous veto players: which veto players are to be considered as
constraints and which should be viewed as institutional equilibria in an underlying game of institutional choice.
The concept of institutional equilibria is central to the main alternative to the veto player approach: the equilibrium
institution approach. We have seen above how the approach has been applied in isolation to both the US Congress
and study of coalition government. What has been missing, however, has been a genuine comparative point of
view that can account for various institutional structures across countries. To accomplish this goal, the concept of
institutional equilibria is critical. To see this, recall that (a), cabinets are the critical policy making institutions in
parliamentary democracies, (b) cabinets need the continual support of the legislature. In the language of non-
cooperative game theory, they must constitute (institutional) equilibria in an underlying game of coalition
bargaining. As discussed, both the solution concepts associated with social-choice theory and the structure-
induced equilibrium theory approach are often empty. Hence, there may not be any stable institutions in a model of
institutional choice. It is here where non-cooperative game theory provides a crucial methodological advantage. To
see why, note the problem of institutional choice defines a hierarchy of institutional models where the institutions of
each lower level become objects of choice at a higher level. Diermeier and Krehbiel (2003) state this as follows:
1. Define and hold fixed behavioural postulates for political actors in collective choice process in which well-
defined institutions are explicit objects of choice.
2. Conduct and/or embed institutional analysis (i.e. steps 1–4 discussed earlier) for each institution identified
in A.
3. Characterize formally the (second order) institutions that constrain the choice of institutions defined in A.
4. Deduce the set of institutions that will be chosen given steps A–C
5. Compare the derived implications with empirical regularities and data.
The critical advantage of game-theoretic analysis lies in the concept of “subgames,” that can be used to formally
model each feasible institution. The theorist then solves for the equilibria of each subgame and embeds each
subgame in a larger game of institutional choice. By solving that larger game, we then have a precise concept of
institutional equilibria. Non-cooperative game theory can accomplish this task for two reasons. First, extensive form
games offer a very rich formal framework to capture institutional variety. Second, Nash equilibria exist for very
broad classes of games. So, they usually will exist at all the levels of each subgame and at the level of the
institutional choice game. The following examples serve to illustrate this approach.
(p. 48) McKelvey and Riezman (1992) provide a formal model that yields a seniority system (e.g. Polsby,
Gallagher, and Rundquist, 1969) as an equilibrium institution.24 Seniority systems give legislatures with longer
tenure disproportionate proposal rights which result in a disproportionate share of benefits allocated to districts with
more senior legislators. But then voters have an incentive to re-elect senior legislators. The senior system thus
creates an incumbency advantage, which will be supported by legislators interested in re-election. The seniority
system thus is not assumed as a constraint on collective decision-making, but is sustained in equilibrium in a game
combining legislative bargaining and electoral competition.
Diermeier and Myerson (1999) show how bargaining between multiple chambers or an independently elected
president with veto powers lead to the existence of internal veto players (e.g. strong committees) or super-majority
rules (e.g. a filibuster rule as in the US Senate). In contrast, unicameral legislators provide incentives to delegate
power to a single actor such as a prime minister or party leader. Thus the model, not only explains the existence of
Page 13 of 22
certain institutions, but also their variance across political systems. The model points out that institutions that
appear to be quite different (e.g. cabinets and US committees, or veto players and super-majority rules) may be
functional equivalents. This is similar to Tsebelis’ veto-player approach, but the modeling approach is quite
different.
Diermeier and Feddersen (1998) present a multi-period model of distributive legislative bargaining in the Baron-
Ferejohn tradition, where legislators need to distribute a fixed benefit in each policy period. In each period,
legislators are randomly assigned a reservation value (i.e. a payoff that they will receive if the proposal fails), and
a proposer is selected according to a recognition rule. However, these recognition rules are not fixed, but voted on
in an organizational period where legislators bargain over recognition rights for the policy periods. Diermeier and
Feddersen then apply their model to two different constitutional settings: a presidential democracy reminiscent of
the US Congress and a parliamentary democracy with multiple parties. The key institutional difference between the
two settings is the existence of the vote of confidence procedure,25 which allows a governing coalition to link
voting on a particular bill with the survival of the governing coalition. Diermeier and Feddersen show that this
constitutional feature has dramatic consequences; it permits legislative majorities to vote cohesively on multiple
issues and to capture more of the legislative benefits compared witha presidential system. The model thus can
explain the difference in voting cohesion between parliamentary and presidential systems. Note that the
explanation does not depend on party discipline or electoral competition. Rather, it depends on the expectations of
future benefits if the current governing coalition can stay in office. Therefore, the model can also explain why in
parliamentary democracies’ voting cohesion is greater across parties than within parties in the US Congress.
As illustrated by this example, we can see three main characteristics of the institutional equilibria approach. First,
unless specified by the constitutions, any legislative institutions must be explained as an equilibrium in an
underlying game of institutional (p. 49) choice. Second, institutions from different systems and countries are
represented as formal equivalents. That allows models to compare different constitutions. Third, the models not
only try to explain the existence of legislative institutions, but their variance across political systems.26
But nothing in life is free. The methodological advantages of non-cooperative game theory also come with
substantial costs. First, as discussed above, non-cooperative games often have more than one equilibrium. This
frequently requires stronger equilibrium concepts than Nash-Equilibrium (Subgame-perfection, Markov-Perfection,
iterated elimination of weakly dominated strategies). The McKelvey-Riezman model, for example, uses all of these
equilibrium refinements. In practice, these restrictions are widely accepted, but they do constitute additional
assumptions. The second issue is the institutional richness of non-cooperative models, which can be both a
blessing and a curse.27 In some applications, it is a blessing because it allows us to model the exact sequence of
moves as specified in a political constitution. But in other contexts (e.g. intra-party bargaining among rival
factions), the precise rules may either not be known, or decisions may result from informal negotiations. Non-
cooperative game theory is not very suitable to model “informal institutions.” It forces the modeler to make
decisions (“who can make offers?,” “who moves first?,” and so forth) even if such modeling decisions may seem
to be arbitrary. This becomes particularly important if the respective modeling variants are associated with
qualitatively different equilibria. There is no simple solution to this problem other than the laborious process of
creating models of increasing generality and robustness that can then be compared with data. This is one reason
why a close connection with empirical regularities plays such an important role in institutionalist models. Finally, the
analysis of non-cooperative models often presents formidable technical difficulties, especially in multidimensional
policy spaces. This does not reflect a methodological problem, just the sheer mathematical challenges associated
with solving non-cooperative models.
2.8 Conclusion: Toward a General Theory of Legislatures
This line of argument suggests some directions for the development of a general theory of legislatures. First, the
goal should be to develop a genuine comparative orientation. The split between the study of the US Congress,
coalition government, and other legislatures must be bridged. The comparative study of elections can serve as a
potential reference case (e.g. Cox 1997). While electoral rules vary widely, much of their complexity can be
reduced to some key feature such as district size (which influences the number of parties in an electoral system)
and the degree of inter-party competition within the same district (which influences party discipline).
Page 14 of 22
(p. 50) Second, bridging such divides requires the ability to represent different institutions from different countries
in a common formal framework. This may redefine traditional distinctions, e.g. between presidential and
parliamentary democracies or between committees and cabinets. Both the veto player and the institutional
equilibrium approach offer possible frameworks.
Third, the only exogenous institutions are the general rules specified in a country’s constitution. All other legislative
institutions, even if they are stable and impactful, need to be explained as institutional equilibria.
Fourth, general theories must be able to explain not only the existence of legislative institutions but their variance.
In this context, it is important that the models get the major differences right. That is, a model that can account for
the (relatively minor) difference in power between the Norwegian and the German committee system, but cannot
account for the difference between committees in the UK parliament and the US Congress, is of limited use.
While the formal study of legislative politics has come a long way, much remains to be done. On the positive side,
in recent years we have seen the emergence of research programs that are genuinely comparative in nature. On
the negative side, the technical challenges of developing models in common frameworks remain formidable.
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Weingast, B. R. and Marshall, W. J., 1988. The Industrial Organization of Congress; or, Why Legislatures, Like Firms,
are not Organized as Markets. Journal of Political Economy, 96: 132–63.
Notes:
(1) . I will use the term “legislatures” throughout this chapters rather than “parliaments” or “committees.” In my
view, it best expresses the ambition of legislative theory to apply to any decision-making body of moderate size (at
least threeand no more than a few hundredactors) whose members repeatedly come together to deliberate and
make binding decisions. The term “committees” is too technical, and the term “parliaments” often connotates the
legislatures of parliamentary democracies thus excluding the US Congress, Latin America, and many other
legislatures in Europe, Asia, and Africa.
(2) . This is enough for models with finitely many alternatives. In the continuous case, it is usually also assumed
that preferences are continuous and strictly convex.
(3) . For a detailed discussion of these issues, see Diermeier (1997).
(4) . For recent overviews on coalitions, see Diermeier (2006, 2011), for overviews on the US Congress, see
Krehbiel (2006), Cox (2006), and Volden and Wiseman (2011).
(5) . Additional concepts such as veto players can then be defined using the concept of decisive coalitions.
(6) . For more details, see Diermeier (1997, 2014).
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(7) . See Riker (1980) for a forceful argument about the irreducibility of dependence on institutions
(8) . Testimony before the GOP Task Force on Congressional Reform, 16 December 1987. Cited from Diermeier,
Prato, and Vlaicu (2014).
(9) . In the case of the US Congress, this is clearly stated in the constitution: “Each House may determine the Rules
of its Proceedings” (US Constitution Article 1, Section 5, Clause 2).
(10) . To be sure, there are cases where the median policy prevails, e.g. when the status quo is located exactly on
the median’s ideal point. Here we focus on the typical case where the Romer-Rosenthal model implies an outcome
that is distinct from the median.
(11) . Variants of the model have been used in the study of legislative voting rules (Baron and Ferejohn 1989a),
committee power (Baron Ferejohn 1989b), pork-barrel programs (Baron 1991a), government formation (Baron
1989, 1991b), multi-party elections (Austen-Smith and Banks 1988; Baron 1991b; Chari, Jones, and Marimon 1997),
and inter-chamber bargaining (Diermeier and Myerson 1994).
(12) . A variant of this set-up allows (nested) amendments to a proposal before it is voted upon. This is the case of
an open amendment rule (Baron and Ferejohn 1989a).
(13) . For an overview see Shepsle and Weingast (1994).
(14) . Other contributions include Epstein (1997), Baron (2000), Collander (2008), and Kim and Rothenberg (2008).
(15) . For a model that sustains commitment in equilibrium using an overlapping generation’s model see Diermeier
(1995). See also Muthoo and Shepsle (2012). McKelvey and Riezman (1992) use a model that involves both
legislative and electoral stages to show that maintaining a seniority system with proposal power encourages the re-
election of incumbents. See also Callander (2008) for a model where policy complexity provides a solution to the
commitment problem.
(16) . In recent years, there has been a third important approach that has explained the institutional structure of
theUS Congress as a consequence of majority party control. The partisan approach argues that party majorities
allow their party leadership to control the agenda because sacrificing their individual policy goals in favour of the
party median helps maintain the party “brand” and with it the party members’ re-election prospects (Cox and
McCubbins 1993, 2005). Deferring to the party leadership may be supported either through disciplined voting on
bills (Aldrich and Rohde, 2001) or on procedures (Cox and McCubbins 2005). Diermeier and Vlaicu (2011a) show
that even in the absence of exogenously imposed party voting discipline preference, affinities among a majority
are sufficient to induce partisan voting cohesion over asymmetric procedures. This approach has been highly
influential in the study of the US Congress, but it is less important in other legislatures, which are often
characterized by multiple, disciplined parties.
(17) . See Laver and Schofield (1990) for a detailed review of the field up to the late 1980s.
(18) . In parallel, theoretical work in the social choice tradition has continued. See, for example, Schofield and
Sened (2006) and Schofield (2008).
(19) . See Laver and Shepsle (1994, 1996) for details.
(20) . See Diermeier and Stevenson (2000) and Diermeier and Merlo (2000)
(21) . A similar debate occurred a decade earlier on the role of committees (Krehbiel 1991, 2004).
(22) . The model in Diermeier and Merlo (2000), for example, has only been solved for three parties with quadratic
preferences.
(23) . Tsebelis refers to them as “conjectures.”
(24) . See also Eguia and Shepsle (2012).
(25) . See also Huber (1996) and Baron (1998).
Page 21 of 22
(26) . Adding uncertainty to the Diermeier-Feddersen model can explain cross-country difference in legislative
success rates (Diermeier and Vlaicu, 2011b).
(27) . Note also that the approaches use different models of policy decision-making. McKelvey and Riezman as well
as Diermeier and Feddersen use sequential bargaining models in the Baron-Ferejohn tradition. Diermeier and
Myerson use a vote-buying model (Groseclose and Snyder 1996), though the general results hold for more general
approaches. These modeling choices are driven by technical convenience and may not matter in the end, but the
models have yet to be integrated into a common framework.
Daniel Diermeier
Daniel Diermeier is the IBM Professor of Regulation and Competitive Practice, Kellogg School of Management, MEDS Department,
and Professor of Political Science, Weinberg College of Arts and Sciences, Northwestern University.
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The Sociology of Legislators and Legislatures

Heinrich Best and Lars Vogel
Methodology
2014
The sociology of legislators and legislatures is an interdisciplinary approach which focuses on the social
interactions, groups, and institutions involved in the process of parliamentary representation. From this
perspective, the institutions of representative democracies are the creations of the people running them. In other
words, representatives are both the creations and creators of the institutional settings in which they act. The
interactions of legislators both inside and outside legislatures are characterized by three types of social relations:
the competition for votes, antagonistic cooperation, and principal–agent relations. This article examines the social
relations within parliaments (insider–insider relations) and the relations between parliaments and society (insider–
outsider relations). It considers how antagonistic cooperation is learned and reinforced in the process of legislative
socialization, and how the social interests and preferences of the population are articulated and mediated in the
legislature. It also discusses legislative recruitment and how it paradoxically promotes both equality and social
closure.
Keywords: sociology, political sociology, legislators, legislatures, parliaments, political representation, social relations, antagonistic cooperation,
principal–agent relations, legislative socialization, legislative recruitment, parliamentary representation
3.1 Introduction
THE sociology of legislators and legislatures has two main objects: legislators as social actors and legislatures as
social institutions. Not only does the sociological approach investigate the impact of institutions on the behaviour
and preferences of actors, it also analyses the social prerequisites and conditions underlying the establishment,
maintenance and transformation of institutions, as well as the impact of social actors on these processes. This
chapter focuses on the social relations within parliaments (insider–insider relations) and on the relations between
parliaments and society (insider–outsider relations), which manifest themselves in three types of social interaction:
competitive struggle for votes (i.e. the competition between legislators organized in political parties for the support
of the population); antagonistic cooperation (i.e. the consensus of legislators regarding the institutions and
informal rules of conflict resolution); and principal–agent relations (i.e. the asymmetric interdependence between
legislators and their constituents based on delegation and accountability).
In a general sense, social institutions can be defined as enduring systems of formal and informal rules, norms, and
values structuring social interactions and relations; institutions make them durable, binding, and meaningful for the
actors engaged in them. In a narrower sense, political institutions such as legislatures “are formal arrangements for
aggregating individuals and regulating their behaviour through the use of explicit rules and decision processes
enforced by an actor or set of actors formally recognized as possessing such power” (Levi 1990, 405). Political
institutions are established (or radically transformed) at “critical junctures” (Rokkan 1999, 34). In such situations
actors enjoy a wide degree of freedom because institutional constrains do not exist or (p. 58) have become
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ineffective for solving problems of social regulation and integration. This wide leeway results in insecurity, impeding
cooperation between legislators due to the reduced predictability of behaviour and the lack of institutional
resources for exercising and retaining power. In such situations influential actors seek to establish new institutions
to provide a stable framework for calculating the benefits and costs of available options for behaviour (i.e. to
reduce transaction costs). After this new institutional arrangement is successfully established, it reduces the
leeway of the actors by restricting certain behaviours and promoting others. The initial institutional choices made
by influential actors at critical junctures have long-term and pervasive effects on the behaviour of their
successors, as institutions generate positive feedback (Pierson 2004). However, path dependency is limited by
potential path inefficiency; if the decrease in transaction costs generated by maintaining an established
institutional order is outweighed by the opportunity costs of maintaining it (i.e. the institutional arrangement is
inefficient to solve problems of social regulation and integration), another critical juncture is reached, and the
existing institutional order is challenged (Best 2010b).
Legislatures in democracies are core elements of an institutional framework in which the struggle for power is
mediated by peaceful competition for votes between antagonistic collective actors, who are usually organized in
parties (Schumpeter 1959, 259, 269). The pacification of the struggle for power is a demanding task in terms of
normative and institutional prerequisites. For centuries, the struggle for power was not peaceful. There are many
examples of instances in which peaceful democratic competition was substituted by autocratic regimes that tried—
often successfully—to win the political struggle by eliminating their competitors, sometimes even physically. The
question therefore arises: why do legislators respect the institutional rules of democracy after acquiring the reins of
state power? The answer is that the competitive struggle for votes and power is peaceful only if there is a basic
consensus among otherwise competing actors on the rules of the political competition and a mutual acceptance of
the political rivals as legitimate. The American sociologist William G. Sumner coined the term “antagonistic
cooperation” to denote how adversaries may enter into limited but durable partnerships in order to pursue common
interests and maintain a mutually beneficial social order (Best 2010a, 102).
The competitive struggle for votes also shapes the relationship between legislators and their electorate. In
Schumpeter’s (1959) pervasive analysis this relation is depicted as a leader democracy to underline that political
leaders impose their preferences on voters. Today, however, the direction of influence is debated, both
theoretically (Körösényi 2010) and empirically (see 3.4). On the most basic level, the social logic underlying the
interaction between legislators and voters is a principal–agent relation. In the simplest terms, the population can be
seen as the principal, who selects agents (legislators) and delegates to them the task of acting on their behalf in
politics. The population holds their agents accountable for the outcomes they achieve (e.g. Strøm, Müller, and
Bergman 2006).
Legislatures can be described as political institutions that regulate both the competitive struggle of legislators for
votes, based on antagonistic cooperation and the (p. 59) interaction between legislators and their constituents,
based on a principal–agent relation. Both the insider–insider relation and the insider–outsider relation are
interdependent. While political institutions such as legislatures provide a stabilizing frame for such interactions, the
stability of these institutions is simultaneously reinforced or eroded by the behaviour of the actors involved.
This chapter investigates three facets of the relationships outlined above: how is antagonistic cooperation learned
and reinforced in the process of legislative socialization? In what way are the social interests and preferences of
the population articulated and mediated in the legislature by virtue of the qualities and qualifications of the selected
agents (legislators), and through the interactions between legislators and their constituents?
3.2 Institutional Socialization: The Learning of Antagonistic Cooperation
Scholars of legislative studies have identified a broad range of informal rules and norms influencing the behaviour
of legislators; these rules and norms are independent of both the partisan and the personnel composition of
parliament (Matthews 1959; Cox 2000). Newcomers elected to parliament for the first time are faced with the
challenge of acquainting themselves with these informal rules and norms. Although there is no agreement about
the scope of attitudes and preferences that parliamentary socialization comprises, there is agreement that this
process can be modeled as adaptation of newcomers to the senior members (Asher 1973; Badura and Reese
1976; Bell and Price 1975; Fenno 1962; Hedlund 1968; Mughan, Box-Steffensmeier, and Scully 1997). Research on
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political socialization thereby contributes to the understanding of the maintenance of institutions and how they
impart their regulative and constitutive rules and norms to their members.
Empirical research has repeatedly demonstrated that institutional socialization is, in large part, learning how to
cooperate with competitors both within and outside one’s party. Fenno (1962, 320) described socialization in the
Appropriations Committee of the US House of Representatives as an apprenticeship in which the perceptions,
attitudes, and behaviours of newcomers must adapt to the consensus among senior members and “serve[s] as a
basis for Committee integration.” Newcomers are offered little freedom or flexibility and are expected to follow the
rules unquestioningly. In addition to this component of apprenticeship, the content of the consensus can be read
as a guideline for antagonistic cooperation, including specialization (the deliberate distinction of responsibilities,
which reduces conflicts of interest), reciprocity (do ut des as the predominant mode of interaction) and (sub-
)committee unity (compromise or consensus as overarching goal) (Fenno 1962, 316). Other studies have identified
precisely these norms as being gradually internalized by newcomers to both the US House (p. 60) of
Representatives (Asher 1973) and German state legislatures (Reiser et al. 2011, 834). Davidson (1969, 72) found
that members of the US Congress shift from “insiders to outsiders” with tenure. The longer they hold their positions,
congressional representatives increasingly focus on internal affairs such as legislation and committee assignment
and come to perceive their mandate to pursue the particular interests of their districts as decreasingly important.
This shift in priorities indicates that the requirements of interest representation are attenuated in favour of stronger
insider cooperation. Similar results were presented by Mughan et al. (1997, 50), who demonstrated an association
between “deradicalization” (Searing 1986, 341) in several policy areas and tenure among members of the British
House of Commons. Most of the recent research on legislative socialization has been conducted on the European
Parliament, with the key question being whether its legislators are “going native,” i.e. does lengthy tenure foster a
more pan-European perspective, with an increasing endorsement of pro-European policies (Scully 2005, 45)? The
empirical results gathered, however, give only marginal indication for such a process (Franklin and Scarrow 1999,
57; Scully 2005, 54, 133).
Studies of legislative socialization emphasize that the ambition of newcomers to gain political influence and their
lack of the resources necessary to achieve this goal are the central incentives for these junior legislators to adapt
to the internal rules and norms in parliament. Those who are successful have learned “that their conformity to [... ]
norms [in legislatures, HB/LV] is the ultimate source of their influence” (Fenno 1962, 322). This learning process
occurs in the daily interactions between the legislators, in which deviations are answered by sanctions ranging
from subtle non-verbal signals to the refusal of further promotion in the parliamentary hierarchy. The significant
others in these interactions are located within the specialized sub-organizations of legislatures bodies, such as
committees and party caucuses.
While the preceding section gives a good organizational overview, the full picture is more nuanced and
ambiguous. In their work on first-term legislators in the California state assembly, Bell and Price (1975, 166)
demonstrated that socialization is not a linear process. They found that some of the newcomers’ attitudes did not
appear to converge after two or more years, and, more strikingly, senior members may also adapt to newcomers.
There is also evidence that political socialization is not restricted to the legislature itself, but includes the pre-
parliamentary career; as a result, many newcomers are acquainted with legislative rules and norms prior to their
entry into parliament (Asher 1973, 512; Bell and Price 1975, 138). These findings have important implications: there
are indications that pre-parliamentary socialization is actually the dominant factor structuring legislative behaviour,
more important than the actual institutional environment. This occurs especially in newly established institutions,
such as the Scottish regional parliament (Stolz 2010, 284), which has no senior members to provide models for
newcomer behaviour. Finally, Best and Vogel (2012a, 56f) have shown that change in the representational focus of
German legislators, which was initially attributed to newcomer status, vanishes if membership in formal positions in
parliament is statistically controlled.
In recent years, institutional socialization has been a neglected area of legislative studies. The majority of the
studies mentioned above were conducted before 1990, and these (p. 61) mainly pertain to the US. None of these
follow a comparative approach, and only a few rely on quantitative individual-level panel data with control groups
(Asher 1973; Bell and Price 1975; Reiser et al. 2011). This is the only adequate method to distinguish institutional
socialization from both confounding cohort effects (if socialization is measured by tenure) and general change
among the totality of legislators in parliament (which is not observable without a control group of elder members).
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In view of the desiderata sketched above, comparative empirical analyses of institutional socialization are needed
in order to understand this important precondition for antagonistic cooperation. Such studies should include
legislatures as the central institutions in which the norms of reciprocity and compromise are communicated.
However, given that preconditions for successful socialization are also provided by the pre-parliamentary career,
research needs to investigate legislatures as just one part of legislators’ political career, in which they become
recruited into their first mandate.
3.3 Legislative Recruitment: Equality versus Social Closure
Legislators play a central role in legitimizing representative democracies (Best and Cotta 2000, 7). The qualities
and qualifications of legislators therefore have a symbolic and functional significance for the performance and
stability of representative democracies (Sartori 1987). Research in legislative recruitment has strongly confirmed
this view and has identified parliaments as intersections of different segments of the elite system, a mixtum
compositum of representatives of different societal interests and from various political followings. However, the
assumption that representative assemblies socially “mirror” the societies from which they are recruited is a
normative construct and is never found in a polity where there is “free competition for a free vote” (Schumpeter
1959, 271; Norris 1997). The parliaments that came closest to this “mirroring” ideal were characteristically those of
Eastern European people’s democracies where the cadres’ offices of Communist parties controlled admission to
the assemblies according to elaborate quota systems based on criteria such as gender, social origin, and ethnic
background. However, even under these special conditions, the mirrors were distorted in favour of meritorious
party activists and veterans (Patzelt and Schirmer 2002, 386–441). The paradox that defines sociological research
into legislative recruitment is that through processes of selection and election which are—in principle—egalitarian,
inclusive, and free, representative democracy emerges as an order of inequality.
Legislative recruitment is the crucial point of the democratic game when it comes to the decision about who has the
right of representation. These rules are inherent to the “competition for political leadership,” which was called
“free” by Schumpeter (1959, 295) “in the same sense in which everyone is free to start another textile mill,”
meaning anyone can be considered free to enter into the competition. The basic Schumpeterian (p. 62) design
has to be amended, however, in two respects that are insufficiently covered and dealt with in his work. The first is
the fact that, like economic elites, political elites try to curb the effects of competition by introducing cartels and
restricting access for new competitors. The second is the observation that the competition for power is a two-
layered process: Parties as selectorates compete for a bigger share of the positions in the political system, which
are directly or indirectly distributed through elective competition. Individual contenders compete for the backing of
selectorates and for access to the valuable elective offices. In short, parties (i.e. selectorates) want to improve
their competitiveness through good candidates who can serve their parties’ external and internal needs in their
struggle for power. Meanwhile, contenders display and employ the assets they have that give them an edge over
their competitors, establishing good starting positions in their race for offices (Norris and Lovenduski 1995). The
changing nature of this competition is the driving force behind the long-term transformation of recruitment patterns
of representative elites. A supply-and-demand model has been very useful in conceptualizing the dynamics and
constraints of the recruitment process. In particular, such a model helps to promote a better understanding of why
long-term changes in recruitment patterns of European representative elites seem to follow regular trends,
notwithstanding some erratic fluctuations at historical turning-points and caesurae of recent European history
(Norris and Lovenduski 1995; Best and Cotta 2000, 9–16). In the simplest version of the recruitment function there
is a demand and a supply side and sets of formal rules and informal practices which determine how both sides are
matched. The rules and practices include the criteria that determine who participates in which role in the
competition for parliamentary seats and what rewards or risks contenders may expect in the competition. The main
actors representing the supply or demand sides of the recruitment process are contenders, selectorates, and
electorates. Contenders are those actors “who are stimulated to enter the competition for offices by individual
incentives like prestige, power, material rewards, spiritual or ideological commitments” (Best and Cotta 2000, 11).
They dispose of certain resources that qualify them for entry into the electoral competition and determine their
starting position in the race for mandates and offices. Attributes and affiliations of contenders give a favourable or
unfavourable momentum to their passage through the recruitment process. Selectorates are collective actors who
select candidates according “to complex choices considering the probable value of the contenders’ resources for
electoral success, to their ideological fit with, their instrumental function for, and their loyalty to the selectorates”
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(Best and Cotta 2000, 11). In a distant past selectorates were informal caucuses made up of dignitaries or state
officials involved in the selection of candidates. Today selectorates in most liberal democracies tend to be
institutionalized in the form of party organizations. These selectorates have an intermediate position in the
recruitment market, matching the offer of contenders with the perceived preferences of electorates. Electorates
are the “end consumers of offers on the electoral support markets” and the final judges of the outcomes of
legislative recruitment (Best and Cotta 2000, 12). Their perceived preferences for a certain type of parliamentary
representation are one factor shaping the lists of candidates drawn up by selectorates. The given makeup of a
parliament can therefore (p. 63) be regarded as the final balance of advantageous and disadvantageous factors
working in the (self-)selective process preceding the act of recruitment (Best and Cotta 2000, 12).
Click to view larger

Fig. 3.1 Assets for legislative recruitment and careers
The interactions of the actors involved in the recruitment process are partly concealed by the secrecy of the ballot
box and the seclusion of the backrooms where caucuses and party dignitaries meet. However, much of the
process of parliamentary recruitment is open to public scrutiny and media attention. This directs, adjusts, and
intensifies the public’s perceptions and expectations concerning the qualities and qualifications of contenders
(Hetherington 2001). Legislative recruitment should therefore be considered part of a construction of reality by
which groups of selectorates—today, mostly within political parties—try to influence the competition for power in
their own favour. Their lists of candidates are an important element of the face parties present to voters and may
be indicative to their “closeness” to certain quarters of the electorate. The makeup of a party’s parliamentary
representation is therefore both a potential attractor of votes and a “tracer” for the groups it targets in the
electorate (Best 2007).
To the extent that the properties and qualities of contenders attract voter support in electoral campaigns, they are
assets in the competition for legislative seats (see Fig. 3.1). Selectorates will prefer contenders with such valuable
characteristics, as they provide an advantage in the struggle for power. Symbolic representation, i.e. the choice of
representatives according to the image they transmit to both the public in general and to their constituents in
particular, is based on innate or primordial qualities of contenders that relate to fundamental political issues.
Examples are skin colour, gender, religion (as far as it is inherited), or social origin (such as working-class
background). This symbolic representation can be distinguished from a second type of representation based on
acquired attributes that are also attractive to voters, but stem from representatives’ personal reputations. In this
category we find “heroes,” “martyrs,” or well-tried leaders. This type of representation could be referred to as
“deferential,” as it is based on voters’ deference to achievements of those who are supposed to represent them.
Seen from the standpoint of selectorates (in particular, political parties), both types of representation have an
external focus: here, the main concern of selectorates is how their supply of representatives affects their parties’
images among voters.
In addition to the external focus, selectorates also choose candidates for parliamentary office according to an
“internal focus,” i.e. the functional requirements of party (p. 64) organizations and parliamentary parties for
experts on certain policy issues, intermediaries connecting them to pressure groups and integrators capable of
uniting divergent segments of party organizations or tiers of the political system (see Fig. 3.1). Again it is useful to
distinguish between two types of resources available to contenders. The first type is relational and based on
representatives’ relations to the extra-parliamentary sphere, built up through linkage positions held in organizations
and networks. The second type of resource with an internal significance to party apparatuses refers to acquired
competencies and qualifications of contenders that are instrumental for the exertion of the representational role.
Inter alias level of education, area of study, pre-parliamentary professional skills, and previous political experience
fall into this category of resource.
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The “internal–external” dichotomy of the taxonomy depicted in Fig. 3.1 refers to the demand side of the
recruitment function by specifying the double task of selectorates: to supply parliamentary parties with personnel
able (a) to attract voters by representing their diverse interests credibly, and (b) to fulfil the function of legislators
competently by providing effective leadership and good governance. These competing and sometimes conflicting
demands have been captured in the trustee and delegate conception of representations, whereby the delegate is
a derivative of constituents’ preferences and the trustee is tied up in the institutional constraints of the policy-
making process (Eulau et al. 1959; Mansbridge 2003). These two different conceptions of representation are both
present in the institutional fabric and political practice of representative democracies and have to be
accommodated within the collective and the individual actors involved; however, the emphasis on one or the other
conception shifts over time and varies between polities. For example, it is plausible to assume that the extension of
suffrage and voting eligibility in the process of mass democratization was accompanied by a shift from an internal
to an external focus of parliamentary recruitment and toward “descriptive representation” which allows
constituents to recognize themselves in those who represent them (Pitkin 1967).
The “attributed–acquired” dichotomy in Fig. 3.1 refers to the supply side of the recruitment function. It considers
the fact that representatives owe their parliamentary office not only to their personal virtues, qualifications, and
skills, but also to the support of powerful organizations or factions of the selectorate who support them with
patronage and sponsorship, expecting loyalty and services in return. In theory, the number of contenders in mass
democracies is equal to the total size of the constituency; in fact, however, the supply of contenders is
dramatically reduced by informal requirements for those who enter the competition. The “free competition for a free
vote” is limited by a process that is commonly and somewhat euphemistically called “political professionalization,”
i.e. a configuration of social processes and informal structures restricting access to parliamentary seats and
political offices (Best 2003, 370). Political professionalization “defines the rules and rites of access of the group,
what holds the members of the group together, and what sets them apart from other individuals in larger society”
(Beaver and Rosen 1978, 66–7). In short, political professionalization establishes an insider–outsider differential
and provides the social mechanisms that integrate professional politicians collectively into the “political class”
(Borchert and Zeiss 2003). In Europe, the (p. 65) mechanisms of candidate selection, which have developed over
the past 150 years, are now predominantly controlled by party organizations, converting parliaments into quasi
internal labour markets for parties. If the access to and support of organizational power has become a crucial
advantage in the competition for seats, one could expect an increasing emphasis on relational assets in the
recruitment process.
It seems that there is an inherent contradiction in the recruitment function: on the one hand it entails the promise of
democratization by an “opening of political societies” and an “expansion of choice opportunities” (Blondel 1997,
96). In the long run, it fosters a rise in self-expressive values, shifting cultural norms toward a greater emphasis on
responsive and inclusive elites (Welzel 2002). On the other hand restrict the self-interest of established elites and
the functional requirements of highly complex policy-making processes the chances of potential contenders and
the responsiveness of those in office. In fact, Max Weber (1958 [1919]) already pointed to the fact that political
professionalization is positively correlated with incumbency, and Robert Michels (1915) based his work on the
trade-off between political democratization and the accompanying emergence of oligarchies in mass
organizations. The gap between the practices of parliamentary representation and the promises of mass
democracy seems to be widening with a negative impact on the legitimacy of representative democracy and the
reputation of those who represent it (Dalton 2004).
Previous research into legislative recruitment has analysed the contradictory coevolution of mass democracy and
political professionalization in a series of country-specific studies. This approach was justified because the
decisive context of legislative recruitment is the nation state, within whose perimeters the creation and
redistribution of wealth, the acquisition and attribution of power, the definition and assertion of collective identities,
the institutionalization of norms in legal systems, the formation of large bureaucratic structures, the aggregation of
interests, and the emergence of platforms for collective political action (e.g. parties) are performed (Rokkan 1999).
If legislative recruitment and its outcomes are path-dependent, it has been the nation state that paved and
maintained the way. The formal structure of opportunities for access to office, such as electoral laws and eligibility
rules, the supply of and demand for contenders, and the composition and mode of operation of selectorates (such
as caucuses or parties) were all defined by the national boundaries of polities and societies, although the actual
act of recruitment might have taken place on a local or regional level. No wonder, therefore, that political elites
Page 6 of 19
have been expected to represent the national distinctiveness of polities and societies (Mosca 1939). Thanks to
regional diversity in the processes of state- and nation-building and the emergence of different paths toward
democracy, the polities of Europe offer themselves as the richest field of observation for such a study.
Research into the long-term trends of representation recruitment has departed from the heuristic assumption that
the long-term change of legislative recruitment was driven by a single harmonious momentum for “political
development” or “political modernization” (Best and Cotta 2000). However, even if one applies the most general
notion of political modernization, we see at best a contradictory picture. While European parliaments have long
ceased to be exclusive clubs for the wealthy and those (p. 66) who inherited positions of high social status, and
while women have increasingly found their way into national assemblies, new barriers have emerged to replace
those of class and gender. Legislative recruitment is now less shaped by the status hierarchies and value systems
prevalent in societies at large; the decisive barriers and filters in the process of selecting candidates are now
located within the narrower realm of political systems (Best and Cotta 2000).This shift is indicated by the gradual
exclusion from the ranks of legislators of those who have a background in productive or distributive economic
activities (such as workers and farmers), the corresponding increase in public servants and (for some time) in
officials of pressure group organizations and parties, the growing accumulation (sequential and simultaneous) of
local and regional offices and the increasing embedding of contenders into the higher ranks of party hierarchies.
The abolition of formal barriers of access to parliaments was thus complemented by the establishment of an
informal insider–outsider differential, firmly guarded and perpetuated by selectorates and party organizations.
Today, those who are available for elective public offices, who have qualifications and skills deemed useful for a
political career (preferably certificated by an academic degree of some kind), and who are willing and able to
implant themselves in local or party offices, stand a greater chance of penetrating the filters and overcome the
barriers on their way to a parliamentary seat.
The rerise of the public sector (after its early heyday in the nineteenth century and its decline between the two
World Wars) as the preferred supplier of parliamentary representatives in Europe, can be associated with the
emergence of parties that rely “increasingly for [their] resources on the subventions and other benefits and
privileges afforded by the state” (Katz and Mair 1995, 20–1). With the goals of politics becoming more self-
referential and politics becoming a profession in its own right, representatives with a background in public service
embody the fusion between party and state; their state employer sponsored them when they were amateur or
semi-amateur politicians through generous exemptions and offered them a safe haven if their political career was
threatened (Cotta and Almeida 2007). On the other hand, disposes their background and actual interest them to act
as “agents of the state” in their representational role (Katz and Mair 1995, 18). Contenders from other professional
backgrounds do not enjoy the same privileges and have to face a disproportionately unfavourable risk–benefit
relationship when they pursue their political careers. However, the rise of public service to become the main
societal sector for parliamentary recruitment not only reflects the cost–benefit calculations of selectorates and
contenders, but can also be linked to the main challenge faced by Western polities in the bipolar world after the
Second World War: the establishment of consensually unified polities and societies as a primary condition for the
containment of communism. The mediation of conflicts and the integration of societies was the order of the day,
and corporate interest mediation and the extension of welfare state benefits, particularly, were the most important
consensus-creating policies. This “consensus challenge” found a response in parliamentary recruitment whereby
redistribution specialists, who are predominantly found in the public sector, prevailed during this period (Best
2007).
(p. 67) It has been suggested to extend the challenge–response model into a general explanatory scheme for the
long-term transformation of European legislative recruitment (Best 2003; Best 2007). It assumes that challenges
which originate in or are mediated by the social and economic structure and the institutional order have an impact
on the elite structure and agenda, which in turn influence elite responses to the same challenges. Elite responses
may have repercussions on elite structures and agendas, the social structure and the institutional setting of the
political order, separately or in combination. Rather than a linear development following the general transformation
of social structures, there has been a pattern of change in parliamentary leadership groups reflecting the timeline
of central challenges for polities and societies since the Western world entered the era of democratization and
industrialization. Thus, the first period of public service dominance in many national parliaments during the
nineteenth century coincides with the era of state- and nation-building. During this period, “symbol specialists”
(Lasswell 1954) and specialists in the application of executive power, both of which were to be found in the higher
Page 7 of 19
ranks of the public sector, had a dominant role.
The second challenge had to be taken up in the period of accelerated economic change during which most
European societies faced the full impact of industrialization. In this period, specialists in the creation and
appropriation of wealth, such as entrepreneurs and landowners, prevailed in parliament (Best 2007, 98–9). The
third challenge was the development of mass democracy and the accumulation of organizational power outside
state apparatuses (such as political parties and pressure groups). This period saw the rise of specialists in mass
mobilization and the running of intermediary organizations (Best 2007, 98–9). A link can be established here to
earlier typologies of parties, with the “elite party” providing a political arena for high-ranking state officials and
economic elites such as entrepreneurs and large landowners, and the “mass party” providing career opportunities
for party and pressure group officials, and with the “catch-all party” forming the seedbed for the “redistribution
specialists” from public service stock (Katz and Mair 1995). The indications for a convergence of legislative
recruitment and career patterns in Western democracies after the Second World War, however limited, can
therefore be attributed to a growing synchronization between the developments in party systems and the main
policy alternatives faced by Western democracies; at the same time, the impact of changes in the formal
structures of opportunities, such as electoral laws and eligibility rules, as well as general societal change at large,
has lost momentum.
The single most important factor that had synchronized the developments of post-Second World War Western
democracies—the communist challenge—disappeared rapidly between 1989 and 1990. If there is an empirical
pattern of “challenge and response,” we would expect that the disappearance of the communist threat would have
resulted in a change of legislative recruitment and career patterns. In particular, this change should have affected
legislative recruitment from the public sector. Indeed, our data confirm this expectation. The time series for public-
sector representation in Western European parliaments reached its turning point at the end of the Cold War (p. 68)
and has decreased considerably since this time (Best 2007, 100). This change is most pronounced in the case of
the teaching profession, which is the single most important sub-category among European legislators from the
public sector. Since the beginning of the 1990s the average share of members of the teaching profession in the
parliaments of Western Europe has dropped by more than 20 percent from its peak at the beginning of the 1990s,
meaning that they have lost about half of their previous gains since the beginning of the 1970s (Best 2007, 100).
As the dominance of legislators with a professional background in public service has not yet been contested by
any other professional category, a diversification of recruitment channels can already be seen. Assets such as
loyalty toward the established political order, a “neutral” position in class conflicts, and command of the policies of
redistribution, which can all be ascribed to contenders from the public service, are less valued after the consensus
challenge has passed.
The change in trends of legislative recruitment patterns was accompanied by a sharp increase in the turnover of
individual legislators, whereby the average turnover rates of Western European parliaments nearly doubled
between the end of the 1980s and the mid-1990s. The time series for newcomers forms a distinct peak during
these years that was only exceeded during the periods of post-crisis recruitment following the First and Second
World Wars. Although turnover rates have leveled off since the mid-1990s they are still above the average levels
of the post-Second World War era. It is no mere coincidence that these changes occurred during and after the
period of regime transition in Eastern Europe: the fall of communism in the East marked the end of the consensus
challenge in the West.
Recent developments such as the increasing diversification of recruitment patterns or the increase in turnover
have been interpreted as responses to a legitimacy challenge that has emerged within the political systems of
Western democracies (Dalton 2004). This new challenge targets elite quality, i.e. the ability of a representative
democracy to produce efficient and accountable political elites. Institutional settings for elite recruitment, such as
the cartel party, which are based on arrangements between politicians to appropriate and share the resources of
the state (Katz and Mair 1995), might be suitable to meet such challenges and create a political elite that is united
by common material interest. In the long run, however, these tendencies might serve to further undermine the
legitimacy of representative democracy, as the ingroup–outgroup differential may become too large and may not
be justifiable by the incumbents’ performance; the “true nature of democracy” (Schumpeter 1959, 295) is blurred if
the competitive struggle for power is impeded. The closure of the political market through political
professionalization and the pooling of interests between formally competing parties is an autocatalytic process that
may jeopardize the working of representative democracy. In this respect, the emergence of the legitimacy
Page 8 of 19
challenge is an indication that democracies are able to generate countervailing mechanisms, infusing new
competition into the system, and making the political profession riskier than most of its protagonists would like it to
be.
(p. 69) 3.4 Representation: Legislators and Their Constituents
Legislative recruitment is a powerful, albeit indirect, mechanism for the transfer of societal preferences and
interests to parliament via the qualities and qualifications of the legislators. Legislators are, however, also involved
in a multitude of direct interactions with their constituents, both during and between elections. The manner in which
societal preferences influence the behaviour of legislators in parliaments and the repercussions of this behaviour
on societal preferences can be described in more general terms as a principal–agent relation. This basic
constellation results in an asymmetric interdependency: the voters expect their legislators to advocate their
interests and preferences; the legislators are in turn dependent on voter support to get (re)elected. The relation is
asymmetric as the legislators are not only better informed and better equipped to deal with political matters than
their constituents, but (unlike their voters) they additionally conduct politics professionally. Therefore, legislators
provide leadership in the principal–agent relation and significantly frame the definition of political success upon
which their constituents evaluate them. The asymmetry in the relationship between voters and legislators adds to
the basic problem of principals in relation to their agents: how to secure effective and efficient supervision of
agents, in order to make sure that they act not only on behalf of their principals, but also in their principals’
interest?
In normative theory the most important mechanism of control by the electorate is the competitive struggle for votes
between legislators: with multiple potential agents legislators are supervised and evaluated by contenders both
inside and outside parliament. The risk of being voted out in the next election constitutes a strong incentive for
incumbent legislators to be responsive to their constituents. In this respect, parliaments are institutions in which
legislators interact in order to advocate the interests of their principals. For a peaceful and efficient competitive
struggle, there must be consensus among the legislators about the legitimacy of parliament and its rules and
norms. Such antagonistic cooperation (i.e. cooperation between otherwise conflicting actors) comprises both the
consensus about politics (i.e. the formal and informal rules institutionalized in parliament and its surrounding
institutions) and the willingness and ability to make political compromises (i.e. achieving policy decisions in the face
of competing interests).
As the interaction between legislators is a balancing act between cooperation and competition, the legislators need
leeway for their actions. On the one hand, this serves the interest of the principals, as it allows their agents to
advocate their interests; on the other hand, it necessarily implies at least a partial deviation of the agents from the
preferences of their constituents. The internal relations between legislators, as structured by legislatures and the
relationship between legislators and their constituents, are thus inextricably intertwined.
(p. 70) The combination of asymmetric interdependence, the competitive struggle for votes and antagonistic
cooperation establishes diverging preferences for legislators and citizens. The population demands both close ex-
ante and ex-post screening and as many restrictions as possible on the behaviour of their legislators (Lupia 2006).
In contrast, legislators are keen to increase their autonomy. However, the preferences of legislators and the
electorate may converge, as the majority of voters is unwilling and/or unable to get actively involved in politics.
The population thereby accepts the delegation of authority and the leadership role of legislators, who are kept
responsive and responsible to their constituents by the competitive struggle for votes. In this way, the social
interaction between legislators and their constituents includes the potential for both convergence and divergence,
responsiveness and leadership.
Any valid investigation of this social interaction and its determining institutional and social factors requires the
inclusion of comparisons of legislators and constituents. Such comparisons are rarely conducted in legislative
studies per se (Leston-Bandeira 2012; Norton 2002) but are common in studies on public opinion, representation,
and political elites. With their pioneering work, Miller and Stokes (1963) were the first to analyse relative
congruence between legislators and their constituents as the extent to which “opinions in districts [... ] that are
more supportive of a policy in a particular direction are reflected through more supportive roll call voting in that
direction” (Shapiro 2011, 990). Despite many differences in research design, data, and theoretical concepts, Miller
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and Stokes’ study and its successors have demonstrated that in the US (Stone 1982; Powell 1982; Page et al.
1984), and in Canada (Soroka, Penner, and Blidook 2009) district opinions are reflected in legislators’ preferences
and behaviour. The degree of this relative congruence is increased by homogeneity of district opinion (Harden and
Carsey 2012), saliency (Kuklinski and Elling 1977), low complexity, rootedness of issues in inter-party conflicts
(Hurley and Hill 2003, 308), and the commitment of legislators to responsiveness (McCrone and Kuklinski 1979; but
see Friesema and Hedlund 1974).
While dyadic representation focuses on individual legislators, collective representation is considered as the
systemic property of a polity and is thus measured by comparing whole legislatures with the totality of the
population (Pitkin 1967, 126ff; Weissberg 1978). However, studies on collective representation are rarely
conducted. Rather, research has concentrated on the way changes in public opinion are reflected in changing
preferences of legislators and ultimately in policy output. These studies have shown responsiveness at work in the
US (Page et al. 1984; Stimson, Mackuen, and Erikson 1995, 985; Shapiro 2011), and in Germany (Brettschneider
1995). It was especially in light of this strand of research that the underlying model of representation was revised.
Miller and Stokes based their research on the assumption of a demand–input model (Wahlke 1971, 272–3),
presuming constituents to be active in formulating policies to which legislators are supposed to remain faithful if
they intend to pursue (re-)election. The mechanisms that are meant to ensure legislators’ responsiveness are
electoral turnover and the rational anticipation of electoral outcomes by the legislators between elections (Stimson,
Mackuen, and Erikson 1995, 544–5). The asymmetric interdependence of the principal–agent relation was
introduced as an amendment to this theorem of rational anticipation. (p. 71) In consequence, legislators are
presumed to adjust their behaviour in anticipation of the preferences of their constituents in the upcoming election
and to actively form these preferences in an advantageous manner (Mansbridge 2003; Körösényi 2010). In the US
and Europe it is now widely accepted—however, not always considered in empirical studies—that the impact
between legislators and constituents is reciprocal (Jacobs and Shapiro 1994; Wlezien 1995; Steenbergen,
Edwards, and de Vries 2007; Dalton, Farrell, and McAllister 2011).
Although Miller and Stokes demonstrated that political parties in the US impact legislative behaviour significantly in
those policy domains that cut across regional boundaries (Miller and Stokes 1963, 56), it has been primarily the
research on Europe that focuses on collective congruence between legislators and partisan voters of the same
party. This approach is justified, as geographic electoral districts appear to be less relevant to the behaviour of
legislators in parliamentary systems with distinct party cohesion and discipline (Thomassen 1994). Most studies
(Barnes 1977; Farah 1980; Converse and Pierce 1986; Esaiasson and Holmberg 1996; Miller et al. 1999) regard
voters as inactive, but responsive to legislators, who offer policy packages and try to find support for them in
elections (responsible-party model). The influence of electoral systems on the congruence between legislators
and constituents has been analysed, showing different patterns for majoritarian and proportional systems:
legislators tend to be closer to their party voters in the latter system and closer to the overall median voter in the
former system (Dalton 1985, 286f Huber and Powell 1994; Wessels 1999). The consequences of this pattern for the
level of overall collective congruence at the national level differ with the proportion of partisan voters in the
electorate (i.e. social composition) (Rohrschneider and Whitefield 2012). In addition to the electoral system, other
factors impact collective congruence; generally speaking, the more hierarchically centralized parties’ organization
(Dalton 1985, 291) and the higher the polarization between parties, (Wessels 1999, 158) the higher the collective
congruence becomes. Catch-all parties consider the median voter as their point of reference, while smaller parties
representing more homogenous constituents cater more closely to their partisans (Ezrow et al. 2011). Testing the
responsible-party model for several countries in Latin America has provided evidence that the degree of
institutionalization of the party system (i.e. a mature record of party competition for votes) contributes significantly
to the congruence between legislators and their partisan voters (Luna and Zechmeister 2005).
In general, collective congruence is less pronounced with regard to particular policy issues, but manifests itself
more in the form of ideological agreement, especially concerning the left–right continuum. Ideological congruences
or differences between voters and legislators reflect the cleavages and polarities of the party system, thereby
increasing party–voter congruence for issues related to party conflicts (Hurley and Hill 2003; Valen and Narud
2007). The party system largely simplifies policy issues to a dominant ideological dimension; this helps to
overcome problems of social choice and is therefore a precondition for collective congruence (Thomassen 1994,
254–5). Observed patterns regarding ideology primarily display relative congruence: the positions of the legislators
on the left–right continuum tend to correspond to the differences between (p. 72) their respective parties’ voters,
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but they tend to be either more or less pronounced than among the population (“polarized” and “moderating”
trusteeship: Kitschelt et al. 1999, 82; for an overview: Valen and Narud 2007, 296), or all legislators are shifted to
the left of their voters (“Elite-mass displacement” Putnam 1976, 118) or (less often), shifted to the right of their
voters (Dalton 1985, 275; Esaiasson and Holmberg 1996, 94; Andeweg 2011, 47). While polarization between
legislators indicates the predominance of the competitive struggle for votes, the tendency toward the median
signifies pronounced antagonistic cooperation. The left–right shift can be partially explained by the distinct social
composition of the legislators—especially their higher educational status—but there seems to be additional
influence of individuals’ status as legislators (McAllister 1991, 259) (i.e. distance arises out of the different positions
in the prinicipal–agent constellation).
The aforementioned studies focus on policy congruence with regard to both issues and ideology. In contrast,
congruence in preferences regarding political processes and institutions has been rarely analysed for legislators.
However, the interest in what might be termed “congruence concerning politics” has increased lately, as it
appears that the evaluation of politicians and the political system is not only driven by (in)congruence regarding
policies, but, increasingly, by the extent to which legislators and citizens agree or disagree on “process
preferences” (i.e. preferences about how politics ought to be conducted; Hibbing and Theiss-Morse 2001). In
recent decades the distribution of such process preferences among citizens has moved in the direction of
increased demand for direct political participation and legislators’ responsiveness (Mair 2011). Against this
background, the decreasing political support and trust in democratic institutions, actors and processes (Dalton
2004) may be seen as being driven by a lack of congruence regarding political processes.
Despite these evident changes, only a few recent studies have analysed the process preferences of citizens
(Carman 2006; Carman 2007; Bengtsson and Wass 2011) while even fewer studies compare these preferences to
those of legislators (Méndez-Lago and Martínez 2002; Bengtsson and Wass 2012; Esaiasson and Holmberg 1996).
With regard to basic principles and liberties, political elites and legislators are generally more supportive of core
elements of liberal democracy than the general population (McClosky and Brill 1983; Pettersson 2010, 132).
However, it has been shown repeatedly that legislators are less favourably disposed than the general population to
direct political participation, which would most severely limit their discretion in the principal–agent relationship
outlined above.
In addition to such fundamental normative principles, the process preferences of legislators regarding their own
behaviour are of decisive importance, because the population perceives institutions such as legislatures primarily
through the observable behaviour of their members, which thereby constitutes the pivotal benchmark for
constituents’ evaluations of both their elected legislators and the legislature. Some studies in this area, in the
tradition of Eulau et al. (1959), centre on the focus and style of representation. These studies have demonstrated
high levels of congruence regarding process preferences between the general population and legislators for
Finland (Bengtsson and Wass 2012), (p. 73) contrasted with low levels of congruence for Spain (Méndez-Lago
and Martínez 2002) and Sweden (Esaiasson and Holmberg 1996). Andeweg and Thomassen (2005) analysed new
dimensions of role orientations. They found that, in the Netherlands, clear majorities in both the general population
and the body of legislators demand that political control is conducted based on mandates given ex-ante in
elections, as opposed to control via ex-post evaluation. However, the general population and legislators disagree
on the impact that legislators should have on the formation process of political preferences: while the population
prefers responsiveness, legislators tend to favour political leadership. One recent study on Germany (Best and
Vogel 2011) analysed attitudes toward a wide range of politics and found that legislators generally prefer a narrow
scope of state responsibilities, with fully professional politicians organized in parties and exerting strong political
leadership. In contrast, the general population tends to support a large scope for state responsibilities, with
politicians being primarily responsive to their constituents, less connected to political parties, and conducting
politics merely as a part-time occupation. A recent comparison of legislators and the general population in almost
all member states of the European Union revealed that legislators are much more Europeanized than their
respective populations, especially with regard to the preferred level of integration (i.e. the politics of competence
allocation). Legislators evaluate the allocation of policy competences at both the EU and national level differently,
considering whether the assumed benefits of the status quo or the reallocation of competences in a certain policy
area would lead to their empowerment (Best 2012b, 240). In contrast, the population prefers competences to be
allocated at the level—usually national—which preserves constituent influence on their legislators (Best 2012a,
214).
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To summarize, the relation between legislators and their constituents is shaped by the underlying social
constellation. Diverging preferences regarding politics are due to both the asymmetric interdependence of the
principal–agent relation and the necessity for antagonistic cooperation. This constellation generally results in
legislators who emphasize their personal autonomy and prerogative for flexible behaviour and who are more
supportive of political systems that grant them this autonomy. Disagreement between legislators and citizens
regarding politics (politics gap) is thus inevitable as it is rooted in the social foundation of their relationship. As long
as politics remain a low priority on the public agenda, legislators are able to detract from this politics gap by
referring to policy (especially economic outcomes) that they present as being direct outcomes of their professional
political competence. However, as popular demand for control and responsiveness of legislators increases, and
the ability of legislators to deliver their constituents’ desired outcomes decreases, the politics gap may develop into
a legitimacy challenge (Best 2007, 108–11).
With regard to policies, it seems necessary to distinguish between two situations. In the first case, preferences are
organized along ideological lines and rooted in identifiable social groups, such as homogenous districts or parties.
In this case, relative congruence between legislators and their constituents in districts and parties is achievable.
Relative congruence is less likely if issues are loosely connected to ideology; in such cases, constituents are
heterogeneous and therefore do not provide sufficient cues for their legislators. In any case, absolute congruence
(i.e. identity of (p. 74) legislators and constituents) is exceptional. This pattern of simultaneous relative
correspondence and absolute deviation from the population indicates that the behaviour of legislators is not
determined by the preferences of their constituents, but rather that their behaviour is jointly constrained by their
constituents and by the positioning of competing parties. Within this space, legislators can use the asymmetry in
the principal–agent relation to impact the preferences to which they are, in turn, responsive.
Political leadership conducted by legislators is influenced by the internal relations among parliamentary
contenders. If the demand for antagonistic cooperation is of primary interest, legislators may use their autonomy to
attenuate policy differences. In contrast, legislators may emphasize policy differences if distinctiveness in the
competitive struggle for votes is their priority. In turn, both antagonistic cooperation and the competitive struggle
between legislators are influenced by the principal–agent relation: close control by constituents may result in a
reluctance to engage in antagonistic cooperation, while inactive and heterogeneous constituents facilitate
legislators’ convergence. There have been only a few empirical studies on the reciprocal influence of insider–
insider and insider–outsider relations. After German unification, Eastern German legislators—with some exceptions
among the Post-Communists—at the national and sub-national levels tended to adapt to their Western counterparts
in terms of politics and, less consistently, in terms of policies. This rapid integration, which took place without much
overt reluctance, seems to have enlarged the distance today between legislators from Eastern Germany and their
constituents to an extent well beyond that which has been common in Western Germany. This distance is posited
to be one of the driving forces for the lower levels of political support in the present day among the general
population in Eastern Germany, as compared to Western Germany (Best and Vogel 2012b).
One of the strategies that could be pursued by legislators to cope with the increasing demand for responsiveness,
coupled with the difficulty in providing the desired political and economic outcomes (Wessels 2011, 96), would be
to intensify antagonistic cooperation, with the goal of attenuating the competitive struggle for votes and thus
lowering the risk of electoral defeat. The employment of such a strategy could ease insider–insider relations, but
would presumably lead to deterioration in insider–outsider relations. Legislatures are the central institution in which
legislators interact, with their internal rules and norms structuring the conditions for antagonistic cooperation. If
both insider–insider and insider–outsider relations are considered to be interdependent, studying insider–insider
relations in parliament would contribute to the understanding of the linkages between legislators and the general
population in representative democracies.
3.5 Conclusion
The sociology of legislators and legislatures is, by its very nature, an interdisciplinary approach which investigates
the social interactions, groups, and institutions involved (p. 75) in the process of parliamentary representation.
From this point of view the institutions of representative democracies are not just a given, but are the creation of
the people running them: representatives are therefore both the creations and creators of the institutional settings
in which they act. This double perspective gives credit to both rational-choice theory and new institutionalism.
Page 12 of 19
According to the rational-choice framework, institutions are presumed to provide systems of rules and regulations
that constrain and enable behaviour by determining the strategies that actors chose to pursue their otherwise fixed
and exogenous ambitions and preferences. The sociological approach does not deny that legislators make their
choices in a rational manner; however, it focuses on the volatile and endogenous character of preferences and
choices that emerge out of social constellations and may be transformed by the interactions of legislators. New
institutionalism, which identifies institutions as the main context framing the preferences of the actors involved, is
extended by sociological approaches maintaining that the stability and proper function of institutions depends on
the social relations and interactions taking place within them.
Three types of social relations underlie and constitute the interactions of legislators both inside and outside of
parliament: the competitive struggle for votes, antagonistic cooperation, and principal–agent relations. Those
relations are intertwined and determine the behaviour of legislators vis-á-vis their fellows, their competitors, and
their constituents. Through the process of institutional socialization, antagonistic cooperation is learned and
deepened. Patterns of legislative recruitment indicate that the logic of antagonistic cooperation leads to social
closure of access to legislatures, transforming parliaments into internal labour markets for parties, and impeding the
competitive struggle for votes. However, recent changes in recruitment patterns can be interpreted as an
indication of the emergence of a legitimacy challenge and a countermovement against political professionalization.
Such developments may be founded in the dynamics of the principal–agent relation between legislators and
constituents, by which legislators are keen to enlarge their own autonomy while constituents tend to restrict it.
When there is an increased awareness of moral hazards, legislators tend to be put on a shorter leash. Political
parties have responded to this legitimacy challenge by opening access to parliament for new brands of politicians
and by limiting tenure. There is an intrinsic gap between principals and agents regarding the preferences of how
politics should be pursued, but legislators are only constrained and not entirely determined by the policy
preferences of their constituents. Leadership by legislators and parties is thus facilitated.
While much is known about these processes at the aggregate level, little investigation has been conducted on how
principal–agent relations and antagonistic cooperation translate into actual social interactions and vice versa.
Because of the contingencies between insider–insider relations and insider–outsider relations these interactions
are embedded in highly complex contexts. Legislators and parties are faced with the dilemma of either optimizing
their responsiveness to their constituents while eroding internal cooperation with their political opponents, or
boosting internal cooperation while distancing themselves from their constituents. Stable representative
democracies are therefore institutional frameworks and informal arrangements which achieve an (p. 76)
equilibrium between the competing demands resulting from two divergent social relations. How this situation affects
the daily interactions of legislators is largely unknown. Little systematic knowledge is available about informal
contacts besides and beyond formal institutional or organizational settings, although the importance of bonding
between rivals has been shown in earlier research (Best 2010a, 12). The sociology of legislators and legislatures
also suffers from a lack of longitudinal data, which would allow a better understanding of the social mechanisms
underlying the emergence, adaptation, and transformation of preferences, norms, and rules (i.e. for cooperation
between competitors) prevalent among legislators.
Further research is also needed to understand how the internet influences relations between legislators and their
constituents. In contrast to those who see the internet as a one-way road to a more participatory e-democracy
(Browning 1995; White 1997; for an overview: Coleman 2005; Ward and Gibson 2009), a sociological approach to
this area of inquiry would shed light on how information technology is superimposed by the logic of existing social
relations between its users. Considering the logic and the dynamics of principal–agent relations, the internet has
the potential to establish and strengthen the direct links between legislators and constituents, in addition to the
processes that take place via established channels such as elections and political parties. In this way, the internet
might increase the ability of principals to control their agents. However, keeping in mind the underlying social logic
of the principal–agent relation, legislators will presumably act, at the same time, to prevent any restriction on their
autonomy. One can therefore expect the internet activities of legislators to be shaped by the social logic of the
insider–outsider relation, rather than solely by the technological potentials of facilitated internet communication.
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Heinrich Best
Heinrich Best is Professor of Sociology and Chair of Social Science Research Methods/Structural Analysis of Modern Societies at
the Friedrich Schiller University of Jena.
Lars Vogel
Lars Vogel is Research Fellow at the Department of Sociology, Friedrich Schiller Jena University of Jena, Germany.
Page 19 of 19
Typologies and Classifications

Amie Kreppel
Institutions
2014
Scholars use a variety of methods to study and compare legislatures around the world. Some studies concentrate
on what legislatures do and others are more concerned with how they do it. Based on many of these analyses, a
typology or classification scheme has been developed to group legislatures into various categories. However,
classification schemes do not provide a comprehensive theoretical explanation of why legislatures are of one type
or another. The profusion of terms such as assembly, congress, or parliament, which are often used
interchangeably with the term legislature, has made comparative study of legislatures more complicated. This
chapterreviews the primary typologies and classification schemes still used in the study of legislatures and
proposes a coherent theoretical framework that focuses more on why legislatures differ. The framework provides a
classification scheme to allow easy comparisons and a theoretical explanation of legislative power that is flexible
enough to explain changes in power and influence over time, even in the absence of systemic institutional change.
The chapteralso explains how the relative autonomy of a legislature can influence the policy-making process.
Keywords: legislatures, classification schemes, typologies, legislative power, autonomy, policy-making, assembly, congress, parliament
4.1 Introduction
LEGISLATURES exist in almost every country of the world so it is not surprising that scholars have long been interested
in studying them and comparing them. However, the diversity among legislatures has led to the proliferation of
different methods of comparison, each concentrating on different aspects of legislatures, although all, to one
degree or another, include an assessment of the relative power of the legislature within the broader political
context. What varies most are the attributes that are considered vital elements of a legislature’s power. Many
analyses focus on the institutional characteristics of political systems as a whole and the legislatures themselves.
Other studies are more concerned with the various functions performed by legislatures within the broader political
system. In other words, some analyses are focused on what legislatures do, while others concentrate more on how
they do it. In general, the most significant contributions to the legislative studies literature implicitly or explicitly
recognize that these two aspects of legislatures are intrinsically linked. In particular, the connection between
structures and their impact on the capacity of legislatures to successfully engage in the full gambit of functions
generally ascribed to them is at the core of comparative legislative studies.
The result of many of these analyses, particularly in the pantheon of “classical” comparative legislative research,
is the creation of a typology or classification scheme that groups legislatures into various categories.1 While this is
a useful exercise in that it facilitates easy comparisons and a common language for the labeling of legislatures, in
most cases this approach provides little in the way of explanation. Classification schemes allow us to label types of
legislatures and compare their relative powers, tasks, and structures, but they do not provide a comprehensive
theoretical explanation of why legislatures are of one type or another. Moreover, classification schemes tend to be
Page 1 of 14
static. Legislatures are categorized as one type or another—with little possibility for shifts in (p. 83) classification
to occur across time, particularly within shorter periods such as from one election to the next. This rigid character
fundamentally limits the utility of most typologies, particularly when studying dynamic legislatures or less stable
political systems.
The goal of this chapter is to revisit the primary legislative typologies and classification schemes still prevalent in
the field and examine the extent to which these can be collectively expanded and embedded within a coherent
theoretical framework that moves beyond the classification of different legislatures towards an explanation of why
they differ. In particular, this chapter will present a theoretical framework that provides both a classification scheme
to enable easy comparisons and a theoretical explanation of legislative power that is flexible enough to explain
changes in power and influence over time, even in the absence of systemic institutional change. Before we can
move forward in accomplishing this task, however, it will be necessary to establish some common definitions of key
terms to ensure semantic clarity.
4.2 Establishing Common Terminology: The First Classification Scheme
One of the most problematic aspects of trying to study legislatures comparatively is the profusion of terms such as
“assembly,” “congress,” or “parliament” that are often used interchangeably with the term “legislature.” Since this
lack of semantic rigor can lead to confusion and misperceptions about the underlying character of the legislature
being analysed (as well as the broader political system in which it functions), it is worthwhile to develop some clear
definitions and basic terminological classifications.

Fig. 4.1 A hierarchy of institutions
Of the words frequently used to describe a legislature,“assembly” is the most general. Indeed, assemblies need not
be explicitly political and the word (uncapitalized) refers simply to the coming together of a group of people for
some purpose; for example, a school assembly. It is only when we implicitly or explicitly add the qualifier “political”
or “legislative” that we begin to think of assemblies in the same context as legislatures, parliaments, and
congresses. By the same token, parliaments and congresses, generically, can be best understood as specific
types of legislatures. This understanding of these four terms creates a hierarchy of institutions from the most
general (an assembly) to the most specific (congress and parliament) which are understood as types of the mid-
level category of “legislature” (Fig. 4.1).2
From this perspective, legislatures are those assemblies that are organized for specifically political, and to some
degree legislative, purposes. While this definition serves to differentiate legislatures from other assemblies, it is still
a very general category. To be able to effectively compare legislatures cross-nationally we need additional
definitions and clarification to help us effectively distinguish between the two primary types of legislature:
parliament and congress.3 It is fundamentally the structural characteristics of (p. 84) the political systems in
which these two types of legislature are located that distinguishes between them.4 Regardless of whether or not a
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political system can be categorized as democratic, if there is a legislature as well as an executive branch, it is the
relationship between these two that will determine the core characteristics of the legislature and determine whether
it is a parliament or a congress. The central determinative characteristic is the relative level of interdependence
between the branches.
In what are commonly referred to as parliamentary systems, the executive branch (prime minister and cabinet) is
elected by the legislature, usually from within its own ranks.5 Furthermore, the executive branch or “government”
is formally responsible to the legislature throughout its tenure. This means that it can be removed from office at any
time should a majority of the legislature oppose it, regardless of the electoral cycle.6 In turn, removal of the
executive by the legislature may be accompanied by early elections for the legislature, thus creating the possibility
for “mutually assured destruction” for both branches. Thus, there is a high degree of mutual dependence between
the government and the legislature. For this reason these types of systems are known generically as “fused-
powers” systems and their legislatures are usually referred to as “parliaments,” regardless of their formal national
title.
In contrast, within what are popularly referred to as presidential systems the executive is elected by the people
(generally through direct election), rather than by the legislature. Thus, unlike parliamentary systems, there is no
direct tie of responsibility between the executive and legislative branches, only a very limited possibility of removal
of the executive by the legislature impeachment), and no provision for the dissolution of the legislature by the
executive branch. For this reason presidential systems are considered (p. 85) “separation-of-powers” systems in
the sense that the core institutional branches themselves are separate from one another. Although separation-of-
powers systems are most often presidential in character, this is not a requirement and non-presidential separation-
of-powers systems exist (e.g. the European Union).
Unlike legislatures in fused-powers system, there is no commonly accepted general category for legislatures in
separation-of-powers systems, though many have the formal title of “congress.” However, “congress,” like
“parliament,” can also be understood as a general type of legislature, with the defining characteristic being the
relative independence of the executive and legislative branches. Although this differentiation is intended only to
provide semantic clarity, it does link to one of the more common metrics used to evaluate legislatures in many
typologies. Both selection and oversight of the executive are key elements of the “control function” often
exercised by legislatures, but only the latter is employed by congress-type legislatures. A brief review of the core
functions of legislatures and the institutional characteristics that are often linked to them will facilitate a better
understanding of the logic supporting most existing typologies and classification schemes and provide the
foundation for the analysis that follows.7
4.3 Historical Evolution of Legislative Typologies and Classifications
Traditionally, legislatures are tasked with four primary functions: linkage; representation; control/oversight; and
policy-making (Bagehot 1872; Blondel 1973; Loewenberg and Patterson 1979; Olson 1994; Loewenberg 2011).
Most legislatures engage in all four of these tasks to some degree, but what varies between them is their relative
level of power or influence within each arena and the extent to which each aspect is prioritized, though these are
clearly linked. A quick review of what each of these tasks entails will serve to underscore their significance in
understanding and evaluating the role of legislatures within the broader political system and the extent to which
existing typologies incorporate one or more of these core tasks in their assessments of legislative power and
influence.
Perhaps the most critical task of legislatures in terms of democratic theory is to link citizens to the government.
Even when the legislature is weak in terms of its other roles, it is almost always able to serve “as an intermediary
between the constituency and the central government” (Olson 1980, 135). In this context, legislatures act as a
conduit of information (through their individual members) allowing local level demands to be heard by the central
government and the policies and actions of the central government to be explained to citizens. Although all
legislatures perform this task to a certain extent, their ability to serve as effective tools of communication, as well
as the relative importance of this role can vary significantly. The linkage role of the legislature will (p. 86) be more
important in political systems in which citizens do not have the opportunity to communicate their preferences and
satisfaction directly to the executive branch through the electoral process. Thus, in parliamentary systems, as well
Page 3 of 14
as in most non-democratic regimes, the linkage function of the legislature is likely to be more important because it
may be the only stable mechanism of communication between citizens and the executive.
In addition to providing a link between citizens and government, the individual members of a legislature are also
expected to represent their constituents. In other words, legislators are responsible for advocating for their
constituents in their stead, insuring that the opinions, perspectives, and values of citizens are present in the policy-
making process (Pitkin 1967). Legislators are the primary conduits of political representation for citizens. The
comparatively large number of members within most legislatures (as compared to the executive branch) and the
relatively small scale of their electoral districts make the effective representation of a variety of different minority
communities possible. In contrast, smaller minority groups may have a difficult time accessing or influencing the
executive branch as a result of the latter’s need to represent the interests of the country as a whole.8 Unlike the
executive branch, which generally includes a small number of actors who share unique (or at least similar) political
beliefs, legislatures are larger and, in all but the most repressive systems, contain representatives of the governing
parties and opposition groups. This plural characteristic of legislatures not only increases their representative
capacity, it also enables them to serve as a public forum of debate, in which diverse opinions and opposing views
can directly engage with one another with the goal of influencing public opinion and policy outcomes.
The ability of the governed to control the government is one of the foundational tenets of representative
democracy.9 The primary tool used to achieve this goal is regularly scheduled free and fair elections. The type of
executive control practiced by the legislature is directly linked to the nature of the relationship between voters and
the executive branch and between the legislature and the executive branch.10 The character of the control
function of the legislature is much more prominent in fused-powers systems than it is in separation-of-powers
systems. In the former the legislature has the power of investiture and/or censure, while in the latter executive
control is limited to confirmation (cabinet) and impeachment.
Although control generally refers to selection and removal of the executive, legislative oversight of the executive
branch is a much broader concept, entailing the monitoring of executive agencies tasked with the implementation
of policy decisions, and regular engagement with the political executive to insure it is meeting its commitments to
the public and adequately addressing the various policy needs of the country. Legislatures also play a critical role
in insuring proper oversight of the executive branch through budgetary authority and the right to review the
budgetary implications of policies. Legislatures may even be able to exercise these types of “oversight” functions
in non-democratic systems, even if they are unable to effectively “control” the executive branch as a whole.
(p. 87) In all of these activities legislatures are largely reactive and have only indirect policy influence. In many
political systems, however, legislatures also have the ability to directly and even proactively participate in the
policy-making process. Such direct engagement can vary significantly, ranging from providing consultative
opinions to making significant amendments, and from initiating independent proposals to vetoing those of the
executive branch. Because of the central role of policy-making within the political process more generally, most
typologies depend heavily on this critical aspect of legislative power as a primary (if not sole) element of their
classification scheme. As noted above, however, there isa broad variety of tasks regularly accomplished by
legislatures, and in many cases legislating is not one of the most important.11
One way to understand the critical differences between the four core tasks outlined above (linkage, representation,
control/oversight, and policy-making) is to cluster them according to how they shape the role of the legislature.
When acting as a linkage mechanism or representative institution, legislatures are functionally the agents of the
voters who elected them. However, when they engage in executive oversight and control functions, legislatures
become the principal while the executive takes on the mantle of agent. Finally, when participating in policy-making
the legislature incorporates both roles, and acts as the agent of citizens, as well as a principal overseeing the
activities of the executive (Kreppel 2010). It is the relative balance between these diverse functions that serves as
the foundation for most typologies of legislatures. Although many, if not most, classification schemes are primarily
focused on the relative policy-making power of the legislature (Blondel 1970; Polsby 1975; Olson 1980), there are
those that weigh other aspects of legislative behaviour as much or more, particularly those classification schemes
that strive to include legislatures from non-democratic and democratizing political systems (Mezey 1979; Kim, et al.
1984).
The task of most classification schemes is to provide a framework within which we can compare legislatures,
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across time and especially across political systems. These typologies offer a kind of shorthand by providing a
substantial amount of information in a relatively concise and cohesive package. Descriptive typologies such as
that presented in section 4.2 describing parliaments and congresses, provide information about the constitutional
structure of the legislature and its institutional ties to other aspects of the political system, but little beyond that.
Thus, it is possible to differentiate between the Mexican and Italian legislatures by noting that the former is a
congress while the latter is a parliament. This tells us that Mexico has a separation-of-powers system, while Italy
has a fused-powers system. In turn, from this we know something about the mechanisms of executive control that
can be wielded by the legislature (confirmation and impeachment in the former versus investiture and/or censure in
the latter). These are only the most general characteristics of the legislature, however. They are useful to some
degree and the classification can lead to different expectations for each legislature, but they do not provide much
support for substantive comparisons. For that it is necessary to engage in a deeper investigation into the extent to
which a legislature is able to pursue the four functions listed above to better evaluate the impact the legislature has
on the political system as a whole (or on the policy process more specifically).
(p. 88) Most contemporary research on comparative legislatures begins with the seminal work of Jean Blondel
(1970; 1973).12 Blondel began from the institutional characteristics that define legislatures and focusing on
parliaments (implicitly in most cases) he examined their legislative oversight and control functions through the lens
of what he termed “viscosity.” This was essentially a conceptual mechanism to measure the negative powers of
the legislature in the policy process. The greater a legislature’s viscosity, the more it is able to delay or even reject
the policy proposals of the executive branch or the “rule-making” process initiated by the executive (Blondel
1970). Although Blondel recognized that legislatures have other functions within the political system, including
linkage and representation, he also noted that law-making “is the one which is most commonly referred to in
textbooks” (1970, 71). Legislative viscosity was measured based on the tools at the disposal of the legislature to
slow down the legislative process, including the duration of the debate, the tabling, length and success of
amendments, as well as their origin (majority or opposition parties). A legislature is deemed to be more or less
“subservient” or “free” based on the viscosity of the policy-making process, or the extent to which it can slow
down the seemingly inexorable legislative machine of the executive. This interpretation of legislative power as the
negative ability to slow down or stop policy is reflected in the more recent literature on institutional veto players
and their impact on policy change (Tsebelis 2002).
What is notable about Blondel’s analysis is that there is no variation on the parliament/congress axis because of
the cases selected (France, India, Ireland, Sweden,and the UK). In the end, perhaps unsurprisingly, Blondel finds
that strictly majoritarian parliamentary systems (such as the UK and Ireland), are less viscous than those of
Sweden and especially France. Blondel goes a step further to note that the breadth of the policy arenas that are
available for the legislature to take an active role in is also significant. For example, in his analysis the French
legislature appeared superficially to be more “free,” but only within a “restricted domain” (1970, 85). Despite this
additional conclusion, the primary focus of Blondel’s typology or classification of legislatures depends critically
upon their ability to impact the policy-making process. More specifically, Blondel focused on the negative powers
of the legislature, which provide it with some opportunity to affect policy outputs and was narrowly constrained to
include only the executive-legislative relationship within this process.13 Other scholars following Blondel increased
the comparative scope of their analyses by including a greater diversity of legislatures and expanding the set of
roles discussed.
One such effort was introduced by Nelson Polsby (1975) with his conceptualization of “arena” and
“transformative” legislatures. These two categories were not presented as a dichotomy, but rather an axis along
which legislatures could be placed with the US Congress serving as the ideal for the transformative type and the UK
House of Commons playing that role for the arena type (Polsby 1975, 130–1). While much of the more detailed
analysis focuses on the US case and the methodology tends toward description more than rigorous empirical
analysis, in many ways Polsby’s analysis contains the seeds for a much more comprehensive theoretical
framework for comparative legislative studies.
(p. 89) To begin with, the analysis immediately differentiates between the two ideal types of legislatures in terms
of not only their legislative role, but also their respective loci of power. To understand transformative legislatures
and their role in the policy process, according to Polsby, the critical subjects of analysis are the internal structures
of the legislature. In contrast, one must look outside the legislature for the source of decision-making power in
arena-type legislatures.14 This is summarized by his conclusion that “for arenas the impact of external forces is
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decisive in accounting for legislative outcomes. For transformative legislatures, what is decisive are variables
depicting internal structure and sub-cultural norms” (Polsby 1975, 141).15
While the specific external actors with the power to shape the policy process are not discussed in any detail, the
effect of party organization on what Polsby labels legislative “independence” is incorporated into his comparative
analysis. Indeed, the “independence and hence transformative capacity of the legislature in modern democratic
political systems lies in the character of parliamentary parties” (Polsby 1975, 142). In particular, there are three
aspects of internal party organization that influence legislative independence, all linked to the majoritarian or
consensual character of the parliamentary parties.16 These include the breadth of the coalition of the dominant
parliamentary group, the extent to which the legislative parties are hierarchically organized, and whether or not
legislative majorities on specific policy issues are “fixed and assured” (Polsby 1975, 142). More simply, arena-type
legislatures are those in which the parliamentary party limits the independence of members through hierarchical
structures and centralized decision-making among a narrow group of actors. In contrast, internal party structures
play a diminished role within transformative legislatures. Thus, organizing majorities can be highly coalitional
(transformative) or narrowly based (arena) and party management can be very decentralized (transformative) or
centralized (arena). Finally, successive policy majorities can be very flexible (transformative) or fixed (arena). The
combination of these classifications leads to a typology of legislative independence ranging from highly
transformative (USA) to arena (UK).
Although Polsby is not explicit about the broader role of political institutions in the development of this typology, the
implication is that transformative legislatures exist in separation-of-powers systems (congress-type legislatures),
while arena legislatures are “parliaments” within fused-powers systems. Partially this conclusion is a function of the
cases he studies (USA, Netherlands, Sweden, Germany, Italy, UK, Belgium, and the French IV and V Republics).
However, it is also the result of a failure to include explicitly the character of executive-legislative relations and the
exogenous party structure within the analysis.17 The absence of the role of the exogenous party is not the only
limitation of the arena-transformative typology introduced by Polsby. Like its predecessor it is fundamentally limited
to democracies and to the internal characteristics of the legislature.
The next typology introduced into the field of comparative legislative studies moved beyond the confines of policy-
making influence to conceive of legislative power in terms of support and durability as well (Mezey 1979). Rather
than relying on a single axis of decision-making viscosity or transformative power, this typology also includes a
second axis incorporating the extent of popular support for the legislature. The (p. 90) addition of support into the
analysis not only increases the complexity of the typology, but also allows it to be applicable to a broader array of
legislatures, including those in non-democratic systems. Moreover, support is exogenous to the legislature and has
the potential to reflect the impact and significance of both the linkage and representative roles more directly than
policy-making power.
Despite the addition of the support variable, Mezey, like his predecessors, centres his typology in large part on
measures of legislative power, understood as “the importance of the legislature in the policy-making process”
(Mezey 1979, 151). For Mezey, legislatures fall into three general categories of policy-making power; strong,
modest, and little to none. What differentiates Mezey’s approach most significantly is the idea that external support
can influence internal policy-making and the power of the legislature more generally. In particular, Mezey focuses
on the ability of the legislature to constrain the executive, arguing that “legislatures will be salient in the policy-
making process to the extent that their presence and prerogatives act as a constraint on the executive,” without
making them vulnerable to dissolution (Mezey 1979, 153). In his analysis, exogenous popular support is the
bulwark against executive dissolution of the legislature, thus those that can rely on popular support are better able
to use whatever institutional policy-making resources they have at their disposal. In contrast, legislatures with low
popular support must always fear that the executive will formally or informally remove the legislature as an
obstacle to achieving its policy goals.18
This expansion to include popular support as a factor in understanding the relative power of a legislature is critical
in that it broadens the analysis to the political landscape outside of the legislature itself and recognizes the
importance of exogenous actors.19 It also underscores the potential impact that linkage and representative
functions can indirectly have on the policy-making influence of the legislature. The combination of these two axes,
formal policy making powers and external support lead to a five-part typology of legislatures (see Table 4.1).
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Table 4.1 Mezey’s typology of legislatures
Policy-Making Power Less Supported Legislatures More Supported Legislatures
Strong Vulnerable Legislatures Active Legislatures
Modest Marginal Legislatures Reactive Legislatures
Little or none NA Minimal Legislatures
Unsurprisingly the “active” and “reactive” categories overlap to a good degree with Polsby’s transformative and
arena-type legislatures. What the concept of external support adds to our understanding of legislative power is the
ability to distinguish between those legislatures that are able to make the most of their formal decision-making
powers (USA) and those that are not (Italy, French IV Republic) because they are “vulnerable” to being bypassed
or dismantled by the executive. Moreover, the inclusion of the minimal and marginal categories extends the
applicability of the typology to non-democracies (p. 91) and allows us to distinguish between them on the basis of
popular support (and likely durability). For these reasons Mezey’s typology stands as the most comprehensive
example of this type of comparative legislative work to date. Without detracting from the significance of his
contribution, this is in part due to the rapid decline of the field of comparative legislative studies. Indeed, other than
a few edited volumes in the 1980s and 1990s very little similar macro comparative work has been published
since.20 This decline is at least partially due to the simultaneous rise in micro-level legislative studies that are often
ill-suited to broad cross-national analysis.21
The shift from broad macro-comparative analyses of legislative power and durability to studies of specific aspects
of the internal organizational structure of legislatures (micro analysis) is in part a result of Polsby’s original work on
transformative and arena legislatures. By highlighting the importance of internal institutional structures in the
decision-making processes of transformative legislatures such as the US Congress, he set the stage for research
on internal legislative structures rather than cross-national comparisons. Indeed, Polsby’s own work on the
institutionalization of Congress was at the vanguard of this micro approach (Polsby 1968). As others responded to
the challenge there was a substantive shift, most notably in the American Congress literature, toward a focus on all
aspects of internal decision-making and organizational structures. This new work concentrated on investigating
specific aspects of legislatures such as agenda-setting, budgetary authority, committee power, caucuses, and
leadership structures, rather than broad comparisons of the legislatures themselves.
The result of this new wave of research was the transformation of the field of legislative studies as a whole, as
scholars emulated the increasingly rich and detailed micro-level research predominant in the American
Congressional literature (Döring 1995; Loewenberg, Squire, and Kiewiet 2002; Döring and Hallerberg 2004). The
influence of the micro-level approach spread well beyond the confines of the American Congress literature to
inspire those studying legislatures in almost every geographic region to attempt to follow suit (with varying degrees
of success).22 While the benefits of this trend have been substantial in terms of the accumulation of a wealth of
detailed studies on particular aspects of the internal organizational structures of a broad variety of legislatures, the
cost has been substantial as well. While there is a wealth of detailed analyses of the impact of particular aspects of
internal legislative structures within one or a few legislative contexts, there is comparatively little in the way of a
shared theoretical framework with which we can effectively utilize those studies to make macro-level cross-
national comparisons, or even cross-time comparisons within a single national context. This is not to suggest that
there has not been any recent high quality work comparing legislatures cross-nationally (see for example Sieberer
2011 or in a different way Fish and Kroenig 2009), but this work is scarce and has avoided the development of new
typologies that facilitate systemic comparisons.
The question raised by this brief analysis is whether it is possible to develop a theoretical framework that allows for
the integration of the now-prevalent micro analysis of legislatures and the type of comparative typologies that
flourished in the past. This approach would recognize the critical impact of internal organizational structures, (p.
92) a variety of exogenous actors and variables, as well as the broader systemic political variables that influence
the character of the legislature as a whole. The resulting typology would be able to include parliaments as well as
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congresses, would be flexible enough to provide explanations for change over time within a single legislature
(even in the absence of substantive institutional change), and variations across legislatures. This type of approach
is possible, but it requires a shift away from focusing primarily on measuring legislative power, which is the
dependent variable most often of central interest to scholars, and focusing instead on the institutional and
environmental independent variables that serve as the origins of legislative power. Understanding how these
variables are linked and interact can serve as the basis for the development of a new typology that bridges the
micro and macro approaches to comparative legislative studies. In other words, it is necessary to move away from
simply measuring legislative power toward an understanding of why legislatures are powerful (or not).
4.4 Comparative Legislative Autonomy
Most analyses of legislatures focus on the relative decision-making power of the legislature, leaving aside explicit
analyses of the representative and linkage tasks, and only implicitly examining control functions (Döring 1995; Fish
and Kroenig 2009). This is an understandable approach given the central importance of policy-making within the
broader political process. Indeed, control, or at least influence over policy outcomes is the raison d’etre of most
political activities and actors. Although there are certainly some who seek power for power’s sake, most would
agree that it is the power to determine policy outcomes that drives political actors from political parties, those from
lobbying groups, and individual voters deciding how to vote.23 The ability of a legislature to influence decisions
over policy outputs is the dependent variable of this typology as well. What is new, however, is the incorporation
and central importance of a series of independent variables that together provide critical information regarding the
level of “legislative autonomy.” The relative autonomy of a legislature can then be used to predict its potential to
influence the policy-making process.
The goal is to provide a theoretical construct within which we can embed the knowledge we already have about
how legislatures work and how they are impacted by other aspects of the political system. To be comprehensive
this approach must include the impact of the broader political environment, the internal structures and resources of
the legislature, as well as the partisan framework that affects individual members and groups within the legislature.
The concept of “legislative autonomy” allows us to achieve this by uniting a central aspect of all of these elements
of the political system—decision-making independence. This approach focuses on the relative level of exogenous
control over the actions of the legislature and its members, the ability of exogenous actors to influence the
outcomes of the legislative process directly or indirectly.
(p. 93) External influence can originate from direct control such as an executive decree, or indirect influence
such as partisan control over the careers of party members. In either case, actors beyond the confines of the
legislature are able to impact the role of the legislature and/or its members in the policy-making process. In doing
so, these exogenous actors effectively weaken the influence of the legislature as an institution and/or its members
as individual actors. The majority of variables highlighted by the recent spate of micro-focused studies as
significant factors in the policy-making power of legislatures are directly linked to the relative decision-making
autonomy of legislatures and their members. These variables can be roughly divided into two broad categories—
institutional and partisan. The former affects the legislature as a whole, while the latter affects the individual
members and party groups within the legislature.
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Fig. 4.2 Institutional and partisan autonomy
The variables included within the institutional autonomy axis are the most familiar within the comparative-
legislatures literature and include both the broad structure of the political system as a whole and the internal
organizational characteristics that have been the focus of most micro-level legislative research.24 These
institutional variables can be divided into two categories: those that are constitutional (and comparatively rigid),
and those that are institutional and more easily modified. As noted earlier, the core distinction between congresses
and parliaments is their relative level of institutional autonomy from the executive branch. Congress-type
legislatures benefit from a much higher level of institutional autonomy because of their constitutionally protected
independence. In contrast, “parliaments” are weakened by the “fused” character of the executive-legislative
relationship, which renders them less institutionally autonomous. This basic division between congresses and
parliaments is visualized in Fig. 4.2 by the location of both types of congresses in the upper two quadrants, while
parliaments are (p. 94) in the lower two.25 The precise location of a specific congress or parliament along the
vertical axis will depend on a variety of secondary institutional variables within the political system.
Secondary institutional characteristics can be formal or informal and are much more likely to change over time.
These include a broad variety of structures that make up the subject of much of micro-legislative studies literature
including agenda-control, committee structure and powers, as well as other institutional resources such as time,
staff, and the quality/full-time status of members. The fact that these institutional characteristics are more
susceptible to change than the constitutional differentiation between fused and separation-of-powers systems in no
way suggests that they are less important in terms of their impact on legislative power. Instead, these two aspects
of institutional autonomy should be understood as interactive—both combining to determine the institutional
autonomy of the legislature as a whole. Thus, the greater the institutional autonomy (constitutionally or internally
created) the higher the legislature will be placed along the vertical axis (see Fig. 4.2).
While the classification of a legislature as a congress or parliament depends on the constitutionally created
relationship between the legislative and executive branches of government, the differentiation between strong and
weak versions of each type of legislature (horizontal axis) depends on a different kind of autonomy, one that is
generated by the characteristics of the party system and the individual parties themselves. This type of partisan
autonomy depends on a broad variety of variables including the level of centralized control within individual
parties, party penetration within society, campaign finance rules, the laws governing ballot access, and the
character of the electoral system as a whole among others.26 As with the vertical axis, the critical attribute is
autonomy, particularly decision-making autonomy within the policy process (legislative influence). However,
because of the possibility for variations between individual members, party caucuses, and external party
organizations, the relationships can be more complex than those found in the institutional arena.
At the individual level, the greater the ability of a party (external or internal party caucus) to control the political
future of its members in the legislature (through ballot access, funding resources, internal assignments, or other
critical benefits) the lower the individual autonomy of members of the legislature will be, meaning that members will
have little ability to autonomously impact policy outcomes. Instead members will closely follow party policy
directives (party voting) regardless of their personal or even constituency preferences.
A similar dynamic exists between party groups/caucuses within the legislature and the external party organization
(party in the electorate). If the hierarchy of the external party overlaps with that of the internal party organization,
and/or if the external party controls party resources, candidate selection, etc., then the internal party groups will
be less autonomous and have less independent ability to impact policy outcomes. However, when there is a
parallel leadership structure between internal and external party organizations, and/or when the internal party
caucus controls resources, candidate selection, etc., the internal leaders of the party will be better able to directly
impact (p. 95) policy outcomes independently from the external party organization.27 It is important to note that
individual member autonomy and internal party caucus autonomy need not be linked or systematic. Thus,
individual autonomy may exist in cases where there is either high or low internal party caucus autonomy and there
can be substantial variations between political parties within a single national party system.
The greater the autonomy of individual members and/or party organizations within the legislature from exogenous
partisan control (i.e., from the “party in the electorate” and/or the “party in the executive”) the higher the level of
partisan autonomy will be for the institution as a whole. Those legislatures with higher levels of (individual and
28
Page 9 of 14
group) partisan autonomy will be located further to the right along the horizontal axis.28 Changes along the
horizontal axis are more likely than variations in institutional characteristics since these can be achieved by
alterations to electoral laws, campaign finance regulations, internal party statutes, as well as simple shifts in the
electoral fortunes of the parties themselves, leading to a change in the partisan control of the executive.
This approach to understanding and comparing legislatures may at first glance seem to lead to another typology
that simply divides legislatures into four categories—not entirely dissimilar to those created by Polsby (1975).
However, employing the concept of autonomy as a mechanism for evaluating legislative power provides a
theoretical explanation of the policy-making influence of legislatures capable of incorporating the numerous micro
analyses that have been prevalent in legislative studies over the last three decades. It also highlights the
erroneous assumption that parliaments are necessarily weak, while congresses are strong(er) in terms of policy
influence that is inherent in much of the early comparative-legislatures literature. This misconception originates in
the implicit merging of the two axes presented in Fig. 4.2 due to the assumption that parliaments have strong
parties and congresses have weak(er) ones (Sartori 1997; Linz 1990).
Once these two axes are separated and considered individually through an analysis of the variables outlined
earlier it is possible to distinguish clear examples of all four types of legislatures. While the US Congress and the
British Parliament serve as the emblematic examples of the strong congress and weak parliament respectively, it is
also possible to point to other cases that represent the weak congress and strong parliament categories such as
the Mexican Congress and Italian Parliament respectively. By bringing together the institutional (internal) and
partisan (external) variables that affect legislative autonomy, and thus policy-making influence, this approach
serves as a first step at integrating the micro and macro approaches to legislative studies. In doing so it allows for
the development of a theoretically driven typology applicable across a broad variety of political contexts and
capable of explaining change over time. Movement from one type of legislature to another (i.e. from parliament to
congress) is unlikely given that this classification is determined by constitutional provisions. However, there can be
substantial movement within quadrants as a result of changes to less fundamental aspects of the structural and
institutional characteristics of the legislative process or the institutions themselves. Thus, movement along the
vertical axis is possible, even if it is generally constrained to movement within quadrants. In contrast, movement
along the (p. 96) horizontal axis, even movement from the “strong” category to the “weak” one (between
quadrants) can occur in a number of ways and may result simply from a change in the electoral fortunes of one
political party or another.29
4.5 Unanswered Questions and Future Research
The proliferation of micro-oriented studies of the US Congress that followed the ground-breaking work of Polsby and
others has fundamentally changed the character of comparative legislative studies. There is now widespread
agreement on the significance of a variety of internal organizational and structural elements of legislatures. The
importance of amendment and voting rules, the committee system, and a myriad of other characteristics of
legislatures are now well recognized and amply studied, not only within an American context, but also
internationally through case studies and cross-national collaborative projects (Döring 1995; Loewenberg, Squire,
and Kiewiet 2002; Hallerberg and Döring 2004; Fish and Koenig 2009). While unquestionably important, these
micro level analyses have two very important weaknesses that hinder the further development of comparative
legislative studies. First, they often fail to fully incorporate the interactive effects of these diverse internal structures
and rules. Studies of agenda-setting, committee powers, or organizational structures rarely extend their analyses
to include other aspects of the organizational structure of the legislature, which may have a profound impact on
the aspect studied. Legislatures are complex organizations with profoundly integrated structures—focusing on why
or how just one element of this structure in isolation impacts the policy-making role of the legislature as a whole is
bound to result in incomplete understanding, if not actual errors of interpretation. A theoretically grounded typology
that incorporates a broad spectrum of structural/organizational variables would help mitigate this concern.
A second weakness of the micro approach as broadly applied in the comparative legislatures literature has been
the focus on the internal structures of the legislature to the exclusion of the broader political environment, and
especially the character of the party system and individual parties. Regardless of the internal organization of a
legislature, if political parties are able to dominate the actions of legislators and control legislative activity from
outside the institution, the relative power of the legislature itself will be minimal. Exogenous manipulation of policy
Page 10 of 14
outcomes through control over individuals and/or legislative party groups is not uncommon, and is readily
recognized in the literature, but it is rarely integrated into micro analyses of legislative structures. This absence
neglects an important component of actual legislative control over policy outcomes. A typology that includes both
internal and external variables (and their interaction) allows for a more comprehensive understanding of the ability
of the legislature to autonomously influence policy decisions.
(p. 97) Finally, while the development of a theoretically driven typology that can bridge the micro and macro
approaches to comparative legislative analysis provides a possible road map for future research, it does not solve
the second major problem that faced scholars back in the 1970s: the lack of large sets of comparable data. While it
is certainly the case that the number of empirical individual cases studies, limited comparative cases studies (small
N), and even broad cross-national analyses (large N studies) of a variety of internal legislative characteristics has
increased over the past 30–40 years, it is also the case that comparability between cases, data sets, and analyses
remains a challenge. In part this is because there has not been a macro approach to provide a framework for
linking these diverse studies. Fundamentally, it is also because all political systems are different and what is
important in one may not be important in another. Furthermore, data collection reflects both the interests and the
resources of the scholar. Thus, even with a unifying framework the underlying challenge of detailed large N
comparisons will remain. This does not mean that we should not aspire to overcome these challenges. Indeed, the
proliferation of legislative scholars, inspired in part by the flourishing of the American Congress literature over the
past few decades suggests that there is much to be optimistic about. To the extent that scholars can work
together, share resources, and collaborate on refining and improving shared understandings and interpretations of
legislative influence and importance, the field as a whole will be significantly improved. The current volume is a
tribute to this type of collaboration, as are other large-scale joint efforts that have begun to flourish in recent years
(Fish and Koenig 2009).
References
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Notes:
(1) . For the purposes of this chapter typology and classification schemes are used interchangeably.
(2) . It should be noted that this interpretation of parliaments and congresses as types of legislatures is not
necessarily exhaustive and does not preclude the potential existence of other types of legislatures. Within
democratic political systems, however, these types are able to accommodate all legislatures with which the author
is familiar.
(3) . While most are familiar with the roots of the word “parliament—derived from the French verb parler, “to
speak”—few recognize that the word “congress” is derived from the Latin congressus,“a meeting or [hostile]
encounter; to contend or engage” (Harper 2001). The use of congress as a general term to denote legislatures
within separation-of-powers systems is justified by the more frequent policy-making focus of their activities and the
greater likelihood of conflict between the legislative and executive branches when compared to fused-power
systems.
(4) . Recognition of the impact of broader institutional structures on legislative type is not new, however the
terminological hierarchy here is intended to clarify continuing ambiguities. For example, nearly a half century ago
Wheare (1963) differentiated between parliaments and congresses—but without directly tying it to the underlying
relationship between the legislative and executive branches. In contrast, Laver (2008) highlights the critical
importance of this relationship, but creates a legislature–parliament dichotomy instead of allowing legislatures to
remain the broader classification.
(5) . Note that although this is the norm, there are parliamentary systems in which it is possible, or even the norm to
Page 12 of 14
select members of the cabinet from outside the legislature (Andeweg and Nijzink 1995).
(6) . This is, of course, a simplification and ignores possible obstacles such as requirements for a constructive vote
of no-confidence, for example.
(7) . The preceding section 4.2 draws from the typology first published in Kreppel (2010).
(8) . This is especially true in presidential systems and those parliamentary systems in which a single party wins an
absolute majority of seats in the parliament. In contrast, coalition governments that include parties representing a
variety of minority interests can serve to increase the representative function of the executive branch as a whole.
(9) . Readers should note that the ability to select the executive within parliamentary-type legislatures is
incorporated within the “control” function. However, because congress-type legislatures do not have this function
it is not included as a distinct category.
(10) . This, of course, assumes at least a moderately democratic political system. The control function of
legislatures in non-democratic systems is marginal at best.
(11) . This is particularly true in non-democratic systems, effectively limiting the applicability of many typologies to
the democratic context.
(12) . Prior to Blondel there was some comparative work, beginning with Walter Bagehot, (1872) and Lord Bryce
(1921), that looked at the changing role and character of legislatures in the broader political system. However, the
former focused largely on the specifics of the UK and US systems, while the latter instead lamented the decline of
legislatures (and the rise of political parties) rather than present a fully developed comparative typology.
(13) . The potential positive impact of negative power is discussed to some degree in that very “viscous”
legislatures are assumed to be able to cajole concessions from the executive during the policy-making process
through the use, or threatened use, of their negative powers (Blondel 1970).
(14) . Polsby notes (p. 130) that the external source is likely to be political parties, but leaves open the possibility
for other actors as well (military, bureaucracy, etc.). He does not, however, examine the role of external political
party organizations in particular, despite noting their clear significance.
(15) . The importance of the internal organizational structures is linked to the role these play in the transformation
of policy, through committee review, amendments, etc. In contrast, the primary function of arena-type legislatures
is the discussion of policy alternatives constructed elsewhere.
(16) . Note that this terminology associated with Arend Lijpart’s ground-breaking work on democracies in plural
societies (1977) was not yet available to Polsby.
(17) . It is this lacuna that the concept of “legislative autonomy” based on both structural and partisan autonomy
(discussed in section 4.4) attempts to correct.
(18) . While the abolition of the legislature is not a particularly relevant threat in established democracies, there are
other tactics that executives can employ to effectively go around legislatures (executive orders and decrees).
(19) . Polsby does this as well when he highlights the importance of external actors for arena-type legislatures
while Mezey credits external support with providing some of the institutional power that allows transformative
legislatures to achieve their full potential.
(20) . See, for example, Olson 1980; Ornstein 1981; Kim, Barkan, Turan, and Jewell 1984; and Copeland and
Patterson 1994.
(21) . It should be highlighted that a great deal of excellent “institutionalist” research on legislatures has been
conducted since this period, but much has been focused either on specific internal characteristics/micro analyses
of legislatures (Döring 1995 is an excellent compendium of such work), or on broader systemic analyses (Lijphart
1999; Tsebelis 2002) rather than focusing on comparative legislatures per se.
(22) . Many who pursue the micro approach and focus on the internal attributes of a legislature are unaware of
Page 13 of 14
Polsby’s original exhortation to look at internal organizational structures to understand the functioning of
transformative-type legislatures, but to focus on external influences on legislative behaviour to understand arena-
type legislatures. As a result there is a tendency to decry the “decline of parliaments” by those seeking a
transformative role from an arena-type legislature.
(23) . Indeed, in many respects linkage and representation matter because citizens want to be connected to and
have their preferences represented in the policy process.
(24) . The interpretation of institutional autonomy used here is similar to, but broader than that used by Fish and
Kroenig (2009).
(25) . The implication of the quadrants is that even the weakest congresses will be more autonomous than the
strongest parliaments.
(26) . These exogenous variables encompass those anticipated to be of significant for “arena”-type legislatures by
Polsby (1975), however, they are important for both congresses and parliaments despite the very different role that
parties are generally assumed to play within these two institutional contexts.
(27) . This differentiation between party in the legislature and party in the electorate can be particularly important,
for example, when the party in the electorate is controlled by party activists (less moderate) and the party in the
legislature is in a coalition—which generally requires compromises that can be unpopular with the party base.
(28) . It should be noted that the two axes are not independent. Fused-powers systems tend to have stronger party
systems with more centralized control of members, but the relationship between the two axes are tendencies
rather than iron laws.
(29) . This is especially possible in systems that have wide variation in the internal organization of political parties.
If some parties have strong control over members while others are less centralized a switch from one party in
government to the other can have a significant impact on the ability of the legislature to act independently. Poland
in the 1990s experienced this type of change as the majority shifted between the highly centralized post-
Communist SLD and the deeply fragmented post-Solidarity AWS.
Amie Kreppel
Amie Kreppel is Jean Monnet Chair (ad personam) and Associate Professor in the Department of Political Science at the University
of Florida.
Page 14 of 14
Roll-Call Analysis and the Study of Legislatures

Royce Carroll and Keith T. Poole
Methodology
2014
Scalingmethods to evaluate the latent dimensions of political behavior and choice have had a substantial impact on
our understanding of the properties of legislative roll-call voting. As interest in spatial models of legislatures has
grown, these methods have been employed to operationalize theories of the role of preferences and ideology in
legislative politics. Scaling procedures and ideal point estimation have enabled the evaluation of the spatial
properties of voting and numerous empirical investigations of spatial theories of politics. With the advent of new
techniques and more computational power, such methods have become even more widespread in comparative
politics. We provide an overview of these methods and applications with a discussion of several challenges and
recent developments in the field.
Keywords: roll-call voting, parliaments, scaling methods, factor analysis, spatial methods, legislatures, US Congress, economic models,
multidimensional scaling method, unfolding method
5.1 Introduction
THE application of spatial models of choice and judgment to measure the behaviour of legislators is built upon
applying statistical procedures that analyse observed data and extract latent (i.e. abstract) dimensions upon which
the objects or subjects can be placed. In political science, scholars are generally interested in policy or ideological
scales using individuals’ judgments or observed voting behaviour. The results of these scales, usually called “ideal
point estimates,” uncover the basic dimensionality of choice behaviour and have the potential to reveal the
underlying latent preferences behind that behaviour. In political contexts, these might be basic differences such as
left-right, liberal-conservative, secular-religious, or regional cleavages that provide a common thread across
numerous policy choices. For legislative scholars, these tools can provide an invaluable means for testing
hypotheses relating to legislators’ preferences or for exploring the basic patterns behind otherwise complex data.
With numerous arguments in the study of legislatures relying on spatial analogies of the policy distances between
political actors, the empirical methods of quantifying distance in legislative behaviour have provided enormous
utility to the field. These methods have become central to the study of the US Congress and as scholars adapt
these methods for comparative purposes they are increasingly important for studies of other legislatures as well.
(p. 104) 5.2 The Evolution of Scaling Techniques and Spatial Analysis
The scaling methods used to analyse roll-call voting mostly originate from research in psychology that was
generally interested in deriving latent properties such as intelligence from patterns of data. The foundational work
in this area was conducted by Charles Spearman (1904) in the form of factor analysis and by Karl Pearson (1901)
in the form of Principle Component Analysis (or eigenvector-eigenvalue decomposition). These techniques were
Page 1 of 19
advanced by L. L. Thurstone who succeeded in developing a method for extracting multiple factors from a
correlation matrix (1931; 1947).1
Parallel to these innovations in statistics were developments in economic models. Hotelling, who also gave principal
components a solid statistical foundation (Hotelling 1933), produced the seminal theoretical work on the stability of
competition, which is now generally recognized as the beginnings of the spatial (geometric) model of voting (1929).
This work later led to the development of the median voter theorem by Black (1948; 1958) and the influential
exploration of its implications for political competition by Downs (1957).
In 1936 the work of Eckart and Young (1936) along with Young and Householder (1938) provided the foundations
for classical multidimensional scaling (MDS), which was developed by Torgerson (1952; 1958). MDS methods are
applied to relational data, such as similarities and preferential choice data that can be regarded as
distances.Multidimensional scaling methods represent measurements of similarity between pairs of stimuli as
distances between points in a low-dimensional (usually Euclidean) space. The methods locate the points in such a
way that points corresponding to very similar stimuli are located close together while those corresponding to very
dissimilar stimuli are located further apart.2 Shepard (1962a; 1962b) developed nonmetric multidimensional scaling
(NMDS) in which distances are estimated that reproduce a weak monotone transformation (or rank ordering) of the
observed dissimilarities.3 Kruskal’s (1964a; 1964b; 1965) monotone regression procedure led to the development
of a powerful and practical nonmetric MDS computer program (Kruskal, Young, and Seery 1973).4
At the same time Guttman (1944; 1950) developed scalogram analysis (Guttman Scaling),whichformsthe basis of
modern Item Response Theory,5 while Clyde Coombs developed unfolding analysis (Coombs 1950; 1952; 1958;
1964) for ranked preference data. In this work, Coombs introduced the idea of an ideal point and a single-peaked
preference function; the purpose of an unfolding analysis was to arrange the individuals’ ideal points and points
representing the stimuli along a scale so that the distances between the ideal points and the stimuli points
reproduced the observed rank orderings.6
By the mid-1950s these techniques began to appear in the work of political scientists interested in legislative
voting. Duncan MacRae’s pathbreaking work on voting in (p. 105) the US Congress (MacRae 1958; 1970) utilized
both factor analysis and scaling methods to analyse correlation matrices computed between roll calls and between
legislators to uncover the dimensional structure of roll-call voting.7 In the 1980s Poole and Rosenthal combined the
random utility model developed by economists (McFadden 1976), the spatial model of voting, and alternating
estimation methods developed in psychometrics (Chang and Carroll 1969; Carroll and Chang 1970; Young, de
Leeuw, and Takane 1976; Takane, Young, and de Leeuw 1977) to develop NOMINATE, an unfolding method for
parliamentary roll-call data (Poole and Rosenthal 1985, 1991; 1997; Poole 2005).
The NOMINATE model is based on the spatial theory of voting.8 Legislators have ideal points in an abstract policy
space and vote for the policy alternative closest to their ideal point. Each roll-call vote has two policy points—one
corresponding to “yea” and one to “nay.” Consistent with the random utility model, each legislator’s utility function
consists of (1) a deterministic component that is a function of the distance between the legislator and a roll-call
outcome; and (2) a stochastic component that represents the idiosyncratic component of utility, which captures
the aspects of voting behaviour that are not explained by the spatial dimension. The deterministic portion of the
utility function is assumed to have a normal distribution and voting is probabilistic. An alternating method is used to
estimate the parameters, meaning that an iterative process alternates between estimation of the ideal points and
the roll-call parameters. Given starting estimates of the legislator ideal points, the roll-call parameters are
estimated. Given these roll-call parameters, new legislator ideal points are estimated, and so on. Classical methods
of optimization are used to estimate the parameters.
As advances in computing power have popularized simulation methods for the estimation of complex multivariate
models, these methods were fused with long-standing psychometric methods. Specifically, Markov Chain Monte
Carlo (MCMC) simulation (Metropolis and Ulam 1949; Hastings 1970; Geman and Geman 1984; Gelfand and Smith
1990; Gelman 1992) within a Bayesian framework (Gelman, Carlin, Stern, and Rubin 2000; Gill 2002) have been
increasingly used to perform an unfolding analysis of parliamentary roll-call data in legislatures and courts,
especially due to the influential work of Martin and Quinn (2002) and Clinton, Jackman and Rivers (2004). The
difference is that estimations are based on sampling from conditional distributions for the legislator and roll-call
parameters using the Gibbs sampler (Geman and Geman 1984; Gelfand and Smith 1990), especially the
Page 2 of 19
implementations by Jackman (2008) and Martin and Quinn (2009). Although not intrinsic to the estimation method,
Bayesian MCMC applications usually use a quadratic deterministic utility function.9
5.3 Spatial Models of Voting
The common thread of all spatial (geometric) models of voting is the notion that a vote is based on the distance
between a respondent’s or legislator’s ideal point and a policy (p. 106) proposal. We focus on the legislative
voting model of binary choice (roll-call voting) because it is the most widely used, but our development below can
be easily extended to mass survey data (ratio scale, rank orders, and nominal data).
An important concept here is the notion of spatial “error.” By error, we simply mean instances of voting that are not
in line with spatial preferences. For instance, if a legislator encounters a proposal that provides disutility relative to
the alternative (the status quo), that voter should vote “nay,” while a legislator should vote “yea” if that proposal is
closer to his or her ideal point. In short, if there were no error of this sort, the legislator would always vote for the
closest alternative in the policy space on every roll call. This results from the fact that the utility function is
symmetric. Let the two policy outcomes corresponding to yea and nay on the jth (j=1,...,q) roll call be represented
by Ojy and Ojn respectively. In most cases it is more convenient to work with the midpoint of the two outcomes:
Ojy + O jn
Zj =
2
In one dimension Zj is known as a cutting point that divides the yeas from the nays. With perfect spatial voting, all
the legislators to the left of Zj vote for one outcome and all the legislators to the right of Zj vote for the opposite
outcome. In two dimensions, a cutting line will divide the yeas and nays.

Fig. 5.1 Perfect spatial voting in one dimension
In one-dimensional perfect roll-call voting both the legislators and the roll-call midpoints are represented by points
—Xi and Zj respectively—and a joint rank ordering of the legislators and roll-call midpoints can be found that
exactly reproduces the roll-call votes (Poole 2005). The process of eigenvector decomposition (described in fn.1)
of the voting pattern in Fig. 5.1, for example, will produce a rank order (from X1 to X6 ) that corresponds to the ideal
points depicted for the legislators.
Page 3 of 19

Fig. 5.2 Example of a cutting line in two dimensions
(p. 107) In two or more dimensional perfect voting a legislator is still represented by a point—the s by 1 vector Xi
where s is the number of dimensions—but a roll call is now represented by a plane that is perpendicular to a line
joining the yea and nay policy points—the s by 1 vectors Ojy and Ojn —and passes through the midpoint, the s by 1
vector Zj. The normal vector to this cutting plane is parallel to the line joining the yea and nay policy points. Fig. 5.2
shows a simple example of 12 legislators in two dimensions, where the cutting line is shown that separates the yea
(Y) and nay (N) voters on a particular proposal with outcomes of Oy if passed and On if defeated. Because each
voter can be separated by this cutting line, this two-dimensional example produces no errors.

Fig. 5.3 Optimal classification coordinates and cutting lines for the sixth EU parliament
In two dimensions, if a variety of voting coalitions form amongst the legislators, then the q cutting lines will criss-
cross one another in a myriad of directions creating a very large number of what are called “polytopes.” With
perfect voting a legislator is only defined up to a polytope. That is, each legislator could be anywhere in the
polytope that corresponds to his or her roll-call choices (Poole 2005). A non-parametric method of unfolding binary
choice data is Optimal Classification (Poole 2000; Poole et al. 2012b), which optimizes cutting-line locations in order
to minimize the number of incorrectly predicted votes (errors). In this method, the coordinates are obtained by
finding their optimal location among the cutting lines that minimizes the number of errors. Fig. 5.3 presents an
example of the process of locating members in two dimensions using this method, and employing data from the
sixth EU Parliament (Hix, Noury, and Roland 2009), with the MEP coordinates and a sample of 100 cutting lines
plotted.10
Page 4 of 19

Fig. 5.4 Cutting line and errors on 1964 Civil Rights Act in the US Senate
If error is present, then the problem of estimating cutting planes is equivalent to a probit or logit analysis depending
upon the assumptions made about the error. The parametric methods of roll-call analysis make use of some form of
assumption about error in order to obtain interval information. As an illustration, Fig. 5.4 presents a spatial map of
the final passage vote of the landmark 1964 Civil Rights Act in the US Senate using (p. 108) DW-NOMINATE. The
left panel shows all the senators and the right panel shows just the five senators who were errors in the DW-
NOMINATE analysis. Each senator’s location in the map is a function of all the roll-calls the senator participated in
during his/her career. The cutting line is specific to the roll-call and divides those senators who are predicted to
vote yea from those who are predicted to vote nay. Those senators who are incorrectly predicted—the “errors”—
are indicated in the right side plot.
The descriptive labels and the relative positions of the party tokens in the map show that a coalition of Republicans
and Northern Democrats voted for the act and a coalition of Southern Democrats and a few Republicans voted
against the act.
The major probabilistic models of parliamentary voting, such as DW-NOMINATE in this example, are based on the
random utility model described above. To recap, in the random utility model a legislator’s overall utility for voting
year is the sum of a deterministic utility and a random error. Drawing on the description in Poole (2005), suppose
there are p legislators, q roll calls, and s dimensions indexed by i=1,...,p, j=1,...,q, and k=1,...,s, respectively.
Legislator i’s utility for the yea outcome on roll call j is:
Uijy = uijy + εijy

(p. 109) where uijy is the deterministic portion of the utility function and εijy is the stochastic portion of the utility
function. If there is no error, then the legislator votes yea if Uijy > Uijn . Equivalently, if the difference, Uijy–Uijn , is
positive, the legislator votes yea. With random error the utility difference is:
Uijy - Uijn = uijy - uijn + ε ijy - εijn
So that the legislator votes yea if:
uijy - uijn > ε ijn - εijy

That is, the legislator votes yea if the difference in the deterministic utilities is greater than the difference between
the two random errors. Since the errors are unobserved, we must make an assumption about the error distribution
from which they are drawn. We can calculate the probability that the legislator will vote yea. That is:
P(Legislator i votes yea) = P(U ijy - Uijn > 0) = P(ε ijn - ε ijy < uijy - uijn )
P(Legislator i votes nay) = P(U ijy - Uijn < 0) = P(ε ijn - ε ijy > uijy - uijn )
So that P(yea)+P(nay) = 1.
(p. 110) Poole and Rosenthal’s NOMINATE (Nominal Three-Step Estimation) model is based on the normal
distribution utility function. The normal distribution concentrates the utility near the individual’s ideal point with tails
that quickly approach zero as the choices become more and more distant.
With the normal distribution utility model, legislator i’s utility for the yea outcome on roll call j is:
∑
s
(− )
ijy = k
Page 5 of 19
∑k=1 wk d2ijky )
s
(− 1
uijy = βe 2
where 2 is the squared distance of the ith legislator to the yea outcome on the kth dimension:
dijky
d2ijky = (Xik − Ojky ) 2
the wk are salience weights (wk> 0); and because there is no natural metric β “adjusts” for the overall noise level
and is proportional to the variance of the error distribution. The wk allow the indifference curves of the utility
function to be ellipses rather than circles.
The difference between the deterministic utilities is:
⎧
⎪ (− 12 ∑ wk d2ijky ) −
s s
(− 1 ∑ wk d2ijky ) ⎫
⎪
= β ⎨e ⎬
2
uijy − uijn
⎩
⎪ ⎭
⎪
k=1 k=1
e
This equation cannot be further simplified. Despite this apparent complexity, it is not difficult to work with
computationally.
With the quadratic distribution deterministic utility model, legislator i’s utility for the yea outcome on roll call j is just:
s
uijy uijy = −d2ijy = − ∑ (Xik − Ojky ) 2
k=1
The difference between the deterministic quadratic utilities is:
s s
uijy − uijn = − ∑ (Xik − Ojky ) 2 + ∑ (Xik − Ojkn ) 2
k=1 k=1
s s
= −2 ∑ Xik (Ojkn − Ojky ) + ∑ (Ojkn − Ojky )(Ojkn + Ojky )
k=1 k=1
(p. 111) This is isomorphic with the two parameter Item Response Model by setting:
⎡ −2(Oj1n − Oj1y ) ⎤
⎢ −2(Oj2n − Oj2y ) ⎥
α = ∑(Ojkn − Ojky )(Ojkn + Ojky ) and βj = ⎢ ⎥
s
⎢
⎢ ⎥
⎥
⎢ ⋮ ⎥
⎣ −2(O − O ) ⎦
k=1
jsn jsy
where βj is an s by 1 vector. This allows the difference between the latent utilities for yea and nay to be written in
the same form as the item response model; namely:
y∗ij = Uijy = Uijn = αj + X′i βj + εij
where yij∗ is the difference between the latent utilities and
εij = εijn − εijy ~ N(0, 1)
This is known as the Quadratic-Normal Model (Poole 2001; 2005). Both the NOMINATE model and the Quadratic-
Normal can be estimated with maximum likelihood (Poole 2005; Poole et al. 2012a).
Page 6 of 19
An alternative to maximum likelihood estimators for spatial voting models is Monte Carlo simulation (Metropolis and
Ulam 1949; Hastings 1970; Geman and Geman 1984; Gelfand and Smith 1990; Gelman 1992), which makes use of
a “random tour” of the parameter space in a Bayesian framework (Jackman 2000a). The random tour involves
recording the probability function at hundreds of thousands or millions of points in the parameter space. From this
process, the shape of the distribution over the parameter space is known with some degree of certainty at the end
of the tour. The means and standard errors of the parameters are calculated based on this information. The
Markov-chain Monte Carlo (MCMC) method used to generate the random tour is computationally intensive, but
produces both estimates of the legislator ideal points and roll-call parameters and measures of uncertainty for
those estimates.
The intuition behind the Bayesian simulation approach can be seen by looking at the simple formulas for conditional
probability. Let θ and Y be two events, then in classical probability theory:
∣ P(θ ∩ Y) ∣ P(θ ∩ Y)
P(θ ∣ Y) = and P(Y∣ θ) =
∣ P(Y) ∣ P(θ)
hence
P(θ ∩ Y) = P(θ| Y)P(Y) = P(Y| θ)P(θ)

(p. 112) And
∣ P(Y|θ)P(θ)
P(θ ∣ Y) =
∣ P(Y)
In the Bayesian framework, Y is the observed data, the θ are the parameters, P(Y |θ) is the likelihood function of the
sample, P(θ) is the prior distribution of the parameters, P(Y) is the marginal distribution of the sample, and P(θ | Y) is
theposterior distribution. Because P(Y) is a constant, the posterior distribution is proportional to the product of the
likelihood function and the prior distribution; that is:
P(θ| Y) ∞ (Y |θ)P(θ)

The researcher specifies the prior distribution of the parameters, P(θ). When this framework is applied to roll call
data, Y is the p by q matrix of choices and θ is the vector of legislator ideal points and roll call parameters.
In the Bayesian NOMINATE model (Carroll et al. 2013) the Likelihood function is:
L (Ojy , Ojn ,X|Y)

where X is the p by s matrix of legislator coordinates, and Ojy and Ojn are q by s matrices. The prior distributions
are all normal distributions so the posterior distribution is:
ξ(Ojy , Ojn ,X|Y) = L(Ojy , Ojn ,X|Y)ξ(O1y )ξ(O1n ) … ξ(Xp )

Similarly, the Posterior distribution for the Bayesian Quadratic Normal (IRT) model is:
ξ(αj , βj ,X∣∣Y)
Each of these models can be estimated using standard MCMC methods (Clinton, Jackman, and Rivers 2004; Carroll
et al. 2009a; Carroll et al. 2013). For the same models, Bayesian estimation generally provides similar estimates to
those of MLE approaches (Carroll et al. 2009a) but the former allows greater flexibility in the use of exogenous
information and a measure of uncertainty obtained via simulations, at the expense of requiring greater
computational resources. In addition, many recent efforts to tailor models to specific problems have made use of
the BUGS language11 for statistical (p. 113) programming which enables the flexible use of Bayesian MCMC
methods (e.g. Clinton and Jackman 2009; Zucco and Lauderdale 2011).
5.4 Seminal Applications of Scaling Methodology in Legislative Studies
As noted earlier, the initial substantive applications of early scaling techniques were applied to the US Congress
Page 7 of 19
(e.g. Clausen and Cheney 1970; Clausen 1973; see Collie 1984 for review). As spatial techniques were developed,
several waves of research emerged employing NOMINATE, notably Poole and Rosenthal’s work identifying the
growing ideological polarization in Congress (1984; recently extended by McCarty, Poole, and Rosenthal 2006)
and the debate surrounding the dimensionality of Congress (Poole 1984; Poole and Rosenthal 1985; Koford 1989;
Wilcox and Clausen 1991). Using the measures made possibly by the DW-NOMINATE dynamic scaling technique,
Poole and Rosenthal (1997) completed a landmark study of the evolution of the American Congressional party
system. This work provided a new understanding of the shifts between the major eras of political, economic, and
social conflict—through the lens of the latent patterns of legislative voting behaviour.
Much of the subsequent development of the method itself has been driven by the desire to derive preference
measures for Congress to operationalize important theories in the field, especially those employing formal spatial
models. Among these questions one of the most prominent has been the relative importance of party, preferences,
and constituency on voting (Levitt 1996; Snyder and Groseclose 2000; Ansolabehere, Snyder, and Stewart 2001;
McCarty, Poole, and Rosenthal 2001; Cox and Poole 2002). Many theorists examining influential Congressional
organization theories have also made use of these preferences measures, including informational and distributive
theories of committees (Londregan and Snyder 1994), “conditional party government” theory (Aldrich and Rhode
1998; Forgette and Sala 1999), “party cartel” theory (Cox and McCubbins 2005), and “pivotal politics” theory
(Krehbeil 1998; Chiou and Rothenberg 2003). Numerous studies have also attempted to distinguish between
partisan and “floor median” control of Congress using scaling techniques (Krehbiel et al. 2005; Clinton 2007; 2011;
Stiglitz and Weingast 2010). Much of this work on parties has extended to applications in the American state
legislatures (Aldrich and Battista 2002; Wright and Shaffner 2003; S. Jenkins 2006; Shor et al. 2010; Carroll and
Eichorst 2013) and historical contexts (J. Jenkins 1999).
With the solidification of scaling methods as a standard tool in the study of Congress, there has been a dramatic
increase in the use of such methods in comparative contexts. Again, many applications have been focused on
identifying the (p. 114) dimensional basis of voting divisions. Hix (2001) and Hix, Noury, and Roland (2006),
provided early and important applications of ideal point estimation to identify the origins for voting cleavages in the
EU Parliament. Similar analyses have examined the key dimensions of voting behaviour in the UN (Voeten 2000;
2004), Korea (Hix and Jun 2009), Ireland (Hansen 2009), the Weimar Republic (Hansen and Debus 2011), Canada
(Godbout and Hoyland 2011), Switzerland (Hug and Schulz 2007), and the Czech Republic (Lyons and Lacina
2009). Rosenthal and Voeten (2004), focusing on the French Fourth Republic, employ Optimal Classification to
exploit its appropriateness for situations of “perfect” spatial voting (that is, low rates of spatial voting “error”) which
is especially common in chambers with high levels of party unity. Others have employed some form of spatial
analysis method to assess the basis of voting blocs in legislative data in cases such as Argentina (Jones, Hwang,
and Micozzi 2009), Chile (Morgenstern 2004; Alemán and Saiegh 2007), Brazil and Uruguay (Morgenstern 2004),
France (Sauger 2009), Hungary (Ágh 1999), Denmark (Hansen 2008), Russia (Bagashka 2008), and the EU Council
(Hagemann 2007; Hagemann and Hoyland 2008).
Parallel to the studies of Congress built around testing formal and informal spatial and ideological arguments,
numerous recent comparative studies have used ideal point estimates to measure policy preferences of individual
legislators to allow testing of hypotheses requiring a proxy measure for ideological preference information. These
applications have been employed to examine questions such as the reasons for switching parties in Brazil
(Desposato 2006), legislative organization theory in Russia (Myagkov and Kiewiet 1996) and Italy (Curini and
Zucchini 2010), and the role of ideology in legislative voting in Brazil (Zucco 2009) and the UK (Kam 2001;
Schonhardt-Bailey 2003). Jones and Hwang (2005) use ideal point estimation as part of their extension of Cox and
McCubbins’ (1993) cartel theory to the Argentine Congress.
5.5 Trends, Extensions, and Improvements
Among the most important extensions to empirical spatial models are those addressing the issue of comparability
across time. One such challenge is to make ideal points comparable across time by constraining them to a
common scale. The most well-known approach of this sort is the DW-NOMINATE model (Poole and Rosenthal 1997)
which constrains ideal points to be a polynomial function of time. An alternative approach has made use of
“bridge” observations across time (Bailey 2007), such that voters in different time periods are treated as having
voted on the same issues.
Page 8 of 19
A second major concern of researchers, so far mainly in the US context but relevant elsewhere, has been
establishing comparability between legislators in different chambers. One approach to this is to make use of the
common members between two or more (p. 115) chambers to unify the roll-call data, an approach taken by Poole
(1998), Bailey (2007), and Battista et al. (2013). Another approach in the same vein is to rescale coordinates
based on a common metric, an approach taken by Shor, Berry, and McCarty (2010) in their work designed to place
US State legislators on a common scale. Bridging techniques also allow other institutions and actors to be
considered on the same scale as legislators, as has been done in the case of US presidents (e.g. McCarty and
Poole 1995; Bailey and Chang 2001; Bailey 2007; Treier 2011).
Another issue of particular concern for comparative applications is the matterof abstentions. Since abstentions are
numerous in many chambers outside Congress, questions of how abstentions should be treated have led to the
application of multichotomous choice models (e.g. Rosas and Shomer 2008).
Finally, a major source of innovation recently in the broader genre of preference measures has been the
application of these methods to data sources other than roll-call votes. These range from analogous alternatives
such as early day motions in the UK (Kellermann 2012) to data with very different properties such as legislative co-
sponsorship (Talbert and Potoski 2003; Alemán et al. 2009; Desposato, Kearney, and Crisp 2011; Calvo and
Sagarzazu 2011; Barnes 2012), speech (Proksch and Slapin 2008; Bernauer and Bräuninger 2009), and other
sources of data with valuable choice information (e.g. Hix and Crombez 2005). Co-sponsorship, in particular, has
been a source of interest for the closely related method of network analysis (Fowler 2006; Alemán 2009).
5.6 Problems and Issues with Scaling Techniques
Although it is a widespread practice to use ideal point estimates as a form of raw data processed through
subsequent statistical analysis, both as independent and dependent variables, it is important to note that
underlying each estimate is a stochastic process that ideally should be taken into account for many applications.
One initial limitation of estimation via the NOMINATE model on this front, and an attraction of Bayesian estimators,
was the lack of reliable measures of uncertainty for the ideal point estimates (see Poole and Rosenthal 1997). Such
uncertainty estimates are often important in establishing the statistical meaning in the difference between the ideal
points of different voters or between those of the same voter across time. This was addressed in the NOMINATE
framework through use of the parametric bootstrap (Lewis and Poole 2004; Carroll et al. 2009b; Poole et al. 2011),
providing standard errors to enable statistical tests of the difference between legislator points.
For all parametric methods, a significant issue persists in obtaining reliable interval information for ideal points—that
is, a meaningful basis for cardinal distances between legislators’ ideal points. Although the recovery of rank orders
has proven extremely (p. 116) robust via numerous methods, the meaning of the distance between points
remains an area of substantial concern. In particular, with low levels of error, there is no basis for the recovery of
interval-level parameter estimates in spatial (geometric) models of parliamentary voting. This problem is especially
severe for the legislators that would be interpreted as “extreme.” An inherent problem of probabilistic estimators is
the issue of “errorless” voting by a legislator at the exterior of the preference dimension—those at the exterior of
the policy space—which is particularly problematic in smaller chambers (such as committees or courts) where
these constitute a larger proportion of the membership. Errorless voting is often better assessed through the non-
parametric method of Optimal Classification (Rosenthal and Voeten 2004), although this method lacks the
uncertainty measures available in other methods (Poole 2005).
Perhaps the greatest limitation for the spatial analysis of roll-call data is simply the degree to which the data fit the
assumptions of the model. For researchers aiming to obtain a measure of preferences, roll-call votes are only as
useful as the underlying process by which they are generated. Despite the wide acceptance of the face validity of
data generated from US Congressional voting, in some cases roll calls simply do not contain information on the
sincere preferences of individual legislators and are not useful for such applications. Thus, scholars can fruitfully
apply these methods only with deep knowledge of the meaning behind the input data. While scaling methods can
always identify latent dimensions of difference among legislators, what these differences represent may vary
dramatically from case to case. Hence one cannot assume comparability between the type of information
uncovered in any two legislative environments.
In situations where strategic voting is widespread—where voting is motivated by factors unrelated to one’s
Page 9 of 19
preferences regarding the content of the policies under consideration—one cannot assume that the variation in the
data can be reasonably interpreted as reflecting the preferences of individual legislators. For instance, in systems
with very high party discipline, defections may not be directly a function of preferences and therefore will not
provide reliable preference information on the individuals within the party (Spirling and McLean 2007; Spirling
2010). Of course, behaviour in such cases may nevertheless provide meaningful information on group-level
preferences or on the position-taking strategies involved with these voting decisions.
Another widespread challenge for interpreting the meaning of ideal point estimates occurs when there is a biased
selection mechanism for determining which votes occur (e.g. Carrubba et al. 2006; Carrubba, Gabel, and Hug
2008; Hug 2010; see also Clinton and Lapinski 2008). Without choice data that provides information distinguishing
legislators on issues where they disagree, no technique can uncover differences in underlying preferences—even
if the voting itself reflects those preferences.
Perhaps the broadest and most obvious limitation on further expanding the traditional application of spatial models
of choice is the lack of recorded voting data. Many countries do not record roll-call votes in significant numbers at
the individual level (Carey 2009). As a result, there has been a growing interest in alternative inputs that meet the
needs of researchers looking for measures of policy preferences (e.g. Saiegh (p. 117) 2009). Hence, the family
of scaling methods discussed will continue to be applied to legislative environments far beyond the existence and
reliability of roll-call data. Of course, for studies intending to explain voting behaviour itself, issues regarding
limitations in the selection of recorded votes must be addressed directly.
5.7 Conclusion
Spatial methods of analysing choice data have made an enormous contribution to our understanding of
legislatures. Beyond the countless studies dealing with the US Congress, numerous quantitative analyses of state
legislatures and assemblies outside the US have been enabled by applying spatial methods to roll-call data.
However, substantial limitations exist in our ability to export standard interpretations of ideal point estimates derived
from the work on the US Congress. This does not mean spatial roll-call analysis cannot provide useful information in
most contexts, but each application must fundamentally reassess the meaning of these measures. Doing so
requires a thorough evaluation of the numerous variables leading up to the choice in question before one chooses
to interpret the data through a spatial model. That, in turn, means acquiring deep knowledge of the processes and
norms of the legislatures we study.
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Notes:
(1) . See Poole (2008), on which this section draws, for a thorough review of this work.
(2) . The method is as follows. First, transform the observed similarities/dissimilarities into squared distances. (For
example, if the matrix is a Pearson correlation matrix subtract all the entries from 1 and square the result.) Next,
double-centre the matrix of squared distances by subtracting from each entry in the matrix the mean of the row,
the mean of the column, adding the mean of the matrix, and then dividing by -2. This has the effect of removing the
squared terms from the matrix leaving just the cross-product matrix (see Gower 1966). Finally, perform an
eigenvalue-eigenvector decomposition to solve for the coordinates.
(3) . Graphing the “true” (that is, the estimated or reproduced) distances—the d’s—versus the observed
dissimilarities—the δ’s—revealed the relationship between them. This became known as the “Shepard diagram.”
(4) . This became known as KYST. Later de Leeuw (1977; 1988) and de Leeuw and Heiser (1977) modernized KYST
with the SMACOF algorithm.
(5) . It is a set of items (questions, problems, etc.) that is ranked in order of difficulty so that those who answer
correctly (agree) on a more difficult (or extreme) item will also answer correctly (agree) will all less difficult
(extreme) items that preceded it.
(6) . Both unfolding analysis and scalogram analysis deal with individuals’ responses to a setof stimuli. But whereas
unfolding analysis assumes a single-peaked (usually symmetric) utility function, Guttman scaling and IRT models
are based on a utility function that is always monotonically increasing or decreasing over the relevant dimension or
space. Yet, these models are observationally equivalent in the binary choice context typical of parliamentary
voting (Weisberg 1968; Poole 2005).
(7) . See Cromwell (1982; 1985) for similar applications on divisions in the UK parliament, Best (1982; 1995) for
applications to parliaments in Europe. See Broach (1972) and Harmel and Hamm (1986) for early applications to US
state legislatures and Collie (1984) for a broad review of later work.
(8) . See Poole (2005), on which this section draws for a more extensive discussion of these models.
(9) . With a quadratic deterministic utility function the simple item response model (Rasch 1961) is mathematically
equivalent to the basic spatial model if legislators have quadratic utility functions with additive random error (Ladha
1991; Londregan 2000; Clinton, Jackman, and Rivers 2004). This has the effect of making the estimation quite
straightforward as it boils down to a series of linear regressions.
(10) . Shapes vary by party group as follows, European People’s Party–European Democrats (EPP–ED), Party of
European Socialists (SOC). Alliance of Liberals and Democrats for Europe (ALDE), Union for Europe of the Nations
(UEN), the Greens–European Free Alliance (G/EFA), European United Left–Nordic Green Left (EUL/NGL),
Independence/Democracy (IND/DEM).
Page 18 of 19
(11) . See Lunn et al. (2000). See Armstrong et al. (2014) for an overview of these and other software
implementations.
Royce Carroll
Royce Carroll is Assistant Professor of Political Science at Rice University.
Keith T. Poole
Keith T. Poole is Philip H. Alston Distinguished Chair and Professor of Political Science at the University of Georgia.
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Words as Data
Words as Data: Content Analysis in Legislative Studies

Jonathan B. Slapin and Sven-Oliver Proksch
Methodology
2014
Legislatures in democratic countries generate tons of documents ranging from draft bills to amendments to bills,
adopted legislation, committee reports, and transcripts of floor debates. Sifting through the entire legislative record
is a challenging task. Thanks to the advent of digital technology, parliamentary records can now be stored in easily
searchable on-line databases, making them more accessible to researchers and available for large-scale data
analysis. Moreover, political scientists can use these documents to study representation, party politics, policy-
making, and legislative behavior. This chapter examines recent technological advances that have allowed
scholars to analyze the vast amounts of textual data produced by legislatures year in and year out. It
describescontent analysis, focusing on recent approaches that treat “words as data.” It also considers some
important applications to comparative study of political parties and legislatures and discusses the challenges faced
by scholars moving forward before concluding with a look at the continuing trends in the field.
Keywords: parliamentary records, party politics, policy-making, legislative behavior, textual data, legislatures, content analysis, political parties
6.1 Introduction
EVERY year, democratic legislatures produce reams upon reams of documents. The stack of paper includes draft
bills, amendments to bills, committee reports, transcripts of floor debates, parliamentary questions, reports of
special investigations, adopted legislation, and press releases. Until recently most of this material went unexplored,
largely due to the daunting task of compiling it into a useable format and the lack of appropriate content analytic
techniques. Sifting through the entire legislative record without the appropriate tools would be a fool’s errand.
Instead, legislative studies have been largely confined to the analysis of roll-call votes—a small, but relatively
easily defined and collected portion of the legislative record. As parliamentary records have gone electronic, with
parliaments storing documents in easily searchable on-line databases, their content has become more accessible
to researchers and available for large-scale data analysis. Advances in computing power, machine learning
techniques, and statistical methods have allowed researchers to develop tools to extract systematic meaning from
the large corpus of text that legislatures produce.
Taken together, these advances have enabled political scientists to take advantage of this treasure trove of data
to study representation, party politics, policy-making, and legislative behaviour. Over the last decade, advances in
content analysis techniques have led to an improved understanding of party politics and legislative behaviour, as
researchers have been able to explore previously unanswerable questions. We begin by describing content
analysis, in particular recent approaches that treat “words as data,” describe some important applications to
comparative legislative studies, and then move (p. 127) on to discuss the variety of challenges scholars face
moving forward. Lastly, we summarize the continuing trends in the field.
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Words as Data
6.2 Words as Data: Classical Content Analysis
Kimberly Neuendorf describes content analysis as “the systematic, objective, quantitative analysis of message
characteristics” (Neuendorf 2002, 1). The goal of content analysis is to extract meaningful content from an entire
corpus of text in a systematic way. To do so effectively, scholars must analyse texts relevant to the research
questions they wish to answer, consider the actors and processes that produced these texts, consider the
techniques to analyse the content of texts, and consider what can be learned from the analysis.
Content analysis has a long history in the social science and communications literature. It was originally used to
explore trends of foreign policy coverage in newspapers, and during the Second World War, it was used as an
intelligence tool to gain information about changes in German policy, especially toward the Soviet Union. Following
the Second World War, political scientists, sociologists, and communications scholars took up content analysis to
study electoral campaigns and media, among other topics (for a detailed history, see Krippendorff 2004). Today,
legislative scholars in political science, in particular, use content analytic techniques to learn about the nature of
party ideology (e.g. Budge et al. 2001; Laver, Benoit, and Garry 2003; Slapin and Proksch 2008; Schonhardt-Bailey
2008), representation (e.g. Martin 2011; Grimmer 2011), issue salience (e.g. Quinn et al. 2010), or the ideological
leaning of news media (e.g. Groseclose and Milyo 2005), to name just a few of the many possible applications. Most
of the work in these areas can be classified as quantitative content analysis, in which researchers turn words into
numbers—they may look at the overall length of texts, or classify or scale documents based on word counts or
sentences. This is in contrast with qualitative approaches, which typically involve reading all documents and
offering a synthesis or interpretation of their content.
Before the advent of computer-aided techniques, quantitative content analysis often involved physically measuring
the length of text (i.e. taking a ruler to the front page of a newspaper), counting headlines, or manually classifying
large quantities of text using human coders, a very labour- and time-intensive process (see Krippendorff 2004, 5–
9). In recent years, quantitative content analysis has been greatly aided by advances in computer science,
statistics, and machine learning techniques. It has become much easier to parse documents into words and
sentences, count these units, and extract meaning from their relative frequencies across documents. Of course,
computer-based content analysis is not without its problems (and, naturally, its critics). We explore the various (p.
128) advantages and disadvantages of using computers to machine read and extract meaning from texts below,
specifically with regard to legislative and party documents.
6.3 Content Analysis and the Comparative Study of Parties and Legislatures
Legislative scholars use content analysis to examine at least seven features of legislatures: party ideology and
polarization, government positioning, parliamentary scrutiny, constituency-based representation, policy agenda,
quality of debate, and the role of media. Table 6.1 lists these themes together with their main approaches, core
assumptions, requirements, typical data sources, and examples.
Table 6.1 Examples of Content Analysis Approaches to the Study of Legislatures
Approach Assumption Requirements Data Example
Party Ideology
Wordscores Word counts reflect ideological References Party Laver,

differences given that words in texts and manifestos, Benoit, and
reference texts constitute relevant reference parliamentary Garry
dictionary, word meanings are constant scores speeches (2003)
Wordfish Ideology is latent and documents can Identical data- Party Slapin and
be scaled, word counts reflect generating manifestos, Proksch
ideological differences, word meanings mechanism parliamentary (2008)
are constant across speeches
documents
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Words as Data
Manifesto Policy priorities reflect ideological Coding scheme, Party Budge et al.
Project differences, identical coding scheme human coders manifestos or (2001)
(CMP) applicable across countries and time equivalent
Government Positioning
Hand coding Policy priorities in governmental Coding scheme, Governmental Budge et al.
declarations reflect ideological human coders declarations, (2001)
differences, identical coding scheme coalition
applicable across countries and time agreements
Policy Agenda
Document Parliamentary speeches or press Number of Parliamentary Quinn et al.

classification releases reflect latent political priorities topics needs to speeches, (2010),
and topic be chosen party press Grimmer
modeling releases (2010)
Oversight and Parliamentary Scrutiny
Speech Longer parliamentary speeches of Parliamentary Martin and

length coalition parties reflect partisan speeches Vanberg
positioning (2008b)
Bill changes Number of successful article changes in Government Martin and

bills reflect more intense coalition bills Vanberg
partner monitoring (2005,
2011)
Bill length Proxy for legislative constraints on the Legislative Huber and
bureaucracy Proxy for complexity database Shipan
(2002)
Maltzman
and Shipan
(2008)
Constituency Representation
Geography- Geography-based references in Dictionary, Parliamentary Martin

based questions reflect constituency human coders questions (2011)
dictionary representation
Positions of Media and Legislators
Citation Legislators and media outlets cite think List of think Newspaper Grosclose
patterns of tanks according to their ideological tanks articles, and Milyo
think tanks positions parliamentary (2005)
speeches
Quality of
Debate
Discourse Speeches can be coded according to Coding scheme, Parliamentary Steiner et
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Words as Data
Discourse Speeches can be coded according to Coding scheme, Parliamentary Steiner et

analysis level of persuasion, justification, or human coders speeches al. (2004)
respect
6.3.1 Ideology
In the vast majority of multiparty democracies, political parties publish manifestos during parliamentary election
campaigns. Typically written by the party leadership, manifestos outline the party’s program for government should
it get elected, and structure the party’s election campaign. Perhaps the most ambitious content analysis research
program in political science is the hand-coding of these party manifestos by the Manifesto Project (Budge et al.
1987; 2001; Klingemann et al. 2006). Formerly known as the Manifesto Research Group and later as the
Comparative Manifestos Project (CMP), the project examines party manifestos and government declarations, and
the resulting estimates of party ideology and government positions produced by the project have been used in
countless studies of legislative behaviour, coalition formation, policy-making, and representation (e.g. Martin and
Stevenson 2001; Adams et al. 2006, 2011; Bawn and Rosenbluth 2006; Walgrave and Nuytemans 2009;
Lipsmeyer and Pierce 2011; McDonald and Budge 2005; Warwick 2011). The project attempts to uncover the
salient dimensions of party competition in a comparative manner across advanced, industrialized democracies.
The fundamental notion of party competition guiding the project “was that parties argued with each other by
emphasizing different policy priorities rather than by directly confronting each other on the same issues” (Budge et
al. 2001, 6–7). The assumption that policy priorities reflect ideological differences has been referred to as a
salience theory of party competition. To capture voters, parties tend to arrive at similar positions on the various
issues (e.g. everyone has to agree that environmental protection is good—no one wants to compete on a platform
of environmental degradation). However, some parties are perceived as being “better” on some issues than others
—Green parties are more credible on issues of the environment than liberal parties, while liberal parties are more
credible on business issues. (p. 129) (p. 130) (p. 131) During election campaigns, parties emphasize the
issues they are perceived to “own” and ignore others.
The CMP coding scheme seeks to capture this facet of party competition. The project sorts each sentence of each
manifesto into one of 56 categories. Most of the categories are positive in nature (e.g. positive mentions of the
environment on the theory that parties do not make negative mentions of the environment). Thus, the coding
scheme captures the relative emphasis a party gives to any one category over the other categories. The goal is to
create a single coding scheme valid across countries and time. The most recent iteration of the project coded
1,314 manifestos written by 651 parties over 185 elections in 51 countries (Budge et al. 2006). Each manifesto is
coded by hand—each sentence (or quasi-sentence) is read by a researcher and placed into one of the 56
categories (or remains uncoded if it is deemed to fit none of the categories). The end result of the coding process
is the percentage of each manifesto falling into each category. These percentages can then be aggregated to
produce general left-right party position scales or scales on other policy dimensions (Laver and Budge 1992; Lowe
et al. 2011). In recent years, the CMP has been subject to trenchant critiques. The reading and coding of these
manifestos is very labour-intensive and prone to inconsistencies, which the CMP does not sufficiently account for
(Mikhaylov et al. 2012), and the manual coding protocol does not account for uncertainty in the text generation
process (Benoit et al. 2009). Moreover, it is not clear the rigid coding scheme that was devised in the 1980s can be
applied in the same way across time and across countries as the manifesto project assumes (Benoit and Laver
2007).
To alleviate some of these problems, researchers have attempted to harness the power of computers to extract
positions from text. The first attempts to use computers to categorize political texts (and party manifestos in
particular) generated dictionaries of words representing a particular ideology, generally culled from manifestos
themselves, and then used computers to count the number of times the words in the dictionary appeared in any
other given document of interest (Laver and Garry 2000). Laver, Benoit, and Garry (2003) built on this framework
to create an automated technique for estimating ideology from manifestos, or any other political text. In creating
Wordscores they developed a technique to compare word counts in reference documents that are carefully
chosen by the researcher to word counts in documents of interest (virgin documents in the parlance of Laver,
Benoit, and Garry). Based on the relation between the relative frequency of words in the reference documents (and
the reference scores assigned to them to anchor the political space) and relative frequency of words in the
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Words as Data
documents of interest, the documents of interest are placed in a one-dimensional policy space. The assumption is
that the relative frequency with which parties use words tells researchers something about their latent positions in
a policy space. This technique has been applied successfully to examine legislative behaviour and party positions
using as data both party manifestos (e.g. Proksch and Slapin 2006; Debus 2009) and parliamentary speeches (e.g.
Giannetti and Laver 2005; Hakhverdian 2009; Klemmensen et al. 2007; Bernauer and Bräuninger 2009).
(p. 132) However, its use has also raised some issues and concerns. First, scholars are tempted to use it as a
method for estimating long time-series, but the question of how one chooses reference texts to create comparisons
over time is not clear, and the choices one makes with regard to reference texts and positions can greatly affect
the analysis (Budge and Pennings 2007). Second, the original transformation of word scores into document scores
yields estimates of virgin text positions and reference texts on a different and incomparable scale. As a result,
there has been some controversy over the best way to transform the virgin text scores to make them comparable
with the reference texts (Lowe 2008; Martin and Vanberg 2008a; Laver and Benoit 2008). Lastly, the choice of
reference texts is particularly important when attempting to estimate positions on different policy dimensions.
Laver, Benoit, and Garry proposed to use all text in the manifestos in both the virigin and reference documents and
to estimate new word scores simply by changing the reference values assigned to the reference documents
without changing the actual text input. This means, however, that one poorly chosen reference text or reference
value can drastically change the results. In the extreme, the estimated dimension might not be related at all to the
dimension of interest since the reference texts do not contain language that discriminates on this dimension.
More recent work has attempted to estimate the ideology of parties and individual legislators without relying on
dictionaries or reference documents (e.g. Monroe and Maeda 2004; Slapin and Proksch 2008; Proksch and Slapin
2010). Slapin and Proksch (2008) present and estimate a parametric scaling model called Wordfish to place
documents in a one-dimensional space based solely on relative word frequencies. Rather than taking advantage of
information contained in reference documents, as Wordscores does, Wordfish assumes word frequencies within
documents are driven by a statistical model (namely that they are Poisson distributed), and are the result of
underlying latent policy positions that can be estimated. The technique is thus applicable in instances where
finding reference texts is difficult. To estimate positions on policy dimensions, the authors have proposed to apply
the scaling model to relevant sections of the manifesto. Identifying those sections can be done manually as the
manifestos are often structured into policy-specific paragraphs. However, this only works for broad policy
dimensions (Proksch and Slapin 2008). Alternatively, scholars can rely on keywords from legislative databases that
clearly identify policy dimensions to tag relevant sentences in the manifesto (König et al. 2010). Independent of the
approach chosen, the important point is that policy dimensions are defined a priori and on substantive grounds.
As the approach is unsupervised and relies on the available data without requiring reference documents or a
dictionary, the demands for data quality are quite high. If one wishes to estimate ideology from a set of documents,
the principal purpose of the authors in writing the documents must have been to express a particular ideology. In
particular, the Wordfish technique (and Wordscores, too, for that matter) best picks up ideological differences
between documents when the data-generating process allows authors to emphasize or de-emphasize any issue
they want. Researchers need to keep this in mind when applying the methods off-the-shelf. In particular, agenda
effects may impact the estimation. Agenda effects may exist over time if politicians or parties use a (p. 133)
different vocabulary to express ideology in different time periods, something that seems natural over long time
periods but may not be as problematic over shorter ones. For example, parties may change how they express their
positions on environmental regulation as new environmental problems arise. Whereas clean air or water standards
may be the dominant theme in one decade, issues concerning global climate change may prevail in another. Thus,
changes in the policy agenda over a long time period may alter the use of language for this policy domain in a way
that distinguishes all parties in one decade quite well from those in the previous decade. Such differences,
however, could be simply a function of the changing topics within the policy domain, and not the result of an
underlying change in party positions on environmental regulation. Long time-series analysis of political text
therefore pose particular challenges that must be taken into consideration.
Agenda effects can also occur when politicians must use the same vocabulary to talk about very specific issues. In
such an instance, the agenda is pre-determined and parties or their members are not free to emphasize or de-
emphasize issues as they can in a manifesto. For example, this may be problematic in parliamentary debates,
where the topic of the debate is predetermined (and procedural language is more common than in manifestos).
Finally, agenda effects may occur when researchers mix different types of documents that do not follow the same
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Words as Data
data-generating process. In this instance, the principal dimension extracted from the text data may simply reflect
the different data generating processes rather than different ideologies. In short, techniques such as Wordfish or
Wordscores have the potential to estimate positions for large collections of political text documents, but
researchers should be aware of the assumptions behind these techniques in applied work.
6.3.2 Policy Agenda
Certainly not all content analysis in legislatures is aimed at estimating party or legislator positions, or relies upon
party manifestos as data. An emerging field of research examines the topics of the policy agenda as expressed in
legislative speeches or other text data such as blogs and press releases. Often, these techniques make use of so-
called topic models to identify latent themes in the text corpus (e.g. Quinn et al. 2010; Grimmer 2010). Quinn et al.,
for example, explore the policy agenda of the US Senate. They uncover 42 latent topics and examine how
attention to these topics vary over time, demonstrating that their measure tracks with the Senate’s voting agenda,
but unveils more nuanced information about the Senate’s attention to various issues. Moreover, they present
models to explain why Senators participate in debate on the latent topics they estimate. They consistently find
Senators speak more often on topics when they serve on a relevant committee, however committee chairs do not
tend to speak more than other committee members. In addition, ideological extremists tend to speak more,
specifically on controversial topics such as judicial affairs, labour policy, taxes, and the budget. Topic models can
therefore provide interesting insights into the operations of (p. 134) legislatures and representation. The models
are unsupervised, and like text scaling models, require the researcher to interpret the estimates ex post. Another
requirement for topic models is that researchers need to set the number of latent topics. This may not always be a
straightforward task, given that important topics may stay undetected if the number is too small, and be artificial if
the number is set too high.
6.3.3 Beyond Policy and Ideology: Oversight, Representation, and the Media
The use of content analysis in legislative scholarship has expanded beyond ideology and political attention to
fields as varied as representation, oversight, and the media. Other work, for example, has examined bills to study
oversight or the stability of laws. Huber and Shipan (2002) examine legislative oversight of the bureaucracy by
looking at the length of bills, assuming that longer bills place greater limits on what bureaucrats can do. To achieve
cross-national comparison, they standardize the page formatting of bills and account for linguistic differences by
applying a verbosity multiplier capturing the efficiency of different languages. Their underlying theoretical notion is
that greater policy conflict in the legislature may lead to more discretion for bureaucrats. Therefore, legislators
write more detailed (i.e. longer) bills to prevent agency loss when delegating powers to the bureaucracy. Maltzman
and Shipan (2008), in contrast, use page length of legislation as a measure of law-specific complexity. They use
this measure to test the hypothesis that complex laws are more likely to be amended in the future. Thus, in these
instances bill length serves as a proxy for both detail and complexity, which may or may not be related. One could
have a very complex, but vague law covering many different areas, or a bill of similar length that is narrowly
focused, but highly detailed. More research on the full text of legislation seems desirable, but it is ultimately very
difficult. Bills are of a highly technical nature, their legal language does not compare well to position statements by
politicians, and the significance of bills is likely independent of their length.
Other recent work on parliamentary oversight has focused on how members of parliament scrutinize government
behaviour by examining parliamentary questions (Proksch and Slapin 2011) and speech (Martin and Vanberg
2008b) rather than bill length. Proksch and Slapin find that members of the European Parliament from national
opposition parties use their institutional position at the European level to gather information and scrutinize their
home government’s behaviour. Martin and Vanberg focus on legislative speech to examine how parties in coalition
governments make use of backbenchers to keep tabs on their coalition partners and highlight differences between
the partners.
Scholars have also turned to content analysis to examine the connection between MPs and their constituents.
Martin (2011) uses parliamentary questions to measure constituency service, while Grimmer (2010) presents a
topic model to understand how US senators use press releases to connect with voters. Martin, together with a team
of research assistants, hand-coded approximately 124,000 questions asked in the Irish Dáil between (p. 135)
1997 and 2002 to determine whether they addressed local issues. He finds that about 44 percent of all questions
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Words as Data
asked in the Dáil have a local, constituency service focus. Grimmer (2010), in contrast, uses a Bayesian
hierarchical topic model to examine how senators explain their work in Washington to their constituents. Grimmer’s
modified topic model takes into account the hierarchical structure of press releases issued by representatives
(thus, political statements constitute the lower level and authors the higher level). He applies this model to estimate
the issues senators emphasize in communication with their constituents. On the basis of the estimates of the
expressed agenda, he shows that committee leaders in the US Senate pay more attention to issues in their policy
jurisdiction than the average senator and that the senators from the same state tend to have a more similar
expressed agenda than senators from other states.
Other work by Groseclose and Milyo (2005) examine US Congress speeches and media reports for references to
think tanks. They use these think-tank citations as bridging observations to locate the media in the same
ideological space as members of Congress to assess the presence of media bias. The underlying notion is that
members of Congress receive higher utility when citing think tanks that hold a similar ideology to them, as do
journalists. Their evidence suggests that there is a left-wing bias in the mainstream American press compared with
the median member of Congress.
Lastly, other content analytic work approaches legislative speeches from a deliberative politics perspective. Rather
than estimate ideology or representation, the goal of this work is to examine the quality of debate as captured by
levels of persuasion, justification, or respect, and relies on hand-coding of a number of selected speeches (Steiner
et al. 2004; Bächtiger, this volume). The argument for this procedure is that higher quality debates lead to better
democracy.
6.4 Issues in Content Analysis
While advances in access to legislative documents and content analytic techniques have certainly pushed
legislative studies forward, there are issues of research design to which anyone using content analysis must
attend. First, and foremost, researchers typically employ content analysis to measure latent variables—variables
that are not directly observed and can only be indirectly measured through indicators. Party ideology, for example,
is a latent variable. The researcher can never directly observe a party’s ideology. Instead, the researcher may
observe indicators, such as the content of speeches made by party leaders in parliament, the direction of votes
cast by party MPs, answers by party supporters to issue questions in surveys, and so on. From these indicators,
the researcher infers the ideological stance of the party. Even this is not so simple, as it involves decisions
regarding the dimensionality of the policy space, which itself is latent (Benoit and Laver 2006). When examining the
indicators of party ideology (typically extracted from documents via some form of content analysis) how much
information should be maintained? Is it desirable to boil down all the information to a single, general dimension? (p.
136) Or is it more desirable to estimate positions separately for economic, social,and foreign policy dimensions?
Researchers must address these important questions before even starting to measure the positions of parties or
MPs.
Any attempt to measure such latent concepts must take into account the validity and reliability of the proposed
measure. Validity refers to the degree to which the given measure captures the nature of the underlying latent
concept, and is often thought of as the (lack of) bias. Because the concept we wish to measure is latent, there is
no direct way to assess validity. Instead, researchers typically assess validity by comparing two or more different
measures of the same latent concept, in the hope that they correlate, or even better they agree (see Mikhaylov,
Benoit, and Laver 2012 for a discussion of the difference between correlation and agreement). Alternatively,
researchers examine construct validity by asking whether the indicators they are using are theoretically related to
the underlying concept they wish to measure. When choosing documents to content analyse, researchers must be
concerned with construct validity. Were the documents written in such a way as to provide information about the
underlying concept of interest? If one is interested in measuring ideology, for example, it probably makes more
sense to content analyse MPs’ floor speeches, in which researchers can reasonably assume MPs express their
positions with regard to legislation, than to analyse MPs’ Twitter statements, in which they may issue brief
comments on current events, but not necessarily on current legislation.
These questions of validity suggest that researchers must pay careful attention to the strategic environment that
produced the texts they wish to analyse. They must carefully examine the data generating process behind the
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Words as Data
texts. If a researcher wishes to use legislative speeches to examine party ideology, he or she must carefully
consider why it is that legislators give speeches, and what pressures they face when they do so. Are they
attempting to communicate with their constituents, their fellow party members, or members of other parties? To
what extent does their party leadership control what they say on the floor, or even control their access to the
floor? The audience and degree of party pressure will determine the content of the speech, and the extent to which
the speech captures the legislator’s own ideological position versus the position of some other group (e.g. the
party or the constituency). Alternatively, speeches may not be about ideology at all, but may instead provide an
opportunity to talk about constituency service and the government funds the legislator has brought back to the
district or simply to criticize the government’s policy decisions. In this instance, analysing speeches may provide
information about the importance of pork-barrel politics and about the difference between government and
opposition MPs, but not about a particular ideological stance. In other words, it is impossible to extract information
from a document that the document was not meant to convey. Proksch and Slapin (2012) argue, for example, that
institutional constraints and electoral considerations greatly affect who may give a speech on the floor of
parliament and the content of their message. Unless researchers account for the strategic nature of speech when
performing content analysis, they will not have a valid measure of the latent concept they wish to capture. This is
why party manifestos have proved so useful when trying to capture party ideology. They (p. 137) are written with
the aim to present the party’s primary ideological program in the midst of electoral competition. The data-
generating process is clearly related to the latent variable researchers wish to measure.
Relatedly, researchers must be concerned with issues of reliability. A reliable method is one that produces the
same result each time the analysis is conducted, and is related to the statistical concept of precision (the inverse
of the variance). A reliable measure may or may not be valid, but if it is not valid, it is not valid in the same way
each time, regardless of who is doing the measuring. These issues, validity and reliability, get to the heart of the
debate over whether human coding or machine coding is better when it comes to content analysis. Proponents of
machine coding argue that their techniques are 100 percent reliable (even if they may not be perfectly valid).
When using Wordscores or Wordfish (or indeed any computer algorithm) to estimate party positions from policy
documents or manifestos, researchers making the same research design decisions (e.g. which documents to
include in the analysis, whether to stem words to their roots or not, and whether to exclude stopwords, i.e. words
that have no ideological content such as prepositions and conjunctions, from the analysis) will obtain the same
results every time they conduct the analysis. This is not necessarily true for projects using human coding. Two
human coders may read a document in a different way and categorize it differently. Perhaps, on average, they will
get the same result as machine coding would, but there is likely to be more noise in the process. Mikhaylov, Benoit,
and Laver (2012) find that there is a great deal of noise in the process of human-coding manifestos in the manner
of the CMP, for example. This is not to say that machine coding is superior to human coding. Those who argue in
favour of human coding often suggest that validity is higher with human coding. Computers may always produce
the same answers, but those answers are not necessarily right. Humans are better able to draw on a wide variety
of knowledge to “correctly” classify texts, whereas computers can only draw on the information human
researchers give them.
Of course, one means of assessing reliability among human coders is to examine intercoder reliability. If two or
more people are confronted with the same coding task, to what extent do they arrive at the same answer? If
multiple coders are unable to arrive at the same answer, perhaps the coding assignment is too difficult, or the
instructions given to coders is not sufficiently clear. This has been a criticism of the CMP, for example. Typically,
the CMP has only employed one coder per document, making it impossible to assess inter-coder reliability. Recent
work has examined the extent to which multiple human coders are actually able to classify sentences on the basis
of the CMP scheme (Mikhaylov, Benoit, and Laver 2012). The results were not encouraging. Common measures of
inter-coder reliability (namely Fleiss’s Kappa) show that coders were not able to classify sentences in a reliable
manner. In its latest installment, the manifesto project now uses two coders to analyse each manifesto, but it does
retain the coding scheme.
Lastly, when analysing a corpus of text, researchers must ensure that all texts within that corpus are comparable.
For example, it would not make sense to analyse speeches, bills, and manifestos all at the same time as part of a
single corpus. As discussed above, these texts were written for different purposes, have different intended
audiences, use different language, and are subject to different constraints. In short, they were produced (p. 138)
using different data-generating processes and are, therefore, not directly comparable. While it may seem obvious
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Words as Data
that it does not make sense to compare speeches and manifestos at the same time, oftentimes comparisons are
made that are less obviously problematic, but nonetheless raise important issues. For example, one may question
whether it is appropriate to compare the content of manifestos across countries and time. The underlying
dimensions of political competition are not the same everywhere, and also vary across elections—the most salient
dimensions of partisan conflict in the legislature may differ in Germany and Japan; and the most salient dimensions
of conflict in the 1970s may or may not be the most salient dimensions of conflict today. Likewise, while
parliamentary questions may primarily serve as a means of oversight in one parliament, elsewhere they may serve
primarily as a means to address constituency service issues. The differences may be due to institutions governing
electoral incentives, party competition, or other considerations. Regardless, even if the type of document is
nominally the same, if the underlying strategic environments that produce the documents are different, the content
of the documents may not be directly comparable.
6.5 Ways Forward
Recent trends in content analysis and the study of legislatures involve both applying new technological techniques
and examining new sources of data to answer new substantive questions. Methodologically, there has been a rapid
move toward importing new methods of machine learning from the fields of computational linguistics and computer
science (e.g. Hopkins and King 2010; Quinn et al. 2010; Diermeier et al. 2012; Spirling 2012). Other recent
advances involve taking advantage of the new legislative databases to examine forms of parliamentary behaviour
that were largely ignored previously—e.g. parliamentary questions. The recent studies discussed earlier all use the
newly available data to study questions regarding constituency service, representation, and much more in ways
not previously possible. These studies have led to new insights regarding party competition, and have also allowed
researchers to peer into the black box of intraparty dynamics to explore how backbenchers interact with party
leaders (e.g. Martin and Vanberg 2008b; Proksch and Slapin 2012). To use these data in the most effective
manner, researchers must pay careful attention to the (often unobserved) processes generating the text they use
as data, as well as the assumptions of the methods they employ. Next, we outline a series of points that we feel
content analytic studies of legislative politics must address.
6.5.1 Strategic Data-Generating Process
Politicians are strategic communicators. This means that all content analysis needs to consider the data-generating
process of the specific textual data being used. Not all (p. 139) political text in legislatures is created equally.
When delivering speeches or asking parliamentary questions, politicians may have a specific audience in mind.
Draft legislation has its own technical features that makes it look very different from positional statements by parties
and their MPs. Text as data approaches ask a lot from the data. For instance, when applying Wordscores or
Wordfish the assumption that word counts are generated according to one-dimensional ideological preferences
needs to be satisfied if this extracted dimension is interpreted as ideology. If the agenda is prestructured and
actors are not free to emphasize or de-emphasize issues (e.g. on the aggregate in parliamentary speeches), this
may be more problematic than in a context where actors are free to choose issues (e.g. during election campaigns
or in parliamentary debates on specific topics such as the budget). Another implication is that it might not be
advisable to apply the same estimation technique across different types of documents, in particular if they are
generated differently. For instance, comparing positions based on speeches and manifestos may be particularly
difficult because the audience and the context for the message is quite different. Finally, it is important for scholars
to consider the institutional context. In some political systems, for instance, it is easier for backbenchers to
participate in parliamentary debates than in others (Proksch and Slapin 2012). Thus, there is the possibility that
even though the distribution of preferences is identical across political systems, the institutional hurdles in one
system prevent the expression of preferences, but allow them in another. Failure to account for such differences is
likely to lead to biased inferences.
6.5.2 Level of Analysis
Some research questions involve measurement at a very detailed level. For instance, when the goal is to find out if
MPs ask parliamentary questions regarding the oversight of legislation in force, then the measurement process
must identify questions asked by individual members and perhaps hand code features of those questions. In other
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Words as Data
instances, the goal may be simply to find out the ideological dispersion of the party system in parliamentary
debates or the topics on the legislative agenda. Here aggregating all speeches by members of the same party and
applying unsupervised scaling or classification techniques may be sufficient. The measurement approach used
needs to fit the question at hand. In some instances, a more labour-intensive and costly hand-coding approach,
ideally involving multiple coders, may be more advisable, whereas in others computer-assisted techniques seem
more promising when dealing with large collections of text. Thus, content analysis techniques should be chosen
according to the level of analysis, which in turn should be motivated by the substantive research question of the
project.
6.5.3 Latent Variables
Ideology and the salient dimensions of partisan conflict are extremely difficult concepts to measure. These
variables, and other related concepts (e.g. intra-party and party (p. 140) system cohesion) are fundamentally
unobservable, but they are indirectly expressed in various forms by members in parliament. MPs express their
latent positions through political speech, voting in parliament, sponsoring legislation, or through statements in
media and during election campaigns. This means that the appropriate way to approach the study of ideology is to
treat it as a latent variable and apply a relevant measurement model. But developing appropriate measures of
these latent concepts also means accounting for the strategic nature in the legislative environment that produces
the data—e.g. what pressures are exerted by parties on members when speaking, voting, participating in
committees, etc. The latent variable approach stands in contrast to other approaches, for example, the CMP, that
assume there is a correct “gold standard” that coders can attain given sufficient training.
6.5.4 Uncertainty
Both human-based and computer-assisted content analysis involves measurement uncertainty. Multiple human
coders will never perfectly agree on how to code text. Existing hand-coded approaches typically provide
intercoder reliability measures based on selected codings, but rarely incorporate uncertainty into the coding
framework. Computer-assisted analysis needs to work with available text. Classical dictionary-based analysis
makes it difficult to gauge measurement error, whereas more recent latent variable models offer ways to take
uncertainty into account, either in a frequentist or Bayesian framework. Ultimately, uncertainty in political text
analysis has multiple components. First, the text generation process itself is stochastic, meaning that MPs or parties
can use different text to express the exact same position (Benoit et al. 2009). Second, there is measurement
uncertainty associated with the chosen statistical model. Capturing measurement error is, of course, not an end in
itself. Ideally, it should be carried over into secondary analysis that use quantities of interest extracted from text as
independent or dependent variables (e.g. Benoit et al. 2009; Proksch and Slapin 2010).
6.5.5 Consider What Legislators Do Not Say
All content analysis techniques rely on available political text to make inferential statements, but techniques differ
in the way they include information about what is not said. A strategic model of political language may predict that
certain parliamentary actors receive less floor time for electoral and institutional reasons (e.g. Proksch and Slapin
2012). Party leaders, for example, may wish to prevent dissidents from taking the floor of parliament to present
views that run contrary to the party’s primary platform. When leaders systematically prevent certain party factions
from giving speeches, parliamentary speeches may not offer an accurate picture of the true views (and diversity of
views) within the party. If this is true, then models that fail to account for selection effects will produce results that
are invalid or biased (with the direction and extent of bias not necessarily being clear a priori). Therefore, the
analysis of missing values may allow (p. 141) researchers to examine under what conditions actors choose to
remain silent and what this means for inferences regarding political conflict in parliaments and governments.
6.6 Conclusion
Content analysis is a powerful tool in studies of parties and legislatures. New advances in data and methods make
it a particularly interesting and dynamic technique for examining latent variables such as ideology. More and more
data are becoming available, and new statistical techniques and text as data approaches are being developed to
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Words as Data
analyse them. To effectively apply content analysis to the study of legislatures, though, researchers must carefully
consider the assumptions of the estimation techniques they are applying, and the nature of the data they are
using. These considerations include, for example, whether hand-coding or computer-coding is best, whether a
supervised or unsupervised learning technique is most appropriate, and whether, given the data-generating
process, extracting the desired information from the text is even possible. Further advances are most likely to
occur at the intersection of a variety fields. Scholars of legislative politics who apply content analysis will likely
greatly benefit from advances in the fields of computational linguistics, statistics, and computer science.
In the absence of a general theory of political speech (or text), scholars must continue to adapt content analysis
strategies to the problem at hand. New data mean that existing measurement models for text may be of limited use
when applied in a context other than the model’s original intent. Furthermore, new types of text data are always
becoming available. Comprehensive on-line archives of parliaments have led to better access to text data for
content analysis. However, parliaments can change the structure of their databases, meaning the access to data
and the way in which it is accessible may change without notice. There is a need for political scientists to capture
the information provided by parliaments and store it in a more permanent and stable format through the
construction of databases to ensure the replicability of studies using data from parliamentary archives. While text
as data techniques hold great promise in the study of legislatures, careful application is required. The five points
outlined in the previous section may serve as a guideline for researchers when applying quantitative content
analysis techniques. Finally, valid comparisons across different types of documents may be a desirable research
goal, but one that is difficult. We see the conceptual and empirical integration of these different data sources, for
example, draft legislation and policy statements of parties and legislators, as one of the future challenges in the
text-as-data literature.
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Jonathan B. Slapin
Jonathan Slapin is Associate Professor of Political Science, University of Houston.
Sven-Oliver Proksch
Sven-Oliver Proksch is Assistant Professor at the Department of Political Science, McGill University.
Page 13 of 14
Debate and Deliberation in Legislatures

André Bächtiger
Institutions
2014
Speech and debate occupy a central place in parliaments, yet have not generated significant interest among
scholars of contemporary political science. This is partly attributed to the notion that parliamentary debate does not
have any impact on policy-making. In the last twenty years, however, legislative speech has been recognized as
more varied than commonly assumed, and may be much more than the sterile argumentative confrontation of
opposition and government. There are three approaches to parliamentary debate: a strategic and partisan-rhetoric
approach (anchored in rational choice theory), a deliberative approach, and a discourse approach. Thischapter
examines debate and deliberation in legislatures, first by providing a broad overview of the strategic/partisan-
rhetoric, deliberative, and discourse approaches to parliamentary debate. It considers the basic theoretical
assumptions of the three approaches and presents some major empirical findings. It gives particular emphasis
tothe deliberative approach oflegislative speech and concludes with a discussion of a number of commonalities,
remaining tensions, and some avenues for future research.
Keywords: parliaments, political science, legislative speech, parliamentary debate, partisan-rhetoric approach, deliberative approach, discourse
approach, deliberation, legislatures
7.1 Introduction
DESPITE the central role of speech and debate in parliament, parliamentary speech has not figured prominently on
the scholarly agenda in contemporary political science. As Proksch and Slapin (2012, 520) note: “Participation in
legislative debates is among the most visible activities of members of parliament (MPs), yet debates remain an
understudied form of legislative behavior.” The conventional view holds that parliamentary debate does not have
any impact on policy-making and is little more than the “public displays of the policy platforms of both government
and opposition” (Brennan and Hamlin 1993, 447). Consequently, the purpose of parliamentary debate seems
largely symbolic.
In the last two decades, however, scholars have begun to refine as well as to challenge the conventional view. Not
only is legislative speech more varied than commonly assumed, some scholars also argue that under specific
conditions, legislative speech may be much more than the sterile argumentative confrontation of government and
opposition and may even display features that have normative appeal. Three approaches can be distinguished: a
strategic and partisan-rhetoric approach (anchored in rational choice theory), a deliberative approach, and a
discourse approach. The strategic and partisan-rhetoric approach provides a systematization and extension of the
conventional view. It starts from the assumption that legislative speech is cheap talk and its main purpose partisan
and electoral. Yet it offers some intriguing insights in its variability, especially by adopting a comparative approach
and by exploring the effects of different institutional arrangements and intraparty politics on the structuring of
parliamentary debate. The deliberative approach, in turn, challenges the conventional understanding of legislative
Page 1 of 17
speech. It tries to identify institutional and issue-based conditions under which legislative speech can be
deliberative, i.e., reasoned, respectful, informed, and oriented toward finding agreement. The discourse approach,
finally, focuses on the (p. 146) constitutive features of parliamentary debates and offers an in-depth look at its
norms and conventions. Recent variants of the discourse approach have also started to analyse specific framings
of legislative speech, sometimes also in connection with normative expectations.
This chapter gives a broad overview of the strategic/partisan-rhetoric, deliberative, and discourse approaches to
parliamentary debate. It starts with the basic theoretical assumptions of the three approaches, followed by a
presentation of some major empirical findings. Given deliberation’s prominence in contemporary political theory, its
different take on legislative speech, and the big controversy about deliberation’s viability in the realm of
legislatures, this chapter takes a special focus on the deliberative approach to legislative speech.1 At the end, the
chapter will discuss a number of commonalities, remaining tensions, as well as some avenues for future research.
7.2 Strategic and Partisan-Rhetoric Approach
The rational choice (or formal) approach to legislative speech provides a systematization and extension of the
conventional view on legislative debate. Two versions can be distinguished. Austen-Smith (1990) presented a
model where legislative debate is viewed as “cheap talk” and may influence decision-making through information
revelation, i.e., by exchanging information that other legislators do not possess. Austen-Smith’s formal model posits
that the role of debate is limited and one of timing. A debate stage in the policy-making process reveals all the
information that otherwise would be revealed through agenda-setting. Or, as Austen-Smith (1990, 144) succinctly
puts it: “debate does not elicit information that otherwise would not be made available during the decision-making
process.” Generally, the revelation of private information may affect legislation, but only under some very
restrictive conditions, namely when the distribution of legislators’ preferences over consequences is not too
dissimilar. In contrast, when legislators’ preferences are dissimilar, they have an incentive to misrepresent
information and manipulate the decision-making process in their favour. Since similar preferences of legislators are
a very rare scenario in legislative politics, information revelation through debate will only very rarely affect the final
outcome. As Proksch and Slapin (2012, 521) concur, if legislators mainly cared about the persuasive impact of
legislative speech onother MPs, then “we would expect not to find much legislative debate at all.” Consequently,
there must be other rationales for why MPs engage in legislative debate.
A second view in the rational choice tradition starts from the assumption that legislators are concerned with
electoral and partisan considerations when giving speeches in parliament. Legislative speech enables MPs to give
a party or personal message to voters and partisan rank-and-file, as legislative debate receives coverage in all
types of media. Legislative speech thus provides an opportunity for position-taking, advertising, and (p. 147)
credit-claiming, which are key strategies to enhance the re-election chances of an MP (Mayhew 1974). Moreover,
rational choice theorists have also started to take an in-depth look at intraparty politics (e.g., the relationship
between parties and their voters) and institutional arrangements (e.g., different electoral systems), which are
considered key factors for explaining variation in legislative speech. However, following Austen-Smith’s pessimistic
expectations about the importance and influence of debate, a core assumption of the partisan-rhetoric view is that
legislative speech can generally have no persuasive effect on policy-making. As we shall see later, this is in stark
contrast with the deliberative approach, arguing that legislative speech may not be fully captured by a strategic
model of position-taking where communication is exclusively tailored to secure or enhance electoral success.
In recent years, rational choice scholars have made a dedicated effort to examine parliamentary debate
empirically. One important area of research is to use legislative speech in order to analyse positions of members of
parliament or political parties (e.g., Laver and Benoit 2002; Monroe and Maeda 2004; Proksch and Slapin 2010;
Diermeier et al. 2012). This is mostly done through computer-based content analysis (such asWordfish), a topic
that is dealt with in Proksch and Slapin’s chapter in this volume. This research, however, is not directly concerned
with the functioning of legislative debate and therefore not addressed in this chapter.
A further area of empirical research examines why legislators actually deliver speeches. In a pioneering study,
Maltzman and Sigelman (1996) examined which factors influence the use of unconstrained floor time in the US
Congress. Drawing on Fenno’s (1973) claim that MPs are motivated by both electoral and policy considerations,
they focus on electoral and policy-based explanations for the propensity of delivering speeches. Empirically,
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Maltzman and Sigelman (1996) find that electorally based explanations do not perform well. For instance, more
electorally vulnerable members used less unconstrained floor time than their more electorally secure colleagues. In
contrast, policy-based explanations fare much better: party leadership, minority status, and ideological extremism
were all conducive to longer floor speeches. While party leaders may have an interest in protecting and promoting
the party’s brand, minority party members and political extremists may find it difficult to shape policy outcomes,
thus have an incentive to speak up on the floor. Maltzman and Sigelman conclude that the failure of electoral
explanations does not necessarily mean that MPs would not be concerned with them: “It is conceivable that
electorally vulnerable members find that their time is better spent in other activities, such as fundraising, than in
delivering speeches to the C-SPAN audience” (Maltzman and Sigelman 1996, 827–8).
Building on the work of Maltzman and Sigelman (1996), Morris (2001) focused on the frequency with which MPs
made partisan-oriented one minute speeches in the 104th Congress. While confirming some of Maltzman and
Sigelman’s findings, he also found that partisanship had a strong impact on debating behaviour. For instance, MPs
with less electoral security used more partisan rhetoric. In this regard, Quinn et al. (2010) also demonstrate that in
election times, politicians put more emphasis on symbolic and social issues in speeches.
(p. 148) Recent studies in the rational choice tradition take an in-depth look at intraparty politics and institutional
arrangements that shape the structure of parliamentary debate. Martin and Vanberg (2008) argue that coalition
parties in parliamentary democracies must communicate to their voters that they have not violated their electoral
promises when they agree to policy compromises with their coalition partners. One pathway to accomplish this goal
is through legislative debate. Martin and Vanberg hypothesize that coalition parties will communicate more
extensively on issues that divide them from their coalition partners. This combines with an electoral cycle
argument: the closer elections are, the more parties will engage in this activity. Using the length of legislative
speeches as a proxy for the extent to which parties communicate with their constituents, they demonstrate that
coalition parties indeed communicate more extensively on issues that divide them from their coalition partners and
do so increasingly when elections approach. Even though the mere length of speaking does not give direct insight
into the content of speeches, the study still provides circumstantial evidence that coalition parties use legislative
debate to convince constituents “that they have not given away the store in exchange for the spoils of office”
(Martin and Vanberg 2008, 513–14).
Proksch and Slapin (2012) present a comparative institutional approach to legislative speech that is based on a
strategic model of intraparty politics. They start from the assumption that in order to uphold the party’s brand, party
leaders must prevent their MPs from delivering speeches that contradict the party’s central message. How much
control is exerted by party leaders, however, depends on institutional factors, namely the configuration of the
electoral system. In this regard, Proksch and Slapin focus on four scenarios. In scenario one, a presidential system
with a majoritarian electoral system, the electoral independence between legislature and executive means that
party unity is not very important and party leaders will not exert much control when MPs take the floor. In scenario
two, a parliamentary system with a majoritarian electoral system, party leaders will generally place more weight on
party unity than party leaders in a presidential system. Nevertheless, in a first-past-the-post electoral system
thatemphasizes the importance of individual candidates, party leaders place less weight on party unity and exert
less control when MPs take the floor. In scenario 3, a parliamentary system with closed-list proportional
representation, party leaders will place high value on party unity, as voters rely heavily on party “labels” to make
their electoral choices. Consequently, party leaders will control the public exposure of MPs. In scenario 4, a
parliamentary system with mixed-member proportional representation, elements of closed-list PR are combined with
single-member districts. This means that while party leaders put a high value on party unity, MPs have different
incentives depending on whether they are elected off the party list or from single-member districts. While MPs
elected from the party list will value the party’s position highly, this is less true for MPs elected in a single-member
district. Consequently, party leaders will try to keep such MPs off the floor, since the latter will have an incentive to
present their own positions to voters which may deviate from the party’s central message. Proksch and Slapin test
the implications of their theoretical model with data on the amount of legislative speeches made by party leaders
and backbenchers in the UK (an example (p. 149) of parliamentary democracy with a majoritarian electoral
system) and Germany (an example of a mixed-member proportional representation system). The findings
corroborate the theoretical expectations: party leaders in Germany are more active on the floor than
backbenchers. By contrast, in the UK, the majoritarian electoral system provides leaders with fewer reasons to
keep backbenchers off the floor. Moreover, German MPs who are ideologically distant from their party leaders are
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less likely to take the floor; in the UK, ideologically distant MPs are more likely to take the floor than MPs who toe the
party line. Finally, the German data show that MPs elected in single-member districts tend to make fewer speeches
than MPs elected from the party list, but this effect weakens when the ideological distance between backbenchers
and leaders is taken into account. The study not only suggests that legislative debates are strongly affected by
partisan strategizing within specific electoral contexts, it also shows that party cohesion is inversely related to
party positions communicated in legislative speeches: “Speeches may [...] underestimate the ideological
differences within parties in many parliamentary systems” (Proksch and Slapin 2012, 535). This has important
implications for the use of legislative speech as a resource to estimate party preferences and party cohesion.
These two examples nicely illustrate how rational choice analysis can deepen our understanding of legislative
speech, even though the basic assumptions are fully in line with the conventional and partisan-rhetoric
understanding of parliamentary debate.
7.3 Deliberative Approach
The deliberative approach to parliamentary debate brings a normative dimension back to legislative politics. In its
classic version, deliberation means that actors justify their positions with a focus on the common good, weigh
alternative arguments and positions with respect, are willing to yield to the force of the better argument, and try to
find a reasoned consensus on validity claims (Habermas 1983, 1996; Chambers 1996; Gutmann and Thompson
1996). The goals of deliberation are geared to both epistemic fruitfulness and consensus: deliberation should
generate decisions that are better reasoned and informed, more public-orientated and consensual, and
consequently more legitimate and effective. In the past decade, deliberation has become one of the “most active
areas of political theory” (Dryzek 2007, 237). The deliberative approach has not only given a new language to
analyse political talk, it has also prompted a vigorous debate onhow politics should ideally function. In this regard,
deliberative theory has taken issue with the standard aggregative models in legislative studies (and political
science in general) where outcomes are determined by numbers, i.e., who has the most votes, and not by reasons,
i.e., who has the best arguments.
Prominent deliberative theorists have repeatedly argued that parliaments are an important sphere of deliberation
because they serve essential legitimizing and social integrative functions (e.g. Habermas 1996). Habermas (2005,
389) even states that legislative deliberation “reaches just to the centre of the whole approach to deliberative (p.
150) politics.” In his book Mild voice of reason, Joseph Bessette (1994) has also provided the first deliberative
reading of policy-making in the US Congress. Here, Bessette contrasts political (or electoral) and deliberative
explanations for key aspects of legislative politics. For instance, while a political explanation views the function of
floor debate only pro forma to enhance the standing with constituents, a deliberative explanation views floor
debates as the “final opportunity to hear the strongest arguments pro and con” (Bessette 1994, 152), while
simultaneously serving as an information source for the contents of complex bills. Or, while a political explanation
views committee hearings as publicizing devices “to mobilize support outside of Congress,” a deliberative
explanation views hearings as fora “to elicit the information and arguments necessary to make informed
judgments” (Bessette 1994, 152).
Yet, many political scientists—and even some deliberative scholars (e.g., Fishkin and Luskin 2005)—strongly
question whether parliaments can entail genuine deliberation. The key criticism is that parliamentary debate is
oriented toward voting, not toward collecting and aggregating information (see Ferrié 2008; Rasch 2011). Drawing
from the partisan-rhetoric approach, critics hold that arguments in legislative speech are not directed toward
persuading other MPs but toward mobilizing an outside audience—voters, citizens, as well as partisan rank-and-file.
Deliberation in parliament is also constrained by the fact that modern legislatures operate under severe time
constraints and have strictly regulated access to delivering speeches (Rasch 2011). Time constraints and access
regulations give parliamentary debates a ritualized and rigid character. Speeches are not spontaneous, but
frequently prepared in advance. Rasch (2011, 20) summarizes the critical view on parliamentary deliberation as
follows:
Arguing seldom affects information and preferences in a way that become important at the final voting
stage. Outcomes almost always are known in advance. Plenary debates lack the dynamic elements that
are central to any deliberative process marked by conflicting preferences.
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In other words, a deliberative lens on parliamentary debate, assuming that parliamentary debate can change the
opinions of MPs seems aspirational and critical rather than descriptive (see Esterling 2011, 191).
Current deliberative scholarship acknowledges that electoral, partisan, and representative pressures loom large in
parliaments, constraining full-fledged deliberation. They nonetheless argue that the conventional and partisan-
rhetoric approach may be too limiting. First, much of the criticism against the possibility of deliberation in
parliaments stems from an analysis of parliamentary systems as well as of contemporary American politics. As we
shall see later, critics are certainly not misled with regard to deliberative failures in parliamentary systems as well
as in the contemporary US Congress; but critics tend to ignore that a different institutional organization of
legislatures—in combination with issue type and partisan strategies—may be conducive to a much higher potential
for deliberative action. In this regard, deliberative scholars also claim that the role of institutions and contexts in
shaping political behaviour is more (p. 151) profound than rational choice scholars tend to assume. They think
that institutions and other contexts do not only affect the strategic incentives of legislators, but may also create
spaces for different action logics (including deliberation). In this view, strategic action is not the only action logic in
politics and the importance of strategic action may vary according to different contexts. The claim is that when
stakes are high, actors will follow a course of action that is highly compatible with the predictions of rational choice
theory. But if stakes are lower, actors have more space to behave differently: they may remain strategic but they
may also become genuine deliberative actors (see Bächtiger and Hangartner 2010). Second, while deliberative
scholars concede that fundamental opinion changes in core values are unlikely in parliaments, even under the
best circumstances, deliberation can still contribute to the theory-component of legislator’s preferences (Vanberg
and Buchanan 1989) by allowing legislators to update their preferences or learn about unforeseen policy
consequences. Concrete policies are complex entities, comprising smaller elements on which participating
politicians can learn and change their minds. Third, critics also (partially) misrepresent the link between
deliberation and voting. Whether persuasion actually occurs is not always a major consideration in deliberative
theory, since this literature accords normative importance to the quality of argument and discussion itself (see
Esterling 2011, 192). Thus, prepared speeches may be deliberative, i.e., they may display high justification
rationality and respect, or even document opinion change, even though they are not fully interactive. Fourth, and
perhaps most importantly, we should not pre-judge the possibility of parliamentary deliberation: claims for and
against the possibility of deliberation in legislatures need to be proven or disproven empirically.
But how much deliberative action is there really in legislatures, and how does it work? For this purpose, let us focus
on three different legislatures, namely those of Switzerland, the United States, and Germany (see Steiner et al.
2004; Bächtiger 2005). Specifically, the Swiss parliament serves as an example of a non-parliamentary consensus
system, the United States’ Congress as an example of a competitive presidential system, and the German
parliament as an example of a competitive parliamentary system. The analysis presented here is a reanalysis of
the study by Bächtiger (2005). It considers a total of 52 recorded debates in the three countries, stemming mostly
from the late 1980s and the 1990s. These debates cover topics with high partisan polarization such as economic
policies and abortion, as well as less polarized topics such as rights of the disabled, animal welfare, and crime
prevention. The debates comprised nearly 4,500 speeches, which were coded for their deliberative quality. Notice
that in the Swiss and German legislatures, recorded debates in non-public committees could be used for a
quantitative analysis of deliberate quality.
The quality of deliberation is measured by the Discourse Quality Index (DQI; Steenbergen et al. 2003). Rooted in a
Habermasian understanding of deliberation, the DQI employs a number of philosophically derived indicators of
deliberative quality. The focus in this chapter is on four key indicators: (1) justification rationality (do speakers give
elaborated reasons for their positions or do they forward demands and positions with no or only simple reasons?);
(2) common good orientation (do speakers cast (p. 152) their justifications in terms of conceptions of the common
good or in terms of narrow group or constituency interests?); (3) respect toward demands and counterarguments
(do speakers degrade, treat neutrally, value, or agree with demands and arguments from other speakers?); and (4)
constructive politics (do speakers sit on their positions or submit alternative or mediating proposals?). These four
indicators capture two essential concepts underlying deliberative theory: the concept of rational argument—
measured by justification rationality and common good orientation—and the concept of weighing positions and
reasons with a “favourable attitude toward, and constructive interaction with, the persons with whom one
disagrees” (Gutmann and Thompson 1990, 85)—measured by respect and constructive politics. The DQI has
proven to be a reliable measurement instrument, i.e., there is generally broad agreement where a particular
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speech act falls on the fourindicators. For the debates considered in this article, two independent coders scored a
subset of the speech acts. The rate of inter-coder reliability ranges from a low of .919 for respect toward
counterarguments to a high of 1 for content of justification. Cohen’s kappa, which controls for inter-coder
agreements by chance, ranges from .881 for respect toward counterarguments to .954 for constructive politics.
These figures indicate excellent inter-coder reliability.2 The DQI has also met with considerable support from
deliberative theorists (Habermas 2005; Thompson 2008). For example, Habermas (2005, 389) writes that the DQI
captures “essential features of proper deliberation.” Thus, the DQI appears to have good construct validity.
Let us first focus on the extentof deliberative action in the three legislatures. Overall, the amount of high-quality
deliberation is fairly limited, which seems to corroborate pessimistic expectations: sophisticated justifications
amount to 39 percent, common good appeals to 15 percent, explicit respect toward (and agreement with) demands
or counterarguments to 12 percent, and mediating proposals to 9 percent. However, there is considerable
variability of deliberative quality across the three legislatures as well as across different arenas and issues within
these legislatures. Let us now explore what drives this variability. The data constitute a multilevel structure with
nearly 4,488 speeches nested in 52 debates, which in turn are nested in seven legislative institutions (the German
Bundestag, Bundesrat, and Vermittlungsausschuss; the Swiss Nationalrat and Ständerat; and the US House of
Representatives and Senate). Because of this data structure, multilevel analysis is used. The analysis includes
fixed effects for the different predictors and variance components at the levels of legislature, debate and, where
appropriate, speeches (i.e., a random intercept model was estimated). System type and chamber vary across
legislatures, whereas the remaining predictors vary across debates. There are no predictors at the level of
speeches.
Table 7.1 Predicting the quality of deliberation in three legislatures (Switzerland, United States, and Germany)
Predictor Sophisticated Common Respect Demands and Constructive

Justification Good Appeals Counter-Arguments Politics
Fixed Effects:
Consensus .45 −.23 .40* −.27

Democracy
(.86) (.20) (.07) (.18)
Second .15 .24 .36* −.22

Chamber
(.78) (.15) (.07) (.17)
Non-public −2.33* .86* .31* −.11

Arena
(.28) (.17) (.06) (.08)
Low Issue .52* −.03 .43* −.09

Polarization
(.19) (.15) (.07) (.08)
Low Party 1.37* −.31 .09 .16

Discipline
(.37) (.22) (.09) (.13)
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Strong Veto .13 −.20 .03 −.01

Power
(.23) (.18) (.09) (.10)
Constant −.77 .63* 1.74* .79*
(.71) (.21) (.10) (.18)
Variance
Components:
Legislature .97+ .00 .00 .04

Level
(.55) (.00) (.00) (.03)
Debate Level .23* .11* .03* .03
(.07) (.04) (.01) (.01)
Speaker Level 1.36*
(.03)
Number of 4464 4464 4464 4464

Speeches
Method Logit Gompit Linear Gompit
Notes: Table entries are maximum likelihood multilevel model estimates with estimated standard errors in
parentheses. The linear models were estimated using an iterative generalized least squares (IGLS) algorithm.
The Logit and Gompit models were estimated using secondorder penalized quasi likelihood (PQL) estimation.
Gompit models take into account extremely skewed distributions; note that in Gompit models, a score of 0 is
predicted. All estimates were obtained using MLwiN version 2.01.
(**) p<.01,
(*) p<.05, + p<.10 (two-tailed tests).
Table 7.1 displays the results of the comparison of deliberative quality among the three legislatures. We see that
respect is the most sensitive deliberative indicator, while other indicators, especially constructive politics, showed
remarkable resilience to institutional and issue variation. A robust finding is that the Swiss grand coalition setting
enhances respectful behaviour of MPs. On a 7-point respect scale, the difference of the Swiss parliament to the US
Congress and the German parliament is 0.4. The institutional argument is that coalition arrangements open up
spaces for less politicized interactions, (p. 153) since parties can jointly profit from policy successes (at least
occasionally). In the Swiss case, the deliberative space is widened by the fact that the coalition arrangement is
permanent, enabling parties to accept more risk and have a greater legislative range (Lupia and Strøm 2008, 36–
7). By contrast, government-opposition (or majority-minority) settings—such as Germany or the US Congress—are
conducive to zero-sum games among the parties involved, undermining respectful behaviour and constructive
problem-solving activities. The German parliament represents an intriguing case here. Even though Germany is
frequently described as a consensus system (Lijphart (p. 154) 1999) with a consensus legislature (Gallagher et
al. 2006, 64), this does not translate into more deliberative behaviour among German MPs. In Germany, the
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combination of parliamentarism with strong party competition has the effect that parliamentary debate is indeed
exclusively oriented toward voting, pressuring MPs to vigorously defend the positions of their parties. Consensus-
building and problem-solving activities are delegated to other bodies (such as the Conference Committee in
Germany). This is even the case when government and opposition parties are forced to work together (which may
happen, for instance, when the opposition parties have a majority in the upper house (Bundesrat) and can veto
policies of the government). Furthermore, presidentialism and lower party discipline barely affect the DQI
indicators. At first glance, this is a surprising result. In presidential systems and situations of lower party discipline,
where legislators can vote against the government without threatening governmental stability, one would expect a
much higher potential for deliberative action than in parliamentary systems with strong party discipline (see
Lascher 1996). However, this result is largely driven by the low deliberative quality in the contemporary US
Congress. Here, we are confronted with the fact that low party discipline as a mechanism promoting deliberation
has become inactive in recent times. Studies of voting behaviour in the US House of Representatives (e.g., Aldrich
and Rohde 2000) show that there is a clear partisan voting pattern, especially since the “Gingrich Revolution” in
the mid-1990s. Next, veto power—measured as the ability of parties to block policies—does not affect deliberative
quality. Here, the literature is quite ambiguous; psychologists have argued that under veto power, exit in the form
of a registered dissent is not a possibility, leaving persuasion and deliberation to be the best option (see
Mendelberg 2002). Conversely, Austen-Smith and Feddersen (2006) have claimed that veto power and unanimous
voting rules create incentives for some actors to conceal information, making information from all discourse
participants suspect. Consequently, the deliberative process tends to break down under unanimity rule. The results
here do not support either approach. New experimental results, however, show that both unanimity and super-
majority voting rules increase deliberative quality (as measured by the DQI; Caluwaerts 2012). Next, the publicity
of a debate is a double-edged sword. In public floor debates, respect levels are lower than in non-public
committees, while justification rationality and common good orientation are higher (for common good orientation, a
gompit model is employed predicting narrow group or constituency interests). Especially the effect for justification
rationality is sizeable: holding all other predictors at zero, moving from the public to the nonpublic arena reduces
the predicted probability of a sophisticated justification by .28 (from .32 to .04). Higher respect levels in non-public
committees confirm scholars arguing that when pressures of representation are lowered, it is easier for politicians
to be reflective, to show respect for the claims of others, or even to change their opinions (e.g., Stasavage 2007).
Conversely, the fact that public arenas enhance justification rationality and common good orientation supports
Elster’s (1998) argument that publicity increases civility in that actors want to appear reasonable and common
good-oriented in public. Second chambers, in turn, enhance respect levels. Several factors lubricate this
deliberative process: members of the second chamber usually have greater political experience, are (p. 155)
usually elected for longer terms, and work in a smaller chamber than their first chamber peers. Finally, the type of
issue also affects deliberation; less polarized (and less salient) issues lead to more reasoned and respectful
debates than highly polarized (and highly salient) issues. This finding indirectly confirms Austen-Smith’s (1990)
formal result that consequential information exchange can occur only when the distribution of preferences over
consequences is not too dissimilar.
Besides institutional and issue factors, partisan characteristics matter as well. Focusing on Germany and
Switzerland, Bächtiger and Hangartner (2010) distinguished between government parties and opposition parties.
The argument is that opposition parties are less cooperative and deliberative, since they will not equally profit from
policy successes than government parties (Ganghof and Bräuninger 2006). Indeed, MPs of government parties in
Germany and Switzerland score higher on respect than respective opposition parties. In Switzerland, an intriguing
result is that not all parties in the grand coalition adopt the same strategies (see Bächtiger and Hangartner 2010).
The deliberative work is primarily accomplished by moderate and middle parties that are willing to take
governmental responsibilities, whereas oppositional government parties are far less deliberative. The effects of
other actor characteristics were modest. Gender, longer tenure, age, and the chairperson role do not (or only very
modestly) affect deliberative quality. These results may not be so surprising; legislatures are highly institutionalized
and party-dominated settings that make most individual characteristics of legislators irrelevant. In sum, controlling
for partisan characteristics did not wipe out the institutional differences between Switzerland and Germany,
indicating that institutions and partisan characteristics combine to shape the deliberative capacities of legislatures.
But are the differences between the Swiss, American, and German parliaments institutional or cultural? A popular
argument in the literature holds that differences in deliberative quality are not the product of different institutions
but of different political cultures. To shed light on this question, Bächtiger and Hangartner (2010) have studied
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debates in Switzerland and Germany where partisan rules varied within a country or cultural context. They
compared respect scores of a number of policy issues in Germany where the context of debating approximated
the Swiss grand coalition setting, i.e., where party discipline was relaxed and debate was not considered a
government-opposition affair. In Germany, respect levels changed dramatically and the German debates had
identical respect scores ascomparable Swiss debates (see Bächtiger and Hangartner 2010). It is also interesting to
see that when institutional conditions changed in the German parliament, there were several recorded opinion
changes, whereby legislators affirmed that persuasion happened on the basis of the better argument presented by
other parties or MPs. These findings not only defy a rigid application of the conventional and partisan-rhetoric view
ofparliamentary debate, they also provide an important hint that a change in the institutional arrangement can have
a profound effect on deliberative quality, regardless of the country or cultural context (see also Pedrini 2012).
When we consider the size of the effects, however, one must conclude that the institutional and issue factors do
not bring about a sea change in deliberative quality. For instance, on the 7-point respect scale, differences
between different institutional (p. 156) and issue contexts are only about .3 and .5 points. This clearly underlines
that despite variance in institutional design, parliamentary discourse still shares many similarities. However, when
favourable conditions combine, i.e. when a less polarized issue is debated in the Swiss consensus setting, we find
debates that have in part features of ideal deliberation with actors being highly respectful, reflective, open,
reasoned, and constructive. Here, the amount of explicit respect toward demands and counterargument goes up to
70 percent, while sophisticated justifications is at 54 percent, common good orientation at 28 percent, and
constructive politics at 15 percent. Rememberthat the corresponding figures for the debates considered in the
above analysis are 12, 39, 15, and 9 percent, respectively.
Let us now turn to the relationship between deliberation and legislative outcomes. In order to minimize institutional
confounding, Spörndli (2004) analysed formal and substantive outcomes in a single institutional context, the
German Conference Committee (Vermittlungsausschuss), a body which tries to reconcile conflicts between the
Bundestag and the Bundesrat. With regard to formal outcomes, he found that in the Conference Committee
unanimous or nearly unanimous decisions were associated with a high level of deliberative quality in the preceding
debates, measured by the DQI.3 This is indicative that deliberation can produce an enhanced willingness to
compromise. With regard to substantive outcomes, however, Spörndli found no association between discourse and
more egalitarian decisions (in the sense that the most disadvantaged in society are particularly helped).
Nonetheless, Spörndli’s findings still provide some hints that under favourable conditions, deliberation may be more
than a procedural “amuse-bouche” that delights only before the real power meal of politics begins.
Notice finally that the study by Steiner et al. (2004) only depicts a potential for deliberation in the context of three
ideal-typical legislatures. Thus, the study does not say anything about the general frequency of deliberation in
parliaments worldwide. Indeed, it may be true that the large majority of parliaments worldwide are not deliberative
at all, as many critics of the deliberative approach have argued. Nonetheless, the above results underline that
under appropriate institutional, issue, and partisan conditions—namely coalition settings, low-issue polarization,
and the strong presence of moderate parties—genuine deliberation is a possibility in legislatures (see also Lord and
Tamvaki 2013 for a DQI analysis of selected debates in the European parliament).
Two other studies have taken an in-depth look at the deliberative quality of parliamentary debate in the US
Congress, focusing on the epistemic side of deliberation and refining the analysis by Steiner et al. (2004).
Mucciaroni and Quirk (2006) have studied the informational quality of three major policy-processes between 1995
and 2000 in the House and Senate: welfare reform, the repeal of estate tax, and telecommunications deregulation.
They focus on the accuracy and realism of legislators’ claims about (or relevant to) the effects of policies. They
compare legislators’ claims to the best empirical evidence and analysis that was available at the time the debates
took place (if the relevant evidence and opinions are mixed or inconclusive, then legislative claims and rebuttals
should reflect the same level of uncertainty). They categorized entire debates ranging from “very good” to “very
poor.” A very good debate is one in which all of the essential (p. 157) information is supported by the best
available evidence. A very poordebate is one in which the initial claim is inaccurate and there is no attempt to
correct this. Notice that Mucciaroni and Quirk are not concerned with DQI standards such as level of justification,
common good orientation, or respect. In accordance with the partisan-rhetoric approach to legislative speech,
they argue that legislators have a clear incentive to use rhetoric and information that they think will have the
greatest political impact on their audience. But at the same time, they argue that legislators are also concerned
with credibility. It is this credibility aspect which provides an incentive for legislators to care about accurate and
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realistic claims.
Overall, Mucciaroni and Quirk found a considerable amount of misleading information and “outright falsehood” in
the debates they studied. Thirty-nine percent of the debates were categorized as very poor or poor, while only 24
percent were coded as very good or good. Mucciaroni and Quirk found it particularly disappointing that legislators
persistently reassert inaccuracies even after they have been corrected multiple times. Adopting a comparative
lens gives a more nuanced picture, however. First, informational quality on the most prominent effect issues is
usually better than issues that receive less attention. Under such conditions, debates include statements in which
speakers concede the accuracy of a claim from the other side or the inaccuracy of a claim from their own side.
Second, Mucciaroni and Quirk found that debates covering telecommunications deregulation which cut across
party lines were generally better than debates over welfare reform and estate tax repeal, where differences
between Democrats and Republicans were large. This corroborates the findings of Steiner et al. (2004) on higher
deliberative quality in the context of coalition arrangements. Contrary to the findings of Steiner et al. (2004),
however, the quality of parliamentary debate did not decline very much in the context of highly salient issues.
Mucciaroni and Quirk (2006) also found that debates in the Senate generally had a better quality than those in the
House. A key reason is the amount of time devoted in the Senate to debate. However, House and Senate
differences largely disappear when the House took more time for debating.
Esterling (2011) has focused on falsifiable and non-falsifiable arguments in the context of US Congress hearings on
the Medicare program, held between 1990 and 2003. Esterling proposes that falsifiable argument is an indicator of
deliberative quality, which he derives from the Habermasian idea that assertions must contain contestable validity
claims. By contrast, non-falsifiable arguments make empirically untestable assertions, or contain non-refutable
statements as well as subjective experiences. Esterling hypothesizes that falsifiable argument is most likely to
occur under moderate disagreement. Under such conditions, participants can hope that others are more open to
persuasion. With extreme disagreement, however, participants are more likely to ignore falsifiable arguments. The
results of Esterling’s sophisticated statistical analyses corroborate these expectations: in the context of moderate
disagreement, participants in the Medicare committee hearings used falsifiable rationales at a much higher
frequency than in the context of extreme disagreement. Institutional and individual features also affect the
frequency of falsifiable arguments. Similar to the findings of Steiner (p. 158) et al. (2004), the amount of falsifiable
arguments increases under bipartisanship, less ideological issues (i.e., issues that do not concern left-right topics),
low salience (the amount of press coverage of an issue), and in the context of Senate committees. Overall, the
studies by Esterling (2011) and Mucciaroni and Quirk (2006) indicate that there is more to Congressional debate
than mere strategic communication, but that appropriate contexts strongly matter for the possibility of informed and
deliberatively desirable debate.
Not all empirical studies yield the same positive conclusions for deliberative action in the realm of legislatures.
Comparing a plenary parliamentary debate and a citizen conference on the import of embryonic stem cells in
Germany, Landwehr and Holzinger (2010) find that parliamentary debate is not deliberative. In their empirical
analysis, parliamentary debate turns out to be monologic and not coordinative, i.e., not geared toward
consequential policy-making. Landwehr and Holzinger’s (2010) study reifies the conventional view on
parliamentary deliberation. But as mentioned before, the definitional emphasis on dialogical and consequential
discussion as the hallmark of deliberation is at odds with some prominent strands in deliberative theory.
Deliberative theory is also concerned with epistemic and process-inherent quality standards such as falsifiability
and respect, which are not fully dependent on the direct interactive and consequential nature of communication.
A final aspect of parliamentary deliberation is “the degree to which an assembly helps form and support the wider
public sphere and enhance the quality of rational public debate in civil society” (Uhr 1998, 226). This idea also
goes back to Bagehot’s (2001 [1867]) “teaching function” of parliament, bringing “true ideas before the nation,
and is the function of its highest minds.” But this teaching function should not be a one-way affair. Drawing from
Habermas’s (1996) two-track model of deliberative democracy, Depauw (2007) argues that the interplay between
formal legislative bodies and the informal public sphere is of critical importance: “Parliaments, then, are to remain
open to the problems that are detected, and the normative reasons put forward, by the communication networks of
citizens that constitute the public sphere.” This focus is in line with the renewed focus on deliberative systems
(Parkinson and Mansbridge 2012), holding that researchers should not only focus on the interactions within a
specific body (such as parliament), but fully take into account the interactions and relationships of various sites of
deliberation (such as parliament and the civic sphere). To date, such systemic approaches have not yet been put
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to systematic empirical scrutiny. However, there have been real-world attempts to better link parliaments with the
civic sphere. An intriguing example in this regard is the newly founded Scottish parliament, which has an
institutionalized sphere of interaction between representatives and the wider public, the organized civic sphere but
also ordinary citizens. Focusing on the nature of all deliberative instances in Scottish parliamentary committees
between 1999 and 2009, Davidson and Stark (2012) find that there has been a relatively high frequency of
deliberative events where MPs have directly interacted with stakeholders and citizens. However, this deliberative
system is currently in decline.
(p. 159) 7.4 Discourse Approach
The discourse approach focuses mainly on the constitutive features of parliamentary debate, its underlying rules,
conventions, and routines. Bayley (2004) describes it as follows: “Parliamentary discourse is ritualised and rule-
bound; it is governed by tradition, rules and regulations, and new Members are required to respect them.” Recent
theorizing understands such constitutive features of parliamentary debate also in terms of ceremony and ritual
(Crewe 2005; Rai 2010). According to Spary (2010, 340), “[p]arliamentary debate is one of many rituals which
embody the symbolic norm of democratic representation in the institution of parliament.” In general, parliamentary
discourse exhibits a number of specific features that distinguishes it from everyday talk. It is made up of a series of
monologues that all address the same question, even though its overall nature “is not monologic but dialogic”
(Bayley 2004, 25). The dialogical character arises from the fact that MPs make reference to and contest or agree
with what other MPs have said. Parliamentary debates also have some specific textual properties, such as specific
forms of political impoliteness, as well as some well-known politeness formulas, such as “my honorable friend.”
According to discourse theorists, the general rationale of parliamentary debates lies in the existence of opposite
political camps (van Dijk 2004). At the same time, parliamentary discourse is marked by a strong awareness of
acting for and in front of several audiences. The combination of party competition and audience expectations is
conducive to confrontational dialogue and a rhetorical stance on the part of the MPs (e.g., Ilie 2003). As Ilie (2010)
writes, “MPs deliberately call into question their opponents’ ethos, i.e., their political credibility and moral profile,
while enhancing their own ethos in an attempt to strike a balance between logos, i.e. logical reasoning, and
pathos, i.e. emotion eliciting force.” In this regard, MPs also rely heavily on rhetorical commonplaces: “MPs tend to
reinforce generally held beliefs, values and norms, which are often predictable ingredients of party political
ideologies” (Ilie 2010). Thus, parliamentary discourse is not a genuine reasoning process nor a discussion aimed
at finding the truth. MPs are fully aware of the fact that they cannot realistically hope to persuade political
opponents of the superiority of their ideas and beliefs. However, in the view of discourse theorists, it would also be
misleading to depict the nature of parliamentary discourse as exclusively adversarial. As Bayley (2004, 21) writes,
not only is there bipartisanism in many parliaments, all parliaments also deal with a considerable amount of routine
business which is not truly politicized. Under such conditions, “mutual consultation, systematic deliberation and
joint discursive undertaking” become the guiding logics of parliamentary discourse (Ilie 2003, 73). Here, a primary
concern of MPs is to reinforce their own credibilityby showing professional competence as well as consistency
between their statements and their actions.
However, apart from a few major publications (Wodak and Van Dijk 2000; Bayley 2004), few systematic empirical
investigations have been carried out regardingparliamentary practices in terms of the institutionalized uses of
language. Ilie (2004), for (p. 160) instance, presents an empirical study of “(un)parliamentary language,”
comparing Sweden and the UK. By (un)parliamentary language, she understands this to mean insults and other
disparaging comments. Ilie finds major differences between the two parliaments. Even when they use insults,
Swedish MPs are more concerned with ideological issues than their British peers. In contrast, when using insults,
British MPs focus much more on personality aspects, such as the intellectual capacity of the political opponent.
According to Ilie (2004), this is due to a particular audience expectation in Britain, “namely to see MPs call into
question other MPs and thus engage in a real battle of wits.”
Another way of analysing parliamentary discourse consists of using computer-assisted textual analyses to identify
prominent themes and distinct patterns of discourse in legislative debate (see, e.g., Bara et al. 2007; Bayley and
Schonhardt-Bayley 2008). Focusing on the US senate debates on the 2003 Partial-Birth Abortion Ban Act and using
the automated content analysis tool Alceste, Schonhardt-Bayley (2008) identified two important dimensions of the
debate: an emotive battle over the abortion procedure itself vs. a battle over the constitutionality of the bill.
Surprisingly, the first dimension did not reflect the divide in the final vote, which is captured by the second
Page 11 of 17
dimension. This “anomaly,”according toSchonhardt-Bayley, can be explained by the discursive strategy of the
sponsors of the bill; while passing the bill in Congress was not a major problem, the main target of the bill’s
sponsors was the Supreme Court. By framing partial-birth abortions as morally unacceptable, namely as infanticide,
they sought to promote their anti-abortion agenda, while simultaneously pushing pro-choice proponents into a
difficult rhetorical position. Indeed, most opponents of the bill in the Senate barely engaged with the topic of the
abortion procedure; instead, they concentrated on the constitutional argument, which then defined the content of
the final vote. Schonhardt-Bayley (2008, 384) concludes that an in-depth analysis of legislative discourse is
crucially important for a better understanding of political decisions:
By looking only at the vote, we cannot determine the reasons why members of Congress cast their votes
as they did. There is, therefore, a strong case for moving beyond the analysis of the roll-call vote to
examine the arguments, deliberations and rhetoric that shaped the content of the bill and the outcome.
In a recent study, Weale et al. (2012) used Alceste to explore whether the deliberative principle of reciprocity
(Gutmann and Thompson 1996) was present in UK parliamentary debates on abortion. They analysed whether
arguments were framed in a way to make them as widely acceptable as possible, whether there were attempts of
bringing together partial understandings, and whether MPs accepted “the broader implications of the principles
presupposed by their moral position,” so that for example, anyone opposed to abortion ought to be in favour of
adequate programmes of financial support to promote the well-being of children (Gutmann and Thompson, 2004,
82). The major finding is that “there is not the gross departure from reciprocity that would be implied by the
phenomenon of partisans talking past one another” (Gutmann and Thompson, 2004, 22), as we typically find it in
political campaigns. Quite to the contrary, Weale et al. (p. 161) find evidence of attempts to engage with one
another’s position and “to find some common civic ground upon which the decision can be made widely
acceptable” (Weale et al., 2012, 13). Yet, when it comes to bringing together partial understandings, the evidence
is less rosy: different MPs not only focused on different aspects of a complex question, they also placed different
interpretation on matters that are commonly agreed to be important. Finally, few MPs acknowledged the broader
implications of principles that they advanced. The studies by Weale and his co-authors represent an intriguing new
line of research in discourse analysis, testing philosophical expectations against the reality of parliamentary
discourse.
Despite such methodological and conceptual innovations, empirical studies in the discourse tradition are still in
their infancy. Compared to empirical work carried out by rational choice and deliberative scholars, existing work in
the discourse tradition focuses on relatively isolated aspects of parliamentary discourse and there is little
theorizing about the exact causes of discursive variations across legislatures. Moreover, even though discourse
scholars refer to varieties of parliamentary discourse, there is still a tendency to pass on the conventional view of
parliamentary debate, by emphasizing its ritualized and adversarial character. Indeed, the discourse approach
sometimes merely rationalizes how practitioners (in competitive and parliamentary systems) would describe their
own activities. Finally, discourse scholars have not (yet) tackled the question whether (and how much) the specific
structuring of parliamentary debate and its textual properties are a consequence of norm-guided and routine
behaviour, or whether (and how much) strategic incentives shape the tone and content of legislative speech.
Indeed, the study by Schonhardt-Bayley (2008) underlines the importance of strategic considerations in this
regard.
7.5 Outlook
For a long time, parliamentary debate has not attracted much scholarly interest in political science. This has clearly
changed in the past decade. Scholars working with rational choice, deliberative, and discourse frameworks have
started to take a more in-depth look at legislative speech, exploring its variability as well as rethinking its nature
under various conditions. The emerging picture may not fully alter the conventional view on parliamentary debate,
emphasizing its inconsequential and purely adversarial character. But the new lines of research described in this
chapter demonstrate that different institutional arrangements (frequently in combination with intraparty politics and
issue type) can produce substantial variation in the way parliamentary debate is conducted. For instance,
deliberative scholars have found that under the conditions of grand coalitions, bipartisanism, and moderate
disagreement, informed, respectful, and consequential interaction becomes a possibility in parliaments. Surely, this
does not describe the modal way of how parliamentary debate is structured. But the fact that this possibility exists
Page 12 of 17
in real-world legislatures might tickle our fantasy of how institutional changes (p. 162) could promote different
ways of doing parliamentary business. Indeed, by bringing back a normative dimension to legislative speech, the
deliberative approach has prompted researchers to rethink the very purposes of parliamentary debate: should we
stick with liberal and aggregative precepts and (re-)value adversarial debating (see Follesdal and Hix 2006), or
should we vie for a more deliberative orientation of legislatures?
Let us finally put the three approaches in relationship with each other, identifying commonalities and remaining
tensions among them, as well as highlighting some avenues for future research.
Both the rational choice and the deliberative approach emphasize the crucial importance of institutional
arrangements as well as intraparty politics and partisan strategies for capturing variation in legislative speech. The
dividing line between the two approaches, however, is that rational choice models assume that legislative speech
is fundamentally strategic and preferences cannot change through legislative debate. This is in stark contrast with
deliberative approaches, arguing that strategic communication is not a constant but may be complemented (or
even superseded) by other action logics (such as deliberation) when (institutional) context changes. While
research on legislative speech shows that genuine deliberative moments are rare events (and possible only under
favourable institutional and issue contexts), deliberative scholars would still leave open the possibility that there is
something like reason-based preferences (Dietrich and List 2010) and argumentative-based learning in legislative
encounters. It is clear that much more research is necessary to substantiate this claim (see also Quirk and Bendix
2011, 567). A pressing problem in this regard is that the deliberative approach is not (yet) in a position to fully
distinguish between true deliberation and strategic action. Empirically, it proved to be extremely difficult to measure
whether actors really mean what they say or say what they mean. Recent trends in deliberative theory even deny
the importance of drawing such a distinction (e.g., Thompson 2008). As Mansbridge (2009) stresses, deliberative
elements such as respect in bargaining processes should be considered an integral and legitimate part of
democratic deliberation. But this may not fully satisfy rational choice scholars, requiring that deliberative scholars
find better ways to properly distinguish between strategic and deliberative action. One way to do so is going
beyond the analysis of transcripts and by interviewing legislators onhow they judge the possibilities and spaces for
deliberation in parliaments (an attempt in this direction has been made by Gardner (2007)).
To date, deliberative and discourse scholars have barely engaged with each other. However, recent openings in
deliberative theory toward rhetorics (Dryzek 2010) may spur such a venture. For instance, deliberative scholars
may learn how crucial deliberative indicators—such as respect—can also be used as rhetorical devices and
semantic strategies. While there has been an effort in deliberative research not to code ritualized forms of
politeness (such as “My honorable friend”) or clear strategic moves as deliberative instances, deliberative
scholars may be well advised to learn more about typical rhetorical strategies in political encounters. A combined
research effort might lead to more valid classifications of parliamentary speech.
(p. 163) To end, parliamentary debate is a much more fascinating research topic than conventional wisdom might
have it. It is an essential aspect of parliamentary politics that warrants the attention of political scientists.
Acknowledgements
I would like to thank Susanne Fuchs, Seraina Pedrini, Paul Quirk, Thomas Saalfeld, and Reto Wüest for excellent
comments on previous versions of this chapter. I am grateful to the Hanse Wissenschaftskolleg (HWK) for providing
an excellent research environment as well as financial support while writing up this chapter.
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Notes:
(1) . Paul Quirk and William Bendix (2011) have written an excellent piece on “Deliberation in Congress” in the
Oxford Handbook of the American Congress (eds. E. Schickler and F. E. Lee). Their chapter is partly
complementary to the present one but takes a prime focus on the informational and deliberative aspects of
legislative speech in connection with the specifics of the American context.
(2) . The high reliability scores could be replicated by other researchers using the DQI (see, e.g., Lord and Tamvaki
2012; Caluwaerts 2012). It appears that measuring formal aspects of argumentation—such as argumentative links
or respect—do not seem to posit overly demanding requirements on coders.
(3) . Spörndli (2004) focused on minutes of the Conference Committee that were available and of sufficient quality.
This was the case between October 1969 and September 1982. He selected 20 debates according to the following
criteria: a certain minimum length (minimum often pages in the minutes); no sub-committee debates (which are not
protocoled); and including a (re-)distributive dimension.
André Bächtiger
André Bächtiger is Swiss National Science Research Professor at the University of Lucerne.
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Interviews and Surveys in Legislative Research

Stefanie Bailer
Methodology
2014
Interviews and surveys are widely used in social science research in general and in legislative studies in particular. As research methods, they help us
understand the thoughts and intentions of parliamentarians, making them one of the most valuable sources of data for the study of political behavior.
Interviews and surveys may be personally administered as in interviews or self-administered as in questionnaires. Despite their importance, however,
the current practice of conducting interviews typically lacks quality control whereas surveys generate low response rates and tend to suffer from
selection bias. This chapterfocuses on the use of interviews and surveys in legislative research. It describes some of the most influential works based
on interview research, as well as the greatest challenges involved in their use. It then explains how interviews with parliamentarians are conducted and
concludes by offering relevant practical advice and presenting tools for addressing the challenges of interviews and surveys in future legislative
research.
Keywords: interviews, surveys, legislative studies, research methods, parliamentarians, political behavior, questionnaires, response rates, legislative research, selection bias
8.1 Introduction
INTERVIEWS and surveys are amongst the most popular research methods in the social sciences, and accordingly, they are a frequently used tool in
legislative studies (Morris 2009). Our understanding of the motivations and the behaviour of parliamentarians would suffer greatly if we could not refer to
studies such as Searing’s (1994) interview-based analysis of the different parliamentary roles, or the data and subsequent studies generated by
established surveys such as the European Candidate Survey (e.g. Zittel and Gschwend 2008). Interviews and surveys—whether personally
administered as in interviews or self-administered as in questionnaires—deliver the most direct measure of the thoughts and intentions of politicians,
making them one of the most valuable sources of data for the study of political behaviour. Yet in spite of their importance, the current practice of
conducting interviews is often characterized by a lack of quality control and surveys by low response rates. In view of this, it is important to develop
tools that ensure that the standards of good interviewing are safeguarded and that the interview partner has a chance to react to the interview
situation. As for low response rates and possible selection bias, international cooperation and the application of statistical tools are recommended.
In interviews, the researcher has the fascinating opportunity of getting an insight into the mindset, the ideas, and the subjective analysis of an event by
an actor who has contributed to a political process (Richards 1996). Interviews thus provide qualitative in-depth accounts as well as allow for breadth
and depth; however, their major drawback is that they do not allow for reporting the degree of uncertainty of the investigator (King, Keohane, and Verba
2001). Hence, interviews are particularly recommended as an exploratory strategy for the analysis of areas that have not been previously researched,
as well as in the case of events that take place in secret meetings, such as party group sessions (Lilleker 2003).
(p. 168) Self-administered surveys are usually conducted by mail or online, and can similarly be used to directly measure the attitudes, positions, and
ideas of politicians. In contrast to interviews, they allow for a quantitative analysis of the data due to a larger number of cases, and thus for a
reasonable estimate of the degree of uncertainty of the researcher’s inferences (King, Keohane, et al. 2001, 31). However, one drawback is that the
absence of the researcher and the randomly assigned respondents may lead to mismeasurement since the intention of a question cannot be personally
explained or the possible misunderstanding of the question wording avoided.
Surveys and interviews have certain advantages over other indicators commonly used for establishing the views and preferences of members of
parliament (MPs). In particular, the attitudes and ideas of parliamentarians are reported directly by the actors themselves; thus, the researcher does not
have to rely on more indirect indicators such as votes, parliamentary questions, motions, or speeches. While data on roll-call votes (Carey 2009; Hix,
Noury, and Roland 2006), parliamentary questions (Martin and Rozenberg 2012), motions (Bräuninger, Brunner, and Däubler 2009), and speeches
(Proksch and Slapin 2010) may be easier to gather, they do not necessarily represent the actual preferences and attitudes of parliamentarians.
Although all are expressions of parliamentary opinions and activities, they may not directly reflect the actual preferences since MPs may be influenced
by disciplinary pressure from a party group leader, peer pressure from colleagues, certain characteristics of a legislative proposal, or their own
strategic considerations (for an analysis of the influence of preferences and party pressure on roll-call votes, see Ansolabehere, Snyder, and Stewart
2001). Nonetheless, the advantages of interviews and surveys come at the price that the reliability and validity of data therewith generated is harder to
ascertain, a topic which is covered at the end of this chapter.
Following a presentation of some of the most influential works based on interview research, a section on interviews discusses the greatest challenges
involved in their use, followed by a general evaluation of employing interviews as a research tool. Since there is surprisingly little information available
on conducting interviews with parliamentarians (for exceptions see Baker 2011; Puwar 1997), the subsequent section of this chapter lists relevant
practical advice.1 In a final section, tools are presented by which the challenges of interviews and surveys can be tackled in future legislative research.
8.2 Development of Survey and Interview-Based Studies in Legislative Research
Page 1 of 14
Interviews and surveys differ in the degree of structure and research goal. Surveys, whose research goal is very clear and predefined by theory, are
much more structured (p. 169) than interviews, since the purpose of interview-based research is often far more explorative and inductive. This is
clearly mirrored in legislative research: while early interview studies have laid the initial groundwork, surveys are now used to investigate the
respective concepts on a more routine basis.
Examples of the kind of exploratory research conducted by means of interviews are the studies by Lewis Dexter (1969) and Richard Fenno (1973;
1978), both of which involved extensive interviewing of representatives in the US Congress with a view to analysing their interests, their activities in
committees, and their work in the election districts. In his study on the constituency work of 18 legislators, Fenno (1978) slightly broadened his
approach, using participant observation in addition to conducting interviews with parliamentarians and their staff. Taking a slightly different angle, but
also using extensive exploratory interviews, Dexter (1969) investigated the degree of influence that citizens have on the decision-making of legislators.
A crucial study concerning the incentives to participate in legislative activity was conducted by Richard Hall (1996), again in the US, using interviews
with staffers instead of the parliamentarians themselves.
A prototypical example of the development of concepts in legislative research and the different use of surveys is the research on parliamentary roles,
which has built on the exploratory studies conducted in the 1950s and 1960s. For example, in a central and early study of legislative norms, Eulau,
Wahlke, and their colleagues (1959) explored the representational role types of “trustee”, “delegate”, and “politico” with the open question: “How
would you describe the job of being a legislator—what are the most important things you should do here?,” which they posed to 474 US state
legislators. A similarly open and exploratory approach was used by Searing (1994) in his study on the House of Commons, in which he identified more
specific types of parliamentary roles based on 136 interviews. Through their studies, these researchers thus prepared the ground for more deductive
quantitative work investigating the various roles and representational orientations of parliamentarians; in fact, this has become such a well-established
research field, thatquestions regarding roles and representational orientations have become a standard item in parliamentary surveys. As such, survey
questions are now the more common method by which to determine whether deputies are more constituency-focused (“delegates”) or whether they
prefer to follow their own judgment on what is best for general welfare (“trustee”).2
Fig. 8.1 The share of surveys and interviews conducted with MPs per year as part of studies published in Legislative Studies Quarterly (1992–2012)
Source: own calculations.
A related body of scholarship is the research on parliamentary norms: while Wahlke et al. (1962) used open questions to find out whether there are
parliamentary rules, later research on the US by the likes of Thompson et al. (1996), Hebert and McLemore (1973), and Asher (1973), built on this
earlier knowledge. Research on European parliaments, e.g. Loewenberg and Mans (1988), Crowe (1983), Bowler and Farrell (1999), or Skjaeveland
(2001), has similarly done so, so that by now, the use of established closed questions covering parliamentary norms in the form of surveys has become
standard practice (e.g. PARTIREP 2012; Weßels 2003).3 Indeed, an investigation of the issues published during the last 20 years by the most important
academic journal in legislative research—Legislative Studies Quarterly (LSQ)—shows that, overall, surveys are (p. 170) currently used much more
often than interviews. Of the 481 articles published in LSQ issued between 1992 and 2012, 95 (20 percent) used survey data and 36 (8 percent) used
interviews; 16 articles (3 percent) combined surveys with interviews. Out of the 111 articles relying on surveys, 38 (34 percent) used surveys
conducted with parliamentarians and parliamentary candidates; out of the 52 articles relying on interview data, 25 (48 percent) used interviews with
parliamentarians and candidates. This clearly demonstrates that surveys in general and surveys with parliamentarians and candidates are used more
often, perhaps because these data are more easily available and sometimes shared between researchers. Interviews, on the other hand, are slightly
less common, which may be due to the higher costs involved.
Fig. 8.1 depicts the general increase in the use of all types of surveys, including of the population, candidates, and parliamentarians (the line in light
grey depicts the percentage of all surveys used in LSQ in the respective year). The black and grey bars show the share of MP surveys and MP
interviews as a percentage of all the studies in Legislative Studies Quarterly. Here we can see that interviews are used less often, but that there is not
a distinct negative trend, indicating that this method is still used for exploratory and in-depth research.
The next two sections discuss the major challenges of interviews and surveys in legislative research, as well as suggest practical advice on
questionnaire design, question wording, and general interview rules.
(p. 171) 8.3 Conducting Interviews with Parliamentarians
8.3.1 General Interaction Between Interviewer and Interviewee
Surveys and interviews with parliamentarians are usually treated under the heading of elite studies, where elites are defined as those having power
(Lilleker 2003, 207), holding a privileged position in society, or being likely to have had more influence on political outcomes than members of the
general public (Richards 1996). This distinction is often deemed relevant in that “interviewing up” (meaning studying elites, i.e. people close to power)
has been found to have different implications than “interviewing down” (meaning interviews with persons not part of the elite, e.g. voters) (Desmond
2004, 262). To be more precise, interviewing up implies that “it is the interviewee who has the power” (Richards 1996, 201) in that he or she is in the
position to control and dominate the interview by taking charge of the interview, changing questions, or refusing to answer. In such a situation, classical
interview guides suggest trying to regain control of the interview and insisting on asking the prepared questions (Lilleker 2003, 211).
Page 2 of 14
On the other hand, the distinction between interviewing up and down may also be considered a rather outdated approach that ignores the fact that all
people who possess more knowledge about a special situation than the researcher—which is one of the reasons why he or she conducts the interview
in the first place—are in a position of power. In this way, interviewers are inevitably in a weaker position since they are dependent on the collaboration
of their counterpart. Despite this, politicians are, in fact, often found to show great respect for the interests of researchers and to be helpful and
dedicated interview partners: “I have frequently been surprised by the level of self-reflection, uncertainty, and nervousness tangible in some of the
most senior [...] interviewees as well as their willingness to share their thoughts with me” (Smith 2006, 647).
The question of power in interviews is further discussed in terms of the idea that interviewing up allows standards different from those employed when
interviewing down. A powerful position on the part of the interviewee is often considered as legitimation for altered treatment such as the manipulation of
questions, more subtle and more insistent questions, and a different level of ethical conduct, compared with that deemed appropriate for interviewing
people with less power. This differential treatment is perhaps justifiable given that politicians are well used to the interview situation and are experienced
in being questioned critically, to the extent that they are “trained” to look for questions whose answers might be used against them. Yet it remains
controversial whether the superior hierarchical position of an interview partner indeed allows for a different treatment, since the power available to
elites in their professional life may not necessarily manifest in an interview situation (Smith 2006, 646). Parliamentarians can (p. 172) also feel exposed
and vulnerable in interviews, so that the power asymmetry is not only defined by structural power but also by the situation.
An interview situation should thus be considered as a form of social exchange, where the researcher and the informant establish a relationship based
on reciprocity. In such a reciprocal or collaborative (Dexter 2006) interview situation, the interviewee has the power of access and information, and the
researcher the power of dissemination. Such a collaborative approach allows for a fruitful exchange of views, where the mutual trust in a
parliamentarian’s honesty and a researcher’s preparedness not to share the data without consent characterize the situation. Such symmetrical power
relations are said to have direct implications on the type of knowledge that is created (Conti and O’Neil 2007).
8.3.2 Sampling, Contacting, and Accessing Interview Partners
In contrast to the challenges non-elite researchers face in identifying respondents (e.g. non-voters or protesters), legislative researchers are usually
not confronted with this problem since the addresses of politicians are mostly public and contacting them is straightforward (Odendahl and Shaw 2001,
305). Furthermore, the sampling of parliamentarians is also rather clear-cut, since the whole population of parliamentarians in a certain parliament is
usually targeted (Goldstein 2002). For more specific research questions, the sampling procedure can be more central, e.g. when all parliamentarians
involved in a certain legislative project are to be investigated. In this case, a researcher can rely on snowballing, in which the interview partners are
asked to recommend further interviewees to the researcher, a technique which can lead to high response rates but also to serious selection bias (for a
description see Goldstein 2002). Another technique is the reputational approach, in which outside experts are asked to identify the key persons
involved in a certain matter, e.g. a legislative reform (Hoffmann-Lange 1987, 30; for an overview of methods see also Maestas, Neeley, and Richardson
Jr. 2003, 89). While this outside perspective might reduce selection bias, it can come at the cost of the experts not being as well informed as actual
participants.
Actually getting an interview appointment can be “more art than science” (Goldstein 2002, 669), however, since receiving and scheduling interviews
with elites is very time-consuming. Hence it is recommended that one allows for sufficient time and financial resources when conducting a research
project using this method of inquiry (Odendahl and Shaw 2001, 308). An alternative is to take up an internship or fellowship in a legislature so that
“embeddedness” provides easier access to the persons of interest (Baker 2011).
To approach a parliamentarian, a written request by mail or email, using official university stationary, is recommended. Cultural specificities should be
respected, e.g. whether email is acceptable or whether written letters are preferred (for an exemplary discussion of French specificities see Leuffen
2006). Overall, it is crucial to detail what (p. 173) the research project is about, and recommendable to explain why the addressed person is relevant
and important for the project. “Buttering them up” (Lilleker 2003, 209) might help in such situations, by, for example, outlining how dependent this
research is on his or her expertise. It is also useful to specify the expected duration of the interview, but since interviewing time can vary a great deal,
one should indicate the minimum amount of time, and not more than 30 minutes (Harvey 2010, 200).
8.3.3 Behaviour During the Interview
Interviewees want to look good, they are skillful in changing questions, they can refuse to answer questions, and they may have memory gaps (Morris
2009, 211). The researcher is thus required to ask “good” questions as well as to undertake all possible precautions in order to minimize measurement
effects and biases and ensure the attainment of valid results. In such a positivist approach, the interviewer is considered not to play a role when the
data is generated (Roulston 2010). This, however, overlooks the possibility that the characteristics and attitudes of the interviewer can have a distorting
for an overview of methods effect, in which case ignoring the role of the researcher may not be wholly appropriate. Somewhat reflective of this is the
standpoint of the constructivist interview theories, where the interviewer and the interviewee are considered to create the data collectively, so that the
data are “co-constructed” (Roulston 2010).
During the interview, researchers should make an informed (although not overly informed) impression, and present themselves as “friendly and
curious” (Leech 2002, 665) in order to build rapport with the interview partner. It is recommendable to encourage the interviewee with little comments to
demonstrate that you are paying attention, that you are listening carefully, and that “you are on their side” (Lilleker 2003, 210). However, one should
not be too deferential and instead stay alert so that one can always bring back the interviewees if they drift too far off the subject. It is impossible to be
a completely neutral interviewer, and it is perfectly legitimate to create a friendly atmosphere in which the interview partner feels appreciated, not
judged, and encouraged, although direct approval and disapproval should be avoided.
Both the interview situation and the role an interviewer assumes can vary depending on the context of the interview, as well as on age, gender, and/or
professional level of the interviewer and the interviewee (Puwar 1997). McDowell (1998, 2138), for example, describes how a quick assessment of a
range of visual and verbal clues was sufficient for her to present herself in different situational roles, ranging from “playing dumb” with a patriarchal
figure, being “brusquely efficient” with an older and fierce woman, “being sisterly” with women of similar age, and being “superfast, well-informed, and
not to be patronized” with younger men.
In any case, a researcher should always carefully consider the extent to which such dynamics might have influenced the interview. A couple of tools
can be applied to diminish these effects: for example, an interviewer can ensure a similar interview setting by using a written questionnaire that
includes short introductory texts that give a brief (p. 174) explanation of the topic before each set of questions. Allowing for greater comparability of
the interview situations, such texts are also particularly useful if several interviewers participate in the data collection exercise.
Page 3 of 14
8.3.4 The Questionnaire: Question Form and Order of Questions
Of necessity, the choice of interview questions depends on the researcher’s objectives and on the degree of prior knowledge of an issue area. In
general, a mix of closed and open questions is helpful for keeping the interviewee in line, allowing for comparability and guidance through the interview,
and avoiding monotony. Including open questions is a must in any case, however, since this allows the researcher to more fully draw on the expertise
of the interview partners.
In elite research, open questions (where few questions or prompts are given, and in the extreme case, only the topic with no specific questions is
indicated, e.g. narrative interviews) used to be the norm since it was recommended not to put elites “in the straitjacket of closed-ended questions”
(Aberbach and Rockman 2002, 674). Indeed, open questions are not only extremely valuable in that they give the researcher a chance to use the
expertise of the interviewee to its full potential, but also allow for the possibility of discovering completely new phenomena and insights, and for a better
flow (Lilleker 2003, 210). Furthermore, open questions permit the interviewees to use their own reference system in their answers. The great drawback
is, however, that the responses are difficult to interpret and code: very detailed coding rules and a more time-intensive interpretation of answers are the
tradeoff for probably more interesting and rich responses.
Asking open questions is also slightly more challenging in that interview partners might answer in new and unexpected ways so that it can be quite
difficult to lead him or her back to the original purpose of the questions. Since guiding the interviewee through the interview in this way also increases
the chance of interviewer effects, it may be useful to include pre-formulated prompts to help the interviewer in guiding a respondent back to the original
questions. These can be slightly more provocative than the original questions and might thus help to receive answers.4 As already mentioned, pre-
formulated prompts are also useful to reduce interviewer effects in situations where several interviewers cooperate in a single research project. Overall,
they are thus a sensible compromise between open and closed questions.
Returning to closed questions during the course of an interview helps to ensure that at least certain questions are answered if an interview partner is
particularly chatty or difficult to interview. It also makes the interviews more comparable and easier to code, and reduces interviewer effects.
Furthermore, closed-ended questions enable the researcher to generate some quantitative data to complement the qualitative data obtained from the
more open-ended questions (Harvey 2010, 203). They also give the researcher the possibility to signal certain normality when asking probing
questions: for example, “How often have you been offered special benefits or payments for a certain legislative (p. 175) service?” can be a less
threatening question than “Have you ever been bribed?” The drawback of closed questions is that unexpected answers are not captured, that the
interviewee is forced into certain categories, and that they are often perceived as rather boring and might thus lead to a loss of attention and, in turn, to
a deterioration of the quality of the data.
As regards the exact wording of open and closed questions, the reader is referred to Hermanowicz (2002), Schaeffer and Presser (2003), and Saris and
Gallhofer (2007), which offer good initial advice regarding which kind of question-and-answer form is useful for which kind of research interest, e.g.
whether middle categories are sensible in answer batteries, how many answer categories are useful, how to avoid acquiescence bias, how to use
forced choice questions, whether to include “don’t know” options, etc.5
When it comes to ordering the questions, the presentation of a general introductory text at the beginning of an interview is recommended to allow for a
common definition of the interview situation, the research goal, and if necessary, any contested concepts.6 Following this it is generally useful to pose a
warm-up question that is easy to answer for the expert, but which already signals that he or she is needed to answer the question. A typical example
here is the “grand tour” question, which asks the parliamentarian or politician to describe “a typical day in his or her life” (Leech 2002). It is not
recommendable to ask for easily available information, such as biographical details, at the beginning of an interview, since this wastes the time of the
interviewee and signals that the interviewer has not done his or her homework (Hermanowicz 2002, 491). Moving through the interview, it is considered
appropriate to progress from less probing to more probing questions (Morris 2009, 213). At the end, an interview partner should be thanked for their
time and praised for their expertise without which the research would not be possible.
Special care needs to be paid to sensitive questions, especially because they are potentially the most interesting given that they disclose knowledge of
experts which is otherwise not possible to obtain. It is legitimate to ask sensitive questions in a way that they convey a “normalcy” of certain behaviour
(so-called “presuming questions,” Leech 2002, 666). An example of such a question would be: “A party group leader should ensure the unity of a party
group where possible. Far-reaching means such as not granting a committee seat are legitimate to achieve this aim. Do you disagree/agree?” Experts
disagree with regard to the positioning of sensitive questions: while some recommend asking them at the end of the interview, others find that placing
them in the middle is the best option. This is because toward the middle of the interview, the interviewee has already been “warmed up” and can then
be led to the more sensitive questions. Asking sensitive questions at the end, on the other hand, bears the risk that the most interesting questions may
not get answered, given that interview times are often limited and that the interview may therefore have to be concluded early.
As regards formatting, it is recommended that one arranges the questionnaire generously so that lots of page-turning motivates the interviewee to make
progress. It is also advisable to have a second questionnaire at hand, in case interviewees wish to fill in their (p. 176) answers to closed questions
themselves. Interviewers should know the wording and order of the interview questions well, in order to ensure a smooth flow of the interview and to
avoid causing interruptions by having to look up the next question.
As to the recording of interviews, it generally is accepted that interviews are taped, although interviewees should always be asked if he or she agrees
before a voice-recording tool is used. Taping has the huge advantage that the interviewer can focus much better on the interview, on giving prompts,
and on guiding the interviewee through the questions, whereas noting down answers can take up a lot of valuable interview time and is prone to
omissions (Lilleker 2003, 210). If the interviewee refuses taping, the researcher should allocate time directly after the interview to tape or note down as
many impressions and notes as possible.
8.3.5 Judging the Quality of an Interview
A great interview, according to Hermanowicz (2002, 481), is one where the interviewer walks away with the realization that “someone’s essence or
inner core—the stuff that makes them tick—has been tapped and bled to show several of the constitutional elements of the respondent,” while a good
interview is one that captures basic and occasionally deep levels of meaning.
In practice, however, assessing the truthfulness of the interviewee’s responses is extremely challenging, especially since interviews are usually
conducted when there is not a lot of prior knowledge on a certain topic. Here, interviewing more than one person about a certain incident or issue,
cross-checking these accounts against each other, and conducting “implausibility checks” (Baker 2011, 108), are the only means of controlling for
validity.
Page 4 of 14
The interview situation itself can also be a source of error, particularly if the interviewee does not feel at ease (which is why it is preferable for
interviews to be conducted in a location chosen by the interviewee, e.g. his or her own office), or if a certain situation is disturbing or distracting the
respondent, e.g. after having lost a vote (Diekmann 1997, 382). Estimating the effect of these error sources on the quality of an interview can likewise
be rather difficult, since the opportunities for elite interviews are so rare that two comparable interviews can hardly be carried out with the same
interview partner. However, a careful transcription of the interview, including all prompts and questions by the interviewer, allows for more transparency
and for detecting the ways in which the interviewer, the questionnaire, and the situation might have distorted the data.7
A new approach to assessing the quality of elite interviews would be to ask the interview partners themselves to quickly rate the questions, the
interviewer, and the atmosphere during the interview on a short evaluation form at the end, in order to obtain an alternative impression of the interview
to that of the interviewer. A good control question regarding the quality of an interview and the interviewer would also be to ask whether an interviewee
would be prepared to be interviewed again in the future by this researcher or by someone else. If the person declines, the reasons for this could then
be (p. 177) asked (e.g. lack of time, not an agreeable interview experience, etc.), which would similarly give an indication of the quality of the
interview.
8.4 Legislative Surveys
As mentioned, surveys have become an increasingly popular tool in legislative research. Parliamentary surveys are currently particularly widespread in
Europe, as well as in countries where there is still less knowledge on legislative behaviour, while studies on the US Congress draw especially on the
easily available NOMINATE scores based on roll-call vote data. This has, in turn, led to a decrease in the use of methods such as observation, elite
interviewing, and “soak and poke approaches” in the US (Oppenheimer 2011). An overview of the most recent parliamentary surveys which make their
data available is provided in Table 8.1.
(p. 178) Table 8.1 Overview of the most relevant parliamentary surveys in recent years
Table 1 country / year of general aim method available data response sample size data availability— data availability— URL literature reference
survey name parliament conduction rate conditions
Comparative 15 March 2009– analysing variety of (1) The focus of national: 7.1% x <http://www.partirep.eu/>
MP Survey of countries: January 2011 changing methods, representation: –46.7%
PartiRep AUT, BEL, patterns of depending on the which are the (average =
(interuniversity FRA, DEU, participation and partners; groups in society 24.9%);
attraction pole HUN, IRL, representation in generally: contact for whom the MPs regional:
participation & ISR, ITA, modern via mail or e-mail, want to speak. 21.6% –40.4%
representation) NLD, NOR, democracies; web-based Special attention is (average =
POL, POR, cross-national survey, reminders paid to territorial 31%)
ESP, CHE, survey among and re-invitations groups, especially
GBR; data regional and via e-mail, backed in countries with a
collection national up by letters or federal or federal-
completed legislators in telephone calls; in type territorial
in BEL, DEU over 70 a number of organization. (2)
(state level), assemblies cases: face-to- The style of
HUN, ISR, face interviews representation:
NOR how do MPs
perceive their task
and which
activities are at the
core of the
representational
role? (3) Attitudes
on representation
and democracy:
what is the
meaning of
democracy? Is
there something
wrong with
representative
democracy and
how could it be
repaired or
improved?
European European April–November providing new contact via mail, personal details, 36% 270 access by <http://www2.lse.ac.uk/government/research/resgroups/EPRG/ R. Scully, S. Hix, and D.M. Farrell 2012
Parliament Parliament 2010 (latest source of data web-based survey electoral systems contacting Simon Hix MEPsurveyData.aspx>
Research edition, on Members of and candidate (<s.hix@lse.ac.uk>);
Group (EPRG) previous the European selection, login necessary;
surveys were Parliament campaigning aims academic purposes
conducted in and activities in only
2000 and 2006 2009 elections,
attitudes/behaviour
to representation,
committees and
Page 5 of 14
voting inside the

parliament, general
political attitudes,
attitudes to EU
policies and
institutional reform
(p. 179) European 2008–11 providing an European For attitudes 4.4%–42.9% free upon <https://dbk.gesis.org/dbksearch/SDesc2.asp? <http://www.piredeu.eu> (Giebler et al.
Providing an Parliament, infrastructure for Parliament Election toward political (average = registration, login no=5048&tab=3&ll=10&notabs=&af=&nf=1&db=D> 2009; Giebler and Wüst 2011)
Infrastructure all 27 the (combined) Study, Candidate issues (position 20.71%) necessary, (GESIS)
for Research member research on Study 2009: mail and valence
on Electoral states citizenship, questionnaire, issues), value
Democracy in political web-based survey orientations,
the European participation and perceived party’s
Union electoral and voters’
(PIREDEU) democracy in positions on
the EU; issues, campaign
improving upon style, strategies
the benchmark and means,
of the American attitudes towards
National Election European
Study (ANES); integration,
origins in the preferences for
European distribution of
Election Studies authority between
(EES) the national and
the European
level, focus of
representation,
attitudes towards
party discipline,
nomination
procedures,
information on
political
background and
experience,
migrant
background,
education,
profession,
religion, and
standard of living
Comparative 15 countries different for studying four alternative campaigning, 17.7%–66.7% sample size: free upon <http://www.comparativecandidates.org/node/> <http://www.comparativecandidates.org/>
Candidate (conducted each country relationships ways (plus recruitment, career (average = 170–1871 registration, login
Study (CCS) or currently (maximum time between the combinations): patterns, issues, 40.81%) (average = necessary
being span: 2005–11) candidate, the mail survey, face- ideology, 700; total =
conducted): party and the to-face interviews, democracy and 14392)
ALB, AUS, voters telephone, on-line representation
AUT, BEL, survey
BGR, CAN,
CZE, DNK,
EST, FIN,
FRA, DEU,
GBR, GRC,
HUN, ISL,
IRL, ITA,
LUX, NLD,
NZL, NOR,
POL, PRT,
ROM, SVN,
SWE, CHE
(p. 180) 18 countries different for providing data appointment via personal info (sex, 24%–90% 46–134 free upon <http://americo.usal.es/oir/elites/bases_de_datos.htm>
Elites of Latin each country on the opinions, phone, personal age, education, (average = (average = registration and
Parlamentarias America: (maximum time attitudes and interview at the salary, civil status, 57%) (Saiegh, 85.9) signing of
de América ARG, BRA, span: 1993– perceptions of interviewees’ political career, 2009) commitment on
Latina (PELA) BOL, COL, 2011) the members of offices party, motivation, confidentiality, login
CRI, CHL, parliament of all political necessary
ECU, GTM, Latin American background of
SLV, HND, countries family,
Page 6 of 14
SLV, HND, countries family,

MEX, NIC, religiosity...);
PAN, PRY, opinion on:
PER, DOM, divorce, abortion,
URY, VEN democracy (e.g.
stability,
consolidation),
elections and
electoral systems,
importance of
political parties,
left-right
positioning of
parties and
politicians, relation
between
population and
parties, level of
democracy in own
party, voting
discipline, relations
to own province
and behaviour in
case of conflict
between interest of
province and
political party,
independence of
judicial system,
free market or
regulated
economy, the
state’s
responsibilities,
direct or indirect
taxation
(p. 181) Japan, 2003 (members surveying mail personal 76.7%–95.3% 392 & 1104 free online <http://www.masaki.j.u-tokyo.ac.jp/ats/atpsdata.html> (Hirano, Imai, Shiraito, and Taniguchi
Asahi-Todai Lower and House of candidates questionnaires, information (name, (average = (2003), 433 2011)
Elite Survey Upper Representatives and/or members responses electoral district, 86.6%) (2004), 1043
(ATES) House & candidates), (of House of returned by fax etc.); political (2005), 433
2004 Councilors and circumstances (2007), 1301
(candidates & House of (party and (2009), 457
members House Representatives) relations); major (2010)
of Councilors), with regard to policies; personal
2005 their policy qualifications;
(candidates), positions on areas of qualified
2007 various issues and strong
(candidates & expertise;
members House personal opinion
of Councilors), on coalition
2009 government;
(candidates), further policy
2010 questions:
(candidates and constitution,
members House defense and
of Councilors) security, foreign
policy, social
policy, size of
government,
economic and
fiscal policy,
privatization,
agricultural policy,
budgeting, welfare,
education/culture,
technological
development,
environmental
conservation,
international
aid/assistance,
internal safety,
Page 7 of 14
immigration, death
penalty, regional
policy, etc.
(p. 182) USA Congressional collecting and The methods are a candidate’s most 2012: 28.72% 274 (2012 completion of <http://votesmart.org/share/api> <http://votesmart.org/>
Project Vote candidates: distributing used varied from recently completed (Congressional Congressional registration form
Smart 1992–2012, information on year to year. The Political Courage candidates): candidates) (contact, intended
State Legislative candidates for standard Test’ & 1992–2010: usage) and
candidates: public office, contacts: biographical 38%–63% submission of
1996–2012, such as issue 1) information: (average = payment required;
Gubernatorial positions, voting Introductory personal 53.9%, for research
candidates: records, Mailing information (marital Congressional purposes on behalf
1996–2012 campaign (including a status, education, candidates), of educational
financing, etc. letter professional and 14%–38% institution US$100
announcing political (average =
the Political experience, non- 29%, state
Courage legislative legislative
Test, the committees, candidates),
questionnaire organizational 34%–77%
2) membership), (average =
Confirmation opinion on 52.97%,
email (all abortion, budget, Gubernatorial
candidates spending, taxes, candidates)
with email campaign finance,
addresses in capital
our database punishment,
receive an economy,
email 1 week environment and
after mailing energy, foreign
to confirm policy, guns,
receipt) health care,
3) Red Card immigration, same-
Mailing (red sex marriage,
post card social security;
sent to information on
candidates 3 special interest
weeks before groups and their
due date ratings on
reminding candidates, state
them of the and federal key
request for legislation and the
information) candidate’s
4) Nag email respective vote,
(all committees and
candidates their members,
with email basic election
addresses in information and
our database candidates in the
receive an election, officials
email 1 week that hold certain
before due leadership
date positions
reminding
them of
request for
information)
(p. 183) USA (House 1998, 2000, understanding first contact via Potential Candidate 1998: 33% informant: free online <http://ces.iga.ucdavis.edu/datasets.html> <http://ces.iga.ucdavis.edu/>
Candidate election 2002 how potential approach letter, Survey: party 1548,
Emergence campaigns) candidates for mail affiliation, personal informant
Study (CES) the United States questionnaires, information interest potential
House of reminder in holding elective candidate:
Representatives postcards office, opinion on 2952, named
decide whether redistricting, size potential
to run for of constituency, candidate:
Congress, characteristics of 452, state
examining current office, legislators:
intensity and comparison of 872
content of House national, state and
campaigns and local level, future
how voters career, political
respond to philosophy (libarl-
Page 8 of 14
respond to philosophy (libarl-

campaigns conservative),
importance of
factors for
election,
importance of
political conditions
for election,
economic
conditions),
influencing factors
of interest in
running for US
House
time spent on
duties, demands of
constituents
(personal
problems,
complaints to
central/local
government,
legislative activity,
etc.), important
factors for entering
first rows of party
electoral list,
important factors
for being reelected
in general election,
communication
media used by
constituents to
learn about a
politician’s
activities
(p. 184) Turkish 1995 gathering data mail questionnaire, Time spent on 19.8% 85 available for (Hazama 2009)
Survey of Parliament on time phone reminder various duties of research upon
members of allocation, parliamentarian, personal request to
the Turkish demands of demands of the author:
Parliament constituency constituents, hazama@ide.go.jp
and their importance of
solutions, factors for entering
motivations for the first rows of the
party list party electoral list,
nomination, importance of
election, media, factors for being
constituency reelected in the
size, previous general election,
incumbency communication
media used by
constituents to
learn about a
politician’s
activities
Surveys bear the great advantage that the samples of randomly selected respondents allow for the making of statements with regard to the whole
population (Brady 2000); they also include a larger number of participants, and allow for drawing more wide-ranging inferences from the analyses and
for estimating the degree of uncertainty. The following section outlines the most common and widespread surveys in parliamentary research and
summarizes the general advantages and challenges of current survey research. In an additional section, expert surveys are discussed as a special
form of generating data for legislative research.
Surveys are a tool designed to obtain information from respondents based on standardized questions, either via face-to-face interviews, mail, phone,
internet, or a combination of these (e.g. visiting, leaving a questionnaire, possible follow-ups by phone). Nowadays, it is rather common to use online
surveys, an example being the established European Parliament Research Group survey, for which members of the European Parliament are contacted
by email and asked to fill in an online questionnaire (Scully, Hix, and Farrell 2012). With an online questionnaire, parliamentarians can choose a time
suitable to them for answering the questions, and interviewer effects are non-existent. While online surveys are thus considered more reliable, they do
demand internet literacy, which most parliamentarians in the developed world can, however, be expected to have (Johnston 2008).
Interviewing by phone or using computer-assisted telephone interviewing (CATI)8 has been reported to be rather successful even for elite and
Page 9 of 14
parliamentary studies (de Leeuw, Hox, and Snijkers 1995; Jahr 2006). Based on his practical experience, Baker (2011, 112), for example, recommends
phone surveys for conducting interviews in the US Congress since he found them to be very time-efficient as well as flexible; however, he admits the
loss of intimacy. Furthermore, while internet and mail questionnaires are considered to perform best in terms of the quality of answers and the
distribution of responses, phone interviews are often criticized on the grounds of reliability (Johnston 2009). In comparison with direct surveying, phone
interviews also bear the danger that (p. 185) “survey satisficing” behaviour is higher, meaning that respondents are more likely to acquiesce in
question batteries and to differentiate their answers less (Holbrook, Green, and Krosnick 2003; Pasek and Krosnick 2010).
8.4.1 Response Rates and Selection Bias
One of the major challenges of interviews and surveys is the low response rate (unit non-response) (for surveys in general see Massey and
Tourangeau 2013; for elite studies, see Montgomery, Cooper, Reiter, and Guan 2008; Gupta, Shaw, and Delery 2000), while the response rate is
usually higher for interviews than for surveys (Maestas et al. 2003). The problem of unit non-response in surveys is that a researcher may be left with a
very low number of cases, which could render the use of statistical methods problematic and lead to selection bias which, in turn, might lead to
distorted results. Rates of non-response appear to be growing internationally as well as to affect elite studies as much as those carried out with regard
to the general population, with the result that, by now, much greater efforts are necessary to achieve acceptable response rates (De Heer 1999). In
particular, mail and online surveys suffer from low response rates since, due to the easiness with which online surveys can be set up, there has been a
huge increase of survey demands so that parliamentarians are increasingly “overloaded” and thus less inclined to respond. The search for interview
partners, on the other hand, tends to be more straightforward, yet non-response rates are often not as systematically reported as in the case of self-
administered surveys. There are several ways of reacting to this. Firstly, one can try to increase the response rate by making repeated calls for
participation and by conducting personal interviews instead of mail surveys. A very good discussion and demonstration of such a method can be found
in Hoffmann-Lange (1987). Additional recommendations for increasing the response rate include the use of a respondent-friendly questionnaire, using
personalized correspondence, and promising that results of the study will be made available to the interviewee (Maestas et al. 2003).
Secondly, low response rates as such are not necessarily a problem if they are not biased (Montgomery et al. 2008). Some knowledge exists as to
which groups of parliamentarians usually do not respond as easily to surveys, e.g. parliamentarians from larger party groups (Weßels 2003) or
politicians in higher offices. By comparing the means of possibly relevant variables such as age, gender, hierarchical level of office, party group, and
career stage of the whole population (often the legislature) with the sample, it becomes obvious which “type” of parliamentarians might be
underrepresented. A measure available for this purpose is the Duncan Similarity Index9 (Marsh and Weßels 1997). In the case that a sample is found to
be biased, a possible remedy is the weighting of the sample, as for example in the state election study by Carey et al. (2002). Since they found that
female members especially serving in upper chambers of states with short sessions and small population districts, and who originated from (p. 186)
non-southern states, were more likely to respond, they assigned weights to correct for differential response rates.
Thirdly, by now several methods have been developed to model selection bias explicitly and to model why certain objects made it into the sample
(Johnston 2008). With Heckman’s (1976) and related selection models, it is now possible to model which persons respond to a survey and which do not.
Since we usually also have data such as party group membership, position, and age of those respondents who did not reply to a parliamentary study,
this is a rather straightforward thing to do. Possible factors influencing the response rate are income, age, race, and working status (Groves and Couper
1998), however, we have much less established knowledge regarding the role of these variables in parliamentary studies (for an attempt to model
survey non-response in population studies, see Brehm (1999)).
And finally, an alternative method for reducing the burden of filling out long questionnaires and thus hopefully increasing the response rate is a split
questionnaire design, where respondents have to fill out only parts of a questionnaire and the remaining blanks are subsequently filled in by the
researchers by means of imputing the missing data (for further discussion of these techniques, see Little and Rubin 1987; Raghunathan and Grizzle
1995). However, to date this has been applied mostly in population rather than elite surveys. In a similar line, there are statistical techniques for dealing
with item non-response (when a respondent does not answer certain questions), amongst the most established being King et al.’s (2001) multiple
imputation technique. This suggests an algorithm for filling in missing data as a possible alternative to listwise deletion and split questionnaire designs
(Goldstein 2002).
Overall, however, legislative researchers still face the problem that their surveys receive fewer and fewer answers, this in spite of the advanced state
of research on survey questions and current technologies that allow for conducting faster, cheaper, and more sophisticated surveys. In order to
remedy this, a first step would thus be to systematically investigate the response rates of parliamentary surveys, in which specific factors, such as the
length of questionnaires, the frequency and type of reminder contacts, the timing of the survey, and certain attributes of the respondents are used to
explain the lack of responses. In the long run, it is also important to encourage, particularly on the part of funding agencies and journal editors, a better
culture of data-sharing, so that parliamentary researchers can use the already conducted surveys more efficiently, and avoid repeating the same or
similar surveys; an example of such an attempt is the webpage VoteWorld.10
8.4.2 Expert Surveys
Expert surveys have become increasingly popular in party and parliamentary research, since they are rather easy to implement, comprehensive, and
very flexible. By sending online or paper questionnaires to several country experts asking them to provide estimates on party positions, legislative
powers, and resources, data on many aspects of (p. 187) party and legislative politics covering a large geographical scope can be collected. The
expert survey carried out by Laver and Hunt (1992) is considered one of the first influential expert estimates in party and legislative affairs literature.
This survey provided different party policy estimates with regard to 24 democracies and has since been repeated in its original (Benoit and Laver 2005)
as well as in modified/revised forms by several scholars. In particular, the Chapel Hill survey stands out for its specific focus on the European
integration dimension, as well as for the fact that it comprises a total of four survey rounds conducted between 1999 and 2010 and covers 24 countries
and 237 parties (Bakker et al. 2012). An emphasis on legislative party groups rather than parties is evident in Benoit and McElroy’s (2012) expert
estimates of European parliament party groups (surveys conducted in 2004, 2007, and 2010).
A particularly useful and geographically more elaborate data source is provided by Fish and Kroenig (2009), who develop a parliamentary power(s)
index based on a survey they conducted with social scientists, journalists, staff, and informed experts from 158 countries with regard to 32 factors that
compose legislative power. The expertise of their interviewees is used, among other things, to distinguish between the formal instruments and the
instruments actually used, so that an instrument was coded as a tool with which to exert power only when the experts considered it to be truly
implementable. On the one hand, this clearly demonstrates the advantage of surveying experts, since they can distinguish between irrelevant and
implemented legislative instruments. On the other hand, it also highlights a certain disadvantage, namely that expert survey measures are static and
have to be repeated in order to capture any changes (Desposato 2012). Also, a further shortcoming of this data collection effort is the omission of a
Page 10 of 14
measure of disagreement or uncertainty regarding the experts’ estimates, such as the standard error (Desposato 2012). In contrast, the Chapel Hill
party positions survey(s) list(s) these disagreement measures, thus providing material for substantially interesting research questions such as that
concerning the common practice among parties to deliberately blur their positions (Rovny 2012).
While there is an extensive debate on the use of expert data (as opposed to party manifesto data) for measuring party positions (Marks, Hooghe,
Steenbergen, and Bakker 2007; Steenbergen and Marks 2007), the use of expert surveys for investigating the characteristics of parliaments is not yet
intensely discussed. The advantage of expert surveys in general as well as in parliamentary research is that one can ask experts about basically
anything in relation to which there are experts (Marks et al. 2007). Often, experts also possess far more information (e.g. about the actual use of roll-call
votes in a parliament, as it was investigated by Hug 2012) than, for example, the document analysis of a parliamentary rule book would convey.
However, it must also be borne in mind that experts can only communicate subjective judgments, in view of which their answers are likely to be less
reliable. Also, experts can often only be asked to give information about facts or situations which are not too far in the past, since—as in the case of
parliamentary or population surveys—ex-post rationalization might otherwise distort the results. Furthermore, (p. 188) rather fluid or unstable objects
of investigation—such as new parties—can cause estimation errors also on the part of experts (Marks et al. 2007). Finally, in the case of party position
judgments, the surveying of experts was criticized by Budge (2001) in that it is unclear by what criteria and according to which time frame experts
actually make their judgments. In an extensive evaluation of expert judgments of party positions, Steenbergen and Marks (2007) discuss these points of
criticism and demonstrate how one can compare various measures of party positions using similarity indices. A final point of note is that expert surveys
suffer from declining response rates, with some reporting response rates nearly as low as those attained in elite surveys. In an ideal world, researchers
should use several sources of data to investigate their subjects. In the case of party positions, this is now easily possible since extensive research
based on diverse methods (ranging from party manifesto analysis to parliamentarians’ and populations’ estimates to expert surveys and media analysis
(for a discussion of these methods, see Helbling and Tresch (2010)) provides a rich database for comparing various estimates.
8.5 Conclusion
In spite of widely available data on legislative behaviour such as roll-call votes, there is still value in collecting data on MPs’ attitudes, ideas, and insights
directly from parliamentarians, their staff, and experts. The development of this field of research from the exploratory studies conducted in the early
years of modern parliamentary research toward the use and formulation of more established models and theories of legislative behaviour has been
accompanied by a shift in the use of interviews toward surveys. However, both methods are still valid in legislative research, depending on the
research question and the level of prior knowledge. As the main challenge in applying these methods I have identified the current lack of quality control
in qualitative interviews. In the tradition of the concept of the collaborative interview approach, a remedy against this could be a very brief evaluation
form for the interviewee at the end of an interview which gives the respondent a chance to assess the interview situation as well as the interviewer. As
for surveys, a recommendation for the improvement of parliamentary research is to lay greater emphasis on the coordination amongst the various
researchers to reduce the number of surveys with which parliamentarians are dealing in order to increase return rates. One example of such a
coordination effort is the comparative election research conducted via the European Social Survey, which is one of the most wide-ranging attempts to
coordinate public opinion research (Curtice 2007). But even in this well-developed field of opinion and election research, cooperation is demanding,
difficult, and dependent on institutional support as it is, for example, given by the European Union or the European Science Foundation. This already
indicates that future attempts to coordinate parliamentary surveys, as in the case of PARTIREP, will be slow and dependent on individuals’ efforts.
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Notes:
(1) . For a general introduction in qualitative interviewing see, for example, Dexter 2006; Kvale and Brinkmann 2009; Roulston 2010.
(2) . The wording of this question is usually similar to “How should, in your opinion, a member of parliament vote if his/her voters have one opinion and
his/her party takes a different position?” (PARTIREP 2012)For a recent empirical comparative study of roles based on survey data, see Blomgren and
Rozenberg (2012).
(3) . For example: “Would you say that the following items are true or false? Members frequently take parliamentary initiatives without the parliamentary
party’s authorization.” (PARTIREP 2012)
(4) . An example of this is the question used in a project about the role of so-called “parachutists” (parliamentarians without party experience) in party
groups (Bailer, Meissner, Ohmura, and Selb 2013): “What are the advantages of parachutists?”, with the following prompts: “Do they have more
professional experience?”, “Do they have more expertise than their colleagues in certain policy areas?”.
(5) . A helpful introduction to the challenges of cross-national surveys brought about by the possible misinterpretations of question and answer forms
can be found in Fu and Chu (2007).
(6) . Here, Patzelt (1996) cites the example of how the concepts of party loyalty, party pressure, party discipline, and party solidarity were first
introduced to and judged for their adequacy by the parliamentarians, before their attitude towards them was inquired.
(7) . For an extensive example of transcripted interviews, see Dexter (1969).
(8) . In CATI, the interviewer follows a script provided by a software application and inserts the data while listening to the answers.
(9) . It is calculated by summing the absolute differences between the proportions of each of the two groups across each category of the scale item and
dividing the total by two; it ranges from 0 (total agreement) to 100 (maximal difference).
(10) . <http://www.voteworld.berkeley.edu>.
Stefanie Bailer
Stefanie Bailer is Assistant Professor for Global Governance at ETH Zurich.
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The Experimental Study of Legislative Behaviour

James N. Druckman, Thomas J. Leeper, and Kevin J. Mullinix
Methodology
2014
This chapter discusses the use of experiments to study legislative behavior. It begins by clarifying what the word
experiment means and considers critical aspects of variation in experimental approaches. It then looks at two
approaches employed by social scientists—observational research and experimental research—and the
differences between them. It also examines experimental designs, focusing on the distinction between random
assignment and random sampling. The chapter reviews three applications of experiments in legislatures: legislative
voting; parliamentary coalitions; and responsiveness and legislators as subjects. Finally, it addresses some of the
challenges and limitations in the experimental study of legislatures and highlights future possibilities.
Keywords: experiments, legislative behavior, observational research, experimental research, experimental designs, legislatures, legislative voting,
parliamentary coalitions, responsiveness, legislators
9.1 Introduction
A. Lawrence Lowell was one of the most influential political scientists of the twentiethand early twenty-first
centuries, serving as president of both Harvard University and the American Political Science Association (APSA).
In Lowell’s presidential address to APSA, he advised against following the model of the natural sciences: “We are
limited by the impossibility of experiment. Politics is an observational, not an experimental science...” (Lowell 1910,
7). Counter to this sentiment, experiments have become a prominent, if not a central, method of inquiry in political
science over the last quarter century (e.g. Druckman and Lupia 2012). Just how much have they influenced the
area on which much of Lowell’s work focused—legislative studies? In this essay, we address this question. We
begin by clarifying what we mean by an “experiment” and we discuss critical aspects of variation in experimental
approaches. We then review three areas of experimental applications in legislative studies: legislative voting,
parliamentary coalitions, and responsiveness. We conclude by discussing the challenges and limitations of
experiments on legislatures but also by emphasizing future possibilities.
9.2 What is an Experiment and How is it Used?1
In contrast to modes of research that address descriptive or interpretive questions, researchers design
experiments to address causal questions. A causal question invites (p. 195) a comparison between two (or more)
states of the world: one in which some stimulus is experienced and another in which it is not, all else constant (an
untreated state). Causation is seen in the difference between these states and the fundamental problem of causal
inference arises when we cannot simultaneously observe a person or entity in these distinct states (Holland 1986).
Consider, for example, the causal effect of having majority versus unanimity rule. Only one of these rules can be in
place at any given point in time. How can we isolate the impact of distinct rules on legislators’ behaviours? To do
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so perfectly would require exploring a single vote, at a single point in time, with the exact same set of legislators—
in one case where a majority is needed and another that requires unanimity. This is obviously impossible and thus
social scientists often take one of two approaches to explore the impact of such rules (and other factors):
observational research and experiments.
Observational research involves comparisons between people subjected to different treatments. In the example
referenced above, it might mean analysing two similar legislatures with similar ideological compositions, identifying
a similar piece of legislation, but legislatures that differ in terms of the voting rule. If the unanimity rule leads
legislators to vote more strategically, for example, one might conclude the unanimity rule has a causal effect (on
strategic voting) relative to majority rule. Of course the validity of this conclusion would depend on the extent to
which the two legislatures and votes are truly comparable. It might be that legislatures that establish unanimity
procedures in the first place already have individuals in place who are likely to vote strategically, thus any
observed relationship is spurious (due to endogeneity).
As an example, a goal of much work on legislatures is to understand how institutional arrangements influence
behaviours, yet legislators themselves (whose behaviours are of interest) often design and alter institutions (see
Riker 1980). Outcomes are thus endogenous to institutional arrangements. Another even more concrete example
comes from Druckman and Thies’s (2002) finding that in bicameral regimes, when a governing coalition lacks an
upper chamber majority, its stability may be reduced due to inter-chamber conflicts. Yet governments can
anticipate the life shortening effects of bicameralism when forming in the first place, and they thus often form
coalitions less likely to suffer from the bicameral dynamic. The type of coalition that forms impacts duration, but
expected duration affects the type of coalition that forms. The inherent endogeneity makes identifying precise
causal mechanisms challenging. This is especially true given that legislative behaviour is dynamic, meaning that it
occurs over time and a host of variables come into play (Druckman 2008). These factors have stimulated a
renewed interest in what is the most direct way to test definitively a causal relationship: experiments.
Experimental research differs from observational research in that the entities under study are exogenously
assigned to treatment. Here, treatments refer to distinct values of potentially causal (i.e. independent) variables.
For example, an experimenter might randomly assign some participants to act as legislators and vote on
propositions under majority rule (one treatment) and others to do the same but under unanimity rule (a second
treatment). In some designs, there also is a control group that does not receive a treatment (e.g. they vote but are
not told how the outcome will be determined) and/or (p. 196) multiple treatment groups (e.g. various voting rules
are used such as a super-majority rule). Random assignment means that each entity (e.g. individual) being studied
has a non-zero (and independent) chance of being in a particular treatment or control condition.
How does random assignment overcome the fundamental problem of causal inference? By definition, random
assignment eliminates concerns about endogeneity and ensures, on average (i.e. in large enough samples), that
the groups are the same in every respect (e.g. same number of “naturally” strategic and non-strategic individuals,
the same average age, and so on for every possible variable). Consequently, differences in average behaviours
across the two or more experimental groups (e.g. more strategic voting in the unanimity rule case) indicates with
confidence that there is an impact of voting rule. Although we cannot observe a given individual in both treated
states (voting under majority and unanimity role), random assignment enables the researcher to estimate the
average difference between groups of individuals in the two states of the world—the average treatment effect.
Prior to the intervention, the randomly assigned treatment groups (and control group) have the same expected
behaviours. Apart from chance variation, random assignment provides a basis for assuming that the one treatment
group behaves as the other would have behaved had it not received the given treatment. Because the
experimenter controls values of the independent variable and assigns groups randomly, all confounding variables
(including those not actually observed) can be ruled out in establishing the effect of the independent variable.
By offering clear causal evidence, experiments allow social scientists to address a variety of issues. Roth (1995,
22) identifies three non-exclusive roles of experiments, and a cursory review makes clear that political scientists
employ them in all three ways. First, Roth describes “searching for facts,” where the goal is to “isolate the cause of
some observed regularity, by varying details of the way the experiments were conducted.” These types of
experiments often complement observational research. “Searching for facts” describes many experimental studies
that attempt to estimate the magnitudes of causal parameters, such as the influence of minority government on
cabinet stability. A second role entails “speaking to theorists,” where the goal is “to test the predictions [or the
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assumptions] of well-articulated formal theories.” The third usage is “whispering in the ears of princes,” which
facilitates dialogue between scientists and policymakers.
It is important that we clarify four important points about experimental designs. First, one should not confuse
random assignment with random sampling. Random sampling refers to a procedure by which participants are
selected for inclusion in some studies. Random assignment, by contrast, does not require that participants be
drawn randomly from some larger population (as with random sampling). Because the bulk of experimental studies
do not include actual legislators, the question of whether the participants (e.g. college students) are comparable to
actual legislators is a significant one, and one which we discuss later.
Second, many social science experiments use a between-subjects design, insofar as the researcher randomly
assigns participants to distinct treatment groups (e.g. majority or unanimity rule). An alternative approach is a
within-subjects design in which a (p. 197) given participant is observed before and after receiving a treatment
(e.g. there is no random assignment between subjects). For example, the same subjects vote under majority rule
and then they do it again under unanimity rule (or vice versa). In principle, the within-subjects design works only if
one can assume that each participant has not changed in any way relevant to the study (e.g. participation in a
prior round of voting does not affect subsequent behaviour). Because social scientists have to contend with
problems of memory and anticipation, a between-subjects experimental design is more typical.
That said, there are important exceptions—by definition, an experiment occurs when the researcher intervenes
(e.g. manipulates the independent variable(s) of interest) and can safely treat the units as on average comparable.
Sometimes this comparability can be assumed through the employment of induced value theory. Induced value
theory refers to gaining control over experimental participants’ preferences via monetary rewards. There are four
conditions necessary for the implementation of induced value: non-satiation, saliency, dominance, and privacy
(Guala 2005, 232–33). In nearly all cases, the payoff is some kind of financial reward. Many of the studies we
discuss below employ induced value theory; this does not mean random assignment does not occur but, in theory,
induced value dominates subjects preferences to such an extent that subjects are effectively homogeneous and
thus the study design can meet the requisites of being an experiment sans random assignment.
One of the early experimental studies of coalitions took this approach. Specifically, Riker (1967) examined how
three-person groups formed coalitions given pre-specified pay-off constraints. In this treatment-only experiment
(i.e. there was no control group), subjects negotiated how to divide a pot of money among themselves within the
confines of a payoff schedule (the independent variable) that offered subjects nothing for a three-person coalition
and varying amounts for each other in a two-person coalition. Riker treated each run of the experiment as
independent.
A third point worth noting is the distinct traditions shaping research by political economists and political
psychologists. Whereas psychological experiments often include some form of deception, economists consider it
unacceptable. Psychologists also rarely pay subjects for specific actions they undertake during an experiment (i.e.
they do not employ induced value). Economists, on the other hand, often require such payments.
Fourth, there are three general contexts in which experiments take place: the laboratory, the field, and within
large-scale surveys. A lab experiment involves an intervention in a setting created and controlled by the
researcher; a field experiment takes place in a naturally occurring setting; and a survey experiment involves an
intervention in the course of an opinion survey (which might be conducted inperson, over the phone, or via the
web). The approach taken and the details of the design speak to the extent to which a given study possesses high
levels of internal and/or external validity. While these concepts are much more complex than they are often
treated (Druckman and Kam 2011), the basic understanding is as follows. Internal validity refers to the confidence
with which one can make definitive casual inference and in many cases, experiments are seen as having relatively
strong standing when it comes to internal validity.
(p. 198) The other major type of validity is external validity; it stems from the reality that researchers typically
conduct experiments with an eye toward questions that are bigger than “What is the causal effect of the treatment
on this particular group of people?” For example, they may want to provide insight into how legislators behave
generally, despite having data on relatively few legislators or student participants acting as legislators. External
validity covers: whether the participants resemble the actors who are ordinarily confronted with these stimuli;
whether the context (including the time) within which actors operate resembles the context of interest; whether the
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stimulus used in the study resembles the stimulus of interest in the world; and whether the outcome measures
resemble the actual outcomes of theoretical or practical interest. The fact that several criteria come into play
means that experiments are difficult to grade in terms of external validity.
The remainder of this essay has four sections. The first three provide reviews of prominent applications of
experiments.2 In the final and concluding section, we touch on some of the challenges to the experimental study of
legislatures.
9.3 Experiments on Voting in Legislatures
One of the most fundamental objects of inquiry in legislatures is voting. It is voting that determines what governing
coalitions survive, what laws are made, and ultimately who wins in politics. An overriding question here is: given
legislators’ preferences, the dimensions of policy, and institutions, can one discover stable political coalitions
forming in legislatures? This is the classic social choice problem and one that has been the subject of experiments
for over 40 years. Experiments allow for control over these various factors and enable researchers to use induced
value theory to control for preferences. In nearly all cases, this work tests theories of social choice.
The seminal social choice work, Arrow’s (1951) “general possibility theorem,” questioned whether it was possible
for any reasonable democratic institution to aggregate collections of individual voters’ preferences into a stable,
majority-supported policy. One implication of Arrow’s work was that any legislative coalition able to obtain majority
support for a given policy could readily be defeated by a differently configured majority coalition. McKelvey (1976)
showed that in multidimensional policy space, voting institutions could produce a cycle through seemingly any
possible policy. In reality, most policies can be discussed on multiple dimensions (e.g. health care concerns
economic and social dimensions; see Riker 1986). If stable majority coalitions cannot be formed, how can
governance—let alone representation—occur?
Questions about majority rule (in)stability remain but have been greatly aided by experimental investigation.
Indeed, while Miller (2011) describes how early empirical efforts (e.g. Riker 1986) attempted to observe linkages
between majority rule institutions, the preferences of legislators, and policy outcomes, such approaches were
“singularly handicapped” due the inability to measure legislators’ preferences or, to a large (p. 199) extent, the
institutional rules in which those preferences operated or the outcomes of legislative voting.
Experiments on majority rule institutions began almost as soon as McKelvey’s work was published (see McKelvey
and Ordeshook 1990). Specifically, Fiorina and Plott (1978) examined the process of simple majority rule institutions
on collective decision-making. They used an experimental design consisting of subjects tasked with choosing a
policy from a two-dimensional space, with each subject having clearly defined (but private) preferences,
essentially unconstrained communication among subjects, and the group decided based upon strict majority voting
under a forward agenda rule. A forward agenda rule is one where possible policies are introduced and voted on
immediately, against the status quo, and this continues until no new proposal wins.
Fiorina and Plott’s experimental approach resolved many of the shortcomings of observational methods. First,
preferences and institutional rules were manipulated so the researchers were able to avoid the challenging task of
observing and quantifying these critical independent variables. Second, by conducting an experiment in which
decision-making was not confounded by unobservable factors of legislative processes (e.g. symbolic votes, log-
rolling, party or constituency pressure, lobbying, etc.), Fiorina and Plott were able to use repeated iterations of the
experiment, manipulating only preferences (so that in one condition there was a majority rule equilibrium—i.e. a
“core”—and one in which there was not), to clearly identify which proposals from the policy space would be
supported during the mock legislative processes. Formal theories had expected that majority rule institutions could
only produce stable (or even remotely predictable) outcomes when a core existed and would otherwise produce
chaos. In a one-dimensional policy space, the core is equivalent to the median voter’s position. In multidimensional
space, the core is the analogous “middle” of the voters’ preferences but depending on the configuration of
preferences such a core does not always exist (e.g. a median along multiple dimensions would be a core).
Differences between configurations of preferences therefore tested the limits of majority rule across plausible
conditions. The key experimental comparison in Fiorina and Plott’s study was between the two conditions—the one
(with a core) where majority rule should have consistently resulted in policy outcomes near the core (and hence
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stability) and the second no-core condition, which tested “what would happen when anything could happen” (Miller
2011, 355). Despite McKelvey’s (1976) theoretical prediction that endless cycling might occur, even without a core
Fiorina and Plott’s experiments largely yielded core-like outcomes and therefore did not “explode” (Fiorina and Plott
1978, 590).
Why did the experiments not produce the infinite cycling expected by theory? Answering this question is an
example of how experiments can be used to “speak to theorists.” One answer is that the experimental procedures
imposed some institutional particularity, which constrained behaviour. Fiorina and Plott’s experiments relied on a
forward agenda (where each new proposal is voted against the last successful proposal), which invariably moved
policy away from the status quo regardless of the presence of a core but which was not thought a priori to
necessarily constrain the eventual (p. 200) collective decision to any particular part of the policy space. A
backward agenda, by contrast, involves voting on proposals in the opposite order from which they were
introduced, eventually pitting the last successful proposal—if any proposals were successful—against the original
status quo. This rule could have more predictable outcomes because legislators can deduce which proposal(s) of
those available to be voted on maximize their utility and if no proposal finds stable support of a majority coalition
then the status quo wins. Wilson’s (1986) experiments on forward and backward agendas (for preference
configurations with a core) show that agenda rules matter: holding all else constant, a backward agenda
significantly constrains instability (generally by leaving policy at the status quo) and a forward agenda offers no
such guarantee of constraint. Agenda rules, then, may not be the best explanation for the apparent stability in
Fiorina and Plott’s experiments (since agenda-setting rules are not the apparent reason for the Fiorina and Plott
stability finding).
Another answer to why McKelvey’s expected chaos did not occur might lie in the nature of preferences.
Experiments conducted after Fiorina and Plott showed that a lack of chaos was not an artifact of their experimental
design, being robust to having ideal points publicly known by all subjects, completely unconstrained discussion,
and no formal agenda rule (McKelvey et al. 1978). McKelvey (1986) himself offered one explanation for the
absence of chaos. He theorized that outcomes of majority voting could be “institution-free” to the extent that an
“uncovered set” (an area of policy space, equivalent to the core if a core exists and otherwise consisting of all
alternatives that can directly or indirectly defeat all other alternatives in head-to-head voting) seems, theoretically,
to encompass the set of likely outcomes across a number of very different institutional arrangements. Experiments
convincingly demonstrated that even without a core, outcomes consistently fall inside the uncovered set. In a
“search for facts” so as to settle theoretical inconsistencies, Bianco et al. (2008) re-analysed 272 iterations of
previously run majority rule voting games to show that 93.75 percent of the time, majority rule produced decisions
inside the uncovered set.3 Thus, the original authors of these studies thought their experiments had demonstrated
instability, but reanalysis shows that the studies had demonstrated predictable outcomes from within the uncovered
set—outcomes that directly or indirectly dominated most other alternatives. Experiments were vital for
demonstrating the stability of social choice, even when the original experimenters had insufficient theory to explain
their empirical results.
Fiorina and Plott had wondered why trials from their no-core condition produced a fairly narrow, centrally located
set of outcomes; the uncovered set appears to explain those outcomes. While theory was able to predict the
effects of institutional factors (e.g. forward versus backward agenda rules) on social choice with experiments used
to test those predictions, these experiments also revealed an overlooked feature of majority rule: when seemingly
anything could happen, preferences themselves (even without a core) heavily constrain the feasible coalitions
and, as a result, the set of possible collective decisions. Experiments have revealed other important insights into
how institutions shape decision making. For example, subtle variations in discussion rules used across studies (e.g.
open discussion, no discussion, issue-by-issue discussion) can have (p. 201) significant impacts on collective
decisions. McKelvey and Ordeshook (1984), for example, compare experimental results from issue-by-issue voting
(i.e. proposals can only move on one dimension at a time) under conditions of either no discussion or unrestricted
discussion. Even though issue-by-issue voting constrains each proposal to a unidimensional move, discussion
allowed the groups to behave more like they were operating under unrestricted majority rule than strict issue-by-
issue voting.
These results reiterate the importance of experimental tests of formal theories but also have implications that can
“speak to princes.” First, voting experiments show how coalitions form and defeat counterproposals in ways not
previously predicted by theory. Compromises can be reached by legislatures, not by stable majorities “bulldozing”
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legislation but through carefully crafted compromises that hold onto pivotal coalition members in the face of
counterproposals (e.g. Jeong et al. 2011). Second, “princes” might learn that while restrictive institutional rules
may produce more predictable outcomes (policies in the uncovered set), those outcomes do not necessarily
correspond to the outcomes produced by pure majority rule. Depending on a legislature’s policy objectives, these
experiments suggest that relatively simple procedural rules (as opposed to significant rule changes like
supramajority voting) can greatly constrain outcomes of majority rule decision-making. Experiments have
confirmed how “institution-free” majority rule produces far more predictable coalitions and fairly stable outcomes
than might be expected by prior theory.
9.4 Experiments on Parliamentary Coalitions
The essence of parliamentary government is coalition formation and functioning. In contrast to presidential
regimes, the leader of the nation and thus the policies implemented are not determined by election, but rather by
coalition negotiations. Coalition formation has been a subject of intense study over the past 40 years (e.g. Golder
et al. 2012). Most of these studies concentrate on making predictions about what government will emerge after
coalition negotiations, how portfolios are allocated, and how long a coalition will last. The empirical challenge is that
many variables affect each of these dynamics (e.g. Martin and Stevenson. 2001). Experiments can address this
challenge as they allow for control of confounds. Moreover endogeneity is always present with observational data
given parties anticipate potential institutional effects and act accordingly. Thus, to truly isolate the impact of
institutions, an approach where one controls the absence or presence of an institution is needed.
As such, experiments have been particularly useful for understanding how legislators bargain over potential
coalitions. Due to the necessity of control over institutional features, almost all of this experimental work is
conducted in a highly structured laboratory setting (as opposed to field or survey settings). Much of it involves
testing the (p. 202) canonical model laid out by Baron and Ferejohn (1989). And, because this research is
focused upon experimental tests of formal theory rooted in political economy, it almost exclusively employs
induced value theory.
The Baron-Ferejohn (1989) model reflects legislative bargaining in a non-cooperative, sequential, and multi-session
game under majority rule. The model begins with the recognition of one party as a proposer (i.e. formateur). A
recognition rule establishes that the proposer is selected at random. The party recognized to make a proposal is
said to have “agenda power,” because it proposes a coalition and recommends a particular distribution of benefits
(which is made up of a fixed, finite pie) among parties in the coalition. Under a closed rule, amendments are
prohibited and the proposal is voted upon immediately. However, an open rule allows for amendments to the
proposal on the floor. The parties vote on the proposal using majority rule. If the proposal passes, the game ends
and the coalition forms, with each party receiving the proposed distribution of benefits. If the proposal fails, the
process continues (i.e. starts over) until a proposal is accepted. The model accounts for settings with both finite
and infinite numbers of sessions.
The Baron-Ferejohn model yields predictions for settings with closed rule finite sessions, closed rule infinite
sessions, and open rule infinite sessions. First, in a closed rule and finite situation, the model predicts majoritarian
results where only a minimal majority of members receives a positive allocation of benefits, and the proposer
receives a disproportionately large share of benefits (e.g. cabinet portfolios). This occurs not only because of the
formateur’s agenda power, but because the closed rule prevents other parties from making amendments or
modifying the proposal. The model also results in some parties being excluded from the coalition altogether as the
proposing party selects the coalition partner with the smallest continuation value (amount necessary to secure
acceptance). When the number of sessions is no longer arbitrarily limited, the closed-rule infinite session model
continues to predict that only a minimal-majority receives the benefits, and the proposer is disproportionately
advantaged. In contrast to these predictions, a simple open rule allows members who were not allocated their
continuation value in the proposal to make a substitute proposal. The formateur knows that other members have
the ability to make such amendments, and takes that into account when making the initial proposal. For these
reasons, the model predicts that in an open rule infinite session legislature, the agenda power of the proposer is
greatly reduced and the distribution of benefits is more egalitarian.4
A wealth of experimental research sought to test the Baron-Ferejohn model, and in doing so, engaged in the critical
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task of “speaking to theorists.” The first such attempt was performed by McKelvey (1991). Here, three voters in a
finite closed-rule setting bargained over how to distribute payoffs. A failure to agree upon a distribution resulted in
a loss of 5 percent of the stake. In contrast to Baron-Ferejohn, McKelvey found that proposers typically offered too
much, and that the lower equilibrium proposals were rejected too often. That is, coalition partners often received
much larger shares than those predicted by the model; unlike the model’s prediction, the proposer did not receive
a share so much greater than the other partners. Diermeier (2011) explains this (p. 203) disparity between theory
and evidence by suggesting that a faithful implementation of the Baron-Ferejohn model in an experimental
laboratory is challenging due to finite time constraints, the model’s assumption of stationarity (requiring that a
member take the same action in structurally equivalent subgames), and because the unique stationary equilibrium
involves randomization.5 The sharp distinction between model expectations and McKelvey’s experimental results
spurred a series of experimental studies that attempted to explain the differences and overcome experimental
limitations.
One body of experimental research addressed the Baron-Ferejohn model’s institutional predictions. Still within the
framework of a distributive model of legislative bargaining, Fréchette et al. (2003) analyse the effects of open (allow
amendments) versus closed (no amendments, vote immediately) amendment rules. Consistent with the Baron-
Ferejohn model, Fréchette et al. find a more egalitarian distribution of benefits and longer delays under the open
amendment rule. They also find that the proposer gets a larger share of the benefits than other coalition members
under both rules, and that play converges toward a minimal winning coalition (Riker 1962) under the closed
amendment rule. In contrast to the Baron-Ferejohn model, Fréchette et al. demonstrate that the frequency of
minimal winning coalitions is much greater under the closed rule (the model predicts minimal winning coalitions
under both rules), and that the distribution of benefits is much more egalitarian than expected.
In an effort to address some of the methodological limitations of McKelvey (1991), Diermeier and Morton (2005)
conduct an experiment to more directly test the Baron-Ferejohn predictions. They concentrate on a finite period
using majority rule in which three players divide a fixed payoff under closed rule procedures. In contrast to
McKelvey’s experiment, Diermeier and Morton’s design does not have to assume stationarity, the subgame perfect
equilibrium does not involve randomization, and by employing a weighted majority game they are able to isolate
comparative statics rather than simple point predictions. In doing so, Diermeier and Morton find that the Baron-
Ferejohn model predicts “hardly better than a coin flip which coalition partner is selected by the chosen proposer”
(p. 201). In contrast to model predictions, proposers distribute much more money to other players than expected.
Thus, proposers often allocate money to all players, the cheapest coalition partners are not always selected, the
proposers offer too much, and many first-period proposals above the continuation value are rejected. In fact,
Diermeier and Morton find that a simple equal sharing rule yields predictions that can account for half to three
quarters of the accepted proposals.
The Baron-Ferejohn model is not without rivals—which is not surprising given its limited success in experimental
tests. In fact, a plethora of observational studies and field research buttressed Gamson’s (1961) claim that
portfolios will be distributed proportionally (to each coalition member based on their relative seat contribution to the
coalition), such that it is often referred to as Gamson’s law (e.g. Warwick and Druckman 2001). Prompted by the
highly disparate predictions of Gamson’s law and the Baron-Ferejohn model, other work focuses on demand
bargaining (Morelli 1999). Morelli’s demand bargaining model strips the formateur of its agenda-setting power and
enables parties to make sequential demands so as to maximize their share of benefits. In contrast to the (p. 204)
formateur in the Baron-Ferejohn model who makes a proposal about how portfolios should be distributed, here the
formateur is distinguished only by the fact that it chooses the order in which sequential demands are made. Other
parties are no longer restricted to accepting/rejecting the formateur’s proposal, but can make demands so as to
maximize their own share of benefits. In a three-party bargaining situation, Morelli’s model would predict an equal
split between the first two movers, with the third party excluded from the coalition and receiving nothing. Thus, the
outcome of the game is quite distinct from the Baron-Ferejohn predictions. A three-party negotiation in the Baron-
Ferejohn model would give roughly two thirds of the benefits to the proposer, one third to the coalition partner, and
nothing to the third party. While there are important cases that distinguish Morelli’s results from Gamson’s (see
Fréchette et al. 2005), the general conclusion is that it is possible to obtain equilibrium outcomes that approximate
the proportional payoff distribution.
In one fruitful line of inquiry, a number of experiments directly test the Baron-Ferejohn, Gamson, and Morelli models
(e.g. Fréchette et al. 2005). These experiments are excellent examples of both “speaking to theorists” and
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“searching for facts” as they provide explicit tests of competing theoretical propositions, and attempt to
understand how portfolios will be allocated. These studies consistently find that Morelli’s demand bargaining
performs best. For example, the predictions of many of these experiments contrast with the expectations of Baron-
Ferejohn in that the allocation of benefits is more egalitarian than expected and that many subjects reject offers
above their continuation value.
Heretofore, the experimental context of the studies mentioned has not been discussed. Diermeier (2011) notes that
much of this research follows in the methodology developed by experimental economics and game theory in which
subjects interact anonymously through computer terminals with payments based on performance, which differs
quite notably from the face-to-face paradigm used in most majority voting studies. Diermeier asserts that a number
of promising lines of research rooted in psychology shift the experimental design away from the abstract economic
setting and move toward a context-rich environment.
Some of this research extends beyond Baron-Ferejohn to not only ask how coalitions are formed, but how they
actually negotiate in ways that facilitate trust. Contextually rich experiments enable scholars to examine a variety
of dimensions that can facilitate trust, including: nonverbal communication via face-to-face interactions in
comparison withcomputer-based negotiations, public versus private communications, and the role of secret
communication settings (Swaab et al. 2009). Face-to-face interactions are shown to increase bargaining efficiency,
private communications decrease efficiency, and secrecy appears to undermine trust and prevent efficient
bargaining altogether. By enriching the experimental context, researchers are able to test theories of coalition
formation and the Baron-Ferejohn model predictions in more realistic settings accounting for variation in
communication strategies.
Disparities between model predictions and empirical results persist and many research questions remain
unanswered. The lack of congruence between formal models (p. 205) and empirical work has led some to
suggest that the topic of government and coalition formation should be reconsidered from “the bottom up” (e.g.
Golder et al. 2012). It may be beneficial for experiments to incorporate recent work on dynamic theories of
bargaining in which the decisions of one period become the status quo in the next (Baron et al. 2012). Much work
remains to be done uniting the findings from experiments from context-rich settings and those from an abstract
traditional economic approach.
Of course underlying all legislative behaviour is the reality that actions are being taken by electorally oriented
actors with an eye toward future elections. Thus, another important area of study—and one that has only recently
been the subject of experimental inquiry—is just how responsive legislators are to those who elect them.
9.5 Experiments on Responsiveness and Legislators as Subjects
Legislative coalitions do not operate in a vacuum. At the heart of both normative and empirical analyses of
legislative behaviour is a concern for responsiveness. Observational studies have long since attempted to
disentangle the relationship between constituency preferences, legislative behaviour, and policy outcomes. These
studies are often plagued by problems of endogeneity. Thus recent experimentation has proven quite useful in
directly testing how legislators respond to public preferences. Many of these studies also include real legislators
functioning in their actual political environment. What better way to “whisper in the ears of princes” than to actually
speak to legislators to see and hear their responses?
Butler and Broockman (2011) employ a cleverly designed field experiment to address how state legislators respond
to constituent inquiries. Emails were sent to state legislators requesting help with registering to vote. The emails
were randomized to contain either a white or black alias as well as an indication of the sender’s partisan
preference. Emails using the black alias received fewer replies, and controlling for partisanship did not erase the
racial disparity. The study illuminates a pattern of discrimination where white legislators of both political parties
reply to the black sender with far less frequency than minority legislators suggesting asymmetric responsiveness to
public concerns.
This study raises important ethical considerations about experimental research on elected officials. This issue
becomes particularly clear when the outcomes of interest in the experiment are political as opposed to individually
beneficial. Butler and Nickerson (2011) randomly provided half of the members of the New Mexico State House with
Page 8 of 13
the results of otherwise unavailable, district-specific public opinion data on a particular policy. Butler and Nickerson
then measured whether legislators who received that information voted in line with the views of their constituents
and found that information did help legislators to follow voters’ preferences. This study provides unparalleled
insights into the nature of legislators’ voting behaviour, and the study authors characterize their (p. 206) findings
as positive for democracy. Yet they make no mention of the ethical implications of withholding treatment from a
random half of the legislature.
In a different direction, Neblo et al. (2010) report on experiments focused on constituents, which use legislators as
part of the treatment. The studies examined what types of constituents were willing to engage in deliberation, with
the type of deliberation randomly consisting of either citizens deliberating with their member of the US Congress or
deliberation with only other citizens. While much experimental work in political science invokes public officials in
treatments or outcomes, most of it uses fabricated treatments to aid the researcher’s purpose. The research
behind the Neblo et al. is quite distinct in that it involves actual legislators recruited to participate in the studies,
which focus on who chooses to deliberate. For example, Neblo et al. demonstrate that the opportunity to deliberate
with a member of Congress significantly increases willingness to participate in deliberation (also see Esterling et al.
2011).
These experimental studies of legislative behaviour, while quite different from the coalition and voting studies, are
innovative for their mundane realism (i.e. their use of real legislators as participants and real legislatures as
contexts). Clearly, trade-offs between experimental realism, external validity, control, and ethical considerations
are underdeveloped in the experimental literature on legislative behaviour.
9.6 Challenges and the Future of Experiments
Our review of applications has hopefully made clear that experiments add considerable insight to what we know
about legislatures. They enable researchers to overcome common problems (e.g. endogeneity, confounding
variables) faced with observational data. Yet, there are significant challenges that may explain why experiments
have not been as dominant of a methodology in legislative studies and this section identifies some of these
challenges.
Perhaps the most notable constraint concerns the nature of the experimental participants. The bulk of studies
(other than those on responsiveness) rely on students or at least individuals who are not actual legislators. This
causes many to worry that the results from such studies provide scant insight in the realities of legislative
behaviours. While we recognize it is a constraint, we also take a more optimistic approach, making two major
points.
First, a cursory glance at a related literature on international bargaining serves as evidence that strides can be
made by using student subjects. This can be done via role-playing which has proven successful in generating
predictions/explanations that have clear relevance to the actual international negotiations. Much of this is done via
simulations where participants are experimentally assigned to different roles and conditions within simulated
settings/negotiations. Additionally, if one is worried about (p. 207) students per se, Kam et al. (2007) suggest
recruiting non-student subjects, even for studies run on campus laboratories.
Second, it is important to clarify the goal of experimental inference. The goal of an experiment is to identify a
causal relationship. This differs from observational research that often focuses on inferring univariate
characteristics of a population. Experimental control aids the researcher by creating a reality that has precisely the
features of interest to the researcher (e.g. particular voting rules). While individual subjects might vary in unknown
ways, the use of induced value is thought to make these differences near-irrelevant by heavily structuring their
preferences within the experimental setting (and random assignment balances any differences between treatment
groups). As induced value overwhelms subjects’ behaviour, the differences between a given sample of subjects
and the real population of legislators to which inference is intended become less important. Characteristics of
subjects are only problematic when features of a sample dramatically differ from the target population and those
differences affect the extent to which subjects respond to a treatment (see Druckman and Kam 2011). In general
and particularly when induced value mimics preferences of the real legislature to which inference is intended, any
subject population can be used to draw accurate causal inferences unless there is some unique feature of the
subject population that makes them react dramatically different to the stimuli than would actual legislators.
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Finally, many coalition processes of most recent interest are inherently dynamic—that is, they occur over time
and/or focus on ongoing policy-making processes (e.g. Dewan and Myatt 2012). Indeed, questions about the
stability of legislative coalitions depend upon longer timeframes than are possibly emulated in a single laboratory
session, but the costs and effort involved in such research can be quite high.
That said, we conclude on a more uplifting note by emphasizing the potential for the expansion of experiments in
legislative studies. As shown, they have proven quite successful in certain areas and we believe more can be
done. One avenue is increased collaboration between those taking political psychological and political economic
approaches—indeed, much of the advances in legislative studies employ economic-style approaches yet many
political science experiments are more psychological in nature. Also notably absent from our review of applications
are survey experiments. This is somewhat surprising given a long history of successfully launching surveys of
either legislatures themselves or experts in certain areas. It would not be difficult to embed experiments into such
surveys to explore how respondent legislators would react to distinct scenarios (e.g. Tomz 2009).
In the end, experiments are one tool that will complement others but one that we believe should play a larger role
along with advances in statistical methods, and the collection of large, collaborative data sets (e.g. Müller and
Strøm. 2000). Despite Lowell’s statement with which we began, experiments have in fact long been a part of
research on legislatures (e.g. Riker 1967), and we believe that, in line with much of the rest of the discipline,
experiments could play an even more prominent place in the future.
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Druckman, J. N., Green, D. P., Kuklinski, J. H., and Lupia, A., 2011a. Experimentation in Political Science. In J. N.
Druckman, D.P. Green, J.H. Kulinski, and A. Lupia (eds.). Cambridge Handbook of Experimental Political Science,
pp. 3–11. New York: Cambridge University Press. (p. 209)
Druckman, J. N., Green, D. P., Kuklinski, J. H., and Lupia, A., 2011b. Experiments. In J. N. Druckman, D. P. Green, J.
H. Kulinski, and A. Lupia (eds.). Cambridge Handbook of Experimental Political Science, pp. 15–26. New York:
Esterling, K. M., Neblo, M. A., and Lazer, D. M. J., 2011. Means, Motive, and Opportunity in Becoming Informed about
Politics. Public Opinion Quarterly, 75: 483–503.
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And Why? American Political Science Review, 104: 566–83.
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385–401.
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Institutions, and Global Society, pp. 85–97. Tokyo: Keiso-Shobo.
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Notes:
(1) . Parts of this section are taken from Druckman et al. (2006; 2011a; 2011b).
(2) . The first two application sections drawgenerously on, respectively, Miller (2011) and Diermeier (2011) each of
which reviews experimental applications in these areas.
(3) . However, outcomes within the uncovered set are not necessarily stable—the instability is simply constrained
to a smaller region of the space.
(4) . The Baron-Ferejohn model predicts that unless there is no impatience, legislatures will prefer a closed rule to
an open rule.
(5) . “An equilibrium is said to be stationary if the continuation values for each structurally equivalent subgame are
the same” (Baron and Ferejohn 1989, 1191).
James N. Druckman
James N. Druckman is Payson S. Wild Professor of Political Science and a Faculty Fellow at the Institute for Policy Research,
Northwestern University.
Thomas J. Leeper
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Thomas J. Leeper is a Post-Doctoral Researcher in the Department of Political Science and Government, Aarhus University.
Kevin J. Mullinix
Kevin J. Mullinix is a Doctoral Candidate in Political Science and Graduate Fellow at the Institute for Policy Research, Northwestern
University.
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Candidate Selection
Candidate Selection: Implications and Challenges for Legislative Behaviour

Reuven Y. Hazan
Institutions
2014
Before they can seek re-election, incumbent politicians must be reselected by their own party. Unless they decided
not to seek re-election, the behavior of legislators in the legislature will therefore be influenced by their reselection.
This chapterexamines the candidate selection method, an extra-parliamentary institution that influences the
behavior of its members, and argues that it can encourage or discourage certain legislative behavior. It explains
how the democratization of candidate selection—a more inclusive candidate selection method—will have a
significant impact on legislators and legislatures. After discussing the relevance of candidate selection for
legislative studies, the chapterconsiders different types of candidate selection methods, focusing on inclusive
versus exclusive selectorates. It then looks at the legislative unity of political parties and analyzes whether
cohesion or discipline is keeping the party united. It also outlines two different approaches to legislative behavior in
general, and to party unity in particular: the sociological approach and the institutional approach. Finally, it
addresses unanswered questions and offers suggestions for future.
Keywords: candidate selection, legislative behavior, legislators, legislatures, legislative studies, selectorates, legislative unity, political parties,
cohesion, discipline
10.1 Introduction
THE first goal of any incumbent politician is to be reselected by his or her own party, before being re-elected by the
public, before achieving party office, and before gaining any legislative or executive office. Reselection is thus the
primary of all political goals, because without this no other goal can be attained—unless they are willing to run the
risks of selection in a rival party or running as independents—and no agenda can be pursued. Reselection will,
therefore, have an important influence on how legislators behave in the legislature, unless they decided not to
seek re-election.
The focus of this chapter is on an extra-parliamentary institution that influences the behaviour of its members—the
candidate selection method. This chapter argues that a particular candidate selection method encourages or
discourages certain legislative behaviour, and that a shift toward more inclusive candidate selection methods—the
“democratization” of candidate selection—will have a significant impact on legislative behaviour. That is, in order
to properly study legislatures we must bring in an external institution, beyond the legislature itself, as a factor or
variable that can influence the dynamics of legislative behaviour. Legislatures are, indeed, driven by the
individuals who inhabit them. But candidate selection methods can also drive the legislators, alter their makeup,
influence their turnover rate, affect and modify their collective behaviour.
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Candidate Selection
(p. 214) 10.2 The Relevance of Candidate Selection for Legislative Studies
Candidate selection methods are the mechanisms by which political parties choose their candidates for general
elections. Selecting candidates is one of the first things that political parties must do prior to elections. Candidate
selection is thus one of the defining functions of a political party in a pluralist democracy. Indeed, the selection of
candidates to compete in elections may be the function that separates parties from other organizations. According
to Sartori (1976, 64), “a party is any political group that presents at elections, and is capable of placing through
elections, candidates for public office.” Those who are elected to office will be the successful candidates, and they
are the ones who will determine much of how the party looks and what it does. The outcome of the candidate
selection process will affect the legislators, the party, and the legislature for a long time after the selection itself is
over.
Candidate selection takes place almost wholly within particular parties. In most countries the parties themselves are
allowed to determine the rules for the selection of candidates. The United States is the foremost exception where
the legal system extensively regulates the process of candidate selection—in Finland, Germany, New Zealand, and
Norway (until 2002) the legal system only specifies criteria for candidate selection. This chapter is, therefore, about
a particular and important aspect of legislative recruitment that takes place inside the party arena and is largely not
regulated by law. Candidate selection is thus “the nonstandardized and predominantly unregimented particular
party mechanisms by which political parties choose their candidates for general elections” (Hazan and Rahat
2010, 4).
The importance of candidate selection methods for understanding the behaviour of political actors stems from a
combination of two elements. First, it is relatively easy for parties to alter their candidate selection methods, much
easier than it is to reform statutorily guaranteed state institutions such as the electoral system. Second, a change
in candidate selection methods will affect legislative politics.
The relevance of candidate selection is augmented by the fact that the effective choice of who will become a
legislator is made not by the voters in the general election but by the candidate selection process. In countries with
single-member districts the number of safe seats is quite large. In the United States and UK, more than one-half of
the constituencies are safe for one party or the other, with pluralities of greater than 10 percent. In countries using
proportional systems, the selection of candidates at the top of a party list virtually guarantees election, particularly
in the major parties, and practically regardless of the results of the general elections. In short, in a majority of the
democratic nations, in a majority of the elections, and in a majority of the parties, selection is equal to election. As
Duverger (1954, 353) argued, “Before being chosen by his electors the deputy is chosen by the party...The
importance of each varies according to the country and the parties; on the whole the party mandate seems to
carry more weight than that of the electors.”
(p. 215) This chapter builds on the important pioneering work of Gallagher and Marsh (1988), who argued that
“the candidate selection process might have consequences in three main areas: the composition of parliaments,
the behaviour of parliamentarians, and the cohesion of parties” (Gallagher 1988, 265). The relevance of candidate
selection for legislative studies is that in order to analyse legislative behaviour one cannot do so successfully
without including an important institution that conditions this behaviour.
10.3 Classifying Candidate Selection Methods: Inclusive versus Exclusive Selectorates
The framework for classifying candidate selection methods is based on four criteria or dimensions (Hazan and
Rahat 2010):
1. Selectorate (who selects the candidates?).

2. Candidacy (who can be selected?).
3. Decentralization (where does selection take place?).
4. Procedures (how are the candidates selected?).
However, when one assesses the legislative consequences of candidate selection it is possible to focus on a
single criterion because there is a clear hierarchy of criteria. While each of the four criteria used has a distinct
influence on politics, it is the selectorate that exhibits the most significant and far-reaching consequences in
general and it is the inclusiveness versus exclusiveness of the selectorate that does so in particular. Accordingly,
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Candidate Selection
the focus here is on the selectorate as the main criterion for classifying candidate selection methods, and on the
democratization of the selectorate in assessing its legislative consequences.
The selectorate is the body that selects the candidates. The selectorate can be composed of one person, several
or many—indeed as many as the entire electorate of a given nation. On a continuum of inclusiveness to
exclusiveness, the selectorate is the most inclusive when the entire electorate has the right to participate and it is
the most exclusive when there is a nominating entity of one leader. As Fig. 10.1 shows, we can distinguish five
archetypical types of selectorates:

Fig. 10.1 Party selectorates
1. The most inclusive selectorate: voters.This selectorate includes the entire electorate that has the right to
vote in the general elections.
2. The highly inclusive selectorate: party members.Here we include party membership in its European sense,
that is, not simply registration as a party affiliate administered by the states as in the United States1—this
belongs to the above category—but registration that is controlled by the party itself.
(p. 216) 3. The in-between selectorate: party delegates.This selectorate is comprised of representatives
selected by the party members. They can be members of party agencies (e.g. conventions, central
committees, congresses) or delegate bodies that were especially chosen for this purpose alone.
4. The highly exclusive selectorate: the party elite.Here we include small party agencies and committees that
were indirectly selected, or whose composition was ratified by wider party agencies and other less formal
groups.
5. The most exclusive selectorate: a nominating entity of a single leader.
Democratization of the candidate selection process is expressed by movement along this continuum toward the
inclusive end—i.e. when the selectorate following a reform of the candidate selection method is more inclusive than
before. Adopting only more inclusive candidacy requirements, or implementing decentralization, may be facilitating
variables, but they do not define democratization and should not be labeled as such.2 In other words, it is the
expanded inclusiveness of the selectorate, a widening of participation, which is the necessary variable for
democratizing candidate selection.
This chapter argues that particular constraints are placed on the candidates based on the distinctive priorities of
each selectorate. In other words, different selectorate priorities produce different candidates—and, in turn,
legislators—in terms of demography, ideology, and particularly behaviour. Candidate selection can have
consequences for many additional aspects of legislative politics, some of which are cursorily mentioned while
others cannot be discussed in a single chapter.
However, movement along the selectorate continuum toward the inclusive end does not necessarily mean that the
selectorate will become more representative of the citizenry. Even the relatively inclusive group of party members
is unrepresentative socially, professionally, and ideologically (van Biezen, Mair, and Poguntke 2012), and thus
more inclusiveness in candidate selection does not mean more representative legislators or more responsiveness
to the electorate at large.
10.4 Recent Research Frontiers: The Impact of Democratizing Candidate Selection on Legislators
and Legislatures
Democracy is more than just participation. There are other, fundamental elements beyond participation that are
also basic to the notion of democracy in general and to (p. 217) intra-party democracy in particular. For example,
representation, competition, and responsiveness are no less central to the well-being of democratic systems.
Participation and competition are two basic norms that are part of even the most minimal definition of democracy.
Representation and responsiveness are two related outputs of a democratic system. From this viewpoint, the more
democratic countries would be the ones that fulfill as many elements as possible: a high rate of meaningful,
substantial political participation; representation of significant social forces and various opinions; true competition
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Candidate Selection
for safe seats, or safe positions on the parties’ candidate list; and a viable electoral connection that would
pressure the (s)elected to be responsive to the needs and grievances of the public.
However, the recent research argues that when it comes to the intra-party arena, fulfilling the norm of inclusive
participation (“democratization”) could result in a declining ability to balance representation, producing a less
competitive race and creating distortions in the patterns of responsiveness.3 That is, political parties are, unlike the
state, not subject to the universal participatory prerequisite in order to be democratic; and when they too adhere to
this element above all others, they have a price to pay in terms of control and they encounter problems
concerning authority (Cross and Katz 2013; Katz and Cross 2013). As Ware (2002) pointed out, the relative
weakness of American parties is due to their adherence to the participatory ideal, which led them to lose their
capacity as intermediaries between state and society.
This section looks at the most recent research findings pertaining to the legislative consequences of adopting more
inclusive selectorates in candidate selection.4 The findings show that increased participation in candidate selection
affects the other three democratic dimensions and is, in turn, reflected in legislative behaviour. Hence, the study of
legislatures can be improved if we identify the main ramifications of variations in the inclusiveness of the
selectorate on both legislators and legislatures.
First, there is the question of representation.What impact does the increased inclusiveness of the selectorate have
on the overall characteristics of single-member district candidacies, or on the composition of a list of party
candidates? Second, there is the issue of competition. How does the level of inclusiveness influence the
competition for safe positions on a party list, or safe party candidacies in single-member districts, and the fortunes
of incumbents in particular? These two dimensions help us determine what kind of legislators will be elected. The
composition of the legislature, beyond having a symbolic importance, also affects legislative behaviour. Who you
are affects what you do (Phillips 1995). The presence of women, for example, significantly influences the working of
the legislature (Childs and Krook 2009). The rate of turnover is also likely to affect the behaviour of legislators
(Somit et al. 1994).
If we focus on the question of representation, smaller selectorates are able to balance the composition of the
candidate list, or candidacies in single-member districts, better than larger selectorates. In the latter, candidates
from a dominant group can win most of the safe positions on the list, or candidacies for the party’s safe seats. The
more inclusive the selectorate the less representative the selected candidates—and vice-versa. For example,
women, minorities, and candidates from territorial and other social peripheries will find it more difficult to be
selected when the selectorate is more inclusive.5
(p. 218) The democratization of candidate selection procedures thus seems to have a negative effect on
representation. When it comes to gender, intra-party elections are as important in determining the gender balance
in the legislature as the general elections. As Narud, Pedersen, and Valen (2002, 222) claim, “the system of open
primaries, however, has profoundly affected the status of women, as it does not assume any responsibility for
placing more women in safe seats.” It is apparent from the behaviour of the parties themselves that they
anticipated the problem of representativeness that would result from selection by an inclusive selectorate. That is,
the democratization of candidate selection procedures in Western Europe occurred at the same time as an
increase in the use of various correction mechanisms (Caul 1999; Bille 2001). Parties increasingly need to restrict
the choices of their more inclusive selectorates in order to ensure the representation of women (Norris 2006).
If we focus on the degree of competition, smaller selectorates will give candidates who are not already legislators a
chance to become known and to contact their selectors personally. When the selectorate is larger and composed
of all party members, support cannot be based on personal affiliations and incumbency is likely to supply a greater
advantage. This is mainly because, as public officials, incumbents enjoy media attention and the ability to
demonstrate responsiveness to the demands of both interest groups and financial supporters. The more inclusive
the selectorate the higher the success rate of incumbents in their efforts to be reselected.6
The experience of the US provides evidence of the advantage incumbents gain in primaries. Incumbents seeking
re-election to both the House of Representatives and to the Senate are rarely defeated in party primaries, and
more incumbents lose in the general elections than in the primaries. As Maisel and Stone (2001, 43) claim, “it is
clear that primary elections do not serve to stimulate more competition and, to the extent that competition is an
essential ingredient of democracy, it is not clear that they accomplish their intended purpose of enhancing U.S.
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Candidate Selection
democracy.”
A third question, beyond representation and competition, relates to the degree of responsiveness, and it is here
that we see the major influence of candidate selection on legislative behaviour. How do different selectorates affect
the responsiveness of legislators? While modern democracy is largely about representatives who are responsive
to the people, this responsiveness is mediated by either party or non-party actors. Legislative performance is likely
to be influenced by the way legislators respond to different selectorates in that party unity is likely to be higher
when legislators respond to party actors and lower when non-party mediators are involved.

Fig. 10.2 Party selectorates and legislative behaviour
When we focus on responsiveness, recent research shows that smaller selectorates will push legislators to
respond mainly to party actors, while in larger selectorates the legislators also respond to non-party mediators.
Since the primary motive in the behaviour of legislators is their desire to be reselected, they will be responsive to
the demands of their selectorates. When selected by small selectorates—the party leader, a few party leaders, or a
small group of party delegates—legislators will display a rather high level of party unity. Their aim will be to satisfy
the small oligarchies who have the power to (p. 219) reselect them, or at least play a dominant role in their
reselection. When selected by a very inclusive selectorate—such as the entire electorate or all party members—
legislators will be exposed to various and sometimes conflicting pressures. Seeking to respond to the range of such
cross-pressures could lead legislators to deviate from the party program or to act in a way that reduces party
unity. As Fig. 10.2 suggests, the inclusiveness of the selectorate is thus a major explanatory variable in
differentiating between candidate-centred and party-centred legislative behaviour.7 Bowler (2000) argued that the
best explanation of party unity lies in the nomination procedures in general, and who does the nominating in
particular. Sieberer’s (2006) research on 11 parliamentary democracies since 1945 found that candidate selection
is an even better predictor of party voting unity than electoral rules.
The more inclusive the candidate selection method, the less unified the party will be. When legislators face a large
and fluid selectorate, they will be responsive to those who can supply the resources, votes, and access to such a
selectorate. Responsiveness cannot be to the individual members per se, because it is too costly to invest in direct
contact with members of a large, unstable, and amorphous selectorate. Legislators will, therefore, be responsive to
mediators who can facilitate their link to such a wide selectorate—such as the mass media or interest groups.
These mediators could promote different interests or even interests that are at odds with those of the party, its
ideology, or its leaders.
A comparison of the levels of party unity in different countries illustrates the impact of the inclusiveness of
selectorates on the behaviour of legislators. Members of the US Congress, which is known for its low levels of party
cohesion despite the increase in recent years, are selected through highly inclusive primaries. In contrast, British,
Irish and Norwegian legislators (as well as most other Western European legislators), who are selected by more
exclusive selectorates, exhibit higher levels of unity. The major institutional difference between the cases is the
level of inclusiveness of the selectorates in the candidate selection process, rather than the nature of the electoral
system. As Gallagher (1988, 271) argued, “it may not matter much, in this sense which party agency selects
candidates, but it does matter that some party agency selects them.” And as Giannetti and Benoit (2009, 7)
argued, “when there are open primaries, the door opens for local activists to select MPs who do not share the
leadership’s policy preferences, thereby loosening party control over the behaviour of the party’s representatives
and affecting its legislative voting patterns.”
(p. 220) In their study of the voting behaviour of members of the European Parliament, both Faas (2003) and Hix
(2004) find that the candidate selection method influences party cohesion, and that the more exclusive methods
gave the (national) parties more influence over the behaviour of their representatives. Depauw and Martin’s (2009,
111) study of party unity in 16 European democracies found that “as the proportion of party voters that are also
party members increases, party unity suffers.”
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If we aggregate the main claims suggested by the recent research findings, we can conclude that different
candidate selection methods produce differences in the composition of legislatures and in the behaviour of the
legislators, largely due to the inclusiveness of the selectorates involved. The composition of a legislature, whose
members are selected by inclusive selectorates, will reflect the demographic composition of society less than a
legislature whose members are selected by exclusive selectorates, and thus is less likely to perform its symbolic
function of representing society. The composition of a legislature is also affected by the level of competition in the
candidate selection process. Turnover, for example, is the result not only of the number of seats that a party wins
in a general election but also of candidate selection—which, in an election with low volatility, may be the central
source of renewal in the composition of legislatures. Parties with more inclusive selectorates will give incumbents a
larger advantage and exhibit low levels of legislative turnover. The more exclusive a candidate selection method,
the more central will be the role of the party vis-à-vis other possible actors. The role of non-party actors in
candidate selection increases with an expansion of the inclusiveness of the selectorate, as does their importance
as an object for responsiveness and their influence on legislative behaviour.
10.5 Party Legislative Unity: Cohesion versus Discipline
If more inclusive candidate selection is likely to lead to less representative legislatures, less competitive intra-party
contests, and less responsive legislators, how does this affect legislative behaviour? One of the distinguishing
features of modern political parties, particularly in parliamentary democracies, is their legislative unity. However,
the existence of unified parties is not necessarily a given. Some parties enter parliament as unified actors, but
others are less unified and are held together in the legislature. The distinction here is between cohesion and
discipline—two terms that are rarely delineated properly in the literature (see Kam in this volume) or distinguished
adequately in how they are influenced by candidate selection. Before we elaborate on some of the challenges for
future research on candidate selection it is important to distinguish whether cohesion or discipline is keeping the
party united, because the determinants of each are different as are the effects of candidate selection.
(p. 221) In order to elucidate this distinction, it is important to look at two different approaches to legislative
behaviour in general, and to party unity in particular. The sociological approach emphasizes norms and roles; it
argues that legislators act in unison for normative reasons including ideological convictions, socialization, party
solidarity, etc. This approach stresses informal rules of behaviour that constrain legislators, and sees parties as a
web of authority based on norms such as loyalty and solidarity. The second approach is institutional; it stresses
strategic incentives and constraints, and argues that party unity emerges from the formal organizational makeup of
parties and parliaments, which pushes legislators to discover self-interested reasons for utility maximization,
through congenial or coercive measures.
The key to the sociological approach is proper socialization, which must take place to a large extent prior to arrival
in parliament. Strong norms of teamwork, a sense of duty and loyalty, cannot be internalized overnight. The key to
the institutional approach is policy, office, and votes—a legislator’s most basic of interests (Müller and Strøm 1999).
Parliament in general and parties in particular, provide and control the distribution of influence, perks and
re(s)election—parties and legislatures have what legislators want. The differences between these two approaches
reveal the very nature of the relationship between politicians, parties, and parliaments. Herein lies the distinction
between cohesion on its own (agreement, or shared preferences) and discipline (compulsion, or anticipated
sanctions).
Once we understand this difference we can see how candidate selection influences legislative behaviour. Only
when the sociological and behavioural reasons for party unity weaken, do the institutional and organizational
measures become relevant. In other words, as long as there are non-institutional (i.e. sociological/behavioral)
reasons for party solidarity then, in effect, we have a cohesive party functioning in parliament. But when party
cohesion begins to break down, as a result of the influence of democratizing candidate selection, there is a need
for institutional mechanisms to keep the party together—and here is where discipline comes into play. That is, when
candidate selection is more inclusive, there is a need for more discipline. At some point, where cohesion has
broken down too extensively, even discipline might not successfully produce party unity.8
In short, there is a relationship between adopting party primaries and party unity due to the changing distribution of
power within the organizational structures of the party. Responsiveness can imply a binding demand for relative
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congruence between the representative and the represented, and between the representatives themselves, which
results in a cohesive party. Party discipline implies a very different type of congruence between the politicians and
the dictates of the party. This chapter argues that candidate selection methods affect the balance of influence
between party and non-party actors on the selection process—the incentives of an expanded, more democratic
selectorate undermine cohesion. Also, within the party, they affect the balance of influence between the party
leadership and its representatives, thus also influencing discipline and hampering the ability of the party to impose
disciplinary measures on its legislators.
(p. 222) 10.6 Unanswered Questions and Suggestions for Future Research
If intra-party selectoral preferences can work to hinder party cohesion and discipline, how can parties hold
themselves together when preferences are not enough, and/or when the enforcement mechanisms have been
undermined? What challenges concerning both their internal functioning and their legislative unity do parties face if
they decide to walk down the path toward more inclusive candidate selection methods?
When it comes to the selectorate, this section develops three perspectives on how parties handle the influence of
a democratized selectorate on legislative behavior in general and on the unity of the party in particular. The first
argues that there is a negative relationship between a more inclusive selectorate and the ability to maintain party
unity, resulting in a decline in both cohesion and discipline. The second sees a lack of cohesion as a possible
problem resulting from a more inclusive selectorate, but suggests that disciplinary solutions based on either the
separation between the appearance and the substance of politics, or on how parties handle themselves internally,
may still maintain unity. The third perspective posits that democracy within parties does not necessarily lead to a
decline in party unity, be it cohesion or discipline, and thus runs counter to the main arguments in this chapter.
10.6.1 Perspective I: The Disjointed Party
The disjointed party perspective argues that if parties move toward more inclusive selectorates in their candidate
selection methods this will negatively influence party cohesion—in that non-party actors will be able to compete
with party socialization and ideological beliefs in determining homogeneity—and that the decline of cohesion
cannot be offset by whatever parliamentary and party disciplinary tools are available.
The argument connecting more inclusive candidate selection and a decrease in party unity was already expressed
by Epstein (1964, 55) when he stated that, “It appears illogical to combine primaries, intended to make legislators
independent of party, with a parliamentary system that requires cohesive legislative parties in order to provide
stable government.” V.O. Key (1967, 452) put it in terms of the US, “The nomination stage is the point at which
party discipline can be applied most effectively. Yet, the direct primary is a procedure not easily usable, either by
the national leadership or by the voters of a district, for that purpose.” Both Epstein and Key argued that party
primaries will negatively influence party unity; the former posited that it would erode cohesion while the latter
pointed out that it would hamper discipline.
When the Icelandic parties widened participation in their candidate selection process, Kristjánsson claimed that this
brought about a decrease in both party cohesion and discipline. “The primary election period in Iceland, since the
early 1970s, coincides with (p. 223) decreasing party cohesion. Increasingly, Icelandic political parties resemble
umbrella organizations for individual politicians rather than highly disciplined organizations” (Kristjánsson 1998,
177). Taiwan’s experience with primaries points to a similar conclusion. The primaries adopted during
democratization led to more independent behavior by politicians, thus eroding party cohesion even in the once-
Leninist and disciplined Kuomintang party, and as a result the party tried to move away from them (Wu 2001). In
Mexico, the adoption of primaries not only damaged party cohesion, it also brought about the phenomenon of
deserters who crossed from one party to another, along with their supporters, if they did not win the selection
process in their original party (Combes 2003). In Israel, the overall tendency to democratize candidate selection
methods has gone hand-in-hand with an increase in both the proposing (reduced cohesion) and the passage
(weakened discipline) of private member bills (Hazan 1997; Rahat and Sheafer 2007), along with other types of
personalized behavior. Andeweg and Thomassen’s (2011) research on the Dutch parliament showed that as the
selection of candidates became more open, homogeneity of preferences and partisan loyalty declined. The
PartiRep (Participation and Representation) research project surveyed legislators across 15 countries and shows
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that there is a relationship between the inclusiveness of candidate selection and party cohesion—in the national
parliaments there was a relative increase of 20 percent in partisan disagreement when comparing legislators
selected by party primaries to those selected by either a party agency or the party leaders (Van Vonno et al.,
forthcoming).
10.6.2 Perspective II: The Cartel Party
The cartel party perspective agrees that democratizing candidate selection will damage party cohesion, but it
points out that there are disciplinary tools—both positive and negative in nature—that can sustain party unity, in
that the pressure of incentives and constraints can be exerted upon politicians to conform. The cartel party
leaders see the problems of party unity in managerial rather than in ideological terms (Katz 2001, 290–3). The
cartel model requires that the party leadership be able to compromise across party lines, unlimited by constraints
imposed on them from a group of ideological activists. In order to neutralize the party activists, party decisions,
such as candidate selection, are opened up to the full membership. Thus, the cartel party model guides party
leaders to adopt a democratization strategy because it gives them greater leverage (Katz and Mair 1995, 20–1).
But a problem of party unity can arise if the party leadership encounters candidates with different ideas (a lack of
cohesion) and does not have the needed tools to discipline them. Bolleyer (2009, 565) echoed this, stating, “In a
fully fledged cartel party, the party leadership is confronted with an increasingly incohesive parliamentary party
composed of MPs over whose fate it has only limited intra-organizational control before they enter the public
realm.” However, unity can still be largely sustained. Katz (2001, 293) suggested that a possible answer to the
demands emanating from the democratization of (p. 224) candidate selection along with the pressure to sustain
party unity creates “a separation between the appearance and the substance of politics,” which means that,
“there will be an increasing divergence between the rhetorical and the substantive behavior of MPs.” Thus the
“image” of party cohesion is cracked, or even shattered, as a result of the public expressions of intra-party
opposition by backbenchers, and even by ministers; yet at the end of the day they all coalesce and vote in a
disciplined manner in order to maintain “substantive” party unity. More inclusive candidate selection negatively
affects cohesion, but discipline still manages to keep the party unified in the legislature. That is, the Rice Index of
Cohesion (Rice, 1925) will show that the party still votes together, but it will not show that cohesion has broken
down.
A recent study found that there is a significant gap between the “noise” that Israeli MPs make in the mass media
and their actual voting in the parliament (Shapira and Rahat 2011). The study picked the leading dozen “media
dissidents” in parliament during 2009–10, those who were the most prominent in publicly expressing positions in
opposition to their party and threatening to vote against it, yet there were very few instances in which they actually
breached party discipline: in almost 99 percent of the cases they voted with their party.
Bolleyer (2009) argued that the solutions to the problem of party unity are based on different disciplinary tools.
When the party is in government, political appointments and additional forms of patronage are used to ensure
unity. When the party is in opposition, its leadership initiates reforms that aim to regulate organizational entry and
grant some control to the central organization over the selection process. The organizational vulnerability of cartel
parties can thus be overcome by the use of selective benefits. The behavior of the Fianna Fail in Ireland validates
this: the party used patronage when in power and internal reforms when in opposition to generate party unity. The
loyalty of MPs from the more cartelized parties in Israel (Kadima, Likud, and Labor) was “bought” through an
increasing number of ministerial appointments and other forms of patronage when the party was in government,
and intra-party reforms were adopted when the party was in opposition.
The cartel party perspective might, however, suggest only a partial solution, as it is based on a fragile equilibrium
between appearance and substance which is hard to sustain in the long run. Moreover, there are also limits to the
patronage/reform solution, since discipline might only be attained from those who are directly “paid” with
patronage positions, for a finite period, while continual intra-party reform can also become counterproductive.
10.6.3 Perspective III: The Stratarchical Party
The stratarchical model posits that adopting more inclusive candidate selection methods has little to no impact on
either party cohesion or legislative discipline. This model declares that as individual party members gain increased
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decision-making power, especially over candidate selection, party identification decreases, forcing parties to
resort (p. 225) increasingly to opportunistic electoral appeals. The result is that modern political parties are more
leader-driven, yet at the same time internally democratic and have to compete in a more open electoral market
with a less solid support base. Parties have thus become multilevel organizations in which the separate levels
enjoy significant autonomy. In other words, parties have become something akin to federal systems, or a network
of affiliated organizations. Carty (2004) argued that parties have become a franchise system that couples the
efficiencies of scale and standardization with the advantages of local participation in the delivery of the
organization’s product. In other words, at the heart of the stratarchical party is a franchise bargain between the
various levels over rights and duties.
In Canada—upon which much of the stratarchical model literature is based, although its application can extend to
institutionally similar parliamentary systems—the parties have exchanged local autonomy for strict national
discipline (Carty, Cross, and Young 2000; Carty and Cross 2006). That is, inclusiveness has not led to a decrease
in party unity because the local selectorates choose candidates who will stick to the party line in the national
legislature.
The stratarchical party model thus argues that increasing inclusiveness need not impair the party’s ability to
remain cohesive. However, the party members’ control over candidate selection is predicated on their willingness
to avoid any attempt to influence the position taken by the parties on national policies. Members select and
representatives follow the party line; the two do not have much to do with each other. As Sandri and Pauwels
(2010, 1241) put it when discussing the Belgian and Italian parties, “National elites are responsible for policy
formulation, while local organizations are responsible for candidate selection.” Or, to put it in terms of an ancient
debate, stratarchical party selectorates choose trustees, not delegates, who remain disciplined in the legislature.
The three perspectives, which beckon for further research, exist on a continuum that addresses the issue of the
linkage between the democratization of candidate selection selectorates and legislative behavior. At one pole
there is the claim that once a party adopts a more inclusive candidate selection method this will inevitably affect
legislative behavior and negatively influence party unity (Perspective I: The Disjointed Party). At the opposite pole
the claim is that no such effect can be seen as long as the party maintains a stratarchical structure in which power
is diffused (Perspective III: The Stratarchical Party). Between these two approaches we have a third, middle path,
which admits that a “problem” concerning legislative behavior is indeed created by the democratization of
candidate selection, but claims that there are at least partial, if temporary, solutions to it (Perspective II: The Cartel
Party).
Two of the three perspectives lead to a similar conclusion: there is a trade-off between intra-party democracy and
unified legislative party behavior. The two perspectives differ in the extent to which they believe that a negative
impact on cohesion can be counter-balanced by discipline. Only the stratarchical perspective posits that there
need not be any relationship between intra-party democracy and party legislative unity.
(p. 226) 10.7 Conclusion
Fenno (1973) and Mayhew (1974) pioneered the study of what motivates legislators, and argued that their main
motivation is a desire to be re-elected, which then determines the utility of their subsequent legislative activity
toward this end. This chapter seeks to reposition this main goal of legislators one step earlier—shifting it from the
inter-party arena to the intra-party arena, from re-election to reselection—and to assess the consequences of
candidate selection in general, and the most recent trend of its democratization, on legislative behavior.9 Couched
with the neo-institutional and rational choice approaches, this chapter focuses on the political consequences of
institutions and, in our case, on how external institutional constraints and norms influence the behavior of
legislators. Institutions such as candidate selection methods matter, not as the exclusive determinants of legislative
behavior, but as relatively uncharted waters that could help us understand more about the type of legislators
elected, the dynamics within the legislature, and the legislative performance of more internally democratic parties.
All this, of course, improves our ability to study legislatures.
This chapter assumes that the behavior of legislators is significantly influenced by their desire to be reselected,
and in order to fulfill this goal, the agents—the party representatives—will try to satisfy their principals. One central
—if not the most important—principal is the party selectorate. If party unity has a positive effect on reselection, we
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expect the representatives to focus on party-centred legislative behaviour and to exhibit high levels of party unity.
If, however, more individualistic behavior is valued in order to be reselected, then we expect the representatives to
engage in candidate-centred responsiveness, which will lead to lower levels of party unity.
Candidate selection has consequences for politics in general, and for legislative politics in particular. Accordingly,
this chapter suggests a key variable—the degree of inclusiveness of the selectorate—to distinguish between
candidate selection methods and to assess their ramifications for legislative behavior. Importantly, this chapter
does not argue that the candidate selection method is the sole determinant of legislative behavior. Rather, it claims
that legislative studies cannot afford to ignore or discount it. Moreover, we must point out that a discussion of
candidate selection could consider a number of additional consequences, such as the effects of selection
procedures on political career trajectories, personal vote-seeking, particularism (pork-barrel politics), and lobbying
activities. These are not the focus of this chapter, and as such were not discussed here, but are substantive
concerns that should be addressed in a more comprehensive discussion of candidate selection methods and their
political consequences.
Further cross-national research on what Gallagher and Marsh (1988) described as “the secret garden of politics” is
needed in general, and comparative data-gathering is essential in particular, in order to examine the perspectives
presented herein that beckon future research. Moreover, the recent research on candidate selection shows that
the incentives generated at the intra-party level may complement, or they may run (p. 227) counter, to those
working at the inter-party electoral arena—personal vote-seeking is an example—and adopting a two-dimensional
approach that incorporates both inter- and intra-party factors, rather than a unidimensional inter-party perspective,
can shed more light on the connection between political parties, democracy, and legislative behavior.
Acknowledgements
I am grateful for the support granted to this research by the Nancy and Lawrence E. Glick Fund. I thank the
participants in the workshop on Parties as Organizations and Parties as Systems at the University of British
Columbia, and those in the ECPR workshop on Party Primaries in Europe at the University of Antwerp, who provided
valuable comments and suggestions on earlier drafts.
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Wu, C-L., 2001. The Transformation of the Kuomintang’s Candidate Selection System. Party Politics, 7: 103–18.
Notes:
(1) . On the differences between party registration and party membership in the United States, see Katz and
Kolodny (1994).
(2) . Decentralization, for example, could lead to the opposite of democratization if the selectorate is decentralized
from a national party congress of several thousand participants to local executive committees consisting of a
handful of party notables.
Page 12 of 13
Candidate Selection
(3) . More inclusive selectorates increase the quantity of participation, but they do not necessarily increase the
quality, and they induce certain participatory pathologies. Thus, increased participation impacts not only on the
other three elements of democracy, but also on participation itself (Rahat and Hazan 2007).
(4) . It is important to note that the consequences of movement toward more inclusiveness of the selectorate can
be somewhat offset by movement toward more exclusiveness concerning candidacy requirements. If a larger
group of selectors is allowed to choose the party candidates, but prior to this the pool of candidates is drastically
reduced by the party, then the more inclusive selectorate will not necessarily exhibit the consequences outlined in
this chapter.
(5) . This rests on the assumption that the party leadership is more interested, and can thus coordinate, in
recruiting women and other minority candidates than the rank and file membership.
(6) . This relationship, unlike the one between inclusiveness and representation, is not necessarily linear. That is,
competition might be lower at both ends of the selectorate dimension than in the middle (Rahat, Hazan, and Katz
2008; Hazan and Rahat 2010). Unfortunately, there are no cross-national comparisons yet that test this claim.
(7) . For an analysis of party- versus candidate-centred representation according to the other dimensions of
candidate selection, see Atmor, Hazan, and Rahat (2011).
(8) . There are those who have argued against such a distinction between unity of action based on preferences or
on parties (Krehbiel 1993; 1999), however, recent research findings show that parties can affect their members’
behavior in ways that are observable, and thus alter legislative outcomes (Bowler, Farrell, and Katz 1999; Bowler
2000).
(9) . Strøm (1997) already suggested that legislative goals should start with reselection.
Reuven Y. Hazan
Reuven Y. Hazan is Professor and Chair of the Department of Political Science, Hebrew University of Jerusalem.
Page 13 of 13
The Effect of Electoral Institutions on Legislative Behaviour

Audrey André, Sam Depauw, and Matthew Søberg Shugart
Institutions
2014
The behavior of (would-be) legislators between elections is shaped by electoral institutions. Legislators are
expected to seek re-election and thus will do the things in the legislative arena that they believe voters will reward
in the next election and avoid those that voters will not reward. To determine whom to vote for during elections,
voters rely on a combination of party-based and candidate-based information shortcuts under different electoral
institutions. The options available to voters are structured by electoral institutions, which may affect whether
legislators will cultivate their personal reputation or the party reputation. This chapterexamines the ways electoral
institutions affect legislative behavior. More specifically, it looks at the causal mechanism responsible for
generating the incentives for voters, political parties, and individual legislators, as well as the manner in which the
formal properties of the electoral institutions translate into conflicting incentives. Moreover, it discusses how
individual legislators choose between the multiple behavioral repertoires that are commonly called personal vote-
seeking. Finally, it describes the monitoring and sanctioning abilities of both voters and political parties.
Keywords: legislators, elections, electoral institutions, reputation, legislative behavior, incentives, personal vote-seeking, political parties
11.1 Introduction
ELECTORAL institutions shape the behavior of (would-be) legislators between elections. It is the assumption that
legislators seek re-election (see Mayhew 1974).1 Legislators will focus on the things in the legislative arena that
they believe voters will reward in the next election and shun those that voters will not reward. Voters typically do
not know much about politics and are reluctant to learn more. To decide how to vote they use a combination of
party-based and candidate-based information shortcuts (Downs 1957; Popkin 1991). More importantly, they use
different shortcuts under different electoral institutions (Shugart et al. 2005). Electoral institutions, in particular,
structure the options available to voters and thereby strengthen or weaken incentives for legislators to cultivate
their personal reputations rather than the party’s reputation (Carey and Shugart 1995). A candidate’s party label is
a low-cost cue to voters about the policies he or she will seek to enact once (re-)elected and the constituencies he
or she will cater to (Kiewiet and McCubbins 1991, 40). However, the party record by definition cannot distinguish
among co-partisans running under the same party label. When voters have the option to indicate a preference
among co-partisans, the candidate will need to win a personal vote. The candidate will need to signal to voters
some reason based on his or her qualities, qualifications, and actions to vote for the candidate and not a co-
partisan (Cox and Thies 1998, 268). For an incumbent legislator, in particular, this may mean the help the
candidate offered the voters, for instance, the projects and funds obtained for the district, or the positions he or
she took championing ethnic minorities (Cain et al. 1987).
(p. 232) So far research has largely missed what Shugart (2005, 50) called the “theoretical link” between
legislators’ behavioral repertoires and the rules that govern the translation of votes into seats. Duverger (1951)
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famously distinguished between the mechanical and the psychological effects of electoral institutions. The
mechanical effects determine who wins and who loses, while the psychological effects denote the strategic
responses of voters and party leaders to the expected consequences of electoral institutions (for a review see
Grofman 2006). The literature with regard to the effect that electoral institutions have on the behavior of rank-and-
file legislators in the legislative arena is an established and fast-growing subfield. More often than not, however,
studies easily leap from the formal properties of the electoral institutions to behavior and outcomes in the legislative
arena, failing to identify the causal mechanism responsible for generating the incentives for voters, parties, and
individual legislators. We do not know as much as we would like, as a result, about the manner in which the formal
properties of the electoral institutions translate into conflicting incentives. We do not know, moreover, how
individual legislators choose between the multiple behavioral repertoires that are commonly called personal vote-
seeking.
11.2 Outline of the Argument

Fig. 11.1 How electoral institutions shape legislative behaviour
Electoral institutions frequently generate a tension between what is in the interest of the party and what is in the
interest of the individual legislator (Carey and Shugart 1995). Ballot structure, electoral formula, and district
magnitude define the electoral institutions in this respect, though electoral laws further include candidacy
requirements, voter registration, and party and campaigning regulations that are beyond the scope of this chapter.
They structure the options open to voters and translate votes into seats—thereby electing politicians into office. In
this manner they have been observed, firstly, to shape patterns of accountability, and secondly, the
competitiveness of electoral races. That is, the formal properties of electoral institutions enable and constrain
voters’ abilities to monitor and sanction poor performance on the part of individual legislators (Carey 2009). They
further affect the scope of competition that legislators face and it is this threat to their prime career goal of re-
election that motivates and energizes them to use the scarce perquisites of office in order to win a personal vote
(Cain et al. 1987). The first section therefore examines how the mechanical effects of electoral institutions translate
into the incentive on the part of legislators to cultivate a personal vote, as arrow one in Fig. 11.1 illustrates.
But incentives of this kind cannot readily be observed and frequently have to be inferred from legislators’ behavior
(Strøm 1997, 162). The second section then turns to the psychological effects of electoral institutions, as arrow two
illustrates, examining how the incentive to cultivate a personal vote translates into behavior—focusing on three
personal vote-seeking behaviors in particular: initiating particularized legislation, doing constituency casework,
and breaking with party discipline to advocate on (p. 233) behalf of constituents. Electoral institutions’ ability to
determine behavior should not be overstated, however. In the third section (arrow three) we demonstrate how
party leaders frequently have the selective benefits at their disposal to monitor and sanction legislators in order to
uphold the party record. In the fourth section (arrow four) we explore how voters’ preferences regarding
representation may upset legislators’ electoral payoffs. In doing so we choose to focus on the empirical research
with regard to personal vote-seeking (for a review on parties in the legislative arena, see Uslaner and Zittel 2006),
and on studies that compare different electoral institutions rather than single-case studies.
11.3 Translating the Mechanical Effects of Electoral Institutions into Incentives
Representation, Mansbridge (2003) pointed out, is in large part anticipatory; legislators act between elections in a
particular manner because they believe that voters will reward them in the next election. On the one hand, voters
are believed to select particular legislators who can credibly claim the personal reputation these voters most
favour. On the other hand, voters are believed to sanction legislators for having failed to live up to their personal
reputation. Legislators’ beliefs in this regard are rooted in the electoral institutions they compete under for re-
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election. First, the formal properties of electoral institutions have a direct effect on the ability of voters to hold
legislators accountable, monitoring and sanctioning their performance. Second, the formal properties of electoral
institutions further translate into the competitiveness of electoral races, shaping the electoral incentive of
legislators to cultivate a personal reputation.
(p. 234) 11.3.1 Accountability
A legislator is authorized by his or her election to act on behalf of his constituents; the incumbent is also said to be
accountable to his or her constituents if two conditions are met. Firstly, constituents can monitor the legislator’s
actions and, secondly, sanction or reward his or her performance (Fearon 1999, 55). Electoral institutions have an
effect on both monitoring and sanctioning, thereby making legislators more or less responsive to constituents. That
is, legislators will not shirk looking after constituents if they will be held accountable for their actions (Bowler and
Farrell 1993). The debate has first and foremost contrasted single-seat districts to multi-seat districts. The legislator
who is the sole representative of the district bears the responsibility for promoting its interests (Mitchell 2000). In
those circumstances constituents have only the actions of one to monitor, increasing the name recognition of the
legislator (Curtice and Shively 2009). When constituents are represented by many legislators, on the other hand,
the cost of monitoring quickly exceeds the time and effort rationally ignorant voters will typically devote to politics
(Samuels 1999; Shugart et al. 2005; Carey 2009). Shirking and free-riding will ensue when legislators’ actions are
hidden from view and credit cannot be attributed (Buck and Cain 1990). In fact, accountability will weaken in a
linear fashion as district magnitude grows; with each additional incumbent constituents’ ability to monitor them all
decreases and the less personalized will be the electoral competition (Weßels 1999).
Much is missed, however, by focusing only on the distinction between single-seat and multi-seat districts (Grofman
2008). In particular, the ballot structure determines the options open to voters to sanction incumbents. In closed-list
systems, single-seat districts included (Carey and Shugart 1995), an incumbent can be thrown out of office only if
voters change their allegiance to another party in sufficient numbers (Mitchell 2000)—as the order in which seats
are allocated to candidates is predetermined by their order on the party list. But under open-list proportional
representation (PR), in which candidates are elected from the list in the rank determined by their preference votes,
voters have the option to sanction an incumbent for poor performance and vote for a co-partisan instead.2 This
aspect of accountability can be captured, Carey and Shugart (1995) argued, by three simple trichotomies that tap
into, (a) whether voters mark a preference for a candidate or the party (vote); (b) the degree to which marking a
preference for a candidate increases the probability of that incumbent being (re-)elected (ballot); and (c) the
extent to which that probability rides on the votes won by co-partisans because votes are pooled across party lists
for the allocation of seats (pool).3 However, the option to sanction individual incumbents in this manner also has
important repercussions for the scope of competition.
11.3.2 Competitiveness
Legislators value re-election and it is the threat to their prime objective that generates the incentive to cultivate
their personal reputations rather than the party reputation. In competitive races even a few additional votes won on
the basis of legislators’ personal (p. 235) qualities and actions may make the difference between re-election and
defeat (Cain et al. 1987). The narrower the margin between winner and loser in single-seat districts, the more
legislators will seek to “put a human face on the party” and thereby attract a few extra votes (see also Heitshusen
et al. 2005). In multi-seat districts, by contrast, a far greater number of votes tends to separate parties from winning
or losing another seat. As a result, the incentive to cultivate a personal reputation, Carey and Shugart (1995)
argued, decreases as district magnitude grows—but only under closed-list PR. Legislators’ efforts to nurture a
personal reputation, Shugart (2005, 46) clarified, has a negligible effect on their probability of re-election in those
circumstances. The shift in votes that their efforts may cause will not be sufficient to win the party an additional
seat. When voters have the option to indicate a preference among co-partisan candidates, on the other hand, the
incentive of legislators to cultivate their personal reputation increases with district magnitude (Carey and Shugart
1995).
Katz (1986, 97) first distinguished between legislators threatened by inter-party defeat and intra-party defeat.4
Defeat on the inter-party dimension is due to votes lost to other parties; the party wins fewer seats and not all
incumbents running under the party label are re-elected. Defeat on the intra-party dimension, on the other hand,
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results from another candidate running under the same party label being elected instead. In fact, as district
magnitude increases seats grow more competitive on the intra-party dimension, Carey and Shugart (1995) pointed
out; the scope of intra-party competition in open-list PR grows with each additional candidate running under the
same party label. Voters will use candidate-based information shortcuts more often (Shugart et al. 2005),
presenting legislators running under the same party label with a “product differentiation problem” (Cox and Thies
1998, 271). As a result, legislators must stand out among their co-partisan competitors in voters’ minds and court
votes based on their personal qualities, actions, and achievements. That is, Carey and Shugart (1995) expect
district magnitude to have a differential effect,5 but they relate different underlying processes to the same
indicator; the negative effect in closed-list PR is ascribed to the number of votes needed to win a seat, whereas the
positive effect in open-list PR is linked to the number of co-partisan competitors. Subsequent studies inspired by
Carey and Shugart’s (1995) article, moreover, have frequently not been very precise as to the underlying
processes linking unobserved incentives to the formal properties of electoral institutions.
11.3.3 In Search of Alternative Operationalizations of Competitiveness
Electoral systems govern the allocation of seats to parties (inter-party dimension) on the one hand and to
candidates (intra-party dimension) on the other hand. But to be returned to the legislature, incumbents need to win
both in the inter-party and in the intra-party competition. District magnitude affects both dimensions, however. On
the one hand, proxies of competitiveness typically point to uncertainty as to the number of votes needed to retain
the seat. In this respect, progress is being made measuring (p. 236) district competitiveness on the inter-party
dimension across a wide range of electoral institutions (Blais and Lago 2009; Grofman and Selb 2009; André et al.
2012). At the party-level, a measure of competitiveness, for instance, equals the minimum number of votes a party
must lose before its last obtained seat passes to another party, or the number it must win before it gains another
seat (Grofman and Selb 2009). The number of votes is used, because comparing vote shares across districts of
different population size can be misleading (see Grofman 2005). The measure can easily be translated to the intra-
party dimension in open-list systems, moreover, equaling the minimum number of votes that must pass from a
legislator to a different candidate for him or her to lose the seat. In closed-list systems, intra-party competitiveness
of the legislator who holds the r-th position on the list can be measured in terms of the minimum number of votes
the party must lose to win no more than r-1 seats (thereby not returning the legislator to the legislature).
On the other hand, the scope of intra-party competition, Carey and Shugart (1995) argued, is further determined by
the number of co-partisan competitors on the ballot per seat contested. As the number of candidates running
under the same party label (C) tends to grow with district magnitude (M), M is used as “the fixed and identifiable
determinant” of the ratio C:M. The expectation is inaccurate, however, Crisp et al. (2007) responded; as districts
grow in magnitude the ratio of co-partisan competitors per seat may increase, decrease, or remain the same.
Instead Crisp et al. (2007) propose the ratio C:P as a proxy: that is, the number of co-partisan competitors divided
by the number of seats the party is expecting to win in the district based on the three previous elections. The
expected party magnitude is not a readily observable quantity, however. More importantly, in the absence of
penalties for overnomination (i.e. where there is vote pooling), the scope of competition is overestimated by the
inclusion of many candidates who get too few votes to impact the race. This is particularly salient when comparing
parties of different size. In this respect, a notion of how preference votes are distributed across co-partisans is
critical to the scope of intra-party competition in open-list systems (Bergman et al. 2013). In closed-list systems, by
contrast, the allocation of seats is determined only by the ratio between a legislator’s position on the pre-fixed
party list and the number of seats his party is likely to win.
Research has failed to fully grasp the tension that frequently exists between competitiveness and accountability
(but see Shugart et al. 2005): while intra-party competitiveness increases with the number of co-partisans on the
ballot, the effect may be counterbalanced by voters’ growing cognitive inability to monitor them and hold them to
account. As their numbers grow, Norris (2006) observed, voters are less likely to recall any of the candidates’
names. Moreover, research has by and large ignored the tension between the two dimensions of competitiveness;
as a result we do not know how the inter-party and intra-party dimensions are interrelated. In open-list systems
legislators are frequently vulnerable to losing their seat to a co-partisan obtaining more preference votes, but other
legislators—party leaders for instance—may be vulnerable only when their party loses seats in the district. In
closed-list systems legislators are frequently vulnerable to losing their seat to another party, but not the legislators
who are ranked high (p. 237) on the party list, only those lower down. These interrelations may have important
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consequences for the particular constituency legislators will seek to cater to and the manner in which they build
their personal reputations.
11.4 Translating the Psychological Effects of Electoral Institutions into Behavior
Electoral institutions shape the conditions for accountability and the scope of competition, thereby generating
incentives on the part of legislators to cultivate a personal vote. Incentives are not directly observable, however.
They can only be inferred from the behavioral patterns they instigate (Strøm 1997, 162). Some legislators initiate
bills or amendments that primarily benefit their local community; others hold frequent surgeries and address
constituents’ grievances; and still others take positions defying the party whip. The implicit assumption that grew
out of the personal vote literature is that incentives will translate into all of the behavioral repertoires and outcomes
that are commonly considered to be personal vote-seeking. But electoral institutions, Morgenstern and Vázquez-
D’Elía (2007) emphasize, are but the rules of the game; they do not impose a particular course of action. More
importantly, one personal vote-seeking course of action may be substituted for another (Carey and Shugart 1995,
430; Mitchell 2000). Because research has focused on a single indicator of personal vote-seeking at a time, we
know little about the manner in which legislators choose between different courses of action that are equally
personal vote-seeking and thereby risk underestimating personal vote-seeking (Crisp 2007).
No representative thinks of the district that elected him or her as “an undifferentiated glob,” Fenno (1978, 3) noted.
They tend to think of the district in terms of concentric circles of support: some people, they feel, will always vote
for them, while others will vote for them if the representativeworks them hard enough; and still others will never
vote for the representative no matter what they do. Most constituencies are capable of a great number of (mostly
latent) social, economic, and cultural lines of cleavage that representatives may choose to activate (Manin 1997).
Two dimensions stand out in this respect. First, a legislator may choose to cater to the interests of a constituency
that is dispersed across the territory or that is rather geographically concentrated. “Parochial” incentives, Grofman
(2005) pointed out, to look after local interests of this kind are expected to weaken as a legislator’s re-election
constituency increases in size. Second, the legislator may seek to connect to non-partisans or rather mobilize
some subsection of the party electorate and persuade it to vote for him or her and not some co-partisan running
under the same party label (Rohrschneider 2002). The constituency that legislators will seek to cater to, moreover,
can be expected to be related to the inter-party and intra-party competition they face: legislators whose (p. 238)
seats are vulnerable to inter-party defeat will favour non-partisan constituencies, for instance, who would not vote
for the party otherwise; legislators whose seat are vulnerable to intra-party defeat, on the other hand, can be
expected to cater to some subsection of the party electorate.
Legislators elected by single-seat districts will be more responsive to the demands of narrow local interests.
Legislators elected by single transferrable vote (STV), single non-Transferrable Vote (SNTV), or open-list PR will
promote government programs that privilege narrow interests more than legislators elected by closed-list PR. They
will claim personal credit for having targeted benefits to particular—typically geographically concentrated—
constituencies. Legislators who are elected on the basis of party votes, by contrast, have been found to overcome
collective action problems more readily than legislators who are elected on the basis of nominal votes. They agree
more readily on general policies that benefit large swaths of the population. Using different rank-orderings of
electoral institutions, a large and growing body of research has confirmed a relationship between the institutions
that govern electoral competition and trade liberalization (Nielson 2003; Crisp et al. 2010), foreign direct
investment (Garland and Biglaiser 2009), economic reform (Gaviria et al. 2004), public goods spending (Persson
and Tabellini 2003; Edwards and Thames 2007; Hicken and Simmons 2008), subsidy spending (Rickard 2012),
human rights protection (Cingranelli and Filippov 2010), and corruption (Chang and Golden 2005).
The aggregate-level proxies used in this body of literature are far removed from the electoral rules’ proximal effect,
however (Shugart 2005, 50). Crisp et al. (2010), for example, found evidence that bilateral investment treaties
between the US and partner countries count systematically more negotiated exceptions when that country’s
electoral institutions provide personal vote-seeking incentives. Legislators under these conditions, they claim, are
more likely to negotiate exemptions to treaties meant to liberalize their investment environments in order to shield
particular constituencies from unfettered foreign competition. Their conclusions are particularly vulnerable to the
ecological fallacy due to the gap between theory and operationalizations, as their inferences about the behavior of
individual legislators may be inaccurate. Average district magnitude, in particular, does not adequately capture
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individual legislators’ incentives given the large within-country variation. More often than not differences in the
coding and scaling of electoral institutions easily mask inconsistencies in the findings across different policies and
outcomes, moreover. After all, the outcome variables capture many other factors—economic, political, and social—
that are unrelated to the incentive and behavior of individual legislators (Rickard 2012, 8).
Individual-level data that measure the extent to which rank-and-file legislators cater to particularistic interests are
hard to come by. Cross-national studies that span a wide range of electoral systems, as a result, are few and far
between. A notable exception is the study of pork-barrel bill initiation that Crisp et al. (2004) conducted in six
Latin American presidential democracies. As districts grow in magnitude in closed-lists systems, a legislator’s
probability of initiating bills that target a local public good or a private good was found to decrease. Intra-party
competition for votes, by contrast, incentivizes (p. 239) Chilean and Colombian legislators to enhance their
personal reputations by initiating bills that target narrow constituencies. Ames (1995) similarly concluded that the
scope of co-partisan competition increases the incentives Brazilian legislators have to propose targeted
amendments to the national budget. Interestingly, strategies targeting contiguous areas or scattered areas are
related to legislators’ prior career trajectories in local government or business. The option to funnel pork to the
district is not available to all, however. It depends on the legislative organization and rules of procedure—in
particular with regard to budgetary powers (see Crisp et al. 2009; Martin 2011) or to particular committees
(Stratmann and Baur 2002; Crisp et al. 2009).
Constituency casework, on the other hand, often takes only the legislator’s time (or his or her staff’s time).
Legislators across the globe return home to the district, attend local community functions, hear constituents’
grievances, and assist them in their dealings with public authorities...As such, legislators’ home style is subject to
fewer partisan constraints than their work in parliament (Searing 1994; see also Fenno 1978). A burgeoning case
study literature has documented the constituency activities of legislators and emphasized the strength of the
“electoral connection” in the context of single-seat districts (Fenno 1978; Cain et al. 1987; Searing 1994), STV
(Gallagher and Komito 2010), and SNTV systems (Cox and Thies 1998; Grofman et al. 1999). Constituency
casework is meant to signal to constituents a legislator’s continuing commitment to the local community—that he or
she hasn’t moved to the capital and lost touch with the district (Crisp et al. 2004, 835)—and to gain their trust as a
person. As a result it is largely non-ideological in tone and will not antagonize the party leadership (Cain et al.
1987). It may, in fact shore up the party result in the district.
Recent studies focusing on mixed-member systems have supported these conclusions. In Germany, Scotland, and
Wales, for example, district members were found to be more committed to constituency service than list members
(Lundberg 2007). In fact, putting a human face on the party may even improve the party’s performance in the
district in terms of party-list votes (Ferrara and Herron 2005). Other research compared legislators’ behavior before
and after electoral reform, or within the European Parliament. Like research on mixed-member systems, these
studies consider the effect of different electoral institutions within a single legislature (thereby controlling for
alternative institutional explanations). Both confirmed the finding that constituency casework is less common in
multi-seat districts. Evidence from the 1993 electoral reform in New Zealand that has shifted from plurality in single-
seat districts to a mixed-member proportional system demonstrates that the service efforts of list members have
weakened over time (McLeay and Vowles 2007). Contrary to the implicit assumption present in the literature,
however, constituency casework also appears to decrease in multi-seat districts in spite of intra-party competition
growing in scope. Members of the European Parliament elected in preferential systems, Bowler and Farrell (1993)
concluded, have contact with individual constituents more frequently and are more inclined to maintain a
permanent constituency office than those elected from closed party lists. District magnitude, however, markedly
decreases the time they spend handling requests from individual voters. Farrell and Scully (2007) confirm that
MEPs—irrespective of the (p. 240) ballot structure—are less likely to do casework or hold surgeries as districts
grow in magnitude.
Is there an electoral incentive to take positions that are favoured by unorganized bodies of opinion among the
population that may be geographically diffuse? There are few observable behavioral repertoires catering to
unorganized constituencies. Research has concentrated mostly on the nomination of candidates instead; the
selection of female candidates, for instance (Matland and Studlar 1996; Thames and Williams 2010). Defying the
party whip to publicly stand behind a particular body of opinion arguably comes closest to catering to a
geographically diffuse constituency. Dissent on roll-call votes is in fact more common under candidate-based than
under party-based electoral institutions (Carey 2007; Depauw and Martin 2009). But the evidence is less
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convincing, with regard to the effect of district magnitude (Sieberer 2006). To take a position against one’s own
party may win additional votes among non-partisans in the electorate, Kam (2009) pointed out, but it will hardly
endear one among the core partisan supporters and the party leadership.6
Few studies have compared different personal vote-seeking strategies, addressing even implicitly legislators’
choice between them. One notable exception is Crisp’s (2007) study of legislators’ entangled electoral incentives
in Venezuela’s mixed-member proportional system. He found some evidence that electoral incentives affected
members’ bill initiation and committee assignments, but not dissent. Other factors were found at least equally
important, moreover: the cameral rules and the time that legislators need to adapt to electoral reform (see also
Lundberg 2007). Another exception compared different “home styles” (Fenno 1978) of national and regional
legislators in 12 European democracies (André and Depauw 2013). District magnitude was found to have the
expected differential effect in open-list and closed-list systems (see Carey and Shugart 1995) with regard to the
time legislators spend in the district, to the importance to legislators of project work, and to the frequency of their
contact with social organizations. But the high marginal cost to legislators of connecting with large numbers of
constituents one-by-one reduces the time they spend doing casework as districts grow in magnitude in open-list
and closed-list systems alike (see also Mitchell 2000; Carey 2009).
11.5 Monitoring and Sanctioning Abilities of Political Parties
Electoral institutions frequently generate a tension, it is assumed (Carey and Shugart 1995), between what is in the
electoral interest of the party and what is in the interest of the individual legislator. In that case legislators have an
incentive to play up their personal record. But party leaders frequently have the ability to directly affect the
behavioral repertoires that record is built on. On the one hand, party leaders will seek to constrain (p. 241)
legislators’ personal vote-seeking where their behavior would be detrimental to the party’s collective reputation. On
the other hand, party leaders may make legislators engage in behavior from which they do not personally benefit
(Swindle 2002). The ability to thwart electoral incentives critically depends, however, on the means at the disposal
of the party leadership to monitor and sanction individual legislators’ behavior. The means include, for instance,
control over career advancement, staff allocation, and numerous procedural advantages in the legislative arena
(for instance, through committee assignment and agenda control, Saalfeld 1995; Bowler 2002). More importantly,
parties more often than not control access to the party label in elections; via candidate nomination they have the
ability to coordinate intra-party competition and thereby “manage” the vote in systems under which unequal
dispersion of candidates’ votes might cost the party (Johnson and Hoyo 2012; Bergman, Shugart and Watt 2012).
Candidate selection methods shape legislators’ incentive to cultivate a personal vote and may thereby strengthen
or undermine the impact the electoral rules have (Atmor et al. 2011, 22; see also Hazan, this volume). Even before
running for election, candidates must win the party’s nomination. The party label is a valuable cue to voters across
a wide range of electoral institutions. The more centralized and exclusive are the nomination procedures, the more
party leaders are able to constrain legislators’ behavior—especially behavior that may harm the party record
(Samuels 1999; Hazan and Rahat 2010). Decentralization, on the other hand, pressures legislators to be
responsive to local interests that may be at odds with the national party’s platform and policies. The more
heterogeneous are those who control nominations, moreover, the weaker party leaders are in the face of
legislators’ personal vote-seeking as legislators owe their nomination to their voters in the candidate selection
process (Atmor et al. 2011). Through centralized nomination procedures the Brazilian Workers Party (PT) is able to
counteract the electoral incentive to cultivate a personal vote generated by open-list PR (Samuels 1999).The
democratization of candidate selection methods in Israel, by contrast, has introduced elements of personal
representation in an extremely party-centred closed-list system (Rahat and Sheafer 2007).
Candidate entry and vote management further underline the coordination by political parties. In both STV and SNTV
the party that nominates too many candidates risks dispersing its vote to the point of losing seats; the party that
nominates too few candidates wins its seats by more votes than needed (Cox 2008). Japanese parties in the former
SNTV system took an even more active role than Irish parties under STV, overnominating less often and spreading
votes more evenly across their candidates (Swindle 2002; see also Johnson and Hoyo 2012). Under SNTV, parties
are also more active than under open-list PR systems, Bergman, Shugart and Watt (2012) add, overnominating less
often and wasting fewer votes on unelected candidates. Political parties further curb intra-party competition even in
the face of strong incentives for candidates to cultivate their personal reputation, by nominating candidates with a
Page 7 of 14
complementary mix of characteristics or by preventing candidates targeting co-partisans’ bailiwicks (Gallagher

2008, 524). Political parties, finally, task legislators to target other parties’ bailiwicks even in the absence of an
electoral incentive (Crisp and Desposato 2004). Even in unwinnable (p. 242) districts list members will “shadow”
the incumbent of another party in mixed-member systems and offer constituency service to their “duty
electorate”—hoping for a more secure position on the party list at the next election (Heitshusen et al. 2003;
Lundberg 2007). Even where term limits prohibit re-election, parties make legislators in Costa Rica provide
constituency service and deliver pork (Taylor 1992; Carey 1996).
11.6 Monitoring and Sanctioning Abilities of Voters
One of the best established findings in the discipline is often discarded in the personal vote literature—voters’
rational ignorance and limited interest in politics. Studies frequently take for granted that legislators’ actions are
known to voters and taken into account to separate good representatives from the bad. It is the assumption that
more voters will rely on candidate-based cues when they have the option to choose among candidates running
under the same party label (Shugart et al. 2005). The type of candidate-specific cues that voters add to or exclude
from their decision calculus is dependent on the complexity of the choice situation, however. Voters, Lau and
Redlawsk (2001) demonstrated, revise their information-processing strategies and heuristic use to compensate for
an increase in the number of candidates of which they need to keep track. Voters will stop paying attention to the
most demanding information cues first (Shugart et al. 2005). Low-demand information cues require little effort by
voters to learn about them, whereas high-demand information cues are typically not that salient to voters. That is,
voters can be expected to pay heed to different personal vote-seeking actions in low and high magnitude districts.
And insofar as a legislator’s choice of behavioural repertoire is centred on the information cues that he or she
believes the voters will employ, the legislator will come to favour some actions over others depending on the
number of competitors.
Few studies have addressed the apparent paradox of why legislators put so many resources into cultivating a
personal reputation, when so little evidence demonstrates that their efforts actually pay off, at least in single-seat
district systems (Cain et al. 1987; Bowler et al. 1996). Little is known about what sort of representation voters want
and reward on their ballot, and this question has not been extended much thus far to multi-seat districts.
Democratic theorists have pointed out multiple and frequently conflicting standards of evaluation (see Pitkin 1967;
Mansbridge 2003). With one recent exception (Dovi 2007), moreover, they have not sought to aid constituents to
choose between them. Previous studies have focused on candidate traits (McGraw 2011): voters make frequent
inferences regarding a candidate’s abilities, issue positions, and behavior once elected from his or her physical
attractiveness or easily observable group characteristics such as sex or race. One recent study (Grimmer et al.
2012) noted that voters respond more to legislators’ strategic credit-claiming communications than (p. 243) to
outcomes. Other research has turned to voters’ preferences for delegate and trustee styles of representation
(Carman 2006) and their attitudes vis-à-vis casework (Wagner 2007; André et al. 2013). If anything, this
developing body of literature points out that voters have preferences and expectations about the nature of the
representative relation and that these preferences and expectations can be plausibly related to voter
sophistication and partisan identification.
What research there is on the electoral gains of personal vote-seeking actions focuses almost exclusively on
casework. Diligent constituency service, Cain et al. (1987) demonstrated, provides British MPs with a safety margin
that is modest in magnitude but nonetheless significant. The electoral advantage for US Congressmen was found to
be even greater (but see Johannes and McAdams 1981). Partisanship mediates the electoral impact of casework,
Serra and Cover (1995, 177) add further; casework improves a legislator’s name recognition among all
constituents, but the electoral payoff is negligible among the party’s core supporters and substantial among
undecided voters and core supporters of challenger parties. Kam (2009) reaches similar conclusions regarding
dissent among New Zealand legislators. Evidence of a personal vote accruing from constituency work has also
been found outside the context of single-seat districts. Irish TDs who put more effort into building a personal
reputation among constituents, Martin (2010) shows, win significantly more first-preference votes and a larger
percentage of the quota needed to win a seat in the district. But the electoral gains of personal vote-seeking
actions have hardly been studied across different electoral institutions.
Page 8 of 14
11.7 Conclusion
The institutions governing the translation of votes into seats, it has commonly been argued, shape the incentives of
legislators to cultivate their personal reputations or the party’s collective reputation and thereby affect the
behavioral repertoires open to them. The electoral rules have successfully been linked to constituency casework,
pork-barrel politics, voting dissent...but the rapidly growing body of personal vote literature remains
underdeveloped in two important ways. It has, on the one hand, been largely unsuccessful in identifying the
underlying causal mechanism tying the formal properties of the electoral institutions to the behavior of legislators. It
has, moreover, failed to explain under what circumstances legislators come to favour one course of action on
which to build their personal reputation over another course. Gaining a better understanding of how the electoral
rules affect the conditions for accountability and the competiveness of seats on both the inter-party and intra-party
dimensions should provide invaluable clues as to the theoretical link and effectiveness of different behavioral
repertoires. Due to the high cost of collecting individual-level data across a range of electoral rules, an
accumulation of knowledge is likely to proceed only from the development (and later integration) of micro-theories
of particular behaviors that are commonly called personal vote-seeking. In doing so, other factors—such as the
party, the district, (p. 244) and the political opportunity structure—that may directly constrain legislators’ choice
of repertoire must be taken into consideration.
This chapter has demonstrated that electoral rules matter in shaping patterns of political representation. But, in
concluding, it is important to note that research in this subfield is further complicated by the nature of electoral
institutions themselves (Morgenstern and Vázquez-D’Elía 2007). Electoral systems, Grofman et al. (1999)
emphasized, are “embedded institutions” operating within a wider institutional framework and social context, such
as presidentialism and federalism. The choice of electoral system design is not independent of the social,
economic, and cultural context, moreover; political parties and legislators often tailor electoral institutions to their
own best interest factoring in prevailing norms (Colomer 2005). This highlights the endogeneity problem regarding
electoral institutions (Przeworski 2004, 528); do electoral institutions bring legislators to do what they otherwise
would not have done and keep them from doing what they would otherwise have done? While Irish TDs’
constituency casework is congruent with STV, Gallagher and Komito (2010) argued, it cannot be traced back to the
electoral rules and cultural factors are considered important (see also Farrell 1985). Legislators must choose from
culturally specific behavioral repertoires that are only in part shaped by the conditions legislators compete under
for re-election (Saward 2010). Central to these repertoires are legislators’ perceptions of the actions that
constituents will respond to or reject, but constituents’ expectations by and large develop in reaction to what
legislators do. Disentangling this intricate relation remains a major challenge for future research in the fields of
electoral and legislative studies.
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Notes:
(1) . It is not that legislators are not motivated by a wide range of career goals and emotional incentives (see
Searing 1994). Some act out of a sense of duty, others are motivated by the policies they get to set, and still others
hope for advancement. But if they are not returned to parliament, it hardly matters what is next on their list (Strøm
1997).
(2) . There are intermediate systems, often called “flexible lists” in which both a pre-election list rank and
preference votes are taken into account to determine the order of election. For simplicity, and because the
literature on them is less developed, we do not dwell on the impact of such lists.
(3) . A remarkable number of indices have been developed, rank-ordering different electoral institutions according
the incentive to cultivate a personal vote (Carey and Shugart 1995; Shugart 2001; Farrell and McAllister 2006). No
two rank-orders are identical, however.
(4) . Katz (1986, 97) uses the notion of “partisan defeat.” For reasons of consistency, we prefer the term of “inter-
party defeat” here.
(5) . At any given magnitude, personal reputations are expected to be of greater value to legislators as the impact
preference votes have on the order of intra-party seat allocation grows—though they are more careful about this
claim in a footnote (Carey and Shugart 1995, 432).
(6) . As Samuels and Shugart (2010) show common assumptions about partisan control over executives are less
valid in presidential or semi-presidential systems.
Audrey André
Audrey André is Post-Doctoral Researcher at the Department of Political Science, Universiteit Antwerpen.
Sam Depauw
Sam Depauw is Assistant Professor and Post-Doctoral Researcher at the Department of Political Science, Vrije Universiteit Brussel.
Matthew Søberg Shugart

Matthew Søberg Shugart is Professor of Political Science and at the Graduate School of International Relations and Pacific Studies,
University of California, San Diego.
Page 14 of 14
Gender and Legislatures

Michelle M. Taylor-Robinson
Institutions
2014
Although there has been an increase in representation of women in national and state legislatures, women still hold
much fewer than half the seats in most chambers. Research on women in legislatures has addressed questions
such as why there are still few women legislators despite constituting at least half the population, whether women
view the job of representative differently than men, or whether they behave differently in the chamber, or have
different legislative agendas. This chapterexamines the issue of gender in the legislatures, focusing on how to get
women into the legislature and what women do once they are there. It begins with a brief review of the evolution of
the research field and summarizes findings about institutional factors that help women get elected. It then
considers whether women differ from men in the legislature in terms of behavior. Finally, it highlights challenges for
moving the field of gender and parliaments forward and argues for greater attention to intersectionality,
operationalizing of women’s interests, and the political opportunity structure faced by politically ambitious
politicians.
Keywords: representation, women, legislatures, women legislators, gender, parliaments, intersectionality, women’s interests, political opportunity,
politicians
12.1 Introduction
REPRESENTATION of women in national and state legislatures has increased, but still women hold far fewer than half the
seats in most chambers. Why is this the case when women are at least half the population? Do women view the job
of representative differently than men; do they behave differently in the chamber, or have different legislative
agendas? Does it matter which women hold seats in the legislature? These questions have motivated women and
politics scholars for several decades, and their research has produced a growing understanding of factors that
influence election of women and of what women do in office. Yet there is still much fruitful ground for research on
these topics, particularly taking into account greater nuance in the diversity among women and the complex
combination of factors that facilitate or limit the likelihood that increased descriptive representation of women will
produce substantive representation.
This chapter will focus on two topics: getting women into the legislature, and what women do once they are there. It
begins by briefly reviewing the evolution of this research field, then it summarizes what scholars have found about
institutional factors that help to get women elected and about whether there are differences in the behavior of
women and men in the legislature, including the current frontiers of this research. The final section offers ideas for
the future research agenda of the field.
12.2 History and Evolution of the Field
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This research field has evolved as representation of women in government expanded. Early research explored
why women do not run for office (and this is still an important topic though it is beyond the subject of this chapter),
and a large body of work has assessed sociodemographic, cultural, economic, and institutional factors that impact
(p. 251) election of women. Scholars have also analysed the activity of women in government, in particular to
gauge whether women legislators view the job differently than their male colleagues, allocate their time differently,
legislate on different topics, and represent women’s interests. Scholars have explored whether and how
legislatures are gendered institutions, looking at women’s committee assignments and access to leadership posts,
and whether women participate differently then men because they are marginalized in the chamber or because
they bring different legislative agendas with them into office.
Women in parliaments research spans the globe’s democratic countries. The US Congress and state legislatures
are studied extensively, though the US lags behind many countries in election of women. For decades scholars
have studied women in Scandinavian politics, because that region led the world in representation of women in
government and is known for its egalitarian gender values. Much research on women in European parliaments has
focused on the role of parties in promoting election of women (Caul 1999; Kittilson 2006), as some parties,
particularly on the left, adopted gender quota rules and over time that caused “contagion,” putting pressure on
other parties to promote nomination and election of women (Matland and Studlar 1996). Argentina’s adoption of the
Ley de Cupos national gender quota law in 1991 drew attention to Latin America, and research on women in
legislatures in Latin America and other regions has expanded, particularly following the spread of gender quotas. In
2012 the highest percentage of women in the legislature was found in Rwanda, with women occupying 45 of the 80
seats in the lower chamber (56.3 percent) (Inter-Parliamentary Union).
This research is often underpinned by a normative concern with increasing representation of women—in
government and of women’s interests in policy. At the same time it is motivated to understand theoretical links
between numerical (descriptive) representation and policy (substantive representation) (Pitkin 1967).1 A normative
expectation is that more women in government will enhance representation of women’s interests, but this is an
empirical question that requires nuanced tests: e.g. which women’s interests gain representation; does the
presence of more women in legislatures or of “critical actors” prompt men to change their representation behavior
(see Childs and Krook 2009)?
12.3 Recent Research Frontiers
Much has been learned about how institutions facilitate or hinder election of women.2 Most clearly, proportional
representation (PR) electoral systems are more favourable to women than plurality systems (see for example Norris
1985; Rule 1987, 1994; Paxton 1997; Kenworthy and Malami 1999; Reynolds 1999; Yoon 2004; Kunovich and
Paxton 2005), though findings are less consistent in developing or post-communist countries (Matland 1998; Moser
2001). Yet the positive affect of PR has contextual limits, since PR systems have been in place for over a century
and they have only been associated with increased election of women in recent decades.3 Tremblay (2007) found
that PR (p. 252) is most helpful to women in relatively new democracies, while in old democracies an egalitarian
attitude about gender is most important for election of women. Hughes and Paxton (2008) also find a changing
relationship over time, and they argue that explaining patterns of growth and decline is different from conducting
cross-sectional analysis to explain different levels of representation of women across countries. Overall, PR is
favourable to election of women once women have become a relevant constituency to parties and parties see
electoral utility in nominating some women while still nominating men (see Matland and Studlar 1996; Caul 1999;
Kittilson 2006). Within PR systems there is debate about the type of PR that is most useful for election of women.
The answer is said to depend on whether party leaders who control nominations place women in electable list
positions—making closed-lists good for women; but if party leaders do not promote women, while voters support
women—open-lists or preferential voting are best (see Rule 1994; Rule and Shugart 1995; Jones 1996; Reynolds
1999; Schmidt 2003b; Kittilson 2005; Matland 2006; Ellis 2012; see Schmidt [2008] for a general comparison of
institutional difference across PR systems; for STV systems, see Schwindt-Bayer et al. 2010).
Larger district magnitude facilitates election of women (see e.g. Engstrom 1987; Rule 1987; Matland and Brown
1992; Schwindt-Bayer 2005), though some scholars argue that party magnitude, not district magnitude is important
(Matland 1993; Matland and Taylor 1997; but see Jones 2009 for an opposing view). Schwindt-Bayer (2005)
demonstrated empirically that high rates of incumbency impede, and term limits facilitate election of women.
Page 2 of 14
Gender quotas typically help to get women into parliament (see Krook 2009 for an extensive review of the
literature, particularly how quotas get adopted). However, the devil is in the details and quotas are more successful
if they are designed with placement mandates so that parties cannot put all the women at the bottom of the list, and
there are severe penalties for noncompliance (Htun and Jones 2002; Norris 2004; Dahlerup and Freidenvall 2005;
Matland 2005; Tripp and Kang 2008; Schwindt-Bayer 2009). It is also important that primaries do not override the
implementation of the quota (Baldez 2007).
Expanded descriptive representation of women begs the question of what do the women do once they are in the
legislature.4 This has been examined in various ways, ranging from who do women consider to be their
constituency or how do they view their role as representatives, to what types of committee assignments do women
hold, to whether the activity of women in the legislature differs from their male colleagues in debate participation,
their legislative agendas or voting behavior, or constituency service.
Interviews and surveys typically show that women have a different view of their constituents, or of their
representational role, than do men. Women tend to view themselves as surrogate representatives of women, or
they articulate a responsibility to represent women’s groups more often then do men (Reingold 1992; Childs 2001,
2004; Carroll 2002; Franceschet and Piscopo 2008; Saint-Germain and Chavez Metoyer 2008; Schwindt-Bayer
2010; Smooth 2011). In some of the oldest research on this topic Elsa Chaney (1979) studied women legislators in
Chile and Peru in the 1960s and early 1970s (p. 253) and found that their view of their constituents and their job
was as “supermadres,” extending their role as mothers in their own families to a similar role for the broader
population. More recent studies have explored whether that traditional attitude still exists for women in Latin
American legislatures as women’s participation in the workforce and in government has expanded throughout the
region. While women legislators still are more likely than men to express concern for representing women and
women’s interests, they no longer view their job as limited to stereotypically feminine policy areas, and thus at least
in their professional persona they appear quite similar to their male colleagues (Furlong and Riggs 1996; Schwindt-
Bayer 2006, 2010). Studies also show that when asked about the time they spend on constituency service, women
do more than men or that they receive more requests for help with personal needs than do their male colleagues
(see Thomas 1992; Richardson and Freeman 1995; Saint-Germain and Chavez Metoyer 2008; but see Reingold
2000 for an exception to this finding).
Moving from attitudes to actions, studies find that women are more likely than men to initiate bills about women’s
rights (e.g. gender equality, women’s health, protection from violence), or bills addressing children and family
issues (see Saint-Germian 1989; Thomas and Welch 1991; Thomas 1991, 1994; Jones 1997; Reingold 2000;
Wängnerud 2000; Bratton 2002; Swers 2002, 2005; Wolbrecht 2002; Taylor-Robinson and Health 2003; Gerrity et
al. 2007; Devlin and Elgie 2008; Franceschet and Piscopo 2008; McDonald and O’Brien 2011).5 Findings are mixed
about whether women differ from men in initiation of bills in policy areas that are traditionally associated with
feminine policy interests, such as education, health, environment, welfare (Thomas 1994; Reingold 2000; Taylor-
Robinson and Heath 2003; Swers 2005; Schwindt-Bayer 2006, 2010; see Swers 2001 for a review of US literature).
More research should explore if the mixed results are due to male representatives also viewing these topics as
important, or constituents or parties caring about these policy areas so that both male and female representatives
feel the need to propose legislation on these topics. Several studies indicate that party, particularly affiliation with a
party on the left, is a better predictor than the sex of a legislator, for whether the legislator will support women’s
rights policies (see Tremblay and Pelletier 2000; Carrol 2001; Poggione 2004; Htun and Powers 2006). Maybe the
way that men and women legislate on these topics differs in the content of their bills. When studies have examined
bill content (see Kathlene 1995; Swers 2007), they find that when men and women introduce bills on the same
topics the substance of the proposal often differs.
Research on US legislatures with a more intersectional focus has found that legislators of colour and, in particular,
women legislators of colour are often the most active on social welfare legislation (see Reingold and Smith 2012).
Disaggregation of women could also be useful in other contexts. Schwindt-Bayer (2010) has moved comparative
analysis of gender and legislative agendas to a new level by examining whether, when women are less active at
bill initiation than men, it is because they expressed less interest in a policy area, or they said the topic was a
priority but did not initiate legislation on the topic. She argues that the former indicates gender differences in
behavior, while the latter could be evidence of marginalization of women. In her study of the national congresses of
Argentina, (p. 254) Colombia, and Costa Rica she finds some evidence of differences in agendas (e.g. women’s
issues topics), and some evidence of marginalization (e.g. while women and men in the Argentina Chamber of
Page 3 of 14
Deputies express similar preferences that economics and fiscal affairs are important topics, the women are less
likely to legislate on those issue areas).
While bill initiation is an important component of the job of a legislator, it is not the only way they can influence
policy, and it may not even be a major part of the job in parliamentary systems or for legislators whose party
demands party discipline. Debate participation is another way of assessing whether women and men behave
differently in the legislature.6 Older studies of women in state legislatures in the US found that women spoke less
frequently in debates (Kathlene 1994).7 However, analyses of more recent legislative terms find that women are
equally active debate participants as their male colleagues (see Pearson and Dancy 2011 on the US; Broughton
and Palmieri 1999 on Australia; Murray 2010a on France). Women are more likely than their male colleagues to
speak about the gendered aspects of policies, and to take part in debates on women’s issues bills (see Taylor-
Robinson and Heath 2003; Childs and Withey 2004; Chaney 2006; Catalano 2009; Pearson and Dancey 2012;
Swers 2012 ; see Swers 2001 for a review of US literature).
Whether and about what topics women speak gets us close to a question that underlies much research about
women in legislatures: are legislatures gendered institutions (Acker 1992; Hawkesworth 2003; Duerst-Lahti 2005)?
Legislatures were established in many countries before women had the right to vote and were almost completely
populated by male politicians until relatively recently, so it is plausible that the institutions advantage the career
needs and legislative styles of male politicians. Empirical research can explore whether the organization of the
legislature indicates a gendered nature to how the institution works—for example, if women participate less in
plenary debates or committee hearings than their male colleagues. Another way to explore the gendered nature of
legislatures is through patterns in women’s and men’s committee assignments. We often do not know which
committees an MP wants to sit on, but we can observe whether women are over- or under-represented on certain
types of committees relative to their percentage in the chamber. Some studies indicate that women are over-
represented on committees in stereotypically feminine policy domain areas, and are more likely to chair such
committees, and that women are under-represented on power committees (Aparicio and Langston 2009;
Zetterberg 20088 [Mexico]; Heath et al. 2005 [six Latin American countries]; Murray 2010b [France]; Towns 2003
[Norway and Sweden]). However, Friedman’s (1996) over time study of the US Congress shows that by the 1970s
the average prestige score of the committee assignments of white women was no lower than for their white male
colleagues.9 Dolan and Ford’s (1997) over time study of state legislatures also shows greater diversity and
prestige in women’s committee assignments. Devlin and Elgie (2008) find that women in Rwanda have obtained
seats on a variety of committees, and are not limited to committees with jurisdictions in a feminine policy domain. In
a study of the US where committee preferences were known, Firsch and Kelly (2003) found that first-term women
were less likely than their male colleagues to get assigned to their preferred committees, but once women gained
seniority, then discriminatory behavior only continued for Republican women.
(p. 255) With the expansion of gender quotas, scholars have examined whether the way women get into the
legislature impacts what they do (or are able to do) in office (see Devlin and Elgie 2008; Franscheset and Piscopo
2008; Schmidt 2003a; Tripp 2006; Vincent 2004). An argument that is sometimes made against the use of gender
quotas to quickly increase election of women is that women elected via quotas will be stigmatized as unable to win
election any other way, or that they lack the experience or independence to do their job as representatives.10
However, studies comparing women elected before the implementation of a quota and after (Franscheset and
Piscopo 2008 [Argentina]; Murray 2010a [France]), or comparing states in Mexico with and without a gender quota
(Zetterberg 2008), or women elected to reserved seats versus directly elected in Rwanda (Devlin and Elgie 2008)
find that such a stigma against quota women is unjustified. In general these authors conclude that where party
leaders control nominations, legislators are beholden to party leaders and will take their behavioral cues from party
leaders if they want to build a political career, and that such a constraint exists whether or not there is a gender
quota.
12.4 Moving Forward
An extensive literature speaks to descriptive representation, exploring what conditions facilitate election of women
to parliaments, and what explains differences in representation of women even across countries with similar
histories of democracy and economic development. A growing literature explores whether there is a connection
between descriptive and substantive representation. One of the arguments made for why women, and greater
Page 4 of 14
numbers of women, needed to be represented in the legislature, is that women will bring different issues, and in
particular women’s issues to the policy agenda. Yet we know less about how descriptive representation of women
links to substantive representation, and here there are challenges for moving the field of gender and parliaments
forward. In particular, I will argue for enhanced attention to intersectionality, operationalizing of “women’s
interests,” and the political opportunity structure faced by politically ambitious politicians.
12.4.1 Intersectionality
Women are not all the same, but this diversity creates challenges for studying representation. Historically women
have been under-represented in government (if women were represented at all), and as a consequence
representation of women is often grouped with representation of historically under-represented minority groups. But
women are not a numerical minority in most countries. Women are found in all social classes, ethnic, racial,
linguistic, and religious communities, and women are not concentrated geographically. While similar to many
minority groups in their under-representation (p. 256) relative to their percentage of the population, women rarely
form a “women’s party” (Htun 2004)11, and rarely agree on policies (more on women’s interests later on).
As Wendy Smooth (2011, 438) eloquently asked: representation of which women? If women are under-represented
in government, women from minority groups in society are often even more under-represented, and when elected
they wear at least two representational hats—as representatives of women and of their minority group. Does this
mean they are doubly busy, doubly disadvantaged in pushing their legislative agendas (Hawkesworth 2003;
Hancock 2007; Strolovich 2007)? Legislatures can be raced and gendered institutions. Even in more ethnically or
racially homogeneous societies, women (and men) differ by social class, which begs the question of whether
increased descriptive representation of women in government really just means elite women. If most
representatives are from the upper classes, are the policy interests of less affluent people being represented? For
legislators who wear multiple hats, we need to explore further what that means for their policy priorities and
strategies, and for how they relate to other women. Foreshadowing political opportunity structures, Smooth (2011,
438) writes that, “The costs exacted upon those representatives who do choose to represent the most
marginalized among women remains an understudied topic in women in politics.”
Incorporating intersectionality more fully into our analysis of representation is also important from an empirical
perspective. Reingold and Smith (2012) show that when women legislators are viewed as a single group we may
conclude that women do not legislate differently than men, even on welfare policies that are typically viewed as a
feminine policy domain that should be of particular interest to women. However, when women are disaggregated
into racial groups, the findings are strikingly different and Hispanic women representatives, in particular, stand out
as proponents of welfare legislation. This study may be just the tip of the iceberg and more such work needs to be
done on diverse issue topics and legislative settings.
Women also differ in their party affiliations. Women vote for all parties in a country’s party system, and as
descriptive representation of women has increased it is not just liberal parties that are nominating and electing
women. But partisan diversity of women in the legislature calls into questions whether women will work together.
Can they join a “women’s caucus” or would joining such a multiparty group be sanctioned by their party?
Researchers studying substantive representation of women typically include controls for party, but more
theoretical discussion of when and why party differences should affect the ability of women legislators to represent
women are needed. Thus, I reiterate Smooth’s (2011, 438) call for “designing and executing research that takes
seriously the effects of difference...research frameworks that appreciate how such differences complicate group
interests and the representation of such interests.”
12.4.2 What Are Women’s Interests?
To study whether descriptive representation of women leads to substantive representation we need to consider
what are “women’s interests,” and how can the concept be (p. 257) measured (see Beckwith and Cowell-Meyers
2007; Baldez 2011). Beckwith (2011) suggests differentiating between interests, issues, and preferences. She
argues that, “Interests are not part of an essentialist understanding of ‘women’ as a group but, rather, a recognition
of constant contexts of women’s life circumstances, and an appreciation of women’s opportunities for advancing
their human capabilities and options for action and improving their life chances” (p. 424). Other scholars argue that
all policy areas are gendered, so all issues are women’s issues.12
Page 5 of 14
Many researchers adopt a general definition, such as “issues about which the female electorate is particularly
concerned” (Reingold 1992, 517). Other researchers adopt a definition with a “feminist accent” (Childs and
Lovenduski 2013, 499; but see Celis and Childs [2012] for an argument to include conservative representative
claims). Another research strategy is to study the politics of adoption of a particular type of policy in one country
or across countries (e.g. abortion rights, family leave, anti-violence policy). But as Beckwith (2011) explains, even
when women agree that a topic is a women’s interest, they may disagree about how to address the issue. So there
is still the question for the researcher of how to handle anti-feminist policy proposals, particularly when they are
initiated by women legislators (e.g. an anti-abortion bill). Tremblay and Pelletier (2000) argue that it is not the
election of more women that produces more representation of women’s interests, but the ideology of legislators,
and in particular election of feminists. But what about the interests of conservative women (Celis and Childs 2012),
and what should we expect to be the behavior of women legislators who reject the feminist label?
A challenge for empirical research is that if we adopt a narrow definition of women’s interests, we may find that
women in the legislature are not providing substantive representation of women because the female politicians
define women’s interests differently than the researcher does. As Swers wrote in 2001 (p.178), “Future research
must investigate the ways in which female legislators incorporate women’s interests into the policy discussion on
issues that are not obviously women’s issues.” That call for research issued a decade ago is still pertinent today.
12.4.3 Political Opportunity Structure.
A challenge for enhancing understanding of the descriptive-substantive representation link is to develop a more
systematic theory that addresses the question, “Should women in the legislature be expected to engage in
substantive representation of women?” “Scholars need to devote more attention to the ways in which the political
and institutional contexts shape the decision calculus of legislators concerning what policies to pursue” (Swers
2001, 175). While this is an ongoing research concern for single case studies, the political opportunity structure
also needs to be made more central to comparative research. If we assume that women are as likely as their male
colleagues to be politically ambitious, is it a rational career-building strategy to focus on women’s issues and
representation of women? The answer may in part depend on the electoral system, and on who controls
nominations. In at least some PR systems seeking the women’s vote (p. 258) may be a viable electoral strategy,
just as a political aspirant could obtain an electable slot on their party’s list as the representative of labour or
business interests, or as a representative of ethnic minorities. However, particularly in single member district (SMD)
electoral systems a legislator typically needs to represent the policy preferences of the majority of the people in a
geographic district in order to maximize their chances of re-election (though Swers [2005, 410–11] points out that
a female incumbent may try to use her legislative record to appeal to a female nominating or re-election
constituency). If representing one’s district is expected by voters than focusing on women’s interests to the
exclusion of male constituents may be a dangerous strategy.13 Many women legislators say that they view their
role as surrogate representatives of women in addition to representing their district or their party (Swers 2002).
Even where a partisan vote can get a politician elected (Carey and Shugart 1995) it is an empirical question
whether being a “women’s sector representative” is a good strategy for moving up the party hierarchy, in the
chamber or outside.
Party platform or ideology may also shape the political opportunity structure, for both men and women (and see the
findings mentioned above by various authors that affiliation with a left-leaning party trumps legislator sex for
predicting support for women’s rights legislation). If the party’s platform promotes welfare policies then it may not
only be feasible for women legislators from the party to promote women’s interests, but the party’s female MPs may
be asked by the party to serve as spokespeople for the party on those issues. But a responsible party model of
government, common in many parliamentary systems, would predict “few gender-based differences in
perspectives and behavior” (McAllister and Studlar 1992, 389). In the current highly conservative era in the
Republican Party in the US, it can be a dangerous career strategy for Republican women in Congress to promote
women’s issues that call for a larger government bureaucracy or socially liberal policies (see Swers 2002, 2005).
Scholars of British politics also find that political party, not gender, is “the strongest predictor of representatives’
values and attitudes,” and that “In all likelihood, politicians are reflecting the preferences of their (or their party’s)
constituents” (Catalano 2009, 47–8; Norris 2001).
Another way that the political opportunity structure may shape the issues that legislators want to champion is the
Page 6 of 14
amount of government resources spent on a topic. Swers (2012) argues that healthcare is a more interesting issue
for US senators than education policy because healthcare is a large part of the US federal budget, while education
policy is a small component of the national budget. Senators can make a bigger political splash staking out their
position on topics that are high budget. This incentive applies to both male and female legislators, and may draw
women legislators into some policy areas and away from others, thereby shaping the types of women’s issues that
get attention, even from women in the legislature.
Whip (1991, 17–18), studying Australian parliaments, explains that “representation of women presents many
[women MPs] with a dilemma. They must decide whether to act on behalf of women...[or to fulfill] a role similar to
that of their male counterparts...” With a similar logic, “Thomas (1994) asserts that the slow acceptance of women
into the political areas discouraged women from translating their more (p. 259) liberal policy attitudes into
legislative priorities, since women were not willing to risk their standing in the legislature to pursue issues that were
not viewed as legitimate by their male colleagues” (cited in Swers 2001, 172). But, as the number of women in US
state legislatures increased, women became full participants, including expressing their different policy priorities
(Swers 2001, 173). So theory also needs to be dynamic because the political opportunity structure can change
over time, as policy priorities or the party in power changes, or as women become an important electoral
constituency for a party. The latter may also incentivize male legislators to represent women’s interests.
In sum, the research field of gender and parliament has built a strong base of knowledge about how women get into
the legislature. We have begun to gather a knowledge base, including comparative knowledge, about what women
do inside the legislature. This base should enable the field to become more nuanced, in study of whether and how
institutions are gendered, how intersectional identities affect representation and strategies and definitions of
women interests, and how the political opportunity structure may differ (or be the same) for female and male
legislators, and how it shapes the types of representation they provide and for whom.
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Notes:
(1) . Mansbridge (2003) outlines additional forms of representation that also provide a theoretical base for this
literature.
(2) . Many factors are hypothesized to affect election of women (e.g., seat share of left parties, economic
development, culture, how long women have had the right to vote), though the impact of some of these factors is
expected to diminish over time. Due to space constraints I focus here on institutional factors.
(3) . Some studies find that a culture of gender equality is more important than electoral rules for election of women
(see Inglehart and Norris 2003; Paxton and Kunovich 2003).
(4) . A related question is if the presence of more women in the legislature makes it more possible for women MPs to
represent women’s interests. Initially a “critical mass” of women was expected to be important, but empirical efforts
to test for a critical mass effect have been unsatisfying and many scholars now call the concept under-theorized,
or argue that critical acts instead of large numbers are what matter (see e.g. Beckwith and Cowell-Meyers 2007;
Childs and Krook 2006; Dahlerup 1988; 2006)
(5) . There are important studies that focus on a particular topic of women’s interest legislation (e.g., family leave
[Kittilson 2008], violence against women [Weldon 2002]). Kittilson finds that proportion of women in parliament is an
important factor in encouraging leave policies that are more generous. Weldon finds that women’s organizations in
civil society are most important for promoting women’s interest policies.
(6) . Even in legislatures where members are largely free to initiate the bills that they choose, a legislator may forgo
the credit-claiming opportunity of being the author of a bill, and ask a party leader or committee chair to initiate a
bill they really want to get passed into law as a strategy to increase the probability that the project will succeed
(see Hawkesworth 2003, 535). If such strategizing is a common occurrence, counting the types of bills men and
women initiate will not provide a thorough answer to whether men and women MPs have distinct policy agendas.
(7) . In a study of participation in standing committees in Costa Rica’s Legislative Assembly during the 1990s
(before implementation of the gender quota that dramatically increased representation of women in the Assembly)
women were also found to participate less frequently than men (Taylor-Robinson and Ross 2011).
(8) . Zetterberg (2008, 452) finds that the women requested to serve on feminine policy domain committees, so he
does not interpret their committee assignments to be an indication of marginalization.
(9) . African-American male and female members are examined as a single group and the average prestige score
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of their committee assignments exceeded that of white men only in the 1970s.
(10) . For insightful essays on the pros and cons of gender quotas see the Critical Perspectives sections in Politics
& Gender 2005, vol. 1, no 4 and 2006, vol. 2, no 1.
(11) . Some women’s parties have formed, typically as a strategy to put pressure on established parties to elect
more women (Levin 1999; Sainsbury 2004; Paxton and Hughes 2007, 145).
(12) . As an example in Rwanda, “The President of the Standing Committee on the Budget and State Patrimony
emphasised her efforts to ‘engender’ the budget, while another deputy stated that she integrates gender into her
work on agricultural development and land issues” (Devlin and Elgie 2008, 249). Also see Whip (1991, 13).
(13) . However, it is worth considering which groups a politician perceives that they can count on for support. In a
study of attitudes of male and female state legislators in Arizona and California Reingold (1992) found that female
legislators were more likely than their male colleagues to say they received strong support (financial or other
forms) from women’s groups, and the women were also more likely to not list support from other groups. She
concludes that, “Perhaps these female legislators look to other women for support precisely because they find it
difficult to gather support elsewhere” (p. 525). Schwindt-Bayer (2010, 135) expects that women legislators will do
more service work for women’s groups and for women in part because they seek electoral support from women
(and also because women may be more likely to bring their needs to women legislators, as would be predicted by
the representative bureaucracy literature).
Michelle M. Taylor-Robinson
Michelle M. Taylor-Robinson, Texas A&M University
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Roles in Legislatures
Rudy B. Andeweg
Methodology
2014
In no other area of political science is the concept of roles as important as in legislative studies. Roles make
political institutions such as parliaments subjective: they are related to positions, but not identical to them.
Perceived expectations, personal motivations, and strategic calculations are assumed to differentiate role from
position. Eulau and Wahlke’s typology of representational roles, inspired by Burke and based on a study of US
state legislatures, has long dominated the study of legislative roles. It is criticized on both theoretical and empirical
grounds, in particular for its lack of predictive power. Searing’s typology, based on an inductive study of the UK
House of Commons, has attracted most attention as an alternative. Both seminal studies are ambivalent in their
treatment of political parties in their role typologies. It is sometimes argued that role analysis is currently regaining
importance in legislative studies because of the renewed attention to institutionalist explanations. This chapter is
more skeptical, advocating a move from mere description to theoretically grounded explanation in this field.
Keywords: legislative behavior, political representation, parliamentary roles, Eulau-Wahlke typology, Searing’s typology, legislatures, legislative
studies, parliaments
13.1 Introduction
IN 1778, the MP for Bristol, Edmund Burke, resisted pleas from his constituents to oppose the lifting of restrictions on
Irish trade, which was not in the interest of Bristol as a trading city. Burke’s constituents had been warned. When
they elected him as their representative four years earlier, he had outlined to them how he saw his role as a
member of parliament:
To deliver an opinion, is the right of all men; that of constituents is a weighty and respectable opinion,
which a representative ought always to rejoice to hear; and which he ought always most seriously to
consider. But authoritative instructions; mandates issued, which the member is bound blindly and
implicitly to obey, to vote, and to argue for, though contrary to the clearest conviction of his judgment and
conscience,—these are things utterly unknown to the laws of this land, and which arise from a fundamental
mistake of the whole order and tenor of our constitution. Parliament is not a congress of ambassadors from
different and hostile interests; which interests each must maintain, as an agent and advocate, against
other agents and advocates; but parliament is a deliberative assembly of one nation, with one interest,
that of the whole; where, not local purposes, not local prejudices, ought to guide, but the general good,
resulting from the general reason of the whole. You choose a member indeed; but when you have chosen
him, he is not member of Bristol, but he is a member of parliament. If the local constituent should have an
interest, or should form an hasty opinion, evidently opposite to the real good of the rest of the community,
the member for that place ought to be as far, as any other, from any endeavour to give it effect.
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(Burke 1774, 81)
Burke was not re-elected, but his speech became famous for its distinction between two representational role
conceptions: that of a trustee, and that of an instructed delegate. This distinction has not only played an important
role in normative debates about political representation (e.g. Pitkin 1967), but it has deeply influenced the empirical
(p. 268) study of parliamentary roles as well. “Some Empirical Observations on the Theory of Edmund Burke” was
the subtitle under which Eulau, Wahlke, Buchanan, and Ferguson first introduced role analysis into the study of
legislative behavior (Eulau et al. 1959), which they later elaborated in their landmark study, The Legislative
System; Explorations in Legislative Behavior (Wahlke et al. 1962). The concept of political roles takes central
stage in this book, and its Burkean typology of representational roles in particular has dominated legislative role
analysis ever since.
For at least one of the authors, Heinz Eulau, the study of parliamentary roles was just the beginning, as he
regarded “roles” as the basic unit of analysis in the then newly emerging behavioral approach to political science:
“Political behavior, then, is always conducted in the performance of a political role” (Eulau 1963, 40). But role
analysis hardly spread beyond the study of legislative behaviour, apart from a few applications to government
ministers (Headey 1974; Searing 1994). Moreover, overviews of the literature on parliamentary roles (Saalfeld and
Müller 1997; Blomgren and Rozenberg 2012) agree that even with regard to legislative behaviour, roles gradually
fell out of favour. Although role analysis has made a modest comeback after the rediscovery of political institutions
in the late 1980s with Searing’s monumental study of Westminster roles (Searing 1994), this “neo-institutionalist
turning point” (Blomgren and Rozenberg 2012) is largely confined to Europe. There is less research on parliaments
in Africa, Asia, and Latin America generally, but role analysis does not feature prominently in it. In the United States,
where this field of study originated, the study of roles in Congress or state legislatures is now exceptional: it
receives but a passing mention (and only in the historical section) of Gamm and Huber’s overview of the state of
legislative studies in the US (Gamm and Huber 2002, 320)
Why has role analysis lost its prominence in studies of legislative behavior and political representation? This
chapter explores two possible answers—with regard to the concept of roles and with regard to the content of role
analysis, before looking at the prospects for the study of roles in parliament.
13.2 Concepts: What are Parliamentary Roles?
The social sciences have rarely succeeded in distilling unambiguous concepts out of the variety of loose
definitions that exist for a particular phenomenon in social discourse (e.g. “democracy,”“influence”). “Role” is no
exception, but there are a few common denominators. First, roles imply interaction between individuals: cast away
on a desert island man does not play a role. Second, a role is connected to, but not identical to, a particular
position (or “status”: Platt 2001) such as gender roles in society and legislative roles in parliaments. The
relationship with institutional positions explains how the fate of role analysis came to be intertwined with that of
(neo-) institutionalism in (p. 269) political science, as we noted earlier. The position-role relationship has also
produced debate between those who see role as all but determined by position (a view attributed to structural-
functionalism) and those who see roles as primarily created by those holding a position (the view of symbolic
interactionism). In practice, this installment of the structure-agency debate was much more nuanced. The work on
legislative roles by Eulau and Wahlke et al. for example, is often classified in the structural-functionalist tradition
(Searing 1994, 9; Blomgren and Rozenberg 2012, 11–14), but most of it is devoted to explaining why
parliamentarians have such different interpretations of what their work entails. The extent to which position
determines role is also much too important an empirical question to be left to the assumptions and definitions of a
particular theoretical perspective.
13.2.1 Is Behavior Part of a Role?
A more fundamental problem is whether behavior should be included or excluded in the definition of role. Both
views can be found in role theory generally (Biddle 1986, 68–9; Platt 2001, 150–90), and in the study of
parliamentary roles. Wahlke clearly distinguishes role from role behavior: “Role, for any individual legislator, refers
to a coherent set of ‘norms’ of behavior which are thought by those involved in the interactions being viewed, to
apply to all persons who occupy the position of legislator” (Wahlke 1962, 8). And “In order to avoid any possible
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confusion, it is convenient to use the specific term ‘role behavior’ to refer to those overt actions which result from
legislators’ acting in conformity with norms included in the role” (Wahlke 1962, 9). Strøm’s view of legislative roles
“as behavioural strategies conditioned by the institutional framework in which parliamentarians operate” (Strøm
1997, 157) is very different, but it also excludes behavior. He suggests that subsuming too many different variables
into the concept of roles, including actual behavior, has contributed to role analysis having fallen somewhat out of
favour (Strøm 1997, 171). Searing, on the other hand, defines political roles as “particular patterns of interrelated
goals, attitudes, and behaviors that are characteristic of people in particular positions” (Searing 1994, 18; italics
in original). Blomgren and Rozenberg’s position that legislative roles “are comprehensive patterns of attitudes
and/or behavior shared by MPs (... )” (Blomgren and Rozenberg 2012, 8) even implies that roles may consist of
behavior alone. The inclusion of behavior into the definition of roles could find support in some prominent
definitions of institutions as “stable, recurring pattern[s] of behaviour” (Goodin 1996, 22), but doing so puts severe
restrictions on the analytical use of the concept: if behavior is part of a role we can still seek to explain the
emergence or change of a role orientation, but we can no longer use an MP’s role orientation to explain his or her
behavior. Searing explicitly denies that the correlations between roles and behavior that he finds, such as MPs
espousing the “Constituency Member” role spending more time in the constituency, are trivial tautologies (Searing
1994, 380–81), but his definition of roles indicates otherwise.
(p. 270) 13.2.2 Are Roles Perceived Expectations, Strategies, or Motivations?
If roles are linked to, but not identical to, positions, the question arises what makes up for the difference between
position and role. Wahlke’s definition emphasizes perceived norms. In a footnote to his definition, Wahlke makes
clear that the term “norms” includes expectations of behavior which is the term more often found in role definitions.
The difference between position and role is that a position is defined in terms of formal rules, but these rules leave
room for interpretation, and they are often complemented by informal rules, which need even more interpretation.
Such interpretation leads different MPs to develop different role orientations, but all of them seek to meet the
expectations that they think significant others have of their position. In this sense, roles are the application of a
particular institution’s “logic of appropriateness” (March and Olsen 1989, 21–6) to the level of individual “inmates”
of that institution: an individual seeks to identify what the most appropriate course of action is for someone in his or
her position in this particular institution, and then pursues that course of action. The view of roles as perceived
norms and expectations predates Ajzen and Fishbein’s social-psychological Theory of Reasoned Action (Fishbein
and Ajzen 1975) and its later revisions, but there is a basic similarity: in addition to personal preferences
(attitudes), an individual is influenced by “subjective norms,” i.e. his perception of whether significant others
expect him—given his particular position—to perform a particular behavior. The inclusion of subjective norms has
greatly improved the explanatory power of models predicting behavior from attitudes. Ajzen and Fishbein weight
the “subjective norms” by the individual’s motivation to comply with the expectations of others. This dispositional
variation could potentially improve the explanatory power of roles significantly, but it has not been included into
legislative role studies yet.
March and Olsen contrast their normative neo-institutionalist “logic of appropriateness” with a “logic of
consequentiality” that is representative of rational-choice institutionalism (March and Olsen 1989, 23). In that
perspective individuals continue to maximize their utility when they enter an institution, but the institution
constrains their options for doing so. Strøm’s conceptualization of roles as strategies conditioned by the
institutional framework is a good example of this tradition (see Alpert 1979 for an earlier example). In this view, the
difference between position and role is accounted for by the goals of the politician, and as politicians may pursue
different goals depending on the situation, they also adopt different roles. To equate roles with strategies has been
criticized because of the different time perspectives associated with these two concepts: “Doing surgery work two
months before an election is undoubtedly an electoral strategy; doing it on a permanent basis throughout a
legislature could be better described as playing the constituency member role” (Blomgren and Rozenberg 2012,
28). Strøm recognizes that strategies generate repetitive behavior which we may observe as a “routine” (Strøm
1997, 158) or a “routinized strategy” (Strøm 2012, 87). This lengthens the time frame, but it becomes difficult to
disentangle the purely rational calculation from path-dependent (p. 271) behavior in such a routine. As Searing
puts it, “the problem is that frequently repeated behavioral routines also sound like habits, which are incompatible
with the adjective ‘strategic’ as used in the strategic behavior framework” (Searing 2012, xxv).
Searing’s own motivational approach has a basic similarity to Strøm’s strategic approach: Searing, too, argues that
Page 3 of 14
MPs’ personal goals shape their role choices. However, there are also important differences between the two
conceptualizations. First, Strøm assumes what the most important goals are, and rank orders them: reselection, re-
election, party office, and legislative office. He readily acknowledges that parliamentarians may also have other
goals and motivations, but “many legislators cannot afford to indulge their less self-interested motivations. Doing so
might lead to a shorter and less gratifying political career than they might otherwise enjoy” (Strøm 2012, 99).
Searing adds to these “cognitive career goals” what he calls “emotional incentives.” Such incentives are deeply
personal and consequently Searing makes no assumptions about their content or any hierarchy among them
(Searing 1994, 19–20).
Second, if roles are strategies, they are obviously instrumental. But if roles are shaped in part to satisfy emotional
needs, playing a particular role may be gratifying by itself. This difference between instrumental and expressive
role behavior is nicely illustrated by the treatment of constituency service in the two approaches. Searing
emphasizes the intrinsic rewards of playing the role of Constituency Member: satisfying a sense of duty, a sense of
competence, etc. Strøm sees the adoption of role orientations such as “welfare officer” for constituents or “local
promoter” of constituency interests as instrumental for the goal of re-election. Hence, “it is roles such as these that
we should expect to see among members with particularly competitive electoral constituencies.” Both approaches
can show empirical support for their assumptions. Zittel (2012) found that German legislators competing in single-
member districts were more likely to adopt a district delegate role if they had a fair chance of winning, while they
were more prone to a party delegate role if they were unlikely to win the district and had to rely on re-election via
the party list. In Searing’s own study electoral insecurity was not a significant factor: of all British MPs elected with a
margin of less than two percentage points, 26 percent could be classified as Constituency Members; the same was
true of 27 percent of the MPs who were elected with a comfortable margin of 32 percentage points or more (Searing
1994, 146–7). Studlar and McAllister (1996) also observed no influence of marginality on the amount of
constituency work in Australia, but an impact of representational role on the type of constituency work instead.
Other studies found both strategic considerations and role orientations to affect constituency work (e.g. Gallagher
and Holliday 2003).
Finally, in Strøm’s approach, the goals of MPs are treated as exogenous to the institutional context. They may
change when their saliency relative to the other goals is affected by changing circumstances such as more or less
electoral security, but they are not affected by the interactions an MP has when playing a particular role or by
socialization experiences. Searing, by contrast, emphasizes the evolving interpretation of roles as the result of a
learning process. “Thus, in the motivational approach, the preferences of (p. 272) politicians are not treated as
wholly exogenous to the institutional context, as they are in economic models” (Searing 1994, 20).
In summary, the fact that Searing emphasizes personal goals rather than perceived expectations as factors
shaping role orientations puts his motivational approach close to Strøm’s position, but the fact that he allows those
role orientations to be expressive rather than instrumental, and endogenous rather than exogenous, points to a
greater familiarity with the normative institutionalism of which Wahlke is an example avant la lettre.
13.2.3 Concepts or Hypotheses?
A third problem for role theory is that it is not much more than a conceptual framework, developing various
concepts such as “role-taking,”“role distance,”“role conflict,” etc. Role theory provides us with a vocabulary, but
it does not lead to hypotheses about the relationship between roles and other variables; it is not a “propositional
theory” (Biddle 1986, 86–88). Searing argues that “this quest for a general theory of roles has always been
fundamentally misguided” because roles are too polymorphic phenomena, but at a less abstract level, he
advocates seeking “particular explanations about particular types of roles in particular types of institutional
contexts” (Searing 1994, 7). This may be too modest an ambition. Searing himself has made an important
contribution by distinguishing position roles and preference roles. “Position roles are associated with positions that
require the performance of many specific duties and responsibilities. Preference roles, by contrast, are associated
with positions that require the performance of few specific duties and responsibilities” (Searing 1994, 12). In a
“position role” there is little room for personal interpretation or role creation—position determines role, and roles
determine behavior. Searing relates frontbench positions in parliament (party whips and ministers in his study of the
UK parliament) to position roles, and backbench positions to preference roles. Searing’s distinction between
position roles and preference roles can easily be translated into hypotheses about the variety in interpretation
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(less consensus for preference roles), and about the explanatory power of the role for behavior (stronger
correlations for position roles).
13.3 Content: Two Classic Typologies of Parliamentary Roles
13.3.1 The Eulau-Wahlke Typology

Fig. 13.1 Wahlke et al.’s typology of legislative roles
Source: Wahlke (1962: 14).
In The Legislative System, Wahlke et al. build an intricate model of the different roles played by parliamentarians,
divided into various “role sectors” (See Fig. 13.1). Three roles constitute the core sector of this model: a
“Consensual role” containing the “working (p. 273) consensus” on how the legislative game is to be played;
“Purposive roles” consisting of expectations about the ultimate aim of an MP’s activities:; and “Representational
roles,” made up of the norms governing an MP’s relationship with his or her voters.
Surrounding these core roles are three sectors of secondary roles: the largest of these is a Clientele-Roles Sector
dealing with interactions with actors outside of the legislature: “Areal Roles,”“Pressure Group Roles,”“Party Roles,”
and “Administration Roles” regarding executive-legislative relations. A second sector of secondary roles is
devoted to interactions within the legislature: “Leadership Roles” and “Subject Matter Expert Roles.” Finally, a
sector of secondary roles refers to “incidental” non-political roles of kinship, friendship, and membership of
associations such as sports clubs. Most of these role categories are analysed on the basis of 474 interviews held
in 1957 with members of four US state legislatures (California, New Jersey, Ohio, and Tennessee).
The fact that the Representational Roles constitute just one aspect of a much larger typology is largely forgotten,
but the impact of these Representational Roles more than makes up for this. Eulau and Wahlke (Eulau et al. 1959;
Eulau 1962) point out that (p. 274) Burke confounds two dimensions of representation in his speech quoted in
part at the beginning of this chapter. One dimension refers to the focus of representation: whether parliament is a
“congress of ambassadors” or an “assembly of one nation,” with the constituency or the nation as a whole as the
related foci of representation for individual MPs. In addition to these territorial foci, one may also envisage non-
territorial, functional groups or categories that an MP seeks to represent. The second dimension refers to the style
of representation and deals with the question whether a representative should put “authoritative instructions” of
her voters above her own “conscience and judgment.” To the delegate and the trustee, Eulau and Wahlke add a
third role orientation, the “politico,” for whom it depends on the circumstances or the nature of the issue involved
whether he sees himself as a trustee or as a delegate. The two role dimensions are independent of each other: a
representative can be a trustee with a focus on his constituency or on the nation.
Both focus and style of representation have been used extensively in later studies. For “focus,” it has become
standard practice to include in questionnaires for interviewing parliamentarians a question such as “Do you
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consider yourself to be primarily a representative of all people in the country, of your constituency, or of your
party’s voters?” One of the most interesting applications of the focal dimension of representational roles is to
members of the European Parliament as it adds an additional, supranational focus to the analysis (Katz 1997, 1999;
Wessels 1999; Scully and Farrell 2003). In general, however, the relevance of the focus of representation for
legislative work has been questioned. Parliament may have started as a venue to represent local grievances to the
Crown, but as parliaments have become centres of power in themselves, MPs have to deal with nationwide issues
rather than constituency interests. And as districts are unlikely to be homogeneous in their views on nationwide
issues, a constituency focus of representation will not be very helpful to an MP developing his or her standpoints
(Thomassen 1994). Thomassen’s point is well taken, but the historical development that he brings to attention has
not led to a decline in the proportion of MPs taking a subnational (or in the EU, a national) focus of representation.
Paradoxically, the constituency focus seems on the rise in a number of countries, most notably in the UK (Power
2012, 59–60). However, a bifurcation has developed between a role orientation with a district focus, and actual
legislative behavior: constituency work takes up more and more of many MPs’ time, but it does not result in policy
initiatives (Power 2012, 66): when it comes to legislative work in parliament, a focus on the political party seems to
replace the district focus.
The “style” of representation is often captured by a question such as “If an MP thinks that most of his voters have
an opinion about a specific issue which is different from his own, what should he do? Should his vote in parliament
be in accordance with the opinion of his voters, or in accordance with his own opinion?” The trustee-delegate-
politico typology has been applied to a great number of parliaments in various parts of the world (Jewell 1985, 104–
106), but it has also come under criticism. Theoretically, the concepts of trustee and delegate hide more
dimensions than this simple question evokes (e.g. Rehfeld 2009). Empirically, capturing an entire representational
role in a single attitudinal question is criticized as reductionist (Searing 1994, 13). Moreover, the normative (p.
275) “mandate-independence controversy” on which the empirical distinction between delegates and trustees is
based has not been a fruitful debate. By its very nature, representation implies that the representative cannot be
identified completely with the views of the represented, and neither can the representative be completely divorced
from those views: “insofar as the mandate-independence controversy contains a conceptual dispute based on the
meaning of representation, both sides are right” (Pitkin 1967, 154). Converse and Pierce make this same
observation with regard to Eulau and Wahlke’s empirical typology: “if 0.0 means a representative’s legislative
record which is purely and unyieldingly Burkean, totally without regard for expressed district wishes, and 1:00
reflects a legislative record laid down at every step in response to perceived district instructions, we should be
surprised if many political representatives in legislative bodies could be created much outside the limits of a
narrower range, such as .30 to .70, or even .35 to .65” (Converse and Pierce 1986, 497).
A second line of criticism argues that the trustee-delegate distinction does not travel far beyond the political
system of the United States. The roles are operationalized as a relationship between an individual representative
and a geographical constituency, without reference to the existence of strong and cohesive political parties
(Thomassen 1994; Gauja 2012). To be fair to Eulau and Wahlke, they did mention political parties but they were not
consistent in their treatment of parties. First they viewed them as a potential focus of representation (Eulau et al.
1959, 745). In this perspective, MPs are either representatives of their constituency or representatives of their
party, but not of both. Later they identified a Party Role as one of their Clientele Roles, but not as a
Representational Role (Wahlke 1962). In their study of representation in France, Converse and Pierce attempted to
solve the problem by transforming the dimension from delegate to trustee into a triangle with the loyal partisan as a
third role type (Converse and Pierce 1986, 664–96). This comes close to Eulau and Wahlke’s original solution of
treating party as a focus of representation: according to Converse and Pierce the loyal partisan is merely a variety
of the delegate role, with the party rather than the constituency as focus. The solution allowed them to make
comparisons between representative roles in countries with and without strong parties (the US, France, and the
Netherlands), but it conflates style and focus again, and it does not account for the way in which parties structure
the interactions between MPs and voters. Nevertheless, many authors have followed the example of Converse and
Pierce, and there seems to be a convergence on a typology of representational roles that includes trustees, local
delegates, and party delegates (see Rozenberg and Blomgren 2012, 223–8).
A third critique points to the disappointing impact of Eulau and Wahlke’s representational role orientations on the
attitudes and behavior of parliamentarians. Burke himself may have been exceptional in acting in accordance with
his role orientation. Most evidence of behavioral consequences is found for the focus of representation. As
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mentioned earlier, a local focus of representation may lead to constituency work, but rarely inspires legislative
work. The same appears to be true of other foci of representation: for example, in a comparative study of the five
Nordic countries, representatives who regard it as important to champion a (p. 276) particular interest (district,
individual voters, or groups: women, farmers, pensioners, etc.) also report more activity in contacting these
interests and in contacting cabinet ministers to promote these interests (Esaiasson 2000). Style of representation
appears to have fewer behavioral consequences. Sorauf (1963) found only small differences in roll-call voting
between Pennsylvania legislators with different role orientations, and they were contrary to expectations. Trustees
toed the party line more consistently than delegates. Also counter-intuitively, Friesema and Hedlund (1974)
reported that delegates are not more likely to vote according to their perception of their constituents’ opinions than
are trustees. Gross (1978) found the correlation between perceived constituency opinion and roll-call voting to be
as strong for trustees as it was for delegates, and that the path from constituency opinion to roll-call vote ran
slightly more often via the perception of constituency opinion for trustees than for delegates. On the other hand,
Kuklinski et al. assert that the roll-call votes by delegates were slightly more representative of constituency
preferences than those by trustees if the issue at stake was salient (Kuklinski and Elling 1977) and if constituents
provided consistent clues regarding district preferences (McCrone and Kuklinski 1979).
Admittedly, linking roles to rollcalls is probably too tall an order. Parliamentarians must vote on a host of issues: too
many for a trustee to develop her considered opinion about each issue and thus forcing her to rely on outside
cues including constituency views; and including many on which a delegate’s constituency does not hold strong
views, thus forcing him to develop his own opinion or to look elsewhere for cues. The result is that the distinction
between roll-call votes of delegates and trustees gets blurred (Jewell 1970). Moreover, in most European
parliaments, the imperative of party unity in legislative votes leaves little room for personal role orientations. As
Esaiasson and Holmberg put it: “The concept of representational style as a determinant of behavioral roles (... ) is
clearly less interesting. In the Swedish context, a classification as Trustee or Delegate is little more than a Sunday
suit that MPs put on to show their feathers, or to make inquisitive researchers happy” (Esaiasson and Holmberg
1996, 57). However, beyond legislative action the impact of these role orientations is not much bigger. In a study of
eight US state legislatures, Cooper and Richardson (2006) found a—relatively weak—correlation between role
orientation and frequency of office hours, but both Hedlund and Friesema (1972) and Erikson et al. (1975)
observed that trustees gave more accurate assessments of constituency opinion than delegates did. Outside the
US, Kim and Woo (1972) found no impact of style or focus of representation on taking action on behalf of
represented interests in South Korea. Katz (1997) shows that, in the European Parliament, delegates report
receiving more mail, and contacting citizens and social groups more frequently than trustees, but the correlations
are generally weak. For Dutch MPs, Andeweg concludes that delegates have more cynical attitudes about citizens
than trustees, and that they have less frequent contact with citizens and organizations. Trustees proved to be as
accurate as delegates in their perception of their party’s voters’ position on a left-right scale (Andeweg 2012).
(p. 277) 13.3.2 Searing’s Typology
This poor performance as a predictor of legislative behavior has been one of the prime motivations of attempts to
develop new typologies of roles. Some of these attempts have concentrated on representational roles. Feminist
scholars have argued that too little attention is paid to the representation of identity, in particular of underprivileged
groups such as women and ethnic minorities. Studies have found evidence of female MPs being more active in
promoting gender equality (e.g. Wängnerud 2000), but the jury is still out on whether this translates into a new role
of “group representative” or “surrogate representative” (Carroll 2002; Celis and Wauters 2010). Apparently, the
“gendered nature” of the institution of parliament is such that the norms and expectations do not (yet) include
identity representation everywhere, or that it is insufficiently rewarding politically to make identity representation a
viable strategic routine.
Andeweg and Thomassen (2005) have sought to replace the Eulau-Wahlke typology altogether. Using existing
theories about political representation they arrive at two dimensions: whether the interactions between
representatives and voters are top-down or bottom-up, and whether the voters exercise ex ante or ex post control
over their representatives. The distinction between representation from above versus representation from below
has been shown to possess more explanatory power than the trustee-delegate distinction (Andeweg 2012), but
Blomgren and Rozenberg have argued that the modes of representation that result from combining the two
dimensions do not readily translate into MPs’ role orientations (Blomgren and Rozenberg 2012, 19).
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Others have broadened their typology from representation to legislative roles more generally. Jenny and Müller
(2012) look at patterns of legislative behavior to distinguish five roles: from the Exemplary MP who is active on most
fronts to the Spectator who is largely inactive, with Workhorses (very active except in speech-making),
Rapporteurs (primarily active in reporting on bills to the plenary), and Showhorses (inactive except in making
speeches) in between. Navarro (2012) distinguishes four roles on the basis of in-depth interviews: Animators, who
are political generalists; Specialists who seek to influence policy in a particular field; Intermediaries, who see
themselves as ambassadors for a particular population or territory; and Outsiders, who defy the conventional
functioning of (the European) parliament.

Fig. 13.2 Searing’s typology of legislative roles
Source: Searing (1994, 32).
More examples can be given, but the typology of legislative roles that has attracted most attention is the one
constructed by Searing (1994). As mentioned above, Searing first distinguishes position roles and preference roles.
His position roles are related to ministerial posts and positions of leadership. They apply to only a minority of MPs,
especially in political systems in which the combination of a ministerial portfolio and a parliamentary seat is not
allowed. For the legislative roles of ordinary MPs, Searing’s preference roles are more important (see Fig. 13.2).
Searing’s typology consists of four roles, each with a number of subroles. One of these four roles is somewhat
peculiar: a quarter of the 521 British MPs interviewed by Searing in 1971–2 were characterized as Ministerial
Aspirants, but this is not a legislative role proper. These MPs see their stay in parliament as merely a stop-over en
route to (p. 278) ministerial recruitment or at best as an opportunity to advertise their skills and talents. To do so,
they must be active in ways that are associated with Searing’s other roles. The largest proportion (41 percent) of
MPs takes the role of Policy Advocate, seeking to put their stamp on legislation, or public policy more generally.
Most of them can be classified into the subrole of the Specialist who focuses on a particular policy sector, but over
a third of the Policy Advocates are Generalists, with a small number of Ideologues. The third role, that of
Constituency Member, is ascribed to a quarter of Searing’s 1972 respondents. Three-quarters of the Constituency
Members specialize in the subrole of Welfare Officers, seeing themselves as ombudsmen solving constituents’
personal problems. The second subrole is that of Local Promoter, with the MP acting as ambassador for the
constituency or region. Finally, less than 10 percent of the MPs are classified as Parliament Men, who identify with
parliament as an institution. Within this small role sector, Searing distinguishes Status Seekers, Spectators, and Club
Men, with that latter subrole further divided into Good House of Commons Men and part-timers, such as Knights of
the Shires.
Searing suggests that the Eulau-Wahlke typology has such a disappointing record in explaining legislative behavior
because trustees and delegates are “constructs that existed in the minds of many social scientists rather than in
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the minds of many of the (p. 279) politicians we studied” (Searing 1994, 13; also Price 1985, 169). It is not so
clear whether Eulau and Wahlke’s methodology is entirely deductive: their reference to Edmund Burke does
suggest so, but they used an open-ended question “how would you describe the job of being a legislator—what
are the most important things you should do here?” to construct their role types (Wahlke et al. 1962, 465–70, 494)
which is not too different from Searing’s own inductive method (Searing 1994, 411–18). Perhaps the rivalry
between deductive and inductive methodology need not concern us here: it is striking that others, using very
different methods, have come up with role types that are rather similar (see Fig. 13.3). Strøm even copies Searing’s
four roles for his deductive strategic approach: MPs who are insecure about their prospects for re-election will
choose a Constituency Member role; if this is not a concern, they may aim for party office by adopting the role of
Ministerial Aspirant or Policy Advocate, depending on the institutional context; and if they want Legislative Office,
they will play the role of Parliament Man. The only situation for which Strøm finds no role in Searing’s typology is
when reselection is uncertain and MPs seek to please the party selectorate (Strøm 1997; 2012). From King’s
“modes of executive-legislative relations” (King 1976), Andeweg distills Parliamentarians, Advocates, and Partisans
(Andeweg 1997) for a study of legislative roles in the Dutch parliament. Given the Dutch electoral system in which
MPs are elected nationwide, there are no Constituency Members in his typology, but there is a clear resemblance
to Searing’s roles with regard to Parliamentarians and Advocates. Scully and Farrell ask MEPs about the importance
of various tasks and about the importance of representing various interests, and use factor analysis to derive four
role orientations: the Parliamentarian, stressing legislation and parliamentary oversight; the Interest Articulator,
resembling Searing’s Constituency Member by concentrating on representing territorial units; and the Social
Arbitrators whose emphasis on developing strategies for EU policies and group representation puts them close to
Searing’s Policy Advocates (Scully and Farrell 2003). Like Andeweg, Scully and Farrell also distinguish a Party
Orientation, which Strøm hints at, but which is missing in Searing’s typology.
Fig. 13.3 Congruence between typologies of legislative roles
Searing, 1994 Ministerial Policy Constituency Parliament Man

Aspirant Advocate Member
Strøm, 1997, Ministerial Policy Constituency Parliament Man ?

2012 Aspirant Advocate Member
Andeweg 1997 Advocate (inapplicable) Parliamentarian Partisan
Scully & Farrell Social Interest Parliamentarian Party

2003 Arbitration Articulation Orientation
The absence of a partisan role in Searing’s typology is puzzling as political parties seem to dominate life in the
British House of Commons. The solution to this puzzle can be found in a footnote to an appendix: “What does not
appear at all in our typology, (p. 280) but appears often in typologies published by both MPs and political
commentators, is the ‘role’ of the Party Politician or Party Loyalist. This is obviously one of the most important
dispositions on the backbenches. But it is a disposition, not a role, a disposition like ‘delegate’ or ‘trustee,’ a
disposition that functions like a decision rule and can be applied by MPs in any role” (Searing 1994, 486: fn 16.
italics in original). This distinction between role and disposition is confusing, especially with respect to Eulau and
Wahlke’s delegates and trustees. Moreover, it seems unlikely that “party” is a decision rule in other roles, such as
when one of Searing’s Constituency Members conducts a surgery to deal with constituents’ problems. The
correlation between the increase of Policy Advocates and the decrease of party cohesion in the division lobbies
also indicates that party may not be a general decision rule for Policy Advocates either. If we were to add the
Partisan to Searing’s typology of preference roles, the typologies become very similar. As with typologies of
representational roles, there is an emerging congruence with respect to typologies of legislative roles.
A final point of discussion with regard to Searing’s typology is his assumption that MPs specialize in a particular
role, that it is “a fixed attitudinal attribute of each person.” Blomgren and Rozenberg (2012, 26–7) associate this
assumption with the motivational approach: personal needs are probably stable, and if role choice is influenced by
personal need, then it follows that role choice is stable as well. Others argue that role-taking is context specific and
Page 9 of 14
point to the analogy with role-playing in the theatre: “to classify MPs on the basis of a single role orientation [would
be] just as odd as classifying great actors as either ‘Hamlets,’‘Uncle Vanyas,’ or ‘Algy Moncrieffs’”(Andeweg 1997,
122), and “Much like an actor playing Hamlet in the spring and then King Lear in the fall, an MP may act differently
in different contexts, with his/her constituency, his/her parliamentary group and lobby organizations, for example”
(Blomgren and Rozenberg 2012, 9). The possibility of role-switching was recognized already by Wahlke and Eulau:
“[W]e should not think of any given role orientation as a fixed attitudinal attribute of each person, which invariably
leads him to act and react the same way in every situation. It is more likely that most legislators pattern their
behavior in the light of one role orientation in one situation, but according to another under other circumstances”
(Wahlke 1962, 17), and “Of course even logically contradictory role orientations may be held without the
experience of conflict. The legislator may take roles seriatim, one role in one connection but not in another, without
any feeling that a problem of consistency is involved” (Eulau 1962b, 385). Yet, not much research has been
devoted to the question: which situation elicits which role orientation. Andeweg (1997) found that the Partisan role
dominates the Dutch parliament in general, and in plenary sessions in particular. However, in parliamentary inquiry
committees, or when parliament deals with a government fiasco, the number of Parliamentarians increases, and in
the specialized parliamentary committees where new legislation is prepared, more MPs assume the role of Policy
Advocate.
However, the difference between the two views should not be overstated. Searing acknowledges that his four
legislative roles “are not completely mutually exclusive” (Searing 1994, 416). His backbenchers were given scores
for each role and although (p. 281) there were only 6.5 percent of MPs with the same score for two or more roles,
the scores for other roles than their top score were not negligible. Searing offers two examples:
The composite scores for the role of the Policy Advocate, for example, show that most backbenchers do
dabble in this role (... ) Much the same pattern applies to the role of the Constituency Member: nearly
everyone does some, but only a minority makes it a principal occupation.
(Searing 1994, 416)
Similarly, Andeweg recognizes that the “Partisan” role is dominant in most situations in the Dutch parliament.
Replicating and updating his study with two more recent waves of interviewing Dutch MPs, Van Vonno (2012)
shows that the proportion of Dutch MPs who specialize in the Partisan role is increasing, while the proportion of
role-switchers is decreasing.
13.4 Prospects for the Study of Parliamentary Roles
The added value of the concept of roles is that it links institutions to individual political actors. As an intervening
variable, it helps us understand how institutional positions affect political behavior by focusing on the subjective
interpretation of the normative and strategic constraints and opportunities that these positions offer. By making
institutions subjective, roles can turn correlations into explanations. In their recent overview, Rozenberg and
Blomgren concluded hopefully “that roles are coming back into legislative studies” (Rozenberg and Blomgren
2012, 211), but this chapter started on a less optimistic note, pointing out that role analysis never took hold outside
the study of members of parliament, and that even within this subfield of political science it has declined. It made a
modest comeback in Europe, but not in other parts of the world, having all but disappeared in American legislative
studies.
This chapter may yield some clues as to why this is the case. The pioneers of The Legislative System summed up
my diagnosis when they announced back in 1962 that “The research to be reported here did not begin with a
theory to test nor did it end with one” (Wahlke 1962, 3). The theoretical work on role analysis is primarily
concerned with conceptualization, and some of the conceptual issues (the degree to which role is determined by
position or by other variables; the degree to which these “other variables” are perceived norms, private needs, or
strategic considerations) are discussed as if they were articles of faith rather than interesting alternative
hypotheses to test. The empirical work on role analysis, resulting in the two seminal typologies discussed in this
chapter, is largely descriptive, leaving us with rich descriptions of the content of the roles and their distribution, but
also wondering: “so what?”
(p. 282) Outlining their agenda for the future of role analysis in legislative studies, Rozenberg and Blomgren focus
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primarily on the potential effect of institutional and social change on parliamentary roles: what is the impact of
electoral reform on representational roles? Does the increased attention to descriptive representation of women
and ethnic minorities result in a new role orientation? Will the transformation of party systems affect the salience of
the political party in legislative roles? What is the effect of growing multilevel governance, through supra-
nationalization and decentralization, on role orientations, in particular of representatives who move from one level
to another, or who are active at several levels? (Rozenberg and Blomgren 2012, 220–2). These are appropriate
questions for a future research agenda, but they do not alter the general impression of descriptiveness.
At the same time, we have encountered several promising developments that can act as starting blocks for more
theoretically grounded explanatory studies. The distinction between position roles and preference roles can serve
to clarify the balance between script and interpretation in role orientations. The balance between the strength of a
politician’s personal needs and the force of the situational context can be hypothesized to determine whether a
role is formed by motivation or calculation. Adding the saliency of various significant others (voters, party leaders,
fellow MPs) to our analysis is likely to improve the explanatory power of roles for behavior. Factors such as the size
of parliament and of parliamentary parties can be used to predict whether MPs specialize in roles or switch roles
according to the context, and this knowledge in turn can lead to better predictions of behavior. These are just a
few examples, but the relevance and the attraction of the study of roles in parliament will be strengthened if
questions such as these can be added to the research agenda.
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United Kingdom. In M. Blomgren and O. Rozenberg (eds.). Parliamentary Roles in Modern Legislatures, pp. 121–
44. London: Routledge.
Goodin, R.E., 1996. Institutions and their Design. In R.E. Goodin (ed.). The Theory of Institutional Design, pp. 1–53.
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Headey, B., 1974. British Cabinet Ministers; The Roles of Politicians in Executive Office. London: George Allen &
Unwin.
Hedlund, R.D. and Friesema, H.P., 1972. Representatives’ Perceptions of Constituency Opinion. Journal of Politics,
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Jenny, M. and Müller, W.C., 2012. Parliamentary Roles of MPs in Sharp and Soft Focus: interviews and behavioural
record compared. In M. Blomgren and O. Rozenberg (eds.). Parliamentary Roles in Modern Legislatures,pp.145–
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Jewell, M.E., 1970. Attitudinal Determinants of Legislative Behavior: The Utility of Role Analysis. In A. Kornberg and
L.D. Musolf (eds.). Legislatures in Developmental Perspective, pp. 460–500. Durham: Duke University Press. (p.
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and M.E. Jewell (eds.). Handbook of Legislative Research, pp. 97–131. Cambridge: Harvard University Press.
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National Parliaments, and European Integration, pp. 61–85. Oxford: Oxford University Press.
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Press.
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Rudy B. Andeweg
Rudy B. Andeweg is professor of political science at Leiden University. He studied law and government at Leiden University and
Political Science at the University of Michigan. He has published on personalization in voting behavior, birth order and political
leadership, legislative roles, political representation, and cabinet decision-making. He recently co-edited Puzzles of Government
Formation; Coalition Theory and Deviant Cases (Routledge, 2011).
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Legislative Careers
Legislative Careers
Thad Kousser and Scott A. MacKenzie
Institutions
2014
According to Nelson Polsby, the US Congress differed from most of the world’s legislatures because of its
transformative capacity. The factors that account for the differences in the policy-making power of legislatures is a
central question in legislative studies. One such factor is a legislature’s ability to attract and retain talented and
ambitious politicians. The US Congress, for example, has presumably maintained its separateness, independence,
and influence due to its ability to nurture legislative careerism. This chapter examines legislative careers in
democratic legislatures and how they are influenced by political institutions. It first considers early efforts to define
and measure legislative careers, along with the relationship between political institutions and legislative careers. It
then looks at the evolution of research on legislative careers from macro-level studies of career patterns to micro-
level studies of career choices. It also discusses several research frontiers, including research on legislative term
limits, and concludes by identifying a number of key unanswered questions as well as the challenges faced by
researchers in addressing them.
Keywords: US Congress, legislatures, policy-making, legislative careerism, legislative careers, political institutions, career patterns, career choices,
term limits, Nelson Polsby
14.1 Introduction
MORE than 35 years ago, Nelson Polsby challenged scholars with the provocative claim that most of the world’s
legislatures were mere debating arenas that offered limited checks on the power of the executive (Polsby 1975).
The US Congress, Polsby argued, was different. Its power was transformative, characterized by an “independent
capacity, frequently exercised, to mold and transform proposals from whatever source into laws.” While scholars
might quibble with this distinction between arena and transformative legislatures, and disagree about whether the
US Congress is unique in its transformative capacity, there is little doubt that legislatures vary markedly in their
policy-making power (Mezey 1979). What factors give rise to these differences in policy-making power is a central
question in legislative studies.
The development of transformative capacity by a legislature probably springs from myriad causes, some external
or environmental, others internal or organizational. However, one factor that might be considered a necessary
condition is a legislature’s ability to attract and retain talented and ambitious politicians. In explaining how the US
Congress has maintained its separateness, independence, and influence, Shepsle (1988) cited its ability to nurture
legislative careerism. He argues that legislative careerism is encouraged when the rewards that legislators receive
depend primarily on their own efforts and fortunes rather than the favours bestowed by others. Legislative
careerism is discouraged in legislatures where members form one undifferentiated mass or where institutional
instability makes investing in legislative service risky.
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Scholars have long recognized that the waxing and waning of legislative careerism offers a barometer of a
legislature’s ability to engage in transformative policy-making (Polsby 1968). Thus, much effort has been expended
in measuring and analysing the different phases of legislative careers—the pre-legislative or recruitment phase, the
career inside the legislature, and post-legislative service. Given these efforts and the recognition that the fates of
legislators and the institutions they inhabit are linked, (p. 287) one might think that the institutional foundations of
legislative careerism would be well-established. Indeed, there is ample reason to suspect that the size of
legislatures, term lengths, legislators’ compensation, legislative professionalization, and other basic institutional
factors will shape the benefits and costs of legislative service. Yet the conclusion of one early review of legislative
careers still rings true today—such matters have been little studied (Matthews 1984).
The relationship between less basic political institutions and legislative careers also remains mostly unsettled
territory. Political scientists have demonstrated that differences in electoral rules influence the number of parties
and the type of party system a nation will have (Duverger 1954; Taagepera and Shugart 1989; Cox 1997). In the
US, scholars have linked electoral incentives to the internal organization of Congress (Mayhew 1974; Fiorina 1977;
Katz and Sala 1996). Similarly, scholars have paid close attention to how such differences in electoral incentives
influence legislative behavior, including party loyalty on roll-call voting. How these differences in electoral system
rules shape the attractiveness of a legislative career or influence how careers develop within legislative settings is
unclear. In recent years, a literature has emerged on how regime structure shapes recruitment and retention
(Patzelt 1999). Nonetheless, while significant progress has been made in the study of legislative careers, there are
many open questions in this field.
In this chapter, we report on studies of legislative careers in democratic legislatures, paying special attention to the
effects of political institutions. We begin with a brief review of early efforts to define and measure legislative
careers. These studies, which rely heavily on first-person observation, interviews, and survey data, attempt to
identify legislators by type or role, and relate these to individual attributes and experiences. The next section
discusses the foundational studies of Schlesinger (1966) and Polsby (1968), which focus on the relationship
between political institutions and legislative careers. We describe the evolution of research on legislative careers
from macro-level studies of career patterns to micro-level studies of career choices. We then explore several
research frontiers, including research on legislative term limits, which offers an example of how attending to the link
between institutions and legislative careers can inform research on the policy-making capacity of legislatures. The
final section identifies several important unanswered questions as well as the challenges researchers will face in
addressing them.
14.2 Evolution of Prior Research
14.2.1 What is a Legislative Career?
Early efforts to study the careers of legislators had to wrestle with two issues: 1) how to define legislative careers,
and 2) how to measure them. The question of how to define legislative careers sparked controversy. One reason
has to do with the ambiguity of the word “career,” which refers alternatively to “one’s calling” and “one’s
occupation.” The (p. 288) term combines both intangible intentions—e.g. the desire to exercise influence or make
a difference—as well as observable achievements—e.g. service in a legislative body or the amount of time spent
there.
Some scholars reject the idea that an individual’s involvement in politics, let alone legislative service, qualifies as a
career as the term is commonly understood. Such skepticism is summed up by Lasswell’s (1930, 303) oft-repeated
quote, which continues to caution scholars against reading too much into observed patterns in legislative careers:
In American politics, the escalator to the top is not a regimented, orderly lift, but a tangle of ladders, ropes,
and runways that attract people from other activities at various stages of the process, and lead others to a
dead end or a drop.
King (1981) similarly rejects the term “professional politician,” claiming that politics “is not a profession in any
ordinary sense” (p. 251). He argues that politicians lack traits exhibited by professionals in other fields, including 1)
the practice of a full-time occupation that serves as a primary source of income, 2) commitment to a calling, 3)
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membership in a professional organization, 4) possession of specialized skills or training, and 5) professional

autonomy.
King’s definition is probably too limiting. Even so, it is likely that a majority of legislators sitting in the US Congress
and many state legislatures, let alone King’s British House of Commons, would satisfy these criteria. Nonetheless, it
is clear that not every individual who serves in a legislature can be considered a professional politician. In his
study of the club movement in New York, Chicago, and Los Angeles, Wilson (1962) distinguishes between amateurs
—those who do not make their living from politics, but are ideologically committed—and professionals—those who
see politics mostly in terms of winning and losing. Following Wilson, Black (1970) argues that professional
politicians exhibit high levels of commitment or ambition, and that differences among legislators in this respect are
related to recruitment and socialization.
Attempts to develop typologies of legislators and legislative careers predominate in early studies of the US
Congress and American state legislatures. These typologies are based on interviews with legislators of the time and
attempt to measure the less tangible aspects of legislative careers, including legislators’ commitment to their job.
For example, in a study of four state legislatures, Wahlke et al. (1962) relate the background and experiences of
legislators to their behavior through the concept of role—the expectations and beliefs that an individual legislator
ascribes to all who hold the position (see also Prewitt 1970). In the US Senate, Matthews (1960) identifies four types
of legislators—patricians, professionals, agitators and amateurs—and argues that only the first two types of
senators exercise real authority.
While studies of legislative roles have mostly fallen out of fashion in the US, they enjoy continued currency among
European scholars. Based on extensive interviews, Searing (1994) identifies four types of backbenchers in Britain’s
House of Commons and finds that these roles help explain what these legislators seek to accomplish. He argues
that the array of legislative roles that exist in Parliament reflect both institutional constraints and (p. 289)
individual preferences. Subsequently, scholars have applied this lesson in relating legislative roles to the external
environments of European legislatures and the partisanship, class, and other attributes of individual legislators
(Muller and Saalfeld 1997; Esaiasson 2000; Blomgren and Rozenberg 2012).
As scholars developed different ways of classifying legislative roles, historians were completing a comprehensive
survey of the Biographical Directory of the US Congress, which provides biographical sketches of members of the
US House of Representatives and the US Senate. Led by the Interuniversity Consortium for Political Research and
Carroll McKibbin, efforts to code entries from the Directory culminated in a new dataset, the Roster of United States
Congressional Officeholders and Biographical Characteristics of Members of the United States Congress. The
Roster, which provides an expansive set of variables summarizing members’ backgrounds, political experiences,
and service activities, has been a primary source of data for studies of congressional careers and congressional
behavior ever since. The Roster enables scholars to calculate straightforward measures of legislators’ observable
achievements, including the amount of time they spend inside the US Congress.
14.2.2 Theories of Institutionalization and Political Ambition: Institutions as a Dependent Variable
The direction of research on legislative careers was set by two studies in the 1960s. The first was Nelson Polsby’s
(1968) study, “The Institutionalization of the U.S. House of Representatives.” The second was Joseph Schlesinger’s
(1966) book, Ambition and Politics. Both studies focus on the relationship between political institutions and
legislative careers. Polsby examines the causes and (mostly) consequences of institutionalization, a process
whereby organizations develop internal norms and institutions that insulate them from external influences and
assist their members in the allocation of resources, problem-solving, and conflict resolution. The development of
lengthy careers inside the US House, which Polsby tracks from 1789 to 1963, is consistent with an institution that
has achieved autonomy from its environment and where lengthy apprenticeships are necessary before members
assume leadership positions.
Polsby’s study left open the question of whether careers shape legislative institutions or the institution shapes
legislative careers (Hibbing 1991). Initially, research focused on the latter relationship. The trend toward lengthier
careers inside the US House continued through the 1960s and early 1970s. Bullock (1972), for example, finds that
the share of House members serving ten terms or more had doubled in 30 years. He attributes this increase to
greater electoral security and new reasons for staying—including expanding federal power, the rise of the seniority
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system, and other facets of institutionalization. When congressional retirement rates began to go up in the 1970s,
scholars also resorted to institutional explanations, such as reduced institutional capacity and increasing
workloads (Frantzich 1978; Cooper and West 1981; Hibbing 1982).
(p. 290) The possibility that political institutions shape individuals’ opportunities for a legislative career and the
desirability of legislative service is articulated most clearly by Schlesinger (1966). Schlesinger identifies three types
of ambition—discrete, static, and progressive—and asserts that an individual’s behavior in office can be traced to
their office goals. Schlesinger’s crucial insight was to recognize how arrays of institutions, the “political opportunity
structure,” give shape to ambition. He finds, for example, that most high national officeholders emerged from just
13 states between 1900 and 1958. The majority of gubernatorial and US Senate candidates followed a few discrete
career paths to these offices. (See Mezey 1970 for a similar analysis of career paths to the US House). Enhancing
the orderliness of political careers is the party system, which serves to regulate competition. Similarly, the
presence of manifest conditions (constituency overlap, functional congruity, and shared political arenas)
encourages transitions between some pairs of offices while discouraging transitions between others.
The implications of these patterns are twofold. First, there is a hierarchy of political offices in the US, a pyramid-like
structure featuring a top tier of highly sought-after offices (president, cabinet, Senate, governor), a middle tier of
desirable congressional and statewide offices (House, lieutenant governor), and a large base of less desirable
state legislative and local offices. Movement is directed upward with advancement opportunities diminishing at
each level. Second, the orderliness of the structure means that politicians can form reasonable expectations about
what office moves are appropriate and whether such attempts are likely to be successful (see Canon 1990).
14.2.3 From Macro-Level to Micro-Level Studies
Research on legislative careers was further advanced by Jacobson and Kernell’s (1981) study of congressional
candidates, which was among the first to apply rational choice models to legislative careers. Jacobson and Kernell
model the decisions of candidates to challenge an incumbent as a comparison of expected utilities. If the expected
utility of running exceeds the expected utility of staying put or not running, then the individual enters the race.
These utilities are a function of the probability of winning, the benefits of the office, and the costs of running for it.
The decisions of incumbents to retire, run for re-election, or seek another office are based on similar
considerations. This economic framework has formed the basis of most subsequent studies of legislative careers.
Jacobson and Kernell (1981) shifted the attention of scholars from incumbents to candidates. The recognition that
strong challengers fare better in congressional elections and that such challengers wait until conditions are ripe
before they run has inspired a rich literature of empirical studies seeking to explain candidate emergence (for a
detailed review, see Fowler 1993). Scholars have focused on factors that influence the probability of winning, such
as an incumbent’s previous vote margin (Jacobson 1989), open seats (Banks and Kiewiet 1989; Gaddie and
Bullock 2000), scandals (Peters and Welch 1980; Welch and Hibbing 1997), and fundraising (Box-Steffensmeier
1996). (p. 291) Evidence for strategic candidate entry can be found as far back as the late nineteenth century
(Carson and Roberts 2005; 2013).
These and other studies marked a shift from macro-level analyses of legislative turnover to micro-level models of
career choices. Previously, scholars had mostly focused on explaining aggregate-level changes in legislative
careers, e.g. changes in the average number of terms served. In recent years, most legislative career studies take
the choice of a politician at a particular moment in time as the unit of analysis. This shift to micro-level choice
models offers several advantages. First, choice models can assess multiple causal factors simultaneously,
resulting in more comprehensive analyses. Second, they enable scholars to examine how individual attributes and
circumstances condition the effects of macro-level forces. Third, choice models can provide more rigorous
hypothesis tests of relationships between causes (e.g. political institutions) and outcomes (e.g. retirements). The
use of choice models need not preclude aggregate-level analyses; indeed, Jacobson and Kernell (1981) look to the
choices of incumbents and challengers to explain how the impact of national political tides is realized on Congress
as a whole.
Such micro-level models are a natural fit for studying legislative careers in the US, where legislators face re-
election trials at regular intervals and parties have relatively little influence over nominations. Studies of legislative
careers in the US typically fall into one of two categories. The first category consists of cross-sectional studies that
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examine choices over a brief period, e.g. one congress. The congressional elections of 1992, for example, have
been scrutinized due to a confluence of events that permits scholars to disentangle the effects of multiple factors
(Jacobson and Dimock 1994; Hall and Van Houweling 1995). These include: the 1990 reapportionment that resulted
in large changes to many House districts; the House banking scandal, which implicated members who wrote
checks in excess of the money they had deposited at the House bank; and the sunset of a campaign loophole that
allowed incumbents elected before 1980 to convert unspent campaign funds into cash.
The second category of studies of incumbent career choices examines re-election trials over an extended period
of time. The best-known study in this vein is Kiewiet and Zeng (1993; see also Gilmour and Rothstein 1993; Brady
et al. 1999), which analyses 8,353 career choices by House incumbents serving from 1947 to 1986. Using their
lengthy time series, Kiewiet and Zeng assess the impact of many factors that concerned early studies of
congressional turnover, including the personal characteristics (age, party, ideology), electoral circumstances
(previous vote margin, scandal, redistricting), and institutional status (committee chair, leadership position) of
House incumbents. They also look at two institutional factors. One of these is political opportunity, which
Schlesinger (1996) identified as a major factor driving movement across offices. Kiewiet and Zeng find that House
incumbents whose districts had greater overlap with the statewide constituencies of governors and senators were
more likely to seek these offices when vacancies for them opened up. The other factor was the adoption of reforms
in the US House that, starting in 1971, weakened the seniority norm as the primary criterion for selecting committee
chairs. Kiewiet (p. 292) and Zeng argue that these reforms reduced the value of a House seat. They find that
these reforms increased retirements and moves to other offices among more senior members.
The macro-level to micro-level shift has also taken hold among researchers studying political ambition, i.e. attempts
at higher office. Rohde’s (1979) cost-benefit model, designed to predict which House members would run for
governor or senator, was the first micro-level study of this type (see also Brace 1984). Subsequently, scholars
have analysed other discrete transitions, including transitions from governor to US senator (Codispoti 1987), from
the US House to Senate (Francis 1993), from the US House to the federal bureaucracy (Palmer and Vogel 1995),
and from the US Senate to the presidency (Abramson, Aldrich, and Rohde 1987). Several studies examine the
transition between American state legislatures and the US House (see Maestas et al. 2006). This transition is of
particular interest as differences in state institutional settings enable scholars to assess the impact of legislative
professionalism. Fiorina (1994) and Berkman (1994) argue that the increasing share of House members with state
legislative experience reflects the professionalization—as indicated by legislative salaries, staff, and days in
session—of many state legislatures. Interestingly, professionalization also provides incentives for state legislative
careerism (Squire 1988, 1992; Berry et al. 2000), making a run for the House more costly.
Researchers have also attempted to verify Schlesinger’s (1966) claim that legislators’ behavior in office will reflect
their office-based goals. These studies are exceptional in that career considerations are an independent rather
than a dependent variable. In a detailed analysis of legislative activity, Herrick and Moore (1993) find that prior to
seeking higher office, House incumbents introduce more bills, make more speeches, propose more amendments,
and keep larger staffs than their colleagues. Several studies compare the voting records of members who ran for
higher office to those who did not. Hibbing (1986) and Carey (1994), for example, find that members do alter their
voting behavior in the year just prior to running for the Senate. Francis and Kenny (1996, 2000) find that members
converge to the average position of co-partisans from their state. Further, movement begins before the last term
and improves the odds of winning.
14.3 Research Frontiers in Career Studies
14.3.1 Lessons of Event History and Other Choice Models
In recent years, scholars have developed more sophisticated methodological approaches to deal with several
problems with micro-level models of legislators’ career choices. One problem concerns the effects of time—the
idea that when an event occurs can be as important as whether it occurs. Many choice models treat the career
decisions of legislators as cross-sectional data. Multiple choices by the same legislator over the course of (p. 293)
the career are assumed to be independent observations. However, the choice a legislator makes at a particular
moment in time might be influenced by choices made earlier. And a legislator’s choice at that moment is conditional
on the legislative career lasting until then. Box-Steffensmeier and Jones (1997) show that failure to account for
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duration dependency can introduce unobserved heterogeneity into empirical models, i.e. the outcome of a choice
process is influenced by the timing of the choice as well as the characteristics of the legislator making it.
Box-Steffensmeier and Jones also demonstrate how duration models can be adjusted to account for complicated
events, in this case, the multiple ways a legislative career can end (e.g. retirement, seek another office, lost
primary or general election). They estimate a competing risks hazard model for House incumbents serving between
1950 and 1976 and find that duration has mild effects on career termination—the risk of defeat decreases by 8
percent with each term, but the risk of retirement increases by 6 percent. More recently, Fukumoto (2009)
observes that the choice models used in past studies do not address another problem of great theoretical interest
—the possibility that legislators will strategically retire rather than face a difficult re-election campaign (Jacobson
and Kernell 1981). Previous studies understate the effects of electoral challenges by assuming that the competing
risks in their models are independent. Fukomoto re-analyses the Box-Steffensmeier and Jones data using a frailty
model to account for bias in the rate of incumbent defeat. He finds that strategic retirement due to greater electoral
risk is substantial. This suggests that even though incumbent defeats are rare, voters have the ability to replace
their legislators by forcing retirement.
Recent studies of candidate emergence have also wrestled with problems of strategic interaction. Previously,
analyses of candidate emergence and legislators’ career choices were carried out separately. These studies
indicate that strong challengers wait until circumstances are ripe, such as when an incumbent opts to retire.
Similarly, incumbents factor in the possibility of a strong challenge when deciding whether to run for re-election or
retire. Thus, these decisions by challengers and incumbents are linked. Failure to account for the strategic
interaction of challengers and incumbents can lead scholars astray in modeling career choices. Carson (2003;
2005) uses strategic probit models derived from a game-theoretic framework to examine challenger and incumbent
choices in House and Senate elections. The results indicate that incumbent spending in previous elections deters
challengers, but that challengers are likely to enter when an incumbent’s voting record exhibits an unusual level of
party loyalty.
Two additional avenues of research on legislative careers deserve brief mention. The first examines the origins of
political ambition. Maestas et al. (2006), for example, survey a national sample of state legislators to examine the
personal and institutional factors that lead to the formation of progressive ambition (i.e. attraction to a US House
seat). They find that, on balance, membership in a professional state legislature contributes to the formation of
progressive ambition. State legislators from professional legislatures were also more responsive to the perceived
probability of winning higher office. Fox and Lawless (2005; 2010) and Lawless and Fox (2005) similarly examine
the formation of political ambition with a survey of individuals in professions that tend to produce (p. 294) elected
officials, but who had not yet run for public office. They find that women and black people are less likely to express
political aspirations and that women are less likely to be encouraged by party leaders and other gatekeepers.
The second avenue consists of studies that estimate the value of holding legislative offices and assess the impact
of changes in legislators’ compensation. Diermeier et al. (2005) observe that legislative career studies ignore the
post-legislative career prospects of politicians. Congressional service, for example, can be valuable in the private
sector and lead legislators to exit at particular stages so as to maximize post-congressional income. Diermeier et
al. model the career opportunities of House and Senate incumbents and show that congressional service does
increase post-congressional wages. They also find that the non-pecuniary rewards of congressional service are
large. Interestingly, they find that imposing term limits would disproportionately impact politicians with better skills
and who value personal political achievement. Eggers and Hainmueller (2010) compare the wealth of British
Members of Parliament with the wealth of those who ran unsuccessfully. Using both matching and regression
discontinuity analyses, they find that legislative service nearly doubled the wealth of Conservative MPs while
having no impact on the wealth of Labour MPs.
14.3.2 Careers as an Independent Variable: The Example of the Term Limits Literature
While much of the work at the methodological frontier has been conducted on congressional careers, recent
research in state politics and in the comparative study of legislatures has successfully exploited many of these
advances. The literature on legislative term limits—a fruitful stream of work that has emerged from the fields of
legislative studies and American state politics over the last decade—provides a model of cutting edge research on
careers. It shares some of the characteristics discussed above and, more importantly, makes the leap from viewing
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careers as a dependent variable to careers as an independent factor that can explain legislative behavior. In this
section, we briefly review the aspects of the literature that make it a useful model for other streams of research.
14.3.3 Illuminating Patterns in Post-Term Limits Careers
Term limits, electoral laws that date as far back as ancient Athens and which reappeared in many American states
beginning in 1990 (Petracca 1992), dictate legislative career choices. Legislative term limits have also been
implemented in other presidential political systems—e.g. Costa Rica, Mexico, Ecuador, and the Philippines—but not
in any parliamentary systems. They were passed in the US during a period when incumbent lawmakers were
winning elections at increasingly high rates. Many legislators became more adept at using the perks of office to
stay in power. This adeptness sometimes led (p. 295) to corruption, with major scandals in California (where an
FBI sting sent multiple lawmakers to jail for trading favours for campaign contributions) and in Maine (where the
House Speaker’s aide pleaded guilty in a ballot-tampering scandal) leading directly to the passage of term limits in
those states. Term limits removed scores of longtime incumbents, bringing a jolt of turnover to state houses.
By preventing lawmakers from serving more than a fixed number of terms, they mandate legislative turnover. This
is their most obvious impact upon legislative careers, and it can be quantified at the aggregate level quite simply.
The first two columns in Table 14.1, taken from data compiled by the National Conference of State Legislatures,
show the level of turnover compelled by term limits in the initial set of states implementing them. These figures show
how many careers in each state’s lower house were cut short and thus the sharp impact that term limits have had
on state legislatures. The states that first implemented term limits in 1998—Arkansas, Colorado, Michigan, and
Oregon—saw turnover that ranged from 37 percent to 58 percent, with the vast majority of seats opened up
directly due to term limits. Even in California and Maine, where term limits brought the sharpest effects when they
were first broadly implemented in 1996, about a third of seats still turned over two years later. When compared to
the congressional turnover figures in Polsby’s (1968) study, they show that limits turned the clock back on many
state houses so that they resembled the US Congress of the nineteenth century.
Table 14.1 Turnover and career changes in State Lower Houses, 1998
Turnover Term Limited Term Limited Running for Other Office
Arkansas 56% 49% 62%
California 33% 15% 59%
Colorado 37% 28% 70%
Maine 32% 7% 55%
Michigan 58% 58% 48%
Oregon 38% 37% 71%
Notes: Data on turnover and term limited percentages are taken from the National Conference of State
Legislators, as reported in Powell (2003, 139). Data on the percentage of term limited legislators who run for
another office are taken from Powell (2003, 141).
These aggregate turnover figures tell only part of the story of the impact of term limits on legislative careers. Where
do lawmakers go once they are termed out of office? Their ambitions and expectations about their future careers
should play an important role in affecting their behavior while in office. In fact, post-term limits career paths became
an important subject of debate even before these laws were adopted. Oregon’s term limits initiative was dubbed
LIMITS, for “Let Incumbents Mosey Into the Sunset,” and was backed by activists who wanted to see legislators end
their careers at the close of their final terms. Scholars debated whether this would really happen. In his proposal for
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congressional term limits, political commentator George Will (1992, 201) argued that they “would increase the
likelihood that people who come to Congress would anticipate returning to careers in the private sector and
therefore would, as they legislate, think about what it is like to live under the laws they make.” Polsby’s (1993, 7)
response to Will warned that “term limitations would put at risk the independence of legislators contemplating exit
who, rather than returning Cincinnatus-like to their waiting plow, prefer some sort of future elsewhere. Even
Cincinnatus might be tempted to send a farm subsidy or two homeward in advance of his return.”
Subsequent scholarship appears to validate Polsby’s predictions. “Once legislators are elected under a term-
limited system,” writes Rosenthal (1998, 77), “they start thinking about where to go next.” Powell (2003) collected
information on post-term limits career paths in six states. His data, reported in Table 14.1, show that term limits do
not end legislators’ political ambitions. Depending on the state, between 48 percent and 71 percent of legislators
termed out in 1998 ran for another office afterward. Another 18 percent of term-limited lawmakers took a job in the
federal, state, or local bureaucracy, and 8 percent became lobbyists. A national survey of term-limited legislators
yielded similar (p. 296) findings: a mere 18 percent of lower house legislators and 28 percent of senators were
considering retirement, with the rest planning to run for another elected office, lobby, or take an appointive office
(Moncrief et al. 2007).
Career studies have also charted where legislators come from in the post-term limits era. Paul Jacob, the former
director of “US Term Limits,” predicted that term limits would bring in more lawmakers “experienced in what has
become known as ‘the real world,’ the nongovernmental sector of the economy” (Jacob 1995, 706). Cain and
Kousser’s (2004) study of careers before and after term limits provides mixed evidence on this count, showing that
after term limits legislators have been less likely to be former legislative staffers but more likely to come from local
governments. More recent work on term limits extends Powell’s research in ways that inform both the federalism
literature that links state and national elections, and the study of term limits themselves. Lazarus (2006) and Steen
(2006) explicitly model the post-term limits career choices of state lawmakers, showing how term limits affect the
supply of congressional candidates.
Overall, the focused study of individual careers, tracked across political levels, tells us more than we learn from an
aggregate snapshot of turnover in a single legislative house. Term limits do indeed bring a sharp rise in turnover to
a house, but they do not cut short the political careers of its members. This recognition changes scholars’
expectations about how term limits should impact legislative behavior. Term-limited lawmakers may seek to impress
constituents from the new district in which they intend to run, or they might be more easily influenced by a
governor whose appointment they are seeking or an interest group that could offer future employment. These
expectations may vary at the individual level, as career goals vary, but the important point is that studies of where
(p. 297) lawmakers go when term limits push them out of a house show definitively that few mosey into the
sunset. Term limits interrupt careers, but do not usually end them.
14.3.4 Assessing the Effects of Term Limits
With the effect of term limits on legislative careers properly measured, scholars have been able to use shifting
career patterns as one factor explaining changes in legislative behavior. Drawing both on formal models and on
plain language reasoning, theoretical works have examined how reduced lawmaking experience and shortened
time horizons impact the representative role that legislators play, their power relative to other political actors, and
the types of policies that they produce. Empirical studies have tested these hypothesized links. The many
intriguing results have allowed scholars to evaluate whether legislatures can play a transformative role after term
limits and whether this proposed reform has met its promise.
First, a series of surveys document the perception that term limits, by populating state houses with so many
legislators at the beginnings of their careers, have reduced collective institutional expertise. Moncrief et al. (2007)
report on the views of “knowledgeable observers”—legislative staff, former legislators, executive agency staff,
lobbyists, and reporters—across states with and without term limits. In their view, post-term limits lawmakers know
less today about statewide issues, the legislative process, and the issues before their committees, compared with
legislators ten years earlier. A range of other studies reveal an erosion of the constituent-legislator link that
plausibly results from the fact that legislators cannot anticipate a long career serving a single district. A national
survey with 18,000 respondents found that in term-limited states, residents are less likely to be able to name their
state legislators and less likely to contact them (Niemi and Powell 2003). Legislators themselves report that they
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spend less time working to serve constituents after term limits (Powell, Niemi, and Smith 2007), and an examination
of legislative budgets in California shows that termed-out members spend less money communicating with
constituents as their career in a district draws to a close (Van Vechten 2003).
This erosion of the electoral connection contributes, a national survey has found, to a shift in the representative
role that legislators seek to play. Shortening their careers has led to a “Burkean Shift” from the role of a constituent
delegate to a trustee of the public good. Asked “When there is a conflict between what you feel is best and what
you think the people in your district want, do you think you should follow your own conscience or follow what the
people in your district want?,” term-limited legislators were more likely to respond that they follow their own
conscience. They were also more likely to place the needs of the state above the needs of their district,
presumably because their political future was severed from narrow district interests (Carey et al. 2006, Powell,
Niemi, and Smith 2007). This impact of term limits, which many find salutary, seems directly attributable to career
changes.
(p. 298) Term limits also affect policymaking patterns and power distributions by shortening the tenure of
committee chairs and legislative leaders. Floor leaders serve for much shorter periods and begin their reigns with
less experience (Bowser et al. 2003; Little and Farmer 2007), and say themselves that they have lost power (Peery
and Little 2003). Committee chairs appear to be less central to the lawmaking process (Apollonio and LaRaja 2006),
and committees have become less specialized and expert with so many new members (Kousser 2005; Cain and
Wright 2007). These trends have contributed to the clearest and most significant effect of term limits: they have
shifted power away from the legislative branch and toward the executive. Kousser (2005) shows that legislators
after term limits are much less likely to amend the budget proposals of governors (a trend that is absent in states
without limits). A national survey of legislators found that term limits have shifted power to the governor and to
bureaucrats (Carey et al. 2006), while the survey of knowledgeable observers found widespread shifts in influence
to the executive branch after term limits cut legislative careers short (Kousser and Straayer 2007). Finally, term
limits have changed the policy outputs that emerge from states. They have led to the passage of shorter bills
(Kousser 2006) and, surprisingly, to a potential increase in state spending. In a finding that directly probes the link
between career patterns and lawmaking, Kousser (2005) shows that veteran lawmakers are more likely to pass
innovative bills just before they are removed from office, but that their less experienced replacements then
produce lower levels of policy innovation.
Taken together, the effects of term limits add to a shift in the role that legislators individually and legislatures
collectively play in state politics. Kousser (2005) concludes that they have made these legislatures less
transformative of outside demands. Many scholars have, in their conclusions to comprehensive studies of the
impacts of term limits in one or many states, compared their actual effects to the predictions of both their
supporters and their initial opponents. Many of these early predictions were flawed, with some of the most important
changes brought by term limits being among the least anticipated (Sarbaugh-Thompson et al. 2004; Cain and
Kousser 2004; Kousser 2005; Kurtz, Cain, and Niemi 2007).
14.3.5 Careers in a Comparative Perspective
For many years, research on legislative careers in non-US settings proceeded like “ships that pass in the night.”
One prominent scholar characterized the literature as a patchwork of single-country studies conducted in
intellectual isolation, open to invasion by American research perspectives and methods, and generally lacking
“variable oriented quantitative research” (Patzelt 1999, 241). Nonetheless, efforts to coordinate findings have
yielded several impressive collections (see Gallagher and Marsh 1988; Norris 1997; Best and Cotta 2000; Siavelis
and Morgenstern 2008). Several of these provide a common analytical framework for cross-country studies of
legislative careers. Norris (1997), for example, portrays recruitment as resulting from the interplay of supply-side
factors (p. 299) that determine who seeks legislative office and demand-side factors that influence the choices of
party organizations, personal factions, voters, and others responsible for selecting candidates. Best and Cotta
(2000) broaden this “supply-and-demand” framework by incorporating formal structures of opportunity—laws and
administrative practices that regulate ballot access and competition for legislative offices.
In addition to providing rich descriptive findings on legislative recruitment and retention for countries around the
world, comparative scholars have taken advantage of recent methodological innovations and research designs
that exploit sources of institutional variation. Berlinski et al. (2007; 2010), for example, use duration models to
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analyse ministerial tenure in Britain. While government duration has received a large amount of attention from
scholars (Laver and Shepsle 1996), the careers of individual ministers have received little systematic study.
Berlinski et al. show that ministerial careers are shaped by legislators’ personal attributes, the characteristics of
appointing prime ministers, and their performance in office.
Cox et al. (2000) use the variety of electoral rules for electing members of the Japanese Diet to study how
legislators’ career ambitions influence factionalism. They find that under the single non-transferable vote (SNTV)
system used in Japan’s lower house, nearly all legislators joined factions to secure assistance in competing against
co-partisans in district elections. In Japan’s upper house, where three different methods have been used to elect
members, Cox et al. find that factional affiliation was most common among members elected by proportional
representation who were competing for closed-party list positions. They also find that factional affiliation is
associated with service in the cabinet, suggesting that progressive ambitions might lead legislators to join factions
even if the immediate electoral benefits are limited. Similarly, Pekkanen et al. (2006) find that the different electoral
incentives created by these electoral rules help explain legislative organization, specifically the distribution of
government, Diet, and party positions.
Recent years have also seen publication of several studies exhibiting the quantitative, hypothesis-testing, and truly
comparative framework that comparative scholars have long envisioned. Much of this work focuses on Latin
America. Combining data from Venezuela, the US, and Costa Rica—which imposes single-term limits on its
lawmakers—Carey’s (1996) work yields surprising findings about term limits and careers. Since Legislative
Assembly members in Costa Rica know that they cannot run for re-election, their career ambitions are directed
toward a government appointment. These posts are controlled by successful parties, giving legislators an incentive
to work for the party’s electoral success even after their terms end. Because of this, they pursue particularistic
benefits as energetically as legislators in Venezuela do. Yet they do not toe the party line as steadily as
Venezualan MPs do, a finding that Carey explains through career patterns as well. Samuels (2000) disaggregates
legislative turnover in Brazil, showing that the nation’s anomalously high turnover is half the result of ambitious
legislators exiting the Chamber of Deputies in an attempt to move up while half comes when electoral competition
culls many of the remaining, less energetic, lawmakers from the body. Drawing on rich data from a single country,
Jones et al. (2002) show how the strong control exerted (p. 300) by party bosses over legislative careers in
Argentina diminishes the incentives of deputies to specialize, thus weakening the legislative branch overall.
Crisp et al. (2004) gather data on career patterns and bill initiations in Argentina, Chile, Columbia, Costa Rica,
Honduras, and Venezuela, uncovering complex links between institutional incentives and particularistic policy-
making. Crisp et al.’s (2009) study probes data from three of these legislatures to show that career incentives help
to shape the adoption of committee structures. Each of these works goes far beyond describing and explaining
career patterns to show how they influence legislative behavior, policy outputs, and even the performance of
governing institutions.
Comparative studies in Europe have also flourished recently. Scarrow’s (1997) study of European Parliament
career paths tracked MEPs from Britain, France, Germany, and Italy from 1979 to 1994, looking at their previous
experiences, tenures in Strasbourg, and post-European Parliament careers. Though aggregate turnover is high,
Scarrow finds that these large countries have developed a cadre of MEPs whose focus is on their European career.
This in turn increases the power of each nation’s delegation as well as the influence of the parliament as a whole.
Scholars are also turning their attention to the young democracies of Eastern Europe, where the development of
legislative careers and professionalization may be integral to the success of these institutionalizing legislatures
(see Shabad and Slomcynski 2002).
By 2011, when the journal Regional and Federal Studies published a special issue entitled “Moving through the
Labyrinth: Political Careers in Multi-level Systems,” Patzelt’s vision for a truly comparative study of legislative
careers had come to fruition. Grounded in explicit theorizing at the individual level (see Borchert 2011), this stream
of parallel studies follows the careers of legislators through multiple levels of government in a sample of nations.
The attention paid to how structures of political opportunity drive the movement of aspiring politicians across levels
of government in multiple settings illustrates how ambition theory can be fruitfully applied in non-US settings.
Viewed together, these articles also demonstrate how a fully comparative approach to studying legislative
recruitment and retention can also improve our understanding of the status of legislatures in different systems, i.e.
their ability to exercise independent policy-making capacity.
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14.4 Conclusion
In their study of the 1992 congressional elections, Hall and Van Houweling (1995) justify the shift from the macro- to
micro-level by stating that the individual choice process must be understood if scholars are to fully comprehend
the patterns in aggregate-level time series. Using these micro-level models, researchers have identified the
personal, electoral, and institutional factors structuring these choices. With improvements in event history models
and attention to the strategic environment affecting legislators’ choices, such models now provide a reliable and
widely accepted methodology for (p. 301) analysing legislative careers. The success of these models in
demonstrating the marginal or direct effects of changes in the internal organization of legislatures and effects of
electoral incentives (shaped by electoral system rules) on legislative turnover reaffirms the claims of Schlesinger
(1966) and Polsby (1968) about the link between institutions and legislative careers.
From another perspective, however, the contribution of these models of legislators’ career choices to scholars’
understanding of the consequences of institutions might be seen as limited. To date, they have not provided
satisfactory answers to several questions of long-standing interest. What is the impact of political institutions, such
as regime structure, electoral system rules, and other aspects of the political opportunity structure, on the
recruitment of candidates to legislative offices? What role do political parties play in identifying candidates and
nurturing their careers, i.e. by assigning them to leadership positions inside the party, legislature, or other
institutions? The literature on US legislative careers assigns parties a minor role, which perhaps explains why
American and comparative career studies have had little to say to each other. Finally, what linkages, if any, can be
established across the three phases of legislators’ careers? Do the recruitment experiences of legislators, for
example, influence their activities inside the legislature (Matthews 1984)? In other words, researchers should
attend to the indirect effects of institutions, i.e. the effects they have on candidate selection, which in turn shapes
legislative behavior.
To answer these questions, researchers will need to overcome several challenges. One challenges lies in how
legislative careers are currently studied. Individual choice models implicitly assume that legislators’ choices can be
modeled without regard to aggregate career patterns. Indeed, an extreme version of this view would hold that the
sequence of office-holding events that form a political career is a mere by-product of a stochastic process that
generates choice outcomes in a stepwise fashion. In essence, a career sequence is “what you end up with”—a
disorderly “tangle” of loosely connected choices that defies systematic analysis. Some scholars, however,
recommend looking at career sequences as patterns that are shaped by institutions and, potentially, have
consequences for legislators’ activities (MacKenzie 2009). More attention to macro-level patterns, where the
effects of institutions (if they matter) should be registered clearly, is needed.
A second challenge consists of the absence of detailed career data for legislators in many countries. Few
countries (and no state legislatures) have a dataset on legislative careers that is as comprehensive as the Roster.
Even the Roster lacks detailed information about the political experiences of incumbents before and after
congressional service. The lack of detailed career data makes truly comparative work on legislative careers
difficult to carry out. Fortunately, efforts are underway to improve the situation. In Europe, for example, scholars
are collaborating on a dataset that will provide detailed data on the social background, political experiences and
legislative careers of legislators in 17 European systems (Best and Cotta 2000). More intensive data collection on
Latin America and other settings will be needed if scholars are to take advantage of the (p. 302) rich variation
across countries in regime structure, electoral system rules, and political opportunity structures.
This hard work will be justified by the high stakes that legislative career patterns hold for theories of representation,
institutional design, and, we argue, legislative capacity and performance. Careers are not important only to the
officials who live them. As the term-limits literature demonstrates, career patterns can determine how a legislature
functions, whether it is truly transformative, and whether lawmakers have incentives to represent voters
energetically and faithfully. As Schlesinger (1966, 2), the architect of ambition theory, notes:
A political system unable to kindle ambitions for office is as much in danger of breaking down as one
unable to restrain ambitions. Representative government, above all, depends on a supply of men so
driven; the desire for election and, more important, for reelection becomes the electorate’s restraint upon
its public officials. No more irresponsible government is imaginable than one of high-minded men
unconcerned for their political futures.
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Thad Kousser
Thad Kousser is an Associate Professor of Political Science, University of California, San Diego.
Scott A. MacKenzie
Scott A. MacKenzie is Assistant Professor of Political Science, University of California, Davis.
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Procedure and Rules in Legislatures

Wolfgang C. Müller and Ulrich Sieberer
Institutions
2014
The conduct of parliamentary work is governed by formal rules that are usually spelled out in the constitution and
in standing orders or rules of procedure of parliaments. The degree of internal regulation of parliaments varies
between countries and regimes. In addition to constitutions and permanent standing orders, other sources of
parliamentary rules include Temporary Standing Orders (as in Britain), individual laws, and case law. This chapter
examines rules of procedure in legislatures and their consequences. It first considers the rationale for
parliamentary rules and what happens when legislative rules fail. It then outlines the core tasks of democratic
legislatures, highlights some of the most important variations in the rules applied by democratic parliaments, and
assesses their consequences. It also discusses rule-making and institutional change, as well as rules on agenda-
setting and parliamentary voting, rules governing political control, and legislators’ reaching out to the public
through parliamentary action.
Keywords: rules of procedure, parliaments, parliamentary rules, legislatures, rule-making, institutional change, agenda-setting, parliamentary
voting, political control, legislators
15.1 Introduction
IN the most general sense “rules” are meant to guide behavior. The Oxford Dictionary defines rules broadly as
“one of a set of explicit or understood regulations or principles governing conduct or procedure within a particular
area of activity.” In this chapter we primarily focus on formal rules. Thus, we are concerned with what constitutions
and other legal documents say about the conduct of parliamentary procedure and thereby make legally
enforceable. This is not to say that parliamentary conventions (i.e. generally accepted or established views of how
the business in the chamber ought to be conducted) are irrelevant. In the absence of formal rules they may
provide crucial guidance, and indeed many formal rules relate back to earlier conventions that were formalized at
some point in time. Conventions are largely self-enforcing as breaking with generally recognized practice will
always involve some costs. Nevertheless, mere conventions (such as paring arrangements—the mutually agreed
balanced absence of individual MPs of different parties from the parliamentary floor—that exist in many
parliaments) are not binding for actors. Furthermore, the precise contents of conventions may be difficult to grasp
for both novices among the actors and outside observers and may gradually change over time, sometimes even
unnoticed. Therefore, in most institutionalized settings such as parliaments the truly important rules are usually
formalized.
Formal rules governing the conduct of parliamentary work are typically contained in the constitution and in
standing orders or rules of procedure of parliaments. While the constitution invariably specifies the external
relations of parliament, in particular with the head of state and the government, there is great variation in the
amount of internal regulation of parliaments between countries and regimes. Take, for instance, those constitutions
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of European monarchies that have not seen much updating after full democratization on the one hand (e.g. the
Netherlands) and that of the French Fifth Republic (p. 312) on the other. While the former contain only few and
general rules on the internal working of parliament, the French document specifies the rules governing the most
important parliamentary processes in great detail.
Constitutions and permanent standing orders are not the only sources of parliamentary rules. For instance, the
British House of Commons also employs temporary standing orders that are as binding as the standing orders, but
last for only one parliament. We also find individual laws (existing side-by-side with standing orders) that regulate
specific parliamentary procedures such as the German law on investigative committees. Finally, parliamentary
rules may contain a considerable amount of case law in the form of earlier interpretations of general rules in
specific contexts. The ability to refer to such precedents when appropriate is a distinct quality of the most
sophisticated among the parliamentary “battle horses.” More distant observers of parliamentary business can only
hope to find such detail in legal commentaries of parliamentary law (which are often written by insiders).
Parliamentary rules typically cover a broad set of themes. Some of these themes are critical to the conduct of
parliamentary business and warfare while others are more marginal and might also do without a great amount of
legal regulation (such as details of parliamentary administration, house rights, etc.). The politically central
categories of rules establish intra-parliamentary institutions (such as committees, leadership bodies, and
parliamentary party groups), define the range of their competencies and obligations, provide precise provisions on
the conduct of the crucial parliamentary processes (such as deliberation, plenary debate, and decision-making),
and fix the principles of dividing scarce resources among MPs and party groups. For instance, parliamentary rules
typically establish parliamentary committees as part of the parliament’s internal structure; explain how committees
are set up (e.g. election by the plenary according to some allocation principle among the parliamentary parties);
define the tasks of committees and their rights and obligations vis-à-vis other actors such as the whole house or
the cabinet; and fix when and how to begin, conduct, and end processes of deliberating legislative proposals.
Likewise, parliamentary rules typically provide the presiding officers and (potential) speakers in plenary debate
with fairly detailed rules about who is entitled to speak, for how long, and in which sequence, and about the
conditions under which debates can be ended before the list of speakers has been exhausted. As a last example,
parliamentary rules typically fix quorum and majority requirements for making decisions in committee and plenary
meetings.
Such rules constrain the behavior of actors and structure the processes typically studied by legislative scholars.
Most of the research covered in this chapter is interested in these processes and their consequences and
considers the relevant parliamentary rules as exogenous to the processes under study. This perspective has been
challenged by Riker (1980) who considered institutions as endogenous and thus not fundamentally different from
“tastes” or “values.” From this view, changing the rules should be the order of the day when they do not
correspond with majority values and observed institutional stability should signal a correspondence of current rules
with the “tastes” of the majority. By contrast, when “tastes” and institutions do not match—what Riker referred to
as “turbulent times”—“the institutions are in flux and only human greed seems constant.” If this claim is correct,
large parts of the institutionalist research program would be built on “illusion” (Riker 1980, 432).
(p. 313) While the power of Riker’s argument cannot be denied, the literature has marshalled many reasons why
institutions may remain relatively unaffected by the “tastes” of the majority of the day (Müller 2002; Shepsle 2006).
Furthermore, rules are typically stable throughout the processes of interest to students of parliamentary behavior.
Both arguments help sustain the traditional focus of institutional research on largely exogenous institutions that
systematically influence processes and outcomes and thus make them more predictable. Indeed, even Riker
(1980, 432) conceded that “we can get a lot of mileage out of relatively stable institutions.” In line with the
dominant perspective in the literature the main focus of this chapter is on understanding the effects of institutions.
However, we briefly address institutional change in the chapter’s penultimate section.
Parliamentary rules are not the exclusive territory of political scientists. In particular, lawyers study parliamentary
rules intensively, focusing on rule description, correct interpretation, and the identification—and probably
resolution—of associated legal problems. Being concerned mostly with normative issues, students of law often
provide commentaries on all the rules that govern a particular parliament. Such comprehensive political science
works are rare (for an exception see Oleszek 2010). Rather, most empirical studies focus on one set of rules or,
rather, one set of parliamentary behaviors that are partly structured by rules. As parliamentary rules cover a vast
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territory, this chapter needs to be selective. We focus on the core functions of parliament and the countries of
Western Europe that host some of the world’s best-studied representative bodies. Still, not even the best-studied
parliament has been analysed nearly as thoroughly as the US Congress. While the Congressional literature does
not travel directly to the European systems of parliamentary party government (Gamm and Huber 2002), it provides
an invaluable yardstick for ingenuity in asking theoretical questions and rigor in answering them. For these reasons
we occasionally refer to this body of work as well.
The chapter proceeds as follows: after addressing the relevance of rules and their emergence in general terms we
discuss a few examples where missing or badly designed rules had severe negative consequences. We then turn
to what most observers consider the core tasks of democratic legislatures, show some of the most important
variations in the rules democratic parliaments apply and discuss their consequences. In so doing, we move from
well-charted territory where extant research is relatively rich to areas that, although important, have not seen
much attention from students of political institutions. Even though institutions are mostly stable throughout
individual parliamentary processes, they remain amenable to change. We therefore address rule-making and
institutional change before concluding the chapter.
15.2 Why Rules?
Taking a ride into the past with a time machine, Gary Cox (2006, 141) explains, researchers would arrive at the
“legislative state of nature,” “an assembly where all business is conducted in the plenary session (no committees)
and members’ ability to talk and (p. 314) make motions is largely unrestricted.” Such internal organization makes
the plenary a bottleneck, especially when demand for plenary time increases. In his earlier study on the
emergence of cabinet government in Britain, Cox (1987) analysed the archetypical case where increasing
electoral competition pushed MPs to justify their holding of seats by visible parliamentary activity while at the same
time the increase of legislative business (driven by societal demands), party-political policy agendas, and
collective electoral incentives pushed even stronger for centralization of procedural power over the conduct of
parliamentary affairs in the hands of the cabinet. Introducing rules and moving away from the “legislative state of
nature” thus was an irresistible process serving the needs of individual MPs, party groups, parliament as an
institution, and society at large.
Thus, what rules can do is to guarantee that parliament works and can live up to fulfilling the basic tasks assigned
to it in the constitution. Depending on the precise setup of institutions this means electing and holding to account
holders of public office, making decisions on policy (mostly by enacting legislation), overseeing and checking the
executive, and making public the most important political choices and their alternatives. Parliaments are effective
institutions if they get to grips with these tasks and do so in an orderly fashion. Once these minimum requirements
are satisfied, attention turns to the quality of processes and outcomes.
We can speak of parliaments as well-structured institutions if their internal processes meet important quality
requirements. At least to some extent such quality assessments will lie in the eye of the beholder and depend on
what normative ideas are used to define the relevant criteria. For instance, advocates of party democracy will
apply yardsticks considerably different from those whose ideal is individual representation. The performance of
parliaments will thus always remain a matter of debate. Notwithstanding that, there is a broad consensus on some
basic challenges well-structured parliaments have to meet. Thus, parliaments (nearly) universally have settled for
rules that make them more effective (compared to Cox’s “state of nature”) by increasing their capacity and
expertise through some division of labour and specialization. There is also widespread agreement that the idea of
making decisions public requires some public debate and explanation of the choices before voting on laws in the
plenary meeting. And there is universal agreement that decisions should be made well informed, after careful
consideration of all the pros and cons, and after thorough examination of the alternative means to achieve desired
goals. Parliaments therefore have structured processes of deliberation that allow for vetting the alternatives and
arguments and calling on expert knowledge. Simplifying reality, in classic parliamentarism (as idealized by Mill
1861) these processes aim at the best societal outcome and are indeed processes of deliberation. In post-classical
parliamentarism (as first portrayed by Bagehot 1873) they aim at what is the best outcome for groups commanding
a majority in parliament and mainly serve as vehicles for group-competition before the arbiter of the electorate
(Manin 1997).
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Effectiveness and successful performance are helped by permanent (standing) rules. Having established rules
instead of discussing how to proceed anew in each case clearly economizes the conduct of parliamentary
business. Moreover, without permanent rules (p. 315) we would be in Riker’s world where each actor tries to
anticipate the consequences of specific procedures and then opts for the one that promises the egotistically best
outcome. (The closest real-world approximation to this theoretical extreme is the US House of Representatives
where the Rules Committee decides case-by-case on how proposals will be processed [Oleszek 2010].) Thus the
decisions on rules and on the issues to be decided under these rules would become one. Combining conflict over
policy and conflict over rules undermines the ideals of fair procedure and good rules and thus has the potential to
threaten the legitimacy not only of today’s rulers but of the entire system allowing such manipulation.
Going beyond the universality of rules, most practitioners and normative theorists could probably agree that good
rules would at least fulfill the following criteria. First, they should be recognized as legitimate by both the actors who
interact under the rules and those who are subject to the decisions made according to the rules. Second, rules
should be simple and unambiguous, i.e. it should not require a law degree and extensive interpretation to apply
them correctly in making procedural decisions. Third, individual rules should apply to all largely identical decision
matters to avoid exceptions and to simplify decision-making. Finally, the rules in their entirety should provide full
coverage of all relevant matters (at least by containing explicit default clauses) and should not leave loopholes
that may cause trouble, often at times when there is already a conflict situation.
Even against the background of such basic criteria for good rules their actual design remains an intellectual
challenge and enacting them may be a political one. There are many ways in which rules can cope with the
problems parliaments need to resolve in organizing the conduct of their business. As a consequence, real world
parliaments have not adopted the same rules and are not converging on one common design despite their largely
identical tasks. Instead, we observe considerable differences between parliaments and over time even within each
of the major regime types. Such differences can be substantively important. For instance, they can have
distributional consequences between parliament and cabinet, government and opposition, majority and minority,
and between party groups and individual MPs even if all these actors accept the rules as legitimate and prefer them
to the “legislative state of nature” (Cox 2006). Such distributional effects and the presence of alternative solutions
to the underlying problems suggest that there are both incentives and scope for institutional reform.
15.3 When Legislative Rules Fail
The history of parliamentary assemblies provides multiple examples where the absence of rules or badly designed
rules have proved highly consequential for the capacity of parliaments or even the fate of nations. Let us first look
at rules governing parliamentary decision-making. The most demanding rules in the history of parliaments were
applied (p. 316) in the Polish Sejm from 1652 to 1791 when the liberum veto granted each member of the Polish
nobility represented in parliament the right to prevent any measure from being adopted (or to dissolve the Sejm and
nullify all acts passed during its session). Indeed, the frequent use of this instrument often paralyzed the
government and prevented Poland from establishing a powerful absolutist regime similar to those of her neighbors.
The king’s attempt to limit the veto right even provoked civil war, foreign military intervention, and the first partition
of Poland (Jedruch 1998). In analytical terms, the liberum veto is pushing super-majority requirements to the logical
extreme. While the Polish case is singular both in terms of the unanimity requirement and subjecting all decisions to
it, many countries require various super-majorities for a more limited range of decisions.
A more recent example of insufficient rules is the failure of the first post-Soviet Russian parliament to adequately
address the problem of cycling majorities. Andrews (2002) shows that the plenary often overturned legislative
proposals that had been passed in committee. According to her analysis, the absence of specific rules—such as
US-type closed-rule committee privilege—along with a complex preference structure among MPs provided the basis
for cycling. In this situation, the president of parliament could strategically use the enormous authority of the
presidium to bring about cycles that served his or her interests. Thus, the biggest problem with the rules was not
the absence of closed-rule committee privilege but the vast powers of the presidium to manipulate outcomes. This
period came to a tragic end by brute force when the chamber was overthrow by President Boris Yeltsin in 1993.
Turning to rules on the usage of parliamentary time, the Austrian parliament in the Habsburg monarchy constitutes
an outstanding case. The absence of rules to curb debate and speed up business virtually paralyzed the Reichsrat
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for the better part of the period between 1897 and 1909. The nationality conflict that rattled the multiethnic empire
in the last few decades of its existence played out in parliament and led the groups critical of the government’s
policy in this area to resort to all kinds of obstruction tactics. These were not confined to pieces of legislation
concerning nationality interests but applied to legislation across the board. The 1875 rules of procedure left the
majority quite defenceless against various obstructionist tactics, the most important of which was the right of any
50 MPs to request very time-consuming recorded votes. Applying this voting procedure even to marginal matters
(such as petitions to be read before the day’s agenda) rendered majority rule virtually impossible. In addition to
procedurally legal obstruction the Austrian parliament of those decades also suffered from a great amount of
unlawful behavior such as disturbing the meeting by noise or engaging in fist-fighting (Höbelt 2000; see Twain 1898
for a colourful report). The long-term experience with such a caricature of parliamentary politics is often taken as a
partial explanation for the failure of parliamentarism in Austria in the interwar period. Indeed, the break with
democracy in 1933 was brought about by the government exploiting a loophole in the parliamentary rules of
procedure: following plenary disorder and the resignation of all preceding officers the government declared that
parliament had dissolved itself permanently (Jenny and Müller 1995, 360–1).
(p. 317) Less drastic but nevertheless consequential rule failures have been observed in other contexts. Even
the much-admired British House of Commons suffered from obstruction during a short period in the 1880s which
was ended by the Speaker assuming the power to stop such action and finally by the introduction of the closure
vote in the new standing orders of 1887 (Redlich 1903, Vol. I, 164–85). Drawing on this and similar experiences
elsewhere, Lowell (1912, 292) already concluded in the early twentieth century that “almost all great legislative
bodies at the present day have been forced to adopt some method of cutting off debate, and bringing matters
under discussion to a decisive vote.” This author identified two forces behind that process: the parliamentary
majorities’ “defence against wilful obstruction by minorities” and the need of parliaments “of getting through their
work.”
Note that all methods employed in (lawful) obstruction have a non-obstructive function in the first place and
become means of obstruction by their excessive use at the “right” moment (Humphreys 1991). As long as each
individual MP has the right to bring his or her case to the floor by various instruments, there are only two ways to
preserve the plenary meeting’s capacity to bring business to a conclusion: ending the debate before the list of
speakers is exhausted—typically by closure vote—and strict ex ante rationing (of access to instruments and time).
Yet, if individual MPs combine to sizeable party groups, rationing individual rights might not be enough to contain
obstructive behavior as exhausting the individual rights of all group members in a coordinated party effort might
still cause gridlock. Under such conditions, parliamentary rules then need to allocate rights to party groups rather
than individual MPs to achieve the desired effect. This is indeed the long-term trend we observe (Heider and Koole
2000, 17).
As our examples of legislatures ridden by obstruction show, ending such behavior and returning to business as
usual can be a major challenge. Indeed, in these cases breaking the pattern required heroic rule interpretation
(Britain) or breaking rules (Austria). By contrast, the US Senate developed smoothly from a chamber basically
unprotected against obstruction to one with a three-fifth cloture requirement (from 1917) but little use of it until the
1970s before increasing ideological conflict triggered another smooth move to a chamber with de facto super-
majority rule (Wawro 2011).
Having demonstrated the need for parliamentary rules we now turn to variation in such rules and their effects. We
start with the area of parliamentary business in which the discipline has arguably compiled the most systematic
body of knowledge: the (s)election and deselection of external officeholders, especially the inauguration and
removal of the cabinet.
15.4 Electoral Rules in Parliament
The main regime types—parliamentarism, semipresidentialism, and presidentialism—have distinct rules (with some
internal variation) of how executive power is organized and to what extent and how holding executive office is tied
to acts of parliamentary (p. 318) assemblies. These rules go way beyond our topic and are well covered in the
literature on regime types. We will therefore abstain from discussing them here. We also abstain from discussing
the relevance of bicameralism and a few other constitutional choices (Strøm et al. 1994). Instead, we concentrate
Page 5 of 16
on parliamentary systems and the rules for inaugurating cabinet members.
Most fundamentally, we can distinguish between “positive parliamentarism” where an incoming prime minister or
cabinet requires the support of the majority of MPs and “negative parliamentarism” where the cabinet can take
office unless the majority of MPs rejects it (Bergman 1993). Bergman’s original argument held that minority cabinets
are more likely under negative parliamentarism. This intuition has marshalled some empirically support (Martin and
Stevenson 2001), but when later refinement brought in the support requirement, arguing that only the absolute
majority requirement makes minority cabinets less likely under positive parliamentarism (Saalfeld 2008, 353;
Sieberer 2010, 104), statistical testing remained inconclusive. However, close inspection of the relevant cases
provides support for the argument (Sieberer 2010, 120). Within positive parliamentarism, the cabinet investiture
vote can be open or secret. Secret voting constitutes a greater hurdle for the incoming cabinet because individual
MPs may disagree with the strategic choices behind cabinet formation or may simply give expression to grievances
they have suffered from their party leaders. Anecdotal evidence from, for instance, the Third French and the “First”
Italian Republics and twenty-first-century German subnational parliaments provide support for the relevance of
these considerations. In sum, positive parliamentarism, absolute majority requirements, and secret voting make
cabinet inauguration a more demanding challenge. Mapping the rules of 25 parliamentary systems in Europe shows
considerable variation with Germany standing out in the demands it makes on an incoming government, while
countries with negative parliamentarism occupy the other end of the scale (Sieberer 2010, 124; see also De Winter
1995; Bergman et al. 2003).
Procedures on cabinet removal are the second group of rules that fundamentally govern the relationship between
parliament and the cabinet. While the ability of any parliamentary majority to remove the cabinet by a vote of no
confidence at any point is the defining property of parliamentary systems of government, the procedures for such
removal are as different as cabinet investiture rules. The most fundamental difference runs between the ordinary
and the constructive vote of no confidence. Under ordinary no-confidence procedures a cabinet can be forced out
of office simply by the majority of (voting) MPs voting against it. In contrast, constructive no-confidence rules
require the election of a new prime minister in order to replace the old one. The latter procedure is obviously more
demanding. It is designed to prevent negative voting alliances (the members of which would not agree on a new
cabinet) from overturning the government. Originally invented against the background of the squeezing the
political centre had experienced between right and left extremes at the end of the German Weimar republic, the
constructive vote of no confidence was first introduced in the (West-) German constitution in 1949 and has since
then been adopted in a number of countries (including Belgium, Hungary, Israel, Poland, and Spain) with the
desired effect of (p. 319) boosting government stability. Government survival can be fostered further by requiring
a majority of all MPs for removal (thus counting abstentions in favour of the government) and by rules that
constrain no-confidence votes in various ways, e.g. by requiring a minimum number of support for its initiation,
limiting the number of such votes each MP can support, limiting such votes to the prime minister (and thereby
increasing the stakes at the outset of a crisis), and by restrictions relating to the process (e.g. requiring a “cooling-
off” period between introducing the proposal and the vote). While the French Fifth Republic has adopted all these
remedies to boost government stability other countries have been more selective (Bergman et al. 2003, 156).
Moving beyond the cabinet, the study of rules governing elections in parliaments has been extended to holders of
other high office outside parliament such as heads of state, judges, heads of audit institutions, and ombudsmen
(Sieberer 2010; 2013), and presiding officers of parliament (Jenny and Müller 1995).
One of the nice things about electoral rules is that the outcomes of the processes they govern are easily
observable. Furthermore, the preferences of the relevant actors are either known or can be reconstructed or
assumed with a sufficient degree of certainty in most cases. Both features allow us to assess whether and how
institutions affect election outcomes. While existing studies are typically cross-sectional and geographically
confined (and thus leave room for further work) they cover considerable institutional variation and make electoral
rules one of the best-covered areas in terms of parliamentary rules and their effects.
15.5 Rules on Agenda-Setting and Voting
In legislative studies, the term “agenda-setting” can be used in a broad and a narrow sense. Narrowly construed,
agenda-setting is primarily proposal power: deciding what bills and amendments come to be voted on. An agenda-
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setter is thus an actor who can make “take it or leave it” proposals to other actors, i.e. legislative proposals on
which parliamentary actors can vote only vote “yea” or “nay” (Tsebelis 2002, 2). Additional elements of a narrow
definition of agenda-setting include the choice of the timing of such votes and the voting rules to be applied (Cox
and McCubbins 2005, 25, 37). This section focuses on this narrow view of agenda-setting. As a generic term,
agenda-setting is applied to many areas. In the parliamentary context, Döring (2005) identifies the topical agenda
(the issues to be discussed) as an additional element beyond the parliamentary timetable and the parliamentary
voting agenda covered by the narrow definition (see also Baumgartner and Jones 1993; Jones and Baumgartner
2005). We discuss this broader conception of agenda-setting below in the section on reaching out to the public.
Formal theoretical work has identified proposal power as a means to avoid legislative cycling (McKelvey 1976), to
empower the agenda setter (Romer and Rosenthal 1978), and to reach structure-induced equilibria (Shepsle
1979). Building on these theoretical insights, agenda power figures prominently as one of the foundations of
committee (p. 320) power in the US Congress (Shepsle 1986; Shepsle and Weingast 1981, 1987; Weingast and
Marshall 1988). More generally, Tsebelis (2002) shows how agenda-setting among veto players helps to explain
the occurrence of policy change. Finally, institutional agenda powers provide great incentives to political actors to
optimize their grip on them. This is the reasoning at the heart of theories of parties as procedural cartels in
legislatures developed in the context of the US Congress (Cox and McCubbins 1993; 2005) that have shown great
potential for traveling to other countries.
Rules for setting the legislative agenda in parliamentary systems of government have been carefully mapped and
analysed (Döring 1995b, 2001; Rasch and Tsebelis 2011). Clear differences emerge between countries that
institutionally privilege the government (such as France, Britain, and Spain) and countries where the government’s
dominance in legislation builds on tight control of the majority party or parties or, in case of minority cabinets, the
cabinets’ pivotal position in parliament (Rasch and Tsebelis 2011). Döring (2001) predicts and shows empirically
that government control over the law-making agenda and more restrictive budgetary agenda rights are related to
fewer bills and lower budget deficits. Even apparently minor details, such as ministers’ power to table “last offer”
amendments late in the legislative process, can be important: Heller’s (2001) game-theoretical model identifies this
rule as a means to uphold coalition policy compromises against opposition attempts to split the government by
offering better deals to some coalition partners. Notwithstanding the pioneering work of Döring (2001) and Döring
and Hallerberg (2004) what largely remains to be done is putting this theorizing to comprehensive empirical testing
with legislative data on different countries, the whole range of legislation, and over an extended period of time. The
complexity and sheer amount of data collection that would be required is likely to keep this task on the discipline’s
agenda for some time to come.
As mentioned above, agenda-control rules also include the sequence of voting. The mathematical literature on
voting rules has thoroughly explored many more alternatives than those empirically relevant in the parliamentary
context (e.g. Balinski and Laraki 2010). Indeed, Rasch’s (1995; 2000) careful mapping of floor voting rules in
European parliaments finds that only two major rules are used (amendment procedures and successive
procedures). We could, of course, still profit from studying how these rules empirically interact with actors’
preferences, but the main focus of such research rests more on conflict in political systems than on the rules
themselves. An exception is Rasch’s (2014) study of voting under the “successive procedure” (i.e. successively
voting one-by-one on alternatives formulated as mutually exclusive options) in the Norwegian parliament which
shows that insincere or strategic voting is very rare.
Quorum and majority requirements constitute another dimension in decision-making that allows for different rules. In
terms of the former passing constitutional amendments is typically more demanding. Several European countries
sharing a French legal system heritage (e.g. France, Spain, and Portugal) have organic laws, a kind of secondary
constitutional law that also require higher quorums of attendance (absolute majority of MPs in Spain, two-thirds in
Portugal), or differ from ordinary laws in other aspects of the legislative procedure. Their regulatory scope roughly
corresponds (p. 321) to what constitutional lawyers refer to as constitutional matters in the material sense,
covering, for instance, electoral laws or the rights of ethnic minorities.
In terms of majority requirements we can distinguish the conventional majority from super-majority requirements.
While constitutional amendments require such majorities in many regimes (or have to pass other hurdles such as
referendums or second votes with an intervening election), countries differ in the precise definition of super-
majorities (e.g. two-thirds in Germany, three-fifths in France, etc.). They also differ in the scope of legislation that
Page 7 of 16
requires super-majorities. Austria is unique in Western Europe in having an extensive body of constitutional laws
and individual clauses of constitutional rank embedded in ordinary legislation spreading over hundreds of
legislative acts plus another type of super-majority legislation employed for the legislation of many educational
issues. The origin of this system was mutual distrust among the major political parties that could pass such
legislation only in joint action (Müller 2000, 91). It was adopted by neighboring Hungary for the same reason—to
constrain parliamentary majorities after transition to democracy. After an earthquake election in 2010 produced an
unprecedented single-party constitutional majority in the Hungarian parliament, legislation of constitutional rank has
become a means of securing policy gains of the majority for the future—a pattern originally found relevant in
systems of separated powers riddled by legislative gridlock (Moe 1990). Majority requirements are thus of obvious
practical relevance. The literature has mapped these rules and theorized their consequences (Rasch 1995), but is
confined to bits and pieces of information about the actual scope of supermajority legislation and how political
actors cope with supermajority rules.
We have already referred to different voting methods in the context of government inauguration. Parliamentary
rules display a great range of different voting methods that can have important substantive implications for
procedural efficiency, party leadership control over backbenchers, and electoral accountability of MPs. In
European parliaments, Saalfeld (1995) finds an amazing variety of different voting techniques that can be classified
as either secret (closed) or open (public voting, both recorded and unrecorded). Under secret voting rules neither
parties nor voters or forces outside parliament (such as, historically, the Catholic Church) know how individual MPs
have voted. Party unity and individual accountability are more difficult to maintain under such rules. Open votes,
by contrast, provide full transparency, at least to contemporary observers. Finally, voting techniques differ in terms
of efficiency. While electronic voting takes the least time, the classic roll-call vote (where each MP is called, rises
from place, and delivers the vote orally for the purpose of recording) is the most time-consuming method (a single
vote can take hours in large parliaments).
Parliamentary rules typically fix voting methods for some decisions (e.g. government inauguration, selection of
office holders) but only provide a default option for votes on other business. This leaves actors with strategic
choices (Carrubba et al. 2008; Hug 2010). Party leaders may aim at recorded votes as a means to discipline their
backbenchers, parties that want to highlight their commitment to a particular case (advertising) or want to delay it
(obstruction) may do the same. Conversely, parties unified over an issue (p. 322) may want to exploit disunity in
other parties by holding secret votes (if they hope to win that way) or, conversely, by holding public and recorded
votes (if they hope to benefit from demonstrating that others are split). Whenever such rationales clash, the rules
on how the actual voting method is chosen are critical.
In modern times, Italy has been the exemplary case to study the political consequences of different voting
methods. Until the parliamentary reform of 1988, the Italian rules of procedure required secret votes on legislation.
However, legislation could also be the subject of an additional confidence vote conducted by roll call, which
preceded but did not replace the secret vote on legislation. Three Italian post-war cabinets fell over a secret vote
on legislation right after winning a confidence vote on the very same issue (Hine 1993, 190–93). This demonstrates
that the choice of voting methods can indeed be highly consequential for party control over MPs and for upholding
coalition discipline.
Unfortunately, the empirical study of parliamentary voting behavior—a growing industry in recent years—suffers
from the fact that most European parliaments leave researchers with little information about this crucial stage of
decision-making. Available roll-call data is often subject to selection bias (Hug 2010). Yet it is precisely the strategic
choice between different voting methods that opens up opportunities for asking fascinating research questions.
15.6 Rules Governing Political Control
According to Mill (1861, 73), “to watch and control the government” is core to “the proper office of a
representative assembly.” Parliamentary control operates via various institutional mechanisms that are structured
by parliamentary rules. The most widely available and frequently used means of control are parliamentary
questions. Despite great structural similarity this instrument shows considerable variety in finer institutional details
between countries and over time. Yet there has been little theoretical work regarding the question whether and how
such variation is relevant. We know that parliamentary questions serve tasks as different as signaling MPs’ concern
Page 8 of 16
for constituency problems and checking the government or coalitions partners. However, theoretical work has
almost exclusively focused on the effects of electoral institutions (as providing incentives to build a personal vote)
and the government/opposition role of the questioner on the use of questions and has largely ignored variation in
the rules of questioning. The most significant exception is the distinction between oral and written question formats.
These two formats generate a set of distinct expectations about their origin, control, content, validity of the answer,
intended audiences, and functions (Martin and Rozenberg 2011). While instructive, the presence of both types of
questions in most parliaments (Bergman et al. 2003, 167–72) and the routine exhaustion of oral question time limits
the analytical leverage that can be derived from this distinction.
Other differences in the rules governing parliamentary questioning include constraints on asking questions and
means to enforce answers. While it should be possible (p. 323) to derive theoretically interesting expectations
from variation in these two dimensions of parliamentary questions, we expect the “real” variation to be more in rule
interpretation than in written rules. On the one hand, questions are the only remaining outlet for individual
parliamentary behavior in most parliaments and as such not too much constrained by rules. Hence, we would
expect little institutional variation that really matters. On the other hand, enforcing answers will mostly be a direct or
indirect majority prerogative and will thus not be applied without considering the consequences for the government
as a non-institutional factor. If these assumptions are true, substantively important differences between patterns of
parliamentary questioning should be more influenced by non-institutional factors and the pure chance of asking the
right question at the right time than by differences in procedure. Yet, the nascent state of research on
parliamentary questions renders all this speculation.
Parliamentary committees are also important for control purposes, as those committees that parallel ministries have
at least some control rights vis-à-vis the former in their areas of jurisdiction. They may demand (or regularly
receive) government reports, hear witnesses, and make good use of the knowledge and background information of
their specialized members in checking what the executive does. While the British Select Committees that specialize
in control have received some attention (Drewry 1989; Jogerst 1993; Kubala 2011), to the best of our knowledge
not much has been published on control exercised by parliamentary committees in other parliamentary systems
since Mattson and Strøm’s (1995) initial mapping of committee powers. This work revealed considerable variation in
committee control rights, but we are still in the dark as to what this means in terms of activities and effects.
Establishing non-permanent investigative committees to scrutinize alleged mismanagement involving government

officials is the strongest control means of parliaments (save removing the government or individual members from
office). Here we find considerable institutional variation between countries in terms of such committees being in the
arsenal of parliaments or not, the rights to establish them (majority or minority) (Bergman et al. 2003, 173), and the
ways in which they conduct their business. It is safe to expect greater use and perhaps impact when qualified
minorities can establish investigative committees and when public access to their hearings and deliberations is
granted. We can expect similar effects from more sweeping committee rights in conducting the investigation.
Unfortunately, assessing such claims empirically is very difficult. Investigative committees are relatively rarely
used, leaving researchers with just a few cases scattered over time and space. Furthermore, variation in
institutional rules may be less important than other parameters such as government constellations, affected parties,
media environment, and the nature of the cases to be investigated. Both their rarity and the specific circumstances
under investigation make the comparative study of the procedures of investigative committees and their relevance
a particular challenging frontier of research that still remains to be explored.
In contrast to these ex post oversight mechanisms, ex ante budget rules and their impact on government spending
have received considerable attention. In modern times the pre-modern view that parliaments curb government
expenditure (epitomized in (p. 324) the political slogan “no taxation without representation”) has been turned on
its head. Rather than constraining government spending to keep down taxation, modern parliaments are generally
considered spend-thrifty as political parties, intra-party groups, and individual legislators all try to insert their pet
projects into the budgets. Therefore, rules that limit the role of parliaments are generally considered to foster
budgetary discipline (Stapenhurst et al. 2008). Specifically, budget rules may constrain parliamentary amendment
powers by demanding that any budget increase be offset by corresponding cuts or tax increases, and by requiring
a vote on the overall budget before considering individual items thus internalizing the underlying common pool
problem (Hallerberg et al. 2009, 63). In the to date broadest study on institutional remedies to budgetary largess,
including 58 countries over the 1971–96 period, Wehner indeed finds that government largess tends to occur in
“countries where the legislature has unfettered powers to amend the budget proposals of the executive” (2010,
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133–4). His analyses further suggest that finer differences in parliamentary budget rules may also matter but
substantiating these claims would require more thorough theorizing and better institutional data (2010, 136–41).
15.7 Rules and Reaching Out to the Public
One of the main tasks generally ascribed to parliaments is what has been referred to as “communication,” “making
public,” “linkage” (Loewenberg and Patterson 1979), or functioning as the nation’s “Congress of Opinion” (Mill
1861). None of these terms is unambiguous and an exclusive feature of parliament. What we mean here is that
parliament is the arena in which political decision-making is concluded before the eyes of the public. Observing
what happens on the parliamentary stage fosters political learning and allows citizens to hold their representatives
accountable.
Reaching out to the public occurs through many different parliamentary instruments. In most cases, the original
purpose of the instrument is a different one, but actors may actually employ it because of its potential publicity
effect (think, for example, of plenary debates and question time). Doing so usually require additional efforts of the
actors to publicize their contributions (in press conferences, press releases, news media interviews, etc.), and the
success of such efforts depends on whether MPs and parties can satisfy the classic news media requirement of
providing inputs that are new, important, and contentious. Which parliamentary processes are particular important
for reaching out to the public thus, to some extent, remains an empirical question.
While parliamentary rules impinge on all processes and instruments that could create publicity, in the present
context the first choice to study are those processes that are directly exposed to the public: those unfolding in the
plenary meeting. We have already referred to the plenary being the bottleneck in conducting parliamentary
business. Access to the plenary thus requires tight regulation for the common good (Cox 2006) but it also involves
important choices in the distribution of resources between (p. 325) parliamentary actors. The relevant questions
include: Who can take the floor, for what purpose, when, and for what amount of time?
While it is relatively easy to map such variation in rules, studying its consequences is much more challenging, and
indeed not much empirical research has been conducted. As Proksch and Slapkin (2012, 520) aptly summarize
“political scientists know surprisingly little about the role of political parties in debate, the institutions that govern
access to the floor, and the strategic nature of the messages the legislators try to convey.” Most empirical
research deals with single parliaments and relatively short periods (i.e. with no or very limited variation in the
relevant rules) and focuses on the rationales and behavior of individual representatives under varying context
conditions or on party strategies (for notable exceptions, see Martin and Vanberg 2008 and Steiner et al. 2004). By
contrast, reformers of parliamentary rules have clearly assumed that rules make a difference, for example, in
attempts to raise attention to parliament as a political arena by making debates more lively or by introducing new
instruments such as “topical hours” that allow discussing “hot” issues even when no piece of related legislation is
on the agenda.
A key issue regarding parliamentary reach-out are the means by which parliamentary processes are conveyed to
the public. Very few citizens watch the debates from the parliamentary gallery or read the minutes of proceedings
themselves. Thus, reporting about the work of parliament in the news media is crucial for parliament as a collective
body, parliamentary parties, and individual MPs. Parliament in a way competes for media attention with other
political arenas and it may be more or less central as the place where genuine news about government policies are
released. Some countries grant parliament the privilege to hear first about government plans (which may, however,
be undermined in practice; Cockerell et al. 1984), while others give the executive more leeway. We are not aware
of research turning such casual observation into hard facts.
Parliaments also differ in the extent to which they expose their working to media reporting. Committees working
behind closed doors are more likely to become arenas of consensus-building than arenas exposed to the public
(Shaw 1979), so parliamentary actors may have good reasons to seclude some proceedings. Parliaments also
differ with regard to the methods of reporting and the time when the relevant decisions were made. Direct
broadcasting provides citizens with the opportunity to base their judgement on their own observations and
interpretations. Interestingly, parliaments have dealt very differently with the advent of TV (Franklin 1989) and more
recently internet broadcasting. Recall that, perhaps ironically, the classic arena parliament (Polsby 1975), the
British House of Commons was a latecomer in that respect, not allowing radio broadcasting before 1978 and the
Page 10 of 16
transmission of moving pictures before 1989.
To conclude, reaching out to the public through parliamentary action, though important for understanding
parliaments as representative bodies, has received little scholarly attention. Although many of the relevant
processes have been studied, scholars have rarely focused on their outward effects. Consequently, we are left
with largely uncharted territory that would well merit thorough exploration.
(p. 326) 15.8 Rule Change
This chapter shows that the discipline has made considerable progress in theorizing about and mapping
parliamentary rules cross-sectionally. However, attempts to study the effects of parliamentary rules on actual
behavior mostly rely on longitudinal behavioral data, lumping together information from different years or legislative
periods. Such research designs thus have to assume institutional stability. While we defended this assumption as
realistic with regard to individual parliamentary processes, it is implausible in a mid- to long-term perspective as a
bird-eye’s view shows considerable amounts of rule change (Sieberer et al. 2011). Such change can take many
forms and serve different purposes. Tsebelis (1990) distinguishes “efficient change” that benefits (almost) all
actors who live and work under these rules from “redistributive change” that serves the interests of the current
majority at the expense of others. Adapting to technological change or other external developments (e.g. EU
integration) to the benefit of parliament as a collective body exemplifies the former, while restricting the access to
parliamentary resources (e.g. plenary time) for minorities illustrates the latter.
So far, parliamentary rule change in parliamentary systems of government has been studied mostly in the form of
idiosyncratic case studies focusing on single reforms of considerable magnitude in individual countries (Thaysen
1972; Norton 2001; Flinders 2007). Research on rule changes in the US Congress builds on thorough theorizing,
systematic long-term data collection, and statistical analysis (Binder 1997; Dion 1997; Schickler 2001)—but is
similarly idiosyncratic with regard to its geographical focus and the stable underlying institutional regime.
Systematically and comparatively mapping rule change in parliamentary systems thus is one of the obvious
frontiers of research. Distinguishing between “efficient” and redistributive reforms and explaining institutional
change and its timing is another challenge faced by scholars of parliamentary institutions. While first steps have
been taken to devise such a research program (e.g. Sieberer et al. 2011) most work remains to be done.
Developing a unified framework for theory building and empirical research designs on rule change beyond the
presidential versus parliamentary divide (Gamm and Huber 2002) constitutes a challenges not only for students of
parliaments but for scholars interested in explaining institutional design and change more generally.
15.9 Conclusion
Rules and procedures cover a vast area and constitute a major angle of research on parliaments and other
institutions. In this chapter we have highlighted their relevance and have provided a review of the state of the art of
research on Western European parliaments including some of the world’s best-researched ones. In (p. 327) doing
so, we have concentrated on the core functions generally ascribed to parliaments: creating and holding to
account executives, legislating, exercising control, and reaching out to the public.
We have argued that the theoretical understanding of parliamentary rules and empirical research is distributed
very unevenly across these areas. We know much about the rules that govern processes leading to authoritative
decisions such as cabinet inauguration, cabinet removal, and the passage of legislation but much less about the
rules on exercising control and reaching out to the public. In a way this corresponds to parliament having a (at
least formal) monopoly role in the former processes but, despite being important, not in the latter ones.
Probably the greatest lacunae in research relates to the fact that studying institutional effects requires data on
variation in the institutions and the behavior under these institutions. These conditions are rarely met
simultaneously. Studies that build on the collection of behavioral parliamentary data are all too rare even on single
parliaments and the comparative study of parliamentary behavior in Western Europe is confined to a few studies
(e.g. Döring and Hallerberg 2004). This leaves a huge agenda for research, even in those fields that have seen
considerable attempts at theorizing and mapping institutions such as law-making.
Page 11 of 16
Furthermore, the standard assumption of mid- and long-term institutional stability has been questioned. Mapping
institutions over time thus is important for the study of institutional effects. At the same time institutional change
constitutes a fascinating topic in its own right and constitutes the second major research frontier this chapter has
identified. It may constitute the even greater challenge, because it might be more difficult to adapt the
Congressional literature to the complexity of parliamentary and multiparty systems and because rule-making, at
least in large reforms, involves an important element of ingenuity among parliamentary actors that is difficult to
grasp in systematic conceptual categories or even law-like conjectures.
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Wolfgang C. Müller
Wolfgang C. Müller is Professor of Democratic Governance at the University of Vienna.
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Ulrich Sieberer
Ulrich Sieberer is Research Group Leader in the Department of Politics and Fellow of the Zukunftskolleg at the University of
Konstanz.
Page 16 of 16
The Politics of Bicameralism

William B. Heller and Diana M. Branduse
Institutions
2014
Bicameralism is easy to identify but hard to measure. The fact that a constitution specifies two legislative chambers
often obscures rather than illuminates the relative influence of the respective chambers, how the necessity of
negotiating across chambers affects the conduct of politics, or the extent to which consideration in a second
chamber might alter legislative content. Moreover, studying bicameralism is problematic because, as with most
political institutions, its effects emerge from processes that are often invisible to observers. Consequently, it can be
difficult to identify fruitful avenues of research or to determine whether or how bicameralism matters at all. We build
on previous studies of bicameralism and its effects to suggest first, areas of research that cry out for more careful
consideration of bicameralism; and second, an index based on a working definition of and a measurement strategy
for second-chamber powers—i.e. the extent to which bicameralism should matter.
Keywords: political institutions, bicameralism, constitutional design, legislative structure and process, political parties
16.1 Introduction
BICAMERALISM occupies a paradoxical position in the pantheon of political institutions. On one hand, it attracts
analysis because it holds a special place among constitutional structures. It is easily observed and clearly
differentiates approximately one-third of countries from polities with unicameral legislatures. Moreover,
bicameralism has no clear systematic relationship with many other institutional details that generally are seen as
important for understanding politics. Neither parliamentary nor presidential systems seem to favour unicameralism
or bicameralism, for instance, and electoral rules also vary broadly both across countries and between chambers.
Even in the case of federalism, with which bicameralism has at least a presumptive relationship, variations in
modes of selection to, and the authority of, upper chambers suggest the existence of sufficient variation for fruitful
study. In short, bicameralism is hard to ignore because it is glaringly obvious even to the most casual observer
whether a legislature comprises one chamber or two.
On the other hand, observers since at least the era of the French Revolution have been wont to declare
bicameralism to be at best irrelevant or at worst an irritant. Alongside this critical view, constitutional designers and
scholars have looked to bicameralism as a cure for any number of political ills, from majority tyranny to ill-crafted
laws (highlighted in The Federalist Papers, which in turn looked to Montesquieu [1689–1755]) to collective
dilemmas among subnational units in federal systems. Some find bicameralism redundant to well-designed
unicameral institutions (Cutrone and McCarty 2006), while others see it as a fundamental safeguard for democracy
(Riker 1992a; 1992b). Ultimately, it is difficult to tell whether or how bicameralism affects outcomes, principally for
two reasons. First, strategic actors adapt their behavior to the institutional rules in place, essentially rendering the
effects of the rules invisible. And second,it can be difficult to identify when or under what circumstances
bicameralism should affect (p. 333) political and policy outcomes, thanks to constitutional variation in allocation of
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authority between chambers in bicameral legislatures and the observation that the partisan composition of each
chamber often mirrors that of the other (the degree of “symmetry” and “congruence,” respectively, in Lijphart’s
[1984; 1999] parlance). The apparent contradiction is inescapable: bicameralism is easy to observe and fairly
widespread, but its effects are difficult to measure, if they exist at all, and quite possibly trivial.
Lijphart’s (1984, updated in 1999, 205–13) classic treatment of bicameralism defines it as strong or weak
depending on upper-chamber formal powers, democratic legitimacy (based on selection method), or differences in
chamber composition. (Lower chambers are as a rule formally stronger or at least no weaker than upper
chambers.). Together these criteria yield an index that in broad-brush terms breaks down to a two-by-two typology
defined by degree of chamber symmetry (determined by formal powers and selection method combined) and
compositional congruence. The problem with this approach, which typifies empirical treatments of bicameralism
(see, e.g. Gerring et al. 2005; Henisz 2000, 2002, 2006; Huber et al. 2004), is twofold. First, it conflates formal
authority, as defined in constitutional rules, with the notion that members of upper chambers selected by any
means other than direct election will refrain from using their constitutional authority to counter the will of their more
legitimately selected lower-chamber counterparts. An institutionalist approach to bicameralism, we believe,
requires that method of selection be considered separately from formal authority. And second, it both ignores the
possibility that bicameralism might lend weight to intraparty differences that otherwise might never enter into
decision calculations (see Heller 2001; VanDusky-Allen and Heller 2014) and makes the measure of bicameralism
—a constitutionally defined element of legislative structure—subject to the periodic vagaries of voter choice.
It is unsurprising, given the inherent difficulty of disentangling formal rules from electoral outcomes and normative
or cultural concerns, that there is relatively little combined theoretical and empirical research into how
bicameralism works. The typical approach is to categorize bicameral systems (e.g. as configurations of veto
points, e.g. Heller 1997; Tsebelis and Money 1997; or as a resource to be exploited, whether for information or as
a means for generating rents, see respectively, Diermeier and Myerson 1999; Rogers 2001) and from there to build
an argument about how bicameralism might impact outcomes. The utility of these studies for understanding
outcomes is muddied by the contradictory signals they send about what is important about bicameralism, and why.
It is true that bicameralism creates delays or vetoes, generates additional points of access and influence (e.g. for
lobbyists; Testa 2010), and can create opportunities for gridlock (Binder 1999). It does so, however, as part and
parcel of the legislative structure and process that defines how a bill becomes a law. Absent process, bicameralism
would indeed be meaningless; as part of process, even ostensibly weak bicameralism can have profound, if subtle,
effects.
In our view, the question of whether a chamber is strong or weak must be rooted in formal authority. If an upper
chamber has little formal power, no amount of incongruence will give it more; but the members of a chamber where
bicameral congruence is high can use their formal authority to advance their own interests in their party caucus.
(p. 334) Because the political give and take that determines who influences policy decisions is likely to take place
out of public view, particularly in the latter circumstance, it is important that the definition and measurement of
bicameralism be theoretically sound and defensible, as well as unencumbered by electoral results or questions of
democratic legitimacy. To that end, we base our definition of bicameral (which we use below to build an index of
bicameralism) on two criteria: first, there must be two constitutionally defined legislative chambers (irrespective of
mode of selection); and second, at the very least each legislative chamber can delay some bills’ trajectory from
introduction through final-passage vote (Tsebelis and Money 1997).
Students of bicameralism face the same basic problem that confronts anyone who seeks to understand the
workings of political institutions: in equilibrium, their impact on outcomes is invisible, but that does not mean they
have no impact. We identify lines of inquiry that might help distinguish and clarify bicameralism’s overall
contribution to policy (and political) outcomes and offer suggestions that will help push the frontiers of research on
bicameralism and political institutions more generally.
We begin this task in the next section (16.2) with a brief examination of the development of research on
bicameralism. In Section 16.3, we look more closely at developments in recent research and offer our views of both
where studying bicameralism can take us and how it will get us there. We close that section with a discussion of
strategies for measuring bicameralism in the real world and details of a pure institutions-focused bicameralism
index. The final section concludes.
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16.2 Evolving Interpretations of Bicameralism
Many examinations of bicameralism, this chapter included, find occasion to cite the Abbé Sieyès’s declaration that
“if a Second Chamber dissents from the First, it is mischievous; if it agrees, it is superfluous” (Campion 1954, 17;
see also e.g. Fisk 2011, 231; Shell 2001, 13; Tsebelis and Money 1997, 1; Uhr 2006, 477). That said, even weak
versions of bicameralism now are understood to affect outcomes (see Lijphart 1999, 211). Generally, studies of
bicameralism fall into one of two broad categories: either they take a normative approach to the question of how
bicameralism affects the quality of legislation, or they focus on bicameralism as a privileged element of the policy
process. We briefly address each in turn.
16.2.1 Bicameralism and the Public Good
Arguments about the value of bicameralism highlight four basic questions: How does bicameralism affect policy
stability? How does bicameralism affect the information (p. 335) available to legislators (and by implication the
quality of legislation; see Krehbiel 1991)? How does bicameralism affect the time it takes to pass legislation? And
how does bicameralism affect representation? Scholars can view each of these as positive or negative (or
irrelevant), depending on their starting concerns, but save for a few more recent explorations most analyses hinge
on whether, how, and to what end bicameralism affects representation.
All else being equal, bicameralism might provide more and will not provide less representation than unicameralism.
Upper chambers can be used, for instance, to guarantee a legislative role to specific actors who might not
otherwise prevail in elections. The initial conception of bicameralism as an instrument to construct good
government (Shell 2001, 6) saw an upper chamber as a means of providing representation to the wise. It is easier,
however, to privilege such identifiable classes as the nobility, regionally defined governments or interests, or
distinct electoral constituencies (see Mastias and Grangé 1987, 82). An upper chamber whose members are
selected on the same basis and from the same population as their lower-chamber counterparts, by contrast
probably will represent the same interests as well (Lijphart 1999; see Buchanan and Tullock 1974; Levmore 1992;
Cutrone and McCarty 2006). Extending the logic of the argument that rulers ceded legislative authority to identified
groups in order to cement their own power (North and Weingast 1989), it makes sense to think of bicameralism as a
means of protecting the prerogatives of groups or classes whose position and influence might otherwise fade away
(see Boix 1999; Blais et al. 2005). Thus, protecting minority special interests has long been a justification for
bicameralism (Madison 1947; Campion 1954; de Miñón 1975; Russell 2001a, 2001b; de Dijn 2005). Whatever the
protected class, a second chamber works only as long as it provides the ability to affect legislative outcomes
(even if only by imposing a delay; Tsebelis and Money 1997).
Protecting minority interests does not necessarily make for good public policy. Riker (1992a; 1992b) takes the point
a step further to argue that bicameralism protects majority rule from itself—that is, from the kind of social-choice
policy cycles that theory identifies as potentially problematic when policy-making is multidimensional (see Plott
1967; McKelvey 1976; Schofield 1983)—and hence from populism’s contradictions. The basic idea here is that
bicameralism reduces policy-making to an efficient, unidimensional bargain between chambers (Hammond and
Miller 1987; Levmore 1992; Tsebelis and Rasch 1995; Miller et al. 1996; Tsebelis and Money 1997; Bottom et al.
2000; Bradbury and Crain 2002; Congleton 2003). Of course, where the status quo ante is itself an efficient
bargain, the logic that leads to policy stability also implies policy gridlock (Alt and Lowry 1994; Binder 1999, 2003;
Breunig 2008; Hiroi 2008a, 2008b). The kind of disagreement in question springs from fundamental differences on
policy across chambers, differences that it is reasonable to expect only when clearly distinct parties or coalitions
control the separate chambers.
Trivelli (1975, 310), echoing the Abbé Sieyès, suggests that a useful second chamber is one that actively opposes
the lower house some of the time. Too much opposition, however, moves an upper house from useful policy brake
to dangerous threat to majority will (see Rockow 1928). Other theoretically predicted policy effects stem not from
the clearly (p. 336) delineated chamber authorities—variations on the “agenda-setter model” (Romer and
Rosenthal 1978) or veto games (see McCubbins 1991a, 1991b; Tsebelis 1995; Heller 1997; Tsebelis and Money
1997)—but from strategic calculations. König (2001) notes that similar chamber majorities decline to check each
other, an observation that Heller (2001; 2007) argues comes from closed-door negotiations wherein chamber
majorities subordinate minor differences to the larger goals they hold in common. Moving away from parties, Chen
(2010) and Shepsle et al. (2009) examine how bicameralism affects spending policy where electoral districts for
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each chamber overlap districts for the other. Abstracting still further from party politics, Diermeier and Meyerson
(1999) examine how the availability of outside resources from lobbyists might affect interchamber competition and,
consequently, how chambers organize internally in order to better capture those resources. Others build on the
Diermeier and Meyerson result to show that, because it makes it more expensive to buy legislators, bicameralism
should reduce corruption (Testa 2010) and contribute to socially desirable policy outcomes (for environmental
policy in particular; Fredriksson and Millimet 2007). These formal treatments of bicameralism jibe with the argument
that bicameralism provides a chambre de réflexion (Bütikofer and Hug 2010; Einaudi 1948; Hedlund 1984), slowing
down the policy process and forcing extended consideration of bills, thus allowing cooler heads to prevail in
conflictual circumstances.
In order to contribute to any outcome, good or bad, bicameralism has to affect legislative decision-making. It makes
sense that it should—how decisions are made generally affects their content—but to view bicameralism in the
context of legislative process (an excellent examplar is Hug 2010a; 2010b) requires stepping away from the notion
that it is sui generis. Like all institutions, bicameralism provides specific actors with leverage they would not
otherwise have (Heller 2007; VanDusky-Allen and Heller 2014). Unlike many institutions, that influence can only be
collectively exercised, and those who wield it do so (formally) independently from their other-chamber
counterparts.
16.2.2 Bicameralism and Legislative Process
Studies that start with bicameralism as the foundation for veto games tend to consider chambers as independent
actors. They patently are not independent, however: they are tied together—or split apart—by the bonds of party
and, at least in parliamentary systems where both chambers constitute themselves on the basis of elections, the
strategems of governments that seek both to pass legislation and hold onto power. Partisan considerations and
government maneuvring alike contribute to the profound difficulty of observing, not to mention measuring, whether
and how outcomes under bicameralism are different from what they would be in a unicameral system, all else being
equal.
The problems are two fold. First, to the extent that a second chamber is a hindrance to government goals or party
success we expect governments and parties to try to ameliorate the problem. Second, irrespective of whether
governments or parties succeed in minimizing bicameralism’s effects, just as a rational proposer in a game
structured like (p. 337) the agenda-setter model or an ultimatum game (Güth and Tietz 1990) will not bother with
proposals that will not pass, bills that provoke visible conflict ought to be rare at best (Lehnert et al. 2008).1
From the perspective of the government in a parliamentary system, a second chamber is an obstacle. Druckman
and Thies (2002), for example, find that governments last longer where upper-chamber majorities coincide with
parties in government. If duration in government is desirable, as seems reasonable (Diermeier, Eraslan, and Merlo
[2007] explicitly equate time in government with payoffs from government), then formateurs should seek to ensure
that their governments encompass majorities in the upper as well as the lower chamber (Druckman et al. 2005).
Diermeier et al. (2007) formalize Druckman and his co-authors’ insights by positing a tradeoff (in terms of
formateur payoffs) between coalition size and cabinet duration. They find, in line with the truism that it is hard to tell
what is going on in equilibrium, that if observed cabinet stability is constant in the face of (hypothetical) fluctuations
in upper-chamber influence over government survival, coalition size should vary in predictable ways. More
generally, the more that upper chamber majorities desire outcomes different from their lower-chamber
counterparts, the more government has to seek compromise if it wants to get any outcome at all (see Larkin and
Uhr 2009; Fisk 2011).
Political parties are at the root of the problems governments confront in the face of bicameralism. Consideration of
bills does not take place in “acoustically” isolated chambers (Rogers 2001), but rather by different actors with an
overview of where others in similar positions stand. In this light, and in line with the logic of the agenda-setter
model, conflict between chambers doesn’t begin to tell the whole story. Brunner and Debus (2008) show in the
case of Germany, for example, that opposition bills introduced in the German Bundesrat are more likely to fail in
that chamber, even when they are in step programmatically with the preferences of a Bundesrat majority. The
simple explanation is that such bills never would pass in the Bundestag, so mucking up the process by sending
them on to the other chamber is a waste of resources.
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Where chamber majorities differ, conflict is expected. When visible, conflict might allow for desirable party position-
taking and product differentiation. Within parties, however, position-taking and product-differentiation motivations
push co-partisans in different chambers to hew to the same party line (Heller 2007). It thus makes sense to expect
parties to organize to ensure message consistency across chambers, just as it makes sense to expect government
formateurs to balance coalition size against expected duration in order to maximize their expected payoffs
(Diermeier et al. 2007; Druckman et al. 2005; Druckman and Thies 2002). Indeed, VanDusky-Allen and Heller
(2014) show that parties centralize candidate selection in bicameral systems precisely to ensure that their
members in each chamber are responsible to the same principal.
That bicameralism is a key factor for party organization and government-formation strategies is an important
finding. The proper inference is even more profound. How organizations are structured defines how they make
decisions, and one of the enduring lessons from the social-choice literature is that different decision-making
processes often yield different decisions, even if the individuals involved do not change. Similarly, (p. 338) the
choices underlying government formation determine both who gets into government and what government seeks
to achieve (Laver and Shepsle 1996). The effects of bicameralism thus go well beyond the observable
empowerment of competing majorities that scholars typically take as a key defining feature of whether or how
much an upper chamber “matters” for outcomes.
Studies of bicameralism necessarily treat it in terms of legislative structure and process.2 That said, most tend to
treat the chambers as independent entities in some sort of bargaining game rather than as formal decision points
(i.e. structure) in the legislative process that determines how (and whether) a bill goes from an idea to a law. In this
context, the important details lie in the bargaining rules—in particular, stopping rules (Gross 1979; Money and
Tsebelis 1992)—in combination with the preferences that dominate in each chamber. Studies in this vein have
advanced understanding of bicameralism a great deal, but not without cost.
Focusing on bicameralism as the object of interest, rather than as a piece of the political puzzle, has blindered
research in two key ways. On one hand, it is difficult to find studies that look into bicameralism’s effects without
including some aspect of chamber congruence in the definition of bicameralism. On the other hand, taking
bicameralism as the subject of interest carries the risk of putting it on a pedestal, treating it as sui generis and
somehow distinct from other institutional structures. Bicameralism is special, as we noted in the introduction,
because it is constitutionally defined (and hence hard to change) and easy to identify, and because it privileges
distinct legislative actors; in terms of comparative statics, however, it is just another element of institutional design.
As we see it, the most useful recent work on bicameralism treats it as an element of process that motivates
strategic behavior. The approach we advocate places the analysis of bicameralism in the same arena as studies of
legislative committees (e.g. Kiewiet and McCubbins 1991; Krehbiel 1991), bicameral conference committees
(Shepsle and Weingast 1987; Weingast 1989; 1992), and the allocation of agenda power (Cox and McCubbins
1993; 2005). Research on bicameralism can and should take full advantage of advances in other areas of
legislative research; we suspect that focusing on bicameralism’s peculiarities distracts scholars from treating it as
simply one more element of structure and process (the classic consideration of “how a bill becomes a law” found
in innumerable textbooks and legislative websites). As a consequence, our understanding of bicameralism grows
more slowly and in a more piecemeal fashion than it otherwise might.
16.3 Forging Ahead: Process, Parties, and Second Chambers
The observation that chamber majorities depend on each other and that they have to account for (and be taken
into account by) other players in the legislative game, such as presidents, cabinets, or even courts, has led to
some interesting findings. Gross (1982, (p. 339) as amended by Miller 1984), treating each chamber’s
consideration of bills as a step in the policy process, but focusing on the end of that process, argues that the
existence of an expected conference-committee bargain different from what either chamber would have produced
on its own means that confining analysis to each chamber alone won’t cut it. The simple requirement that bills be
deliberated in separate chambers, whatever the stopping rule, implies that in most cases whatever happens in one
chamber occurs in the shadow of what can happen in the other (Brunner and Debus 2008; Hug 2010b; 2010a;
Martin 2001). Chiou and Rothenberg (2003) adapt a pivotal-politics gridlock model to show that real-world
observations of legislative gridlock in the US comport with predictions from theory only when theory makes room
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for party discipline and an independent president. Costello (2011), treating the European Parliament (EP) and the
Council of Ministers as two chambers in a bicameral system, makes use of the natural experiment provided by
existence of distinct versions of legislative process (co-decision and consultation) that provide for different levels
of EP legislative influence. He shows that MEPs behave differently under the two procedures, with co-decision
yielding clearer and more consistent coalition patterns. And in an intriguing study of the (partially) reformed House
of Lords, Russell (2010) argues that changes that plausibly gave members of the Lords a degree of political
legitimacy that hereditary privilege could not afford led the Lords to become more assertive vis-à-vis the House of
Commons. Russell shows at the very least that procedures that make a chamber appear weak can look quite
different where legislators are willing to use the influence provided by legislative procedure.
16.3.1 Bicameralism and Territorial Representation
The killer application for bicameralism in the modern era is representing territorial interests (Russell 2001a). Here,
the key to bicameralism’s importance lies in its (presumptive) role in injecting sub-national interests into the
formulation of national policy (Levmore 1992). Lijphart (1979), for example, saw federalism without bicameralism as
incomplete, and Filippov, Ordeshook, and Shvetsova (2004, 280) include bicameralism with a relatively powerful
upper chamber in their “minimal” list of provisions necessary “to make the federal government sustainable for the
long run.” In a similar vein, Money and Tsebelis (1992) see upper-chamber strength and federalism as feeding off
each other: federalism gives upper chambers (that represent regional interests) legitimacy, which in turn makes
them more assertive (Russell 2010) and hence more effective. All the assertiveness in the world would count for
nought, however, if a duly legitimate lower chamber could ignore upper-house concerns with impunity.
The existence of an upper chamber does not guarantee effective territorial representation, however. Shepsle et al.
(2009), on the way to showing that legislators take both regional concerns and electoral cycles into account in
making appropriations decisions, assume that regional interests are represented in both chambers of the US
Congress. (p. 340) Parties play no role in their argument. This contrasts starkly with Brunner and Debus’s (2008)
finding that the German Land governments most likely to see their proposals wend their way into law are precisely
those that share the government’s partisan complexion (and see König 2001). Further, Kalandrakis (2004)
questions the presumption that individual regions with distinct interests gain more, if anything, from bicameralism
than they could in a suitably malapportioned unicameral legislature (see Cutrone and McCarty 2006). And Heller
(2002) shows that motivated regional parties can reap the benefits of unicameral coalition negotiations where the
legislative party system leaves space for manoeuvre. The mechanism that makes bicameralism necessary or
important for effective federalism thus is murky at best.
In a world where federal or quasi-federal structures are extolled as remedies to civil strife, we need to take
seriously the link between bicameralism and federalism. For the most part, scholars have assumed that
bicameralism provides effective representation to sub-national interests, but have not sought to test the notion. A
casual glance at 19 countries identified by Treisman (2007) suggests that the relationship holds up empirically, but
in light of the evidence that the heavy lifting in bicameralism is done within and by parties, it is worth asking what it
is about bicameralism that makes it important for federalism. Contrary evidence (e.g. the case of Spain; see Rubio
Llorente and Álvarez Junco 2006) is attributed to case-specific deficiencies in electoral rules or legislative
processes and hence cannot challenge the notion of a general federalism/bicameralism relationship. Moving from
an assumption that bicameralism sustains federalism to understanding why it does (and why it might fail) requires
research in two distinct but related directions. On one hand, the evidence points to a key role for political parties;
on the other hand, in order better to understand how bicameralism works we need to get a better handle on how it
fits into legislative structure and process. The first requirement is in large part a question of combining theories of
parties—and in particular of parties in federal systems (Filippov et al. 2004; Ordeshook and Shvetsova 1997)—with
theories of bicameralism. The second requirement cries out for a better way of measuring bicameralism that is
distinct from the preferences of chamber majorities and the question of intercameral congruence.
16.3.2 Measuring Bicameralism
Examinations of bicameralism have been most fruitful, in our view, where they take advantage of the politics of
inter- and intraparty competition and bargaining to get at the effect of legislative institutions. Extending this line of
research to integrate party-centric theories of federalism and the conventional wisdom on the relationship between
Page 6 of 17
bicameralism and federalism holds great promise. To realize this promise, however, measures of bicameralism must
divorce questions of partisanship and preferences from the formal definition of chambers’ relative power. We need,
in other words, an alternative measure of bicameralism.
(p. 341) To date, the only available alternative (but see VanDusky-Allen and Heller 2014) has been to count as
bicameral any country whose constitution stipulates two legislative chambers, or where the upper chamber has a
non-overridable legislative veto (see respectively, Heller 2001; 1997). In the interests of providing a more
generally useful measure, we propose an index of bicameralism that rests on the idea of structure and process and
explicitly does not incorporate partisan concerns. Researchers who want to bring bicameralism and parties
together in their arguments—and we believe they should—can do so in a way appropriate to the questions they are
trying to answer.
We begin with the assumption that chamber majorities seek to influence policy outcomes. We assume as well that
actors, collective or individual, will use their formal authority to advance their own interests, perhaps limited, but
not denied, by other concerns such as party ties. This yields a theoretical basis for conceiving of a chamber’s
power as based fundamentally on its formal ability to affect policy outcomes as a consequence of its place in the
policy process. This ability exists independent of the congruence of chamber compositions, though in terms of
observation we expect that where congruence is high disagreements between chamber majorities should take
place out of public view.
To construct our index, we rely on national constitutions available as of December 2011 (drawn from the University
of Richmond’s Constitution Finder Database <http://confinder.richmond.edu/index.html> and, for a few problematic
cases, Hein Online World Constitutions Illustrated, <http://home.heinonline.org/content/list-of-libraries/>) for the 75
countries whose legislatures fit our definition of bicameral. We designed our coding scheme to capture purely
institutional characteristics, such as whether chambers can veto legislation or only delay it, or whether bills can
originate only in one chamber. In essence, we add up three types of upper-chamber powers—whether it can veto
all legislation, a subset of bills, or merely delay passage (and for how long), in decreasing order of importance for
the final score—and we adjust for whether any veto can be overridden (details available at
<http://bingweb.binghamton.edu/~wheller/research/data.html>). We presume that veto power imparts significant
influence over legislative content, even without concomitant amendment power, because it forces agenda-setters
who care about outcomes to take veto players’ interests into account.3
Our index (see Table 16.1) ranges between 0 and 1, with 1 indicating an upper chamber with authority essentially
equal to that of the lower house and 0 indicating a unicameral system.4 Italy and the United States both score 1
(along with, for example, Australia and Paraguay). The data represent only a snapshot in time, but the coding is
transparent enough to extend the measure back (e.g. to incorporate important changes such as in Belgium (which
in 1994 amended its constitution to become formally federal, even as it weakened its Sénat). While the kind of
constitutional revision that moves a system from unicameral to bicameral (or vice versa) is infrequent, we hold that
it is important and can have repercussions that are both subtle and far-reaching.
(p. 342) Table 16.1 Bicameralism measures compared
Country Heller and Lijphart Huber et Gerring et Henisz VanDusky-Allen

Branduse (1999) al. (2004) al. (2005) (2007) and Heller (2014)
Afghanistan 0.1667 0
Algeria 0.6000 1
Antigua and 0.4982 2 0

Barbuda
Argentina 1.0000 1 1
Australia 1.0000 4 2 1 1
Page 7 of 17
Austria 0.4848 2 0 0 1 0.46
Bahamas 0.4982 2 0
Bahrain 1.0000 1 0
Barbados 0.4982 0
Belarus 0.0839 1 0
Belgium 0.5000 3 1 1 0.67
Belize 0.4982 1 0
Bhutan 1.0000 1 0
Bolivia 1.0000 1
Bosnia and 1.0000 0 0

Herzegovina
Brazil 1.0000 2 1
Burundi 0.4945 0 1
Cambodia 0.0918 2 0
Canada 0.9839 3 0 0 1
Chile 0.5000 2 1
Colombia 1.0000 0 1
D.R. Congo 0.1612 0 1

(Kinsasha)
Congo 0.1612 0
(Brazzaville)
Czech 0.1505 1
Republic
Dominican 1.0000 1 1
Republic
Egypt 0.5000 0 0
Ethiopia 1.0000 0
France 0.1631 3 0 0 1
Gabon 0.1354 1 0
Page 8 of 17
Gabon 0.1354 1 0
Germany 0.9773 4 2 2 0 0.67
(p. 343) 0.4972 0 0

Grenada
Haiti 1.0000 1 1
India 0.9972 0 1
Ireland 0.1648 2 0 0 0 0.45
Italy 1.0000 3 1 2 0 1
Jamaica 0.4976 1 1
Japan 0.0918 3 1 1 1
Jordan 1.0000 1 0
Kazakhstan 1.0000 1 0
Lesotho 0.4839 2 0
Liberia 1.0000 2 1
Madagascar 0.4945 0 0
Malaysia 0.4986 2 0
Mauritania 0.4945 1 0
Mexico 1.0000 1
Morocco 0.4945 0 1
Myanmar 0.5000 0
Namibia 0.0839 1
Netherlands 1.0000 3 1 2 1 0.81
Nigeria 1.0000 1 1
Pakistan 0.9945 0 1
Palau 1.0000 0 1
Paraguay 1.0000 2 1
Philipines 1.0000 1 1
Page 9 of 17
Poland 0.6000 0 1
Romania 0.9918 1 0
Russia 0.0667 2 0
Rwanda 0.5000 0 0
Saint Lucia 0.4972 0
Senegal 0.1042 2 0
Slovenia 0.4375 2 0
South Africa 0.0839 2 1
South Sudan 0.5000 0
Spain 0.0918 3 1
(p. 344) 0.4839 1 0

Sudan
Swaziland 0.9375 0
Switzerland 1.0000 4 2 1
Tajikistan 0.1000 0 0
Thailand 0.4979 0
Trinidad and 0.4982 1 1

Tobago
United 0.4972 2.5 0 1 0 0.52

Kingdom
USA 1.0000 4 2 2 1
Uruguay 1.0000 0 1
Uzbekistan 0.0545 2 0
Zimbabwe 0.4945 0
What distinguishes our index from other measures of bicameralism (Lijphart 1984, 1999; Henisz 2000; 2002, 2006;
Huber et al. 2004; Gerring et al. 2005) is its institutional focus and treatment of upper chambers as elements of
legislative process.5 Other measures of which we are aware either ignore important differences between chambers
in terms of their respective powers or make partisanship/preferences an integral aspect of measurement. Ours is
both more comprehensive than others in its coverage, including non-democratic systems (see Gandhi 2008), and
explicitly ignores the partisanship (p. 345) underpinning observable intercameral bargaining. It nonetheless
Page 10 of 17
correlates fairly well with Lijphart’s (1999) and Huber et al.’s (2004) measures. Henisz’s (2000; 2002; 2006) and
Gerring, Thacker, and Moreno’s (2005) measures, in contrast, predictably correlate poorly with ours (see Table
16.2): Henisz’s binary coding brings in executive-legislative relations (from the Polity dataset; Marshall and Jaggers
2010), while Gerring, Thacker, and Moreno (2005) measure “nonbicameralism” (hence the negative correlation)
and also join the others in incorporating chamber congruence into their coding (Svensson et al. 2012, Codebook,
202).
Table 16.2 Bicameralism measures: correlations
Heller Lijphart Huber et Gerring Henisz VanDusky -Allen

and (1999) al. et al. (2007) and Heller
Branduse (2004) (2005) (2014)
Heller and 1.0000

Branduse
Lijphart (1999) 0.6076 1.0000
Huber et al. 0.6118 0.8984 1.0000

(2004)
Gerring et al. −0.3049 −0.9693 −0.9469 1.0000

(2005)
Henisz (2007) 0.2655 0.2226 0.1393 −0.3388 1.0000
VanDusky-Allen 0.8262 0.5721 0.6025 −0.6025 −0.0355 1.0000

and Heller (2014)
16.4 Conclusion
Despite its qualities as an attractive object for study, or more probably because of them, bicameralism is a hard nut
to crack. In democracies, the ubiquity of political parties and interparty competition obscures any independent
effects (and incentives) that bicameralism might produce. In non-democratic regimes, Gandhi’s (2008) key insight
that formal authority confers some degree of real influence notwithstanding, the presumption that legislatures are
mere window dressing makes bicameralism appear irrelevant (see Henisz 2000, 2002, 2006).6 Basically, any
effects of bicameralism tend to be obscured—but not swept away or neutered—by power asymmetries and the
effects of intra- and interparty politics.
We have sought to do two things in this chapter. We have tried to map trends in the study of bicameralism and we
have tried to identify how taking bicameralism seriously can provide leverage for understanding larger questions.
Building on our review of the state of research on bicameralism, we believe that the next “big thing” requires taking
two steps back from the way scholars usually think about bicameral legislatures. First, we need to abandon the
unquestioned presumption that bicameralism is an essential pillar of support for federalism. It might be, but simply
assuming that it is unhelpful. Second, we need to stop thinking of bicameralism as removed from other aspects of
legislative structure and process. Bicameralism is unique in that it is unambiguously present in some systems and
unambiguously absent in others, but where it exists it can and should be accounted for using the same tools
scholars apply to the studying other facets of institutional architecture.
Our starting goals lead us to a third. With an eye to helping researchers assimilate bicameralism into legislative
studies more naturally, we offer a new, purely institutional measure of bicameralism. Our index separates the
preferences and party affiliations of members of upper (and lower) chambers from the question of how much
authority they have. Researchers who want to examine partisan conflict thus can combine data on parties or the
Page 11 of 17
partisan composition of legislative chambers with our measure in order to delve into a range of questions, from the
role of position-taking versus policy-making (see Mayhew 1974) to government-coalition bargains. Researchers
who want to explore questions touching on intraparty politics or the (p. 346) relationship between party-as-
organization and party-in-the-legislature, for example, can leverage bicameralism as a means of dispersing
authority within as well as among parties. And researchers who want to understand the evolution and survival of
federal and near-federal systems can combine multilevel data on political parties, federal structures, and
bicameralism to gain insight into the sources of stability. The object is not simply to study bicameralism in isolation,
but rather to understand its effects on political actors’ calculations and behavior. The object is to bring studies that
highlight politics not only within but across chambers into the mainstream.
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Notes:
(1) . The rarity of observed conflict is a general problem in studying institutions. Where they work, they should
motivate institutionally empowered actors to internalize each other’s preferences. The resulting observation (in
equilibrium) is that all proposals are accepted. It is only where they don’t work, information is deficient, or there are
additional considerations in play that we should observe institutional tools being put to use.
(2) . We leave to one side research into second chambers and their members that embraces no aspect of
intercameral interaction. Studies along these lines sometimes claim the “bicameralism” label, if only because upper
Page 16 of 17
chambers have received precious little attention in legislative studies, but they are no more bicameral than
research focusing solely on lower chambers.
(3) . Much of the data we and others use is collected in the Quality of Government dataset (see Svensson et al.
2012).
(4) . Our index includes only bicameral systems, the “least” bicameral of which, according to our measure, is
Uzbekistan with an index value of 0.0545.
(5) . Timing might matter as well, if any countries have amended either chamber’s constitutional authority since the
older measures we refer to were created.
(6) . This assumption is probably misguided. If legislatures matter even in dictatorships, as Gandhi (2008) argues,
and if institutional structure matters generally, then it should make a difference whether the legislature is bicameral
or unicameral.
William B. Heller
William B. Heller is Associate Professor in the Department of Political Science, Binghamton University.
Diana M. Branduse
Diana M. Branduse is a Doctoral Candidate in the Department of Political Science, Binghamton University.
Page 17 of 17
Committees
Committees
Shane Martin
Institutions
2014
Legislative committees are internal subunits of the legislature comprised of legislators and enjoying certain
delegated authority. As a common form of legislative organization, committees play an important role in the
functioning of the legislature, for example by influencing the content of legislation and holding the executive
accountable. This article discusses the four most prominent theories that explain why committees are fundamental
to the operation and everyday life of the US House of Representatives and the Senate: distributional theory,
informational theory, cartel-party theory, and bicameral-conflict theory. It also considers attempts to test
empirically theories of committees in legislatures outside the United States and examines comparative theories of
legislative organization.
Keywords: legislative committees, parliamentary committees, House of Representatives, Senate, distributional theory, informational theory, cartel-
party theory, bicameral-rivalry theory, legislatures, United States, legislative organization
17.1 Introduction
AT least since Woodrow Wilson’s canonical observation, “Congress in session is Congress on public exhibition,
whilst Congress in its committee-rooms is Congress at work” (Wilson 1963 [1885], 69), legislative scholars have
sought to understand the origins, design, role, and significance of legislative committees. Committees, defined as
an internal subunit of the legislature comprised of legislators and enjoying certain delegated authority, are a
common form of legislative organization. Indeed, virtually no democratic national legislature is without at least one
committee. Today, the conventional notion is that a strong system of committees, however defined, is a necessary
if not sufficient condition for the legislature to operate effectively, not least in terms of influencing the content of
legislation and holding the executive accountable.
Although establishing a system of committees may seem like an obvious organizational choice to overcome the
plenary bottleneck (Cox 2006), significant attention has focused on the exact reason for committees’ popularity as
a form of legislative organizations. Indeed arguably, legislative scholarship has experienced a “golden age” of
committee research—with analysis of US Congressional committees influencing not just legislative studies but also
the study of American politics and political institutions more generally (Diermeier, this volume). This chapter begins
with a review of the four most prominent theories emerging from this golden era: the distributional theory, the
informational theory, the cartel-party theory, and the bicameral-conflict theory. Each of these theories seeks to
explain why committees are fundamental to the organization of the United States House of Representatives and the
Senate.
Subsequently, Section Three discusses attempts to test empirically theories of committees in non-US legislatures.
Comparative legislative research has the potential to provide an obvious laboratory for studying theories of
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committee organization. Despite the increasing tendency of Congressional research to influence comparative
legislative research, the popularity of research on Congressional committees has not resulted in (p. 353) much
cross-national research on such bodies. National legislatures vary in methods for organizing committees and their
role in the process of decision-making. Yet, with notable execeptions, attempts to measure and explain such
variation are largely absent.
Section Four reviews such exceptions. Examining committees in multiple systems represents an appropriate means
to reinvigorate the Congressional and comparative study of legislative organization. If committees are really a
necessary ingredient for modern parliaments to operate effectively and to achieve goals of both the collective
organization and individual members, a greater understanding of committees is crucial to more fully understand the
functioning of legislatures.
17.2 Explaining Congressional Committees
This section explores developments during the late 1970s through the 1990s which saw considerable attention
paid to the issue of why committees appear so significant to the operation and everyday life of the US Congress.
The era produced four significant and competing theories of legislative organization. Arguably, the level of
theoretical and, to a lesser degree, empirical innovation and this literature’s wider impact on the study of politics
warrants identifying the period as a golden age of legislative research. The initial focus here is on these theories in
the setting where they were first considered, namely the US Congress and especially the US House of
Representatives.
17.2.1 Distributional Theory
The distributional theory gains its designation from the suggestion that committees exist to allow members to
distribute particularistic benefits to their constituents. Benefits could include specific policies favoured by voters in
the member’s district or so called pork-barrel projects, in legislative jargon, “fiscal legislative particularism,” which
refers to the practice of spending national tax revenues on economically inefficient, geographically targeted
projects. A number of assumptions are key factors for understanding the distributional theory of legislative
organizations; in particular, legislators’ self-interest and motivations from the goal of re-election requires building
personal reputations with constituents by providing vote-winning pork-barrel projects and aligning policy concerns
with voters’ salient issues (Mayhew 1974; Fenno 1978). For example, voters in a Michigan district with or close to a
car-manufacturing conglomerate may have different concerns for policies than voters in rural Kansas, who place
salience on policies different from those of voters in New York City. While those constituents emphasize urban
environment and public transport, Michigan voters’ concerns may centre on protecting domestic manufacturing
industries from foreign competition. Rural voters may seek to promote agriculture, and in particular, assurance of
continued flow of governmental subsidies to support farming. To be re-elected, incumbents must adopt policies
most (p. 354) salient to their constituents, control public policy, and allocate scare resources to the sector that
enhances credentials with voters.
Yet, in a plenary-centred legislature where simple majorities can enact changes to policy, each legislator is equal in
ability to influence all proposals. Thus, unless representatives from rural areas control a majority of the plenary,
they cannot, clearly, control and claim credit for agricultural policy. Complicating the situations is that the
existence of multiple salient policy issues disallows the likelihood that any one interest can maintain a majority of
the plenary. Social choice theory hypothesizes that political outcomes under such conditions, and assuming simple
majority rules, are inherently unstable (Arrow 1951). The classic divide-the-dollar game illustrates the problem: in
this game, three players must agree to divide a dollar. Under majority rules, any two can form a winning coalition to
agree on the distribution of the 100 cents. Player A and Player B may agree to divide the dollar equally between
them, leaving Player C with no money, thus “maximizing” the utility of A and B. However, Player C may offer a
counter-proposal, perhaps by offering Player A 51 cents and retaining 49 cents, thus denying Player B any money
and simultaneously improving Payer A’s position (by one cent). And so the game continues. No obvious result is
available and any counter decision can easily negate a previous one.
The divide-the-dollar game applies, substantively, to any legislative setting which allocates scarce resources.
Distribution of funding in pork-barrel politics is a classic example—legislators must collectively agree the amount
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each member receives, but in a majority setting, any decision has the potential for alteration by a counter
proposal, just as in the divide-the-dollar game. However, cycling can occur in less obvious ways: for simplicity,
consider a House of Representatives divided three ways based on members’ and their constituents’ preferences
for policies. The focus of one group of incumbents is domestic manufacturing, the second agriculture, and the third
urban environment, with all three interests aiming for spending-sensitive policy changes. This situation
characterizes a sequential game, which requires a coalition of two groups to institute change. The domestic
manufacturing and agricultural interests may coalesce with the agricultural group voting for the manufacturing
group’s interests with the agreement that the manufacturers will subsequently support agricultural interests at
another time. But once the manufacturing bill gains approval, the manufacturers have no incentive not to renege
on any promise made to their agricultural colleagues. Instead, the rational action for the manufacturers would be to
seek to strike a new deal to secure an additional allocation of the remaining resources. Thus, cycling emerges, with
always changing coalitions and no credible ability to commit to log-rolling—the sequential exchange of votes. The
game, although simple, illustrates what social choice scholars typically refer to as the Condorcet cycle. In short, no
decision is stable.
Shepsle and Weingast (1981) suggested that committees exist to break the chaos predicted by cycling by allowing
for credible commitment in log-rolling, thus permitting members to distribute particularistic policies and spending to
their constituents. Legislative chambers typically decide their internal organizations, and legislative chambers can
constitute a system of committees to ensure that members with particular (p. 355) preferences for policies control
those policy areas. Thus, representatives of agricultural interests seek establishment of an agricultural committee
which has control of governmental policies and allocation of resources that concern the industry—effectively
removing decisions from the plenary and providing power to members who have the most to gain or lose in that
policy area. Put slightly differently, committees represent rules to prevent the breakdown of cooperation among
groups with different priorities for policy and who cooperate to enact legislation (Weingast and Marshall 1988).
Empirically, Katz and Sala (1996) noted the emergence of the candidate-centred ballot created the need for credit-
claiming with constituents and associated this with the emergence of Congressional committees.
Such parsimonious, but nonetheless powerful, explanations of committees’ distributional origin requires committees
to have three characteristics. First, committees must have the ability to control the agenda and the outcome in the
policy jurisdictions—commonly known as gatekeeping powers. The plenary, thus, must delegate significant
authority to committees, making them veto-players in the legislative process. Consequently, any change in
agricultural policy must require approval of the relevant agricultural committee. Second, members must be able to
self-select into preferred committees (Shepsle 1978). Third, and relatedly, committees are composed of “policy-
outliers” (Shepsle and Weingast 1987). In other words, committees should not be representative of the plenary (or
the plenary median) but should include members with extreme preferences toward the committee’s jurisdiction.
Thus, to continue the example, an agricultural committee would consist of members strongly interested in and
committed to that industry. As such, the committee would be unrepresentative of the chamber. Crucially, the
policies emanating from the legislature are ultimately unrepresentative of the views of the majority in the plenary—
exactly because the committee has the power to control the agenda in that policy area.
The suggestion of committees as institutional solutions to drive geographically focused particularistic distribution,
and thus incumbents’ re-elections, has had a profound effect on the study of social choice theory and American
politics. Social choice scholars long suggested that cycling and chaos were the expectations in legislative settings
and the reason for real-world legislatures not behaving in this way presented a puzzle. As Tullock (1981) asked,
“[s]o why so much stability?” The answer, proposed by scholars of congressional committees is that design of
internal legislative institutions can avoid cycling, facilitate log-rolling, and stabilize decision-making. Thus,
institutions can reshape decision-making—an important insight simultaneously reflecting and driving the growth of
neo-institutional perspectives in political science. The best example is, perhaps, reflected in Shepsle’s “structure
induced equilibrium” (Shepsle 1979). At the heart of structure-induced equilibrium is the notion that institutional
structures, such as decision rules, allocation of authority, and committees’ agenda control can generate stable
outcomes—in other words, an equilibrium induced by institutional structures. The suggestion is that we don’t
observe chaos in modern legislatures because internal legislative structures such as committees prevent cycling.
(p. 356) 17.2.2 Informational Theory
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Whenever a theory approaches the status of settled conventional wisdom, as happened with the distributional
theory, it is likely to be challenged by alternative perspectives. And so it was for the distributional theory. The
informational theory of legislative organization emerged from the same paradigm as the distributional theory,
namely the perspective of rational choice institutionalism. But the informational theory fundamentally challenges
the orthodoxy that committees exist to aid distribution, and consequently, members’ re-election needs.
The foundation of the informational perspective is the notion of imperfect information. Most models of rational
choice political behaviour assume perfect information, yet, in the real world, outcomes are uncertain and actors
make choices with limited or imperfect information. Despite legislators’ knowing their preferred policy outcomes, the
optimal route for achieving a policy outcome may be unclear. Policy-making is complex and perhaps even more
challenging when the legislature confronts a better-resourced executive and bureaucracy. Creating subunits and
delegating authority allows for the effective and efficient use of time. This organizational advantage of committees
is not only characteristic of legislatures; any organization can benefit from creating a subunit in which members
specialize. Consequently, almost immediately, the workload of the assembly can increase dramatically as the
plenary bottleneck succumbs to committees working simultaneously, thereby exponentially increasing the possible
workload and output of legislatures.
Importantly, the informational argument of Gilligan and Krehbiel (1987) moves beyond simple argument for
organizational efficiency to suggest that the legislature is structured to maximize members’ acquisition and sharing
of information. A series of articles (see, especially, Gilligan and Krehbiel 1987 and 1990) and a seminal monograph
on Congressional organization (Krehbiel, 1991) suggested that committees provide a mechanism by which
members of Congress can focus and specialize in particular policy areas. Therefore, committees do not just allow
more work to be done, they allow members’ specialization to accumulate informational advantages and tacit
knowledge resulting in better legislative activities of benefit to the entire chamber. As such, members provide
policy expertise as a collective public good and service to the chamber.
A more subtle aspect of the informational theory relates to the rationale for members’ specialization. In the
distributional perspective, members’ incentives are clear: Membership on a committee delivers distributive benefits
which aid re-election. In contrast, membership on committees, from the informational perspective, provides a
collective benefit. Members undertaking committee assignments must recognize the gain from contributions is
respect and honor from the parent chamber. Thus, committees must have prerogatives, even if the parent
chamber maintains a check on agendas.
The key element to ensuring ideological congruence between the committee’s position and the chamber’s position
is the appointment process and selection criteria; committees should be a microcosm of the parent chamber.
Appointment of members to committees should be not to facilitate constituents’ particular interests but rather (p.
357) members’ personal expertise and knowledge. This expectation of committee members as representatives of
the floor is in sharp contrast to the distributional theory’s suggestion that committees consist of “policy outliers.”
The difference in the expected characteristics of members provides an observable consequence and a potential
opportunity to test which theory most correctly reflects the reality of congressional committees by empirically
comparing the composition of committees to the composition of the chamber.
Krehbiel (1990) was among the first to test the committee composition hypotheses. Using interest-group ratings of
members’ perspectives, and data of the membership of committees, some evidence emerged countering the
distributional perspective. Subsequent congressional research sought to investigate the committees’ congruence
with the parent chamber. Yet, no conclusive evidence appeared to support either the distributional or informational
perspectives. For example, Groseclose (1994) found little evidence that committees consist of preference outliers
or that committees are representative of the parent chamber. Adler and Lapinski (1997) reported evidence in
favour of the distributional perspective, finding that committees disproportionately consist of legislators whose
constituents have special interests in the committees’ portfolios.
Ultimately, the informational perspective, along with the distributional perspective, represent stylized abstractions
from reality with neither, alone, likely to fully explain legislative organization. For many, the informational
perspective is a perfectly intuitive theory of organization and intra-institutional delegated authority. Yet, as Krehbiel
(1990) appeared to acknowledge, explaining individual legislator’s committing resources to building expertise for
policy requires some payoff from committee work. Given the dominant motivation being re-election in the
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Congressional setting, Krehbiel (1991, 259) acknowledges that “the axiomatic foundation of informational theory
has both informational and distributional components.”
Meanwhile, scholars of comparative legislatures may well question the role the legislative party plays in theories of
congressional politics. In part, both previous theories stress the individual legislator as the central unit of analysis
and discount, if not entirely ignor the role of political parties in Congress. In contrast, the third major theory of
committee organizations places the legislative party at the centre of explanation.
17.2.3 Party Cartel Theory
As previously discussed, two of the dominant theories of internal legislative organization (the distributional and
informational theories) place emphasis on individual members’ interests and abilities to shape the committee
system. In a significant departure within the tradition of congressional rational choice, Cox and McCubbins (1993)
suggested a need to re-evaluate the role and impact of legislative parties in the US Congress (see also Aldrich
1995 and Rohde 1991). Cox and McCubbins acknowledged that much of the observable work of Congress is
undertaken within and between committees but suggested that political parties nevertheless play a crucial role by
shaping the committee (p. 358) system and committee activities. Moreover, for Cox and McCubbins, the
structuring of the system by political parties assists the party’s leadership by cartelizing legislative power. The
committee system, far from being the focal point of power is a structure created to allow parties to influence
members’ behaviour. In the model of a partisan cartel, all is not as apparent to the casual observer, and in
particular, committees are not the dominant source of influence and authority which traditional accounts of
congressional organization suggest.
Similar to the empirical investigation of existing theories of organization of committees, Cox and McCubbins (1993)
focused on the assignment (and reassignment) process—the rules by which members gain appointment. The
party’s leadership, Cox and McCubbins suggest, play a far more significant role in the assignment process than
previously acknowledged. The analysis of assignments to committees, between 1947 and 1988, undermines the
assumption that committees consist of policy outliers. Assignments of members of Congress are not always to their
preferred choices. Instead, evidence suggests the party leaders cartelize the allocation of assignments and use
the assignments strategically to reward loyal partisan and punish members who have defied the leadership during
roll-call votes. A similar pattern of control emerges when exploring requests for switched assignments
(reassignment of committee membership). In short, the suggestion is that the focus on committees as an important
unit within Congress obscures the fact that parties control who sits on which committee. This control shapes not
only the composition of committees, and by extension the nature of the committee, but also the power the party
leadership wields, to enforce party discipline. It may not be a case of committees versus parties, but parties using
committees.
For Sartori (1997) bipartisan behaviour and continuous interaction are features of a committee-centred rather than
plenary-centred legislature. Indeed, it could be argued that committees are capable of being less political than the
plenary. The US case appears not to conform to this model. In exploring patterns of behaviour inside Congressional
committees, Cox and McCubbins (1993) uncovered significant evidence of partisanship, which, they suggest,
confirms their thesis that conventional wisdom of congressional scholars understates the role and impact of
parties. For example, bill sponsorship aligns along partisan lines. Thus, committees are not alternatives to parties
within the legislature but in their operation and behaviour reflect the predominance of party. This significant
departure from the thesis of a “committee-centred Congress” has the consequence of rendering the appearance
of the US to be more similar to parliamentarism in which scholars have long understood the predominance of party,
and not committees, as the central organizational structure.
17.2.4 Bicameral-Rivalry Theory
The foundation for the fourth theory of committees in Congress arises again from the perspective of rational
choice, from which committees are member-designed, (p. 359) institutional aids for members’ achieving their
goals. In the bicameral-rivalry theory, the proximate goal, however, is neither re-election nor policy influence, but
the maximization of payments to legislators by lobbyists. The rationale for committees as mechanisms to extract
maximum payments from lobbyists relates to whether or not the legislature consists of one or two chambers, hence
the name bicameral-rivalry theory (Groseclose and King 2001).
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Diermeier and Myerson (1999) suggested that a non-cooperative game between competing chambers provides the
best understanding of the internal organizational design of a chamber. Consequently, the cameral structure
(whether the legislature has a single or multiple chambers) shapes the incentives for establishing committees as
core organizational features. Diermeier and Myerson’s explanation and model relies on a vote-buying perspective
whereby lobbyists use bribes in an attempt to influence legislative outcomes. In this game, legislators desire to
maximize their monetary payoffs. The core contribution of Diermeier and Myerson is demonstrating, through formal
modeling, that legislators maximize their monetary payoffs under bicameralism by creating institutional hurdles
within each chamber. Institutional hurdles include within-chamber veto points and supermajority requirements.
Thus, if one chamber has such hurdles and the second chooses not to, members of the first chamber extract
disproportionately more bribes from lobbyists. In equilibrium, both chambers should maximize their hurdles in order
to maximize their share of bribes. A strong committee system with delegated authority, arguably, is an obvious
avenue for a chamber to create an internal hurdle. Committees can institute an internal veto to maximize
incumbents’ monetary returns derived from lobbyists seeking passage of preferred legislation.
Plausibly, many would reject or at least question the underlying assumption that legislators design the internal
organization of the chamber to maximize monetary payments from lobbyists. However, as Groseclose and King
(2001) astutely observed, the possibility remains to retain the Diermeier and Myerson (1999) model and derived
expectations while replacing bribes as the core motivation of legislators with “power” or “policy influence.” From
this perspective, chambers in a bicameral system engage in a non-cooperative game competing for influence on
policy-making. In such circumstances, the approach suggested by Diermeier and Myerson (1999) would yield
exactly the same expectations: a chamber in competition with another chamber for legislative influence would
create internal hurdles to maximize influence; committees, apparently, are ideal internal hurdles.
Although the bicameral-rivalry theory has not received sufficient attention compared to the distributive,
informational, and cartel-party theories of committees, the rivalry theory nevertheless, is appealing for its
parsimony. Moreover, it fits with the well-observed idea that the US House of Representatives and Senate compete
aggressively with each other to shape policies. In seeking to indirectly test various components and observable
consequences of the competing theories of Congressional committees, Groseclose and King (2001) suggested that
the bicameral-rivalry theory is at least as empirically accurate as the three other theories. Gailmard and Hammond
(2011) returned to the bicameralism argument, suggesting that committees are bargaining (p. 360) agents in
interactions with the other chamber. Again, using formal analysis, they suggested that this creates incentives to
stack committees with “tough” agents—those whose polices misalign with the parent chamber but whose
consequently tough bargaining confounds the other chamber. The impact of inter-cameral rivalry on intra-chamber
organization undoubtedly deserved more attention.
17.3 Do Congressional Theories Travel Well?
Clearly, a richly informative literature exists for the origins and consequences of internal legislative design in the
case of the US Congress. By contrast, the literature is sparse in consideration of the reasons for the evolution of
the legislative structures in parliamentary systems. Given the increasing tendency to frame comparative legislative
research within the congressional literature, perhaps surprisingly, an understanding of the origins of committees as
a form of legislative organization has not reproduced itself in other settings. The explanation for the non-mobility of
committees as an agenda for research perhaps relates to the perceived weakness of committees in most
legislatures operating under parliamentarism (Lees and Shaw 1979; Hazan 2001). Of course, even if accepting that
committees are not particularly significant in all legislatures, the reasons for this are legitimate and fruitful issues for
research. The second and possibly more significant factor preventing construction of comparative theories relates
to a lack of data to test any such theories. In short, and with some exceptions discussed later, paucity exists for
comparable data on national committee systems and even a sense of the important institutional features of
committee systems. In short, comparative work on committee structures is largely country-specific or thick-
descriptive in intent.
A clear exception is the empirical contribution made by Mattson and Strøm (1995) as part of the Döring project
exploring the structure and operation of 17 Western European parliaments and the European Parliament. Mattson
and Strøm (1995) provided impressive detail for a large number of committees’ features covering structures,
procedures, and powers. The reductionist method, codifying the rich details and significant complexities of
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committee institutions in each parliament has the potential to miss much of the important information. Nevertheless,
the impressive data reveals that committee systems differ greatly in their complexities and arrangements.
Committee strength, at least in part, is representative of two observable dimensions. The first dimension relates to
committees’ abilities to draft legislation, including, for example, the right to initiate legislation or rewrite bills. A
second dimension relates to committees’ ability to control its own agendas, including, for example, controlling its
own timetable and the ability to summon witnesses and demand documents.
Mattson and Strøm (1995) embedded their data and analysis within the broad framework of rational choice and
used the European data as a test of the distributional, (p. 361) informational, and cartel party theories of
Congressional committees. Sadly, they concluded that a clear-cut test of these competing propositions is not
possible, although they postulated that the evidence seems to favour the informational perspective. Western
European committee systems seem to share many of the features associated with committees as institutions to
maximize gains from exchange through policy specialization. Yet the suggestion is tentative and Mattson and Strøm
(1995) concluded their exploration of committees in European parliaments by suggesting that “many of the critical
questions have not yet been asked, much less answered.” Disputing their analysis remains difficult, today as well
as originally.
Martin (2011) reported original data on committees’ designs in 39 democratic legislatures, with the express intent of
building an index of committees’ strengths. Such endeavors inevitably accrue costs and challenges: determining,
ex-ante, the characteristics of a strong committee system relative to a weak committee systems is necessary.
Building on Strøm (1990), seven features of committee systems are suggested as potential measures of the ability
of committees to impact public policy and oversight:
1. Committees’ jurisdictional congruence with executive departments.

2. The stage, if any, in the legislative process in which committees consider bills.
3. Committees’ rights to initiate legislation.
4. Committees’ rights to amend proposed legislation and/or rewrite bills.
5. Committees’ authority to compel ministerial attendance and evidence.
6. Committees’ authority to compel civil servants to attend.
7. Existence of subcommittees.
To provide an example of the rational, the first component of the index of committee strength—the congruence
between official ministries and committee portfolios—may be a key indication of committee influence. The more
closely the committee system corresponds to ministerial portfolios the more likely the former holds “property rights”
over a particular area of policy. The congruence between ministry and committee should also ease oversight, with
the committee able to accumulate expertise concerning an ongoing interaction with the relevant department.
Notably, all seven variables are rule-based; that does not suggest any direct measure of influence from the
committee.
Even when generally agreed that certain institutional characteristics imply significance, scoring each variable for
each country is necessary. Martin (2011) relied on a mixture of document analysis (national constitutions, the
chamber’s Standing Orders, other rules of procedures) and a survey of national experts. The general absence of
cross-institutional and inter-temporal measures of committee organization and the entirely absent variables for
committees from cross-national studies of institutional structures reflects the difficulty of obtaining such data. For
example, committees are notably absent in the Fish and Kroenig (2009) study of the powers and rules of national
parliaments.
An alternative empirical strategy has been to focus on one or a small number of legislatures and explore, in detail,
typically quantitatively, the patterns of appointments. (p. 362) This seems a potentially fruitful exercise when
recalling that an analysis of appointments to committees formed the backbone of empirical research on
Congressional committees.
The European Parliament (EP) system of committees provides a special opportunity to test theories of assignments
to committees given the similarity between the US Congress and the parliament of the European Union (see Hix and
Høyland, this volume). Earlier study of committees in the EP noted that distribution of committee’ assignments were
proportionate to the party’s plenary size, and parties thus influenced and shaped the composition of committees
(Bowler and Farrell 1995; McElroy 2006)—suggesting evidence favouring the party-cartel perspective. In contrast,
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Whitaker (2001; 2011) noted that members are typically able to self-select assignments, based on members’ own
policy interests—suggesting evidence in favour of the informational perspective. Yordanova (2009) found little
evidence to support the partisan theory but noted that committees with distributive potential tend to consist of
“high-demanding” preferential outliers—suggesting evidence in favour of the distributive explanation. In contrast,
committees with no distributive authority tend to attract members with relevant expertise but no special interests—
suggesting evidence in favour of the informational perspective. As with the US Congress, research on committees
in the EP currently brings us no closer to agreeing on a general theory of legislative organization.
Crisp et al. (2009) explored patterns of assignment to committees in Argentina, Costa Rica, and Venezuela. They
found that procedures for selection of candidates and electoral rules contribute to explaining some but not most of
the variation in patterns of assignments among national cases and individual careers. Ciftci, Forrest, and Tekin
(2008) explored patterns of assignments to committees in the Turkish National Grand Assembly and found
evidence that policy interests and seniority are influential, interpreted as evidence for both distributional and
informational theories. They also revealed that members closest to the party median were more likely to receive
assignments. Thus, the empirical study of the Turkish case seems to suggest that the three theories of
congressional organization have at least some predictive value but no one theory best explains the Turkish
pattern.
Other recent studies explored the patterns of assignments to committees in the Danish Folketing (Hansen 2010)
and the Irish Dáil (Hansen 2011). The Danish case suggests assignment processes differ within the same chamber
by party. Some parties place members with special knowledge on relevant committees, although this practice
appears to be declining. For smaller parties, allocation to committees appears less strategic. In the Irish case,
neither the distributional, informational, nor partisan theories explain the pattern of assignments, leading Hansen to
speculate that the entire process is simply random. Ultimately, Hansen (2011, 358) suggested that the aspect
needed to advance understanding of committees in European parliaments is “a clear break with the theories based
on the unique American institutional design,” which leads us to consideration of the recent and ongoing attempts to
move beyond congressional theories and toward comparative theories of legislative organization.
(p. 363) 17.4 Comparative Theories of Legislative Organization
As Martin and Vanberg (this volume) highlight, recent comparative research suggested that legislatures play a key
role in helping individual parties in multiparty government maintain relationships. Each party in such governments
must maintain awareness of each other to ensure implementation of agreed policies by each minister (Strøm,
Muller, and Smith 2010 provide a review of legislative and extra-legislative controlling mechanisms).
Recent scholarship suggested that parliamentary committees function as mechanisms for parties in government
coalitions to maintain oversight of each other. In particular, Martin and Vanberg (2004; 2005; 2011) showed that
parties in government use parliaments to review policies of their coalition partners. For any given policy proposal,
the greater the ideological distance between parties on that issue, the longer was required for the bill to pass
through the committee stage in the legislative process. Moreover, the more divisive the topic, in terms of the
preferences of each party in government, the more amendments were added—to correct any “ministerial drift.” As
Hallerberg (2000) identified, in the case of budgetary politics, at least two characteristics of committee’ systems
maximize the usefulness of committees as a tool of intra-coalition monitoring: First, committee jurisdictions should
be congruent with ministerial portfolios. Second, in terms of the appointment of committee chairs, such appointment
should come from a party other than the party controlling the ministerial portfolio. In other words, in a two-party
government, in which one party controls the agricultural portfolio at cabinet level, the other party should control
the chair of the agricultural committee. Clark and Jurgelevilt (2008) revealed that Lithuanian parties adopt such
strategies for appointing chairs in committees.
In a significant contribution to this debate, Carroll and Cox (2012) considered the pattern of parties in government
in 19 legislatures shadowing each other through the use of committee chairs. Their findings are consistent with the
theory that committees are monitoring mechanisms. Moreover, Carroll and Cox (2011) confirmed previous results
that monitoring (this time through the strategic appointment of committees’ chairs) is most likely to occur when
political parties governing together diverge most from each others’ preferred positions on policies.
Martin and Depauw (2011) extended the previous suggestion, by asserting that committees emerge under
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parliamentarism as a structural solution to the needs of each party in a coalition government to maintain oversight
of the other. The suggestion is that parties’ need to “keep tabs” on coalition partners shapes not only legislative
behaviour but also structures legislative organization, in particular, committee structures and powers. A strong
committee system is likely the best form by which the legislature can hold accountable individual cabinet ministers
(Lees and Shaw 1979) by scrutinizing draft laws emerging from the government. Significantly, they can do so more
efficiently and (p. 364) effectively than the plenary assembly because of gains from trade, information
acquisition, and specializations of committee members (Krehbiel 1991). Strong committees can maintain vigilance
over post- and non-legislative activities of individual ministers, particularly when parliamentary committees shadow
a particular official department. Only as long as committees continue to serve governing parties’ interests for
monitoring one another, will strong committee systems be features in legislatures. This argument suggests both an
informational role for committees and a partisan role as the key players are political parties seeking to maintain
oversight of each other. Supporting cross-institutional evidence linking government-type (coalition versus single-
party) and the structure of legislatures, is a case study tracing the reorganization and strengthening of committees
in the Irish parliament following Ireland’s shift from single-party to multiparty government. The suggestion is that
legislative organization shifted in the Irish case, with committee structures strengthened to serve as an institutional
solution to the needs of the smaller Irish parties in a coalition government to shadow their larger partners.
Powell (2000, 34) noted the empirical correlation between strong committees and proportionally representative
electoral systems. This may reflect that majoritarian electoral systems tend to lead to single-party government,
whereas proportional representation electoral systems lead to parliaments with no party having an overall majority,
rendering coalition governments more common. If committees serve as a solution to problems of multiparty
government, expectedly, an empirical correlation would arise between proportional representation electoral
systems and strong committee systems in legislatures.
A reasonable but largely overlooked suggestion is that the system of committees depends on whether or not the
legislature operates in a consensus as opposed to a majoritarian democracy (Lijphart 1999). Conventionally,
strong committees are associated with opposition influence. Stronger committees may, therefore, be a feature of
consensus-based political institutions with weaker committee systems more likely to exist in majoritarian political
systems.
Finally, Martin (2011) suggested an alteration to the distributional theory as an explanation of legislative
organization under parliamentarism as distinct from presidentialism. The implication of the distributive theory of
congressional organization is that candidate-centred electoral systems should result in legislatures with strong
committees. Martin (2011) suggests an overlooking of a key component of the relationship between electoral
systems and legislative organization: The mechanism to cultivate a personal vote shapes legislators’ preferences
over institutional design. Committees will be stronger when personal vote-seeking legislators supply fiscal
particularism (pork) but weaker when legislators cultivate personal support by delivering extra-legislative service to
constituencies. Empirically, Martin found that the effect of personal votes is conditional on legislators’ ability to
provide fiscal particularism. The unconditional effect of ballot structure on committees’ strengths is statistically
insignificant. The direction (and magnitude) of the effect of ballot structure on committee strength depends,
critically, on the mechanism for cultivating personal votes. Thus, the degree to which committees (p. 365) provide
a tool to cultivate votes differs and this difference shapes legislators’ interests in committee work and ultimately
committee organization.
17.5 Conclusion
Scholars have long maintained interest in the origins of committee power in the US Congress. Indeed, theory-
building and the emergence of influential counter theories during the 1980s and 1990s could be representative of a
golden age of congressional research. That research stimulated empirical study of congressional organization but
also influenced heavily the theory of social choice, research on the political economy of institutions, and the study
of American politics more generally. All major theories of legislative organization from this period provide many
attractive features and some evidence of empirical accuracy. At the same time, despite much quality scholarship,
no definitive explanation of congressional organization exists.
Research on the design and operation of committees in various legislatures is even more limited. Truly comparative
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Committees
cross-national and inter-temporal research has been the exception rather than the norm. Measurement issues and
difficulties in identifying even the most basic characteristics of committee systems may represent likely barriers to
the study of committees in different institutional settings. Yet, the perceptions of strong committees, normatively,
remain a necessary if not sufficient condition for the legislature to have influence, vis-à-vis the executive branch.
In terms of congressional research, further theoretical and empirical work is necessary to understand the degree to
which committees compete with or are complimentary to the operation of the legislative party. In particular,
understanding the emergence of an equilibrium between independently minded committees and party leadership
which seeks to control all aspects of congressional life, is a necessary avenue of investigation. The most
successful political science theories tend to be parsimonious; yet the reality of the origins and basis of legislative
organization is likely far more chaotic than current explanations proffer, and future theoretical explorations are
likely to require more complex models and arguments.
The power of theories is at least somewhat circumscribed when conditions limit opportunities for empirical testing.
Beyond competing claims for the patterns of appointments and memberships of committees, observational
equivalence is a significant barrier to empirically assessing competing theories of committee’ organization. As
theories become more precise in their assumptions, explanations, and expectations, perhaps direct and indirect
observational consequences can withstand identification and testing, either through observational studies, text
analysis, or experiment.
The empirical assessment of existing theories of congressional research is far from exhausted. The changes that
committees undergo over time, not least in the current era of perceived greater partisanship, is a study worthy of
empirical assessment, either contemporarily or through the lenses of American political development. Empirical
tests (p. 366) using state legislatures as a laboratory and the legislatures in presidential systems in Latin
American can likely reveal much more about the validity of theories of congressional committees than studies
focused on legislative organization in parliamentary systems.
Relatedly, recent work seeking to identify novel explanations for parliamentary committees under parliamentarism
need to progress theoretically and empirically. This may require moving beyond congressional theories or adapting
them suitably to very different exogeneous institutional and political landscapes. Fundamentally, understanding the
tension, if any, between parties and committees is critical to advancing legislative scholarship toward a more
complete understanding of the operations of parliaments.
Finally, existing research focuses, perhaps too heavily, on the question of committee origins, with insufficient
attention to the political economy of institutional consequences. Studying the structures of committees may be
difficult, but scholars have only accomplished a bare minimum in uncovering the consequences of committee
design. Since Strøm’s (1990) suggestion that strong committees facilitate minority governments, little research has
argued for the significance of committee organization. Whether or not committees are assets, or if legislatures
would be as efficient and effective without committees, remains an unanswered issue. Clearly, the assumption,
made also in this chapter, that committees are a crucial ingredient of a strong legislature is a stylized fact in need
of theoretical and empirical verification.
References
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Constituency Characteristics Approach. American Journal of Political Science, 41: 895–918.
Aldrich, J., 1995. Why Parties? The Origins and Transformation of Political Parties in America. Chicago: University
of Chicago Press.
Arrow, K. J., 1951. Social Choice and Individual Values. New York: John Wiley & Sons.
Bowler, S. and Farrell, D. M., 1995. The Organizing of the European Parliament: Committees, Specialization and Co-
ordination. British Journal of Political Science, 25: 219–43.
Carroll, R. and Cox, G. W., 2012. Shadowing Ministers: Monitoring Partners in Coalition Governments. Comparative
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Lithuanian Coalition Governments. Europe-Asia Studies, 60: 631–42.
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Crisp, B. F., Escobar-Lemmon, M. C., Jones, B. S., Jones, M. P., and Taylor-Robinson, M. M., 2009. The Electoral
Connection and Legislative Committees. The Journal of Legislative Studies, 15: 35–52.
Diermeier, D. and Myerson, R. B., 1999. Bicameralism and Its Consequences for the Internal Organization of
Legislatures. American Economic Review, 89: 1182–96.
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Fish, M. S. and Kroenig, M., 2009. The Handbook of National Legislatures: A Global Survey. New York: Cambridge
University Press.
Gailmard, S. and Hammond, T., 2011. Intercameral Bargaining and Intracameral Organization in Legislatures. The
Gilligan, T. W. and Krehbiel, K., 1987. Collective Decision-Making and Standing Committees: An Informationale
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Gilligan, T. W. and Krehbiel, K., 1990. Organization of Informative Committees by a Rational Legislature. American
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440–58.
Groseclose, T. and King, D. C., 2001. Committee Theories Reconsidered. In L. C. Dodd and B. I. Oppenheimer
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State University Press.
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Shane Martin
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Political Parties and Legislators
Political Parties and Legislators*

Thomas Saalfeld and Kaare W. Strøm
Print Publication Date: Jun 2014 Subject: Political Science, Comparative Politics, Parties and
Bureaucracy
2014
This chapter examines how legislators may serve multiple principals through their party affiliation. It looks at the
forms and activities of legislative parties, focusing on established democracies, and the functions that they perform
as vehicles of electoral delegation and accountability. The discussion begins by presenting a brief morphology of
legislative parties, with particular reference to central players within and around legislative parties in their
relationship with individual legislators. Using a principal–agent framework, it considers the complexity of the
competing agency relationships of which legislators are often part. It then explores why political parties exist at all,
and why they have become such durable features of legislatures and representative democracies. It also
describes the link between legislative parties and legislative committees. Finally, it analyzes whether and how
political parties influence legislative outputs.
Keywords: legislators, principals, legislative parties, democracies, agency relationships, political parties, legislative committees, legislatures
18.1 Introduction: What Are Legislative Parties?
POLITICAL parties tend to be complex organizations with multiple goals (Pomper 1992). They can be defined
instrumentally as teams of individuals united for the purpose of controlling government (Downs 1957, 24).
Frequently, they are also united by some shared normative or expressive goals: in Federalist 10, for example,
Madison defines factions (his notion of party) as:
...a number of citizens, whether amounting to a majority or minority of the whole, who are united and
actuated by some common impulse of passion, or of interest, adverse to the rights of other citizens, or to
the permanent and aggregate interest of the community.
(Hamilton et al. 1961, 78)
While legislative parties can be said to face tough choices between policy, office, and electoral goals (Strøm
1990), a party’s aim to win political (including legislative) office through elections distinguishes it from other political
organizations such as pressure groups or social-movement organizations.
In its simplest form, the legislative party is “an organised group of members of a representative body who were
elected either under the same party label or under the label of different parties that do not compete against each
other in elections, and who do not explicitly create a group for technical reasons only” (Heidar and Koole 2000, (p.
372) 249).1 Together with legislative committees, the (legislative) “party in government” is the most important
component of legislative organization and preference aggregation. Depending on their level of unity, parties
promote decisional efficiency in the chamber and allow legislators to influence policy. They also organize
opposition to the incumbent government. By providing voters with choices over policies and personnel, they offer a
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mechanism by which partisan governments can be held accountable for their actions. Through this “electoral
connection” (Mayhew 1974) legislative parties maintain,“responsible party government” (Aldrich 1995) becomes
possible. Parties are the only organizations that in all liberal democracies can be counted upon to provide some
measure of transparency, stability, and political accountability. In the words of Schattschneider (1942, 1) “political
parties created democracy, and...democracy is unthinkable save in terms of parties” (see also Aldrich 2011, 3).
Yet in most liberal democracies, legislative parties are part of more complex party organizations, and their
members may have incentives to respond the preferences of other parts of the party’s wider organization. Key’s
(1964, 163–5) much-cited work thus distinguishes between the “party in the electorate,” the “party as
organization,” and the “party in government.” To account for the stronger extra-parliamentary organizations often
found outside the United States, Katz and Mair (1993) extend Key’s second dimension to distinguish, firstly, what
they call the “party on the ground,” the local organizations including campaign workers and financial supporters
(Katz 2002, 95); and secondly, there may be a “central office” consisting of the national executive committee and
central party staff. Legislators are often beholden to this extra-parliamentary organization, not least because it
tends to select the party’s candidates for public office. In terms to which we shall return below, legislators may thus
serve multiple principals through their party affiliation.
In this chapter, we discuss the forms and activities of legislative parties, focusing especially on established
democracies. Our account of legislative parties is based on three observations. Firstly, while we focus on the party
in public office, the different facets of parties are bound together by the functions that parties perform as vehicles
of electoral delegation and accountability (see, e.g. Müller 2000). Particularly in many European and some Asian
and Latin American democracies, the party on the ground and the party in central office may be powerful
influences on members of the legislature. These extra-legislative organizations may constrain the behaviour of the
elected members as much as the legislative party itself. Therefore, it may be necessary to include the preferences
of influential actors in the extra-legislative party when modeling legislative behaviour. Secondly, while presenting
some evidence from descriptive studies, we will highlight the value of analytical models of legislative parties for
comparative studies. In doing so, this contribution will complement some of the more formal chapters in this
Handbook and draw especially on models derived from the rational-choice tradition, such as game-theoretic
models, social choice results, and models from the Principal-Agent (PA) literature on delegation. Finally, the world of
legislative parties is one of considerable complexity, in which critical decisions are often unobservable or
deliberately concealed. Moreover, observable legislative behaviour is often fraught with problems of observational
equivalence (Krehbiel 1999), so that it is open to several (p. 373) different interpretations. For example, legislative
scholars often use the underlying preferences of legislators to explain their behaviour. But the preferences of
members typically have to be inferred from their recorded votes and speeches, which for various reasons may not
reflect their sincere beliefs and concerns. For example, what looks like high levels of party unity in legislative
voting may reflect either preference homogeneity within a legislative party, or effective discipline, or other strategic
considerations. Thus the inferences that can be drawn from observed behaviour in roll-call votes may suffer from
selection bias (Hug 2013), whose effects are difficult to compare from one legislative setting to the next. In trying to
make sense of this complex world of legislative parties, it is therefore particularly important to be carefully guided
by analytical models whose predictions are precise and whose assumptions are explicit and well understood.
In the second and third sections, we will present a brief “morphology” of legislative parties. In other words, we will
define central players within and around legislative parties in their relationship with individual legislators. A
principal-agent framework, more fully developed elsewhere (e.g. Lupia 2003), will illuminate the complexity of the
competing agency relationships of which legislators are frequently a part. The fourth section will discuss some of
the most influential analytical studies seeking to explain the emergence and ubiquity of legislative parties. Rather
than taking legislative parties for granted, a number of scholars have sought to address the puzzle why nominally
equal legislators accept the inequality of party hierarchies—and what incentives might motivate some members to
assume leadership positions. Not only are these fundamental questions important to understand the emergence of
legislative parties, they also provide insights into the opportunities and challenges of continuing cooperation and
leadership in legislatures. We will also highlight how legislative parties are interwoven with the other major element
of legislative organization, namely committees. Finally this section will take up a further fundamental issue
discussed in the formal literature, namely whether political parties have any discernible effect on legislative outputs
at all—and if they do, how. In the final fifth section we assess the conditions under which legislative parties are
likely to be influential—and how these conditions could be studied empirically in comparative analyses across
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space and time.
18.2 Players, Rules, and Resources
Legislative party organizations are often seen as (more or less durable) floor-voting coalitions (e.g. Aldrich 1995).
Some authors liken them with firms in the literature on industrial organization (e.g. Döring 2001). Others see them
as partnerships such as law firms with “various gradations of junior and senior partners” providing “overall
strategic and tactical direction to the firm” (Cox and McCubbins 2005, 18). Whatever their particular form,
legislative parties are organized to produce club goods, so that the benefits from cooperation are excludable, but
at least in part non-rivalrous: one member’s benefits (e.g. carrying a recognizable party label) do not lessen the
value of the benefit to any (p. 374) other member. Yet, party membership entails costs as well as benefits.
Decision-making within legislative parties can involve fierce competition and protracted bargaining; it may require
individually unattractive compromises; and the imposition of penalties is often costly to both those who are
penalized and those who impose penalties. Those who create and manage a legislative party must therefore
carefully husband their resources to ensure that the benefits exceed the costs for the intended members, and that
their cooperation is indeed secured. To improve their members’ joint electoral prospects and support the
production of policy expertise, legislative parties may need to give some members control of executive or
legislative offices and thus equip them with agenda control (Cox and McCubbins 2005). The relationship between
leaders and backbench members of the legislative party thus resembles a precarious agency relationship, which
will be discussed further. Typically such parties have a hierarchical structure and varying degrees of internal
specialization.
18.2.1. Hierarchy
Legislative parties vary greatly in size, resources, hierarchy, and other organizational properties. Hierarchy is, for
example, at the heart of Aldrich and Rohde’s (2000) conditional party government model where legislators have
incentives to equip their leaders with procedural and disciplinary powers to push through the party’s median in
legislation. Nevertheless, it is one of the great puzzles of legislative studies why nominally equal members accept
hierarchical organizations (Loewenberg 2011, 14). Yet, there is one arena where individual members can be active
and relatively equal participants in collective decision-making. This arena is the caucus which is typically
comprised of all party members in the relevant chamber, irrespective of their rank in the party hierarchy. Informal
hierarchy cannot be avoided completely, however, unless there is an organization such as the 1922 Committee of
the British Conservative party, which consists only of the party’s backbench MPs (Norton 2013b). The caucus is
often the body formally vested with ultimate decision-making power in the legislative party; it may formally elect
party leaders, ministers, and committee chairs; and it may subject them to ongoing scrutiny. The caucus tends to
be an arena for internal policy deliberation. Especially where the media are barred, caucus meetings may
“facilitate candid discussion and avoid media reports of party infighting” (Smith et al. 2009, 129; for similar
accounts on other legislatures see Ismayr 2012, 128–30; Messerschmidt 2005, 282). Caucus deliberations often
allow members to reveal their sincere preferences and, hence, can be “informationally efficient” in Krehbiel’s
(1991) sense. At the same time, party leaders may use the caucus to commit its members to a unified position on
the floor (Ismayr 2012, 128–30). Legislative parties vary greatly in their use of caucus deliberations. Whereas the
parties of the US Congress (Smith et al. 2009, 129) and the German Bundestag (Ismayr 2012, 122–3) have regular,
well-prepared, and well-attended (weekly or bi-weekly) meetings when the chamber is in session, the caucus of
British parliamentary parties often suffers from poor attendance (Norton 2000, 43).
(p. 375) At the top of their hierarchies, legislative parties are usually headed by a single leader who in
parliamentary systems is sometimes a (prospective) prime minister. In virtually all cases, this floor leader, chair, or
president is tasked to ensure party unity and serves as the party’s most prominent spokesperson (for the US
Congress see Smith et al. 2009, 137–46). Parties vary in the authority vested in their leaders. Some have significant
powers to act as the legislative party’s central agent (Kiewiet and McCubbins 1993, 43) with considerable
opportunities to convert their position in the hierarchy into policy, office, or electoral gains, whereas others serve
as chairpersons with coordinating functions. In well-established democratic legislatures, where they have been
most extensively studied, party leaders tend to get elected by the legislative caucus, or by an electoral college of
which the caucus is an important part (e.g. in the UK Labour Party), or by the extra-parliamentary party. Although
the leader’s specific rights are often defined in the legislative party’s constitutional documents, he or she may in
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addition retain substantial “residual rights” of control (in the language of contract theory). In some cases, these
rights, the leaders’ informational advantage over backbench members, their privileged media access, and their
staffing resources may be strong enough to turn the agency relationship between caucus (as the principal) and
the leader (as the agent) effectively on its head. Messerschmidt (2005, 230), for example, discusses the growing
independence of French parliamentary party “presidents” and their use of this position as a launching pad for
campaigns to become president of the Republic.
Between the tiers of the caucus and the leadership, democratic legislative parties tend to have a more or less
developed intermediary structure. Most legislative parties select various intermediate leaders such as the chairs of
policy-specific working groups and they often elect, from their midst, leaders to occupy legislative or government
positions with agenda powers. Thus parties typically have organizational hierarchies designed to facilitate internal
coordination and control. Especially in larger legislative parties, the “middle management” may consist of a chief
whip and a number of assistant whips, who are in charge of information, coordination, and discipline within their
parties. Larger legislative parties may have well over a dozen such business managers (see Norton 2013a, 55, for
the British House of Commons; for the US Congress see Smith et al. 2009, 143). In other parliaments, policy experts
organized in policy-specific working groups and legislative committees may dominate the middle management (for
the German Bundestag see Saalfeld 1995b, 272). In parliamentary systems, middle managers typically constitute
the candidate pool for appointments to senior intra-party, parliamentary, or governmental positions. Yet, in some
systems, the middle management is more depoliticized. In France, for example, the legislative parties are managed
by a full-time secretary-general, who is not a legislator but essentially a senior party employee reporting to the
party leader in the National Assembly (Messerschmidt 2005, 214–7).
Legislative parties and their leaders sometimes possess considerable staff resources. For example, the
Bundestag’s five parliamentary parties employed a total of 870 staff in 2010, in addition to the 4,209 staff members
employed by individual representatives.2 The total funding available to the legislative parties in that year was over
78.7 million Euros. In the US Congress, the aggregate size of leadership staff was 274 in 2000, not (p. 376)
including majority and minority party floor staff, and approximately 11,692 personal staff employed by individual
members of Congress.3 Most other legislative parties are not nearly as well-staffed as the German or US ones. The
French legislative parties, for example, had fewer than 100 employees in 2001 (Messerschmidt 2005, 218).
Nevertheless, most European and North American legislative parties have experienced a significant expansion of
their resources. Heidar and Koole (2000, 259) thus conclude that for most European parliaments, “the growth in
state funding has produced better staffed and more professional parties inside parliaments.” This development has
often contributed to a dominance of the legislative over the extra-parliamentary party organization, even in parties
with historically strong extra-parliamentary roots (e.g. Katz and Mair 1995).
18.2.2 Specialization
It would be misleading to model legislative parties as organizations held together exclusively by hierarchical
coordination. Members also mutually benefit from policy specialization. Specialized policy committees, in particular,
are arenas for policy advocacy, compromises between different factions and interests within the party, and
bargaining between the party leadership and individual members. In internally differentiated legislative parties the
caucus may delegate positive agenda powers (to formulate party policy) and negative agenda powers (to block
certain initiatives) to policy experts in committees or to factional leaders. The American congressional parties
maintain a system of policy committees and task forces (see Smith et al. 2009, 129–31). The major British
parliamentary parties work through subject committees, which are particularly active when the party is in
opposition (Norton 2000, 44). The Japanese LDP maintains internal policy committees, sub-committees of the so-
called “Policy Advisory Research Committee” (PARC) shadowing the main legislative committees (Krauss and
Pekkanen 2010, 154–202). Along similar lines, the “working groups” of the German parliamentary parties (based on
policy areas) provide a highly structured interface between parties, the legislature’s committee system, policy
communities, and government departments. The chairs of such internal policy committees may play a crucial role
in inter-party coalition negotiations (for Germany see Saalfeld 2010). Yet there is variation in the extent to which
there is meaningful internal specialization. In some legislatures, such as the French National Assembly, proponents
have failed to establish such durable and differentiated internal committee systems (see Messerschmidt 2005).
Where such policy-based committees exist (especially in larger legislative parties), hierarchical conflict
Page 4 of 20
management within the legislative party (for example through a majority vote in the caucus or by empowering the
leader to decide on behalf of the party) may be only one out of several mechanisms to ensure effective
cooperation. Schüttemeyer (2001, 2009), for example, describes the organization of the major German
parliamentary parties as one of conditional leadership dominance: “if hierarchical measures are applied, they may
indicate that the mechanisms of political consultation and coordination inside the governmental majority have
failed” (Schüttemeyer 2009, 6). She (p. 377) (2009, 8) highlights mechanisms based on specialization, expertise,
information, and exchange among the specialized working groups of the major legislative parties, which effectively
shadow the regular parliamentary committees. The legislative party’s caucus or leadership typically delegates the
task of developing detailed policy proposals to the party’s policy experts. The policy discretion these specialists
enjoy seems to be a function of (a), the policy area’s salience for the party and (b), the party’s internal preference
heterogeneity (Schüttemeyer 2001, 44). Andeweg and Thomassen (2011) find very similar mechanisms for the
Second Chamber of the Netherlands Parliament.
18.3 Members of Legislative Parties and Their Competing Principals
The morphology of legislative parties allows researchers some insights into the discretion floor leaders have to
formulate party strategy and the process by which leaders reach decisions. However, legislative leaders may not
be the only masters that members of legislative parties serve. In constitutional terms, the policy process in
parliamentary democracies can be modeled as a chain of delegation and accountability in which voters delegate
to members of the legislature; legislators to chief executives such as the prime minister; the prime minister to
individual cabinet members; and with the latter delegating tasks to civil servants and other administrators (Strøm,
Müller and Bergman 2003). The chain of accountability runs in the reverse direction. In the language of principal-
agent theory, legislators are thus the agents of their voters in parliamentary democracies and simultaneously the
principals of the prime minister and the other cabinet members. Political parties underpin and mediate this chain of
delegation. Although their control has varied diachronically, cross-nationally, and from one stage of the policy
process to the next (Müller 2000), some parties are capable of exercising fairly tight control over their legislators.
But these representatives in fact have multiple principals, as they are commonly agents of their voters, their
legislative parties, and often also their extra-parliamentary parties where the party on the ground and the party in
central office are strong. Therefore, the preferences of party actors outside the legislature need to be accounted
for in some cases.
While political delegation is necessary, it is also risky. Agents may misuse their discretionary power to pursue their
own interests or other goals different from those of their principals. The more agents differ from principals in their
preferences and information levels, the more severe this agency problem is likely to be. It may take two forms that
have been commonly analysed: adverse selection and moral hazard (e.g. Lupia 2003). While the fact that
legislators ultimately answer to the voters helps contain potential agency problems, it by no means guarantees that
public policy will be consistent with the preferences of most citizens. And even to the extent that legislators must
serve several masters (principals), it does not necessarily lessen the agency problems. If these (p. 378)
principals, such as the legislative and extra-parliamentary party leaders, as well as the voters, have common
preferences that differ from those of the legislators, then this coalition of principals may be able to rein in their
agent. But if the various principals have divergent preferences that pull their legislative agents in different
directions, then these agents may either be hand-tied or in a position to play one principal off against another,
neither of which may be socially beneficial. In order to understand the constraints that parties place on their
representatives, we therefore need to understand where authority resides within the party and how the
preferences of its power-holders differ from those of the party’s legislators.
The descriptive literature on party organizations has implicitly identified a number of important agency relationships
within political parties. We will draw briefly on this rich body of scholarship to illustrate how the role of legislative
parties may vary in the chain of intra-party delegation and accountability. Although empirically this literature tends
to focus on Europe and the United States, the typology arising from it is relevant universally, irrespective of the fact
that contextual factors vary. The “elite” or “cadre” parties established in the late eighteenth and early nineteenth
centuries in the US and Europe (Duverger 1959; Neumann 1956), for example, primarily aimed to solve problems of
coordination and collective action within the legislature (Aldrich 1995, 2011; Cox 1987), but they did so
imperfectly. Elite parties—originally very much “an assemblage of notables of equal status” (Loewenberg 2011, 14)
—often failed to impose a high level of discipline amongst their members, and legislatures frequently included a
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substantial number of independents. Preference heterogeneity within legislative parties was sometimes
pronounced. Ideological differences between parties were often ill-defined and restricted to particular (and
sometimes shifting) policy areas. Given the restrictive suffrage of the time, socio-economic cleavages (such as
class, which became so important from the late nineteenth century onwards) were not as salient as they later
became, and extra-parliamentary mass organizations were not necessary. In the UK, for example, some critics of
legislative party discipline thought of this situation as a “golden age of Parliament” understood as the glory years of
the independent legislator (Norton 2013a)—but with negative consequences for government effectiveness and
legislative accountability. These constituted good conditions for pivotal legislators (rather than the party median) to
prevail and poor conditions for legislative parties to put their stamp on legislative outputs (for a general formal
argument see Krehbiel 1999).
Cox shows how the gradual extension of the franchise for the British House of Commons changed this situation;
from the mid-nineteenth century the (national) party’s label became more and more valuable for MPs (as a credible
policy commitment) as well as for voters (as an information shortcut) and thus attained the character of a public
good. The 1867 Reform Act almost doubled the size of the electorate and created incentives for Members of
Parliament to establish extra-parliamentary support organizations: the increased dependence on the party’s label
and organization for (re-)election created incentives for stronger party unity in the legislature.
This dependence was particularly pronounced in so-called “mass parties” (Duverger 1959) or “parties of
integration” (Neumann 1956), which emerged in the second half of (p. 379) the nineteenth century. Where these
parties had been electorally suppressed and therefore relied on their extra-parliamentary organizations for political
mobilization, their elected legislators often remained dependent on, or even subordinated to, the party on the
ground and the party in central office. Besides, the extra-parliamentary party frequently provided a “career track”
and safety net for aspiring members (Müller 2000), which allowed for the screening, selection, and rewarding of
legislative candidates. Thus, in addition to their voters, parliamentarians of mass parties effectively had a second
principal. The increasing importance of securing a party’s nomination for office, plus growing dependence on the
party on the ground and the party central office contributed, usually, to high levels of party discipline in the
legislature. Where they dominated, the strong discipline and clear ideological focus of such parties allowed them to
shift policy away from the median legislator. The instability of liberal democracies with strong mass parties in their
parliaments, especially in the 1920s and 1930s, suggests that this trend may have occurred at the expense of
democratic legitimacy (Zimmermann and Saalfeld 1988).
From the 1950s on, some elite and mass parties transformed their organizations to become “catch-all parties”
(Kirchheimer 1966), which pursued a broader range of voters than did the elite and mass parties of the nineteenth
and early twentieth centuries. Catch-all parties behaved more like the vote-maximizing parties modeled by Downs
(1957), as their leaders began to develop and refine vote-seeking strategies beyond clearly defined core groups.
This type of party was often characterized as political organizations where the balance of policy, office, and vote-
seeking motivations was tilted toward the latter. Although their extra-parliamentary organizations frequently
remained substantial and well-organized, it was no longer practical for them to subordinate the legislative party.
Both the social exclusivity of the elite party and the strong subcultural ties that mass parties had to some collateral
organizations (such as trades unions or faith-based organizations) had limited their scope for electoral expansion.
The catch-all party could appeal to a broader range of voters by loosening these ties. Nevertheless, it was
relatively disciplined in the legislature. Within it, the legislative party and its leaders moved centrestage. Leadership
attempts to cater to the median voter in the country (rather than the typical member of the traditional supporter
group) often led to conflicts between the legislative party and the party on the ground (with the latter being more
responsive to the internal median, see May 1973), as the post-1945 history of the British Labour Party illustrates
(see Tsebelis 1990, 119–158).
The trend toward stronger legislative parties relative to the extra-parliamentary organization (at least in many
advanced democracies) was reinforced by declining party identification among the voters and, in many cases,
dwindling party membership figures (for a summary, see Dalton and Wattenberg 2000). Consequently, legislative
parties in some countries began to rely less on resources provided by their extra-parliamentary organizations,
such as membership dues and voluntary labour, and more on state subsidies and donations. The resulting
independence of legislative parties has been noted by authors who argue that catch-all parties have developed
into “electoral-professional parties” (Panebianco 1988) dominated by professional politicians and political
marketing (p. 380) experts outside the party hierarchy, or (mostly in Europe) into “cartel parties” (Katz and Mair
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1995), which are said to have responded to the decline of their extra-parliamentary support base by creating a
cartel to secure state subsidies. Crucially for our purposes, legislative parties in advanced democracies typically
operate in more uncertain electoral markets but simultaneously have much more discretion to formulate policies
than the powerful mass-membership parties of the early twentieth century. Voters are clearly their undisputed
principals.
A further party type highlighted in recent decades is the “entrepreneurial party” (e.g. Hopkin and Paolucci 1999),
in which a powerful political entrepreneur is the ultimate principal. Such parties tend to be created by and for such
political entrepreneurs to serve their own purposes. They often reflect high electoral volatility and a party that is
weakly institutionalized in the electorate and on the ground. Entrepreneurial parties are typically created by
politically ambitious persons (often nationalists or politicians on the populist or extreme right), who may not be
legislators in the first place. And this entrepreneurial party often remains under the “ownership” and control of this
founding politician. Whereas legislators may constitute an important part of the public face of the party, it
fundamentally belongs not to them, but to the party “boss.” In more technical terms, residual property rights, and
ultimate control over the party assets, in the end belong to this person. This fundamental organizational property
makes the entrepreneurial party more oligarchic than even traditional “cadre” parties. Such parties may be found
in some European countries, but they are more prevalent in South and Central America and generally in countries
that have undergone decolonization under a nationalist leadership.
18.4 Why Parties, Why Legislative Parties?
While we have shed some light on the nature of legislative parties as organizations and how they are embedded in
wider party organizations, the most fundamental question about political parties remains why they exist at all, and
why they have become such durable features of representative democracies. After all, the description of
morphological aspects (discussed earlier) shows that parties may involve significant individual and social costs. In
addition, the hierarchical nature of parties clashes with the ethos of legislatures as bodies of nominally equal
members. But as easy as the question about the origins of parties is to pose, it is difficult to answer. This is partly
because generalizing about party politics is no trivial matter. Research on political parties—including legislative
parties—dates back at least to the late nineteenth and early twentieth centuries (e.g. Lowell 1896; Ostrogorski
1903; Michels 1915 [1911]; Weber 1978 [1922]) and has been one of the most prolific and diverse areas of study
in political science. In addition, legislative parties are often being taken for granted. To many political observers,
they are such an omnipresent and essential part of democratic governance as hardly to call for any explanation
(e.g. Truman 1951). Researchers who have sought to address the fundamental (p. 381) question have taken one
of two tacks. One body of scholarship is methodologically holistic in outlook and sees parties as organizations
serving societal purposes and needs and seeks explanations at a systemic level, often couched in functional
terms. The other body is methodologically individualistic and has sought to frame explanations rooted in the
interests and preferences of politicians themselves.
18.4.1 Methodological Holism: Functional and Normative Stories
The first body of literature mentioned above thus seeks to understand parties on the basis of the social purposes
they serve. Many such accounts have been of a functionalist and/or normative nature. In essence such accounts
have taken a macro-level perspective and are largely holistic in their methodological approach. From a
functionalist perspective (e.g. in systems theory), political parties are considered to be a crucial link between civil
society and government and indeed the organizations that make legislatures, and the whole edifice of democracy,
work. Parties convert a wide range of social demands into a manageable set of state-sanctioned activities. Political
parties are structures that first and foremost serve the function of aggregating diverse political inputs into policy
alternatives for government policy-makers (e.g.Powell et al. 2012); they are prominently involved in interest
articulation—the formulation of social demands; they facilitate the conversion of social interests into political
decisions that can be implemented and enforced; they are agencies for the recruitment, socialization, and training
of political leaders; and they serve as “long” inter-generational coalitions of politicians, if they can credibly
guarantee that such policies will be sustained over time. In fulfilling these functions they contribute to the stability of
the political system by setting goals, making appropriate decisions, and contributing to the integration of societal
norms and values (the classic text on sociological systems theory is Parsons 1970).
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As far as the normative underpinnings of the functionalist perspective are concerned, there is far from universal
agreement that political parties on balance serve benign societal purposes. Some theorists emphatically defended
their role in democratic politics, either implicitly as part of a pluralist normative conception of a democratic society
(e.g. Crick 1962) or explicitly as the mechanism that ensures political competition as the central characteristic of
liberal democracy (Schumpeter 1942; Dahl 1956). Authors deeply skeptical of representative democracy, by
contrast, criticized their potential to promote divisiveness and decisional inefficiency (e.g. Schmitt 1969 [1931],71).
Other scholars held parties responsible for the “decline of legislatures” (e.g. Bryce 1921). Skepticism toward
parties is hardly novel. Madison famously warned against “the mischiefs of faction” in Federalist 10. Factions,
Madison argued, can promote special interests and give rise to conflicts of interest among policy-makers. In this
contribution we are not focusing on the holistic or normative literature. Nevertheless, our more individualistic
account has implications for the normative debate on the collective costs and benefits arising from political parties.
The contemporary literature on political parties has picked up on (p. 382) and sometimes formalized some of
Madison’s key concerns and placed them within a framework of delegation and coalition bargaining. In the
broadest sense, political parties exist because representative democracy typically demands that policy decisions
be endorsed by a simple or qualified legislative majority, whereas expedience requires that they be implemented
by others with more specialized skills or more time on their hands. Representative democracies thus face two
fundamental challenges: coalescence and delegation. Political parties can help legislators meet both of these
challenges, but they also imply concomitant risks. Yet, any model accounting for the micro-foundations of party
formation needs to start from the individual legislator’s perspective.
18.4.2 The Legislators’ Perspective
One limitation of functionalist or normative accounts of political parties is that even if parties may serve useful
political functions, it is not obvious why politicians would find it useful to create or join them. While some historians
of political parties have always looked to politicians’ motivations to uncover the circumstances and reasons that
triggered the establishment of legislative (e.g. Binkley 1962; Boldt 1971) and extra-parliamentary parties (e.g.
Sassoon 1996), such accounts have largely lacked an explicit theory of legislator motivations and behaviour, and
they have tended to focus on specific cases or periods. Yet, an important branch of the contemporary political
science literature on parties has sought to establish precisely such micro-foundations. In so doing, the relevant
scholars have sought to explain why ambitious and self-interested legislators value the benefits of parties enough
to accept the costs of membership, including the need to submit themselves to their discipline. Aldrich’s (1995,
2011) Why Parties? is a prominent example of this perspective. This book provides a comprehensive and
influential explanation of the various US party systems since the late eighteenth century. Aldrich identifies three
dilemmas that motivate legislators to form political parties: (1) collective action problems within the legislature; (2)
social choice problems in policy making; and (3) collective action problems in the mobilization of voters. Collective
action problems within the legislature occur, for example, when legislators, if left to their own devices, would pass a
program of legislation that provided particularistic benefits for each of their constituencies, but was collectively
inefficient, because it lacked coordination or simply busted their budget. Thus, legislators would find themselves in
a classical prisoners’ dilemma in which what is individually rational is collectively detrimental. The solution may be
a political party strong enough to assume control of the legislature and impose a collectively efficient program.
Rather than reinforcing fractious tendencies (as Madison or Schmitt believed), Aldrich argues that political parties
can thus provide a solution, as all co-partisan legislators submit themselves to the discipline of a team designed to
win control over the legislative process.
Yet, while legislators may straightforwardly want to participate in winning coalitions, it is not clear why they would
prefer such “long” coalitions as parties typically are. Commitment to a party line can, for example, force legislators
to adopt policies that they (p. 383) disagree with and are unpopular among their own voters. And parties that fail
to win control of the legislature cannot provide many benefits to their members. As a result there may be incentives
for legislators to detach themselves from parties that either fail to win, or whose policy dictates are too draconian.
Instead, we could imagine a body of independent legislators forging ad hoc coalitions from bill to bill and from day
to day. The problem with such free-floating ad hoc majorities, however, is that they force legislators to negotiate
every decision anew. The requisite time and energy can exhaust their resources and reduce their ability to
accomplish important policy goals. An important rationale for legislative parties as “long coalitions” (Aldrich 1995)
is, therefore, that they economize on such transaction costs.
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Aldrich’s second rationale for parties pertains to challenges associated with collective decision-making detailed in
the social choice literature. Extensive scholarship in this field has generated a series of dilemmas and impossibility
results (Arrow 1951; McKelvey 1976; Schofield 1978). The crux of these results is that when groups of three or
more actors attempt to make collective decisions by majority vote in multidimensional policy spaces, their choices
may not converge to a core, or stable equilibrium. Even if individuals have complete and transitive preference
schedules, majority decisions may “cycle” in a policy space, so that the ultimate choice may depend more on
agenda rules than on the distribution of preferences within the group. To some extent social choice theorists
disagree about the seriousness of such collective preference instabilities. Whereas some see them as utterly
destructive of any expectation of stable and mutually desirable collective decision-making (Riker 1980), others
consider them a curiosity that plagues abstract social choice theory more than the real world of democratic
decision-making (Feld and Grofman 1986; Krehbiel and Rivers 1990; Niemi 1983). Yet, at the very least we cannot
ignore the possibility that collective decisions may be unstable, and social choice theory shows that the likelihood
of such instability increases with the number of decision-makers as well as with the number of policy options.
Aldrich argues that political parties can alleviate this problem by reducing the number of decision-makers, vesting
agenda control in a central agent selected by and acting on behalf of the individual legislators.
Finally, Aldrich sees a third purpose of political parties in collective action problems that legislators encounter in the
electoral arena. Scholarship on legislative behaviour, especially in the US context, has long recognized the
powerful force of electoral motivations. Indeed, in a seminal book, Mayhew (1974, 5) models members of the House
of Representatives as “single-minded seekers of reelection.” To the extent that legislators also intrinsically or
instrumentally care about policy decisions (Budge and Laver 1986), they will also want other candidates with
similar preferences to be elected. The key to both of these objectives, Aldrich argues, is to coordinate candidate
selection and to mobilize ordinary citizens for electoral participation. Parties help legislators market themselves,
and party discipline enables them to become credible among voters looking for an easy way to pick candidates at
election time.
Particularly in societies in which citizens have to initiate their own voter registration, and where there are no real
rewards for voting and no penalties for abstention, (p. 384) legislators can significantly enhance electoral
participation, and thereby their own prospects, by forming political parties that can educate citizens, help them
register to vote, and help (or bribe or coerce in less than perfectly democratic parties) them to participate on
election day. If co-partisan candidates behave individualistically and without coordination, they reduce the
informational value and credibility of the party label for voters. Cohesive legislative parties tie legislators to specific
party labels, which in turn carry policy reputations. This helps voters discriminate prospectively among candidates
for legislative office. Moreover, unified legislative parties make it easier for voters to hold government officials
accountable retrospectively as they are able to choose between the incumbent party or parties and alternative
parties. Therefore, to the extent that voters prefer a legislature whose actions are predictable, consistent, and
sanctionable, they should reward politicians who credibly commit to something more than a transitory coalition (see
also Cox and McCubbins 1993; Kiewiet and McCubbins 1991).
Aldrich’s account of political parties is explicitly focused on the American party systems since the late eighteenth
century. Yet, similar arguments have been made about parties in Victorian Britain (Cox 1987) and indeed about
their evolution in a number of liberal democracies, including Sweden (Metcalf 1987; Roberts 1986). The most
comprehensive analytic contribution in this tradition of searching for explanations for the emergence of parties
may be Congleton’s Perfecting Parliament (2011). He portrays legislative parties as organizations that transform
legislators’ rewards and punishments in such a way that active cooperation becomes the dominant strategy for all
members, even if there are incentives to shirk or switch parties. Congleton applies his model to the evolution of a
number of democratic parliaments, including those of the UK, Sweden, the Netherlands, Germany, Japan, and the
US, and argues that the emergence of political parties was a critical feature of at least the more successful of these
democratization experiences.
Theoretical explanations of parties sometimes place them in a more specific institutional setting. In an interesting
account of “how political parties emerged from the primeval slime,” Laver and Shepsle (1999) situate their analysis
in a parliamentary multiparty setting, in which political decision-making revolves around the allocation of cabinet
portfolios. The authors see the formation of political parties as driven by politicians’ desires to control not just the
legislative process, but more critically also the cabinet. Possession of cabinet portfolios, they argue, entails critical
agenda powers, as it is virtually impossible to constrain cabinet members from implementing their most preferred
Page 9 of 20
policies within their particular ministerial jurisdictions once they are appointed (which implies a form of moral
hazard). Hence, having a set of “ministrable” political leaders with transparent policy preferences helps parties
commit to credible policy positions in coalition negotiations. And paradoxically, internally heterogeneous parties
that have a diverse set of such credible contenders for executive office enjoy a bargaining advantage over those
that do not, since the former will generate a larger set of credible policy options (see also Debus and Bräuninger
2009). Potential partners can therefore pick and choose among a large menu of policy options at a low risk of a
policy surprise.
(p. 385) The literature reviewed thus far assumes that legislative parties matter for a chamber’s legislative output.
Otherwise, neither the internal nor the external motivations for accepting hierarchical direction and discipline would
make much sense. But the truth of this argument is by no means easy to demonstrate or uncontroversial. In Pivotal
Politics (1998), Krehbiel challenges the assertion that legislative parties make any significant policy difference,
arguing that if any party effect on legislation is to be demonstrated, it is necessary to identify consequences of
partisanship that go beyond what we would predict on the basis of the individual legislators’ preferences alone.
More precisely, if legislative decisions always reflected the preferences of pivotal actors such as the median
legislator, it would make no sense to attribute any significant policy impact to legislative parties. In policy terms, a
party (or a coalition of parties) can be consequential only if it can impose its own internal median position, or that of
an influential extra-parliamentary group. Reviewing the evidence from US legislative politics, Krehbiel is skeptical,
although he does not argue that parties fail to affect legislation altogether. Rather, he suggests that “competing
party organizations bidding for pivotal votes may roughly counterbalance one another, so final outcomes are not
much different from what a simpler but completely specified nonpartisan theory predicts” (Krehbiel 1998, 171).
Krehbiel’s work has had a considerable influence on the study of legislative parties in the US Congress. Critics
have marshaled a substantial amount of empirical evidence to challenge his “null hypothesis” that legislative
parties are inconsequential as far as legislation is concerned. Ansolabehere, Snyder, and Stewart (2001), for
example, compared survey material on individual deputies’ preferences and their roll-call behaviour. They
observed party influence in approximately 40 percent of roll calls (see also Cox and Poole 2002). In other words,
there may be situations where parties are consequential. In other contexts the impact of partisan forces may be
less relevant. Krehbiel’s work has sparked numerous further empirical, methodological, and theoretical studies (for
a discussion see Smith 2007). In sum, the question whether parties and party leaders are important in Congress
seems to have been “mostly settled in favour of the affirmative view” empirically (Strahan 2011, 371).
Nevertheless, even critics admit that “Krehbiel has had a profound impact on the course of legislative research via
his penetrating critiques of what he regarded as unclear theory, inadequate measurement, and unpersuasive or
inconclusive evidence” (Monroe et al. 2008, 7).
Although little research has been done so far on how well Krehbiel’s analysis travels internationally, his thesis
seems least plausible for polarized bipartisan (or quasi-bipartisan) legislatures, especially where party leaders
possess much stronger disciplinary tools than in the US Congress. In the UK’s parliamentary system of government,
for example, the leader of the majority party forms the government and is able to employ the government’s
agenda-setting powers and the Royal Prerogative to control parliamentary business (Qvortrup 2011). Furthermore,
in social movement parties, extra-parliamentary party leaders may dominate policy formulation and candidate
selection (Heidar and Koole 2000, 257-8). Krehbiel’s reasoning may be more likely to prevail elsewhere, for
example where legislative parties bargain toward a consensus over procedural matters in a business committee
(for Germany see Ismayr 2012, 155–62). Here, (p. 386) the chamber median or other pivotal actors may be more
likely to prevail. And Laver and Shepsle’s (1996) portfolio-allocation model (as well as other coalition bargaining
theories emphasizing the power of the median legislator) has provided analytical arguments as to why Krehbiel’s
thesis may be particularly relevant in multiparty coalition systems.
One of the most recent theoretical challenges to Krehbiel’s skepticism about the effectiveness of legislative parties
is Cox and McCubbins’ (2005) model of legislative parties as “procedural cartels.” Cox and McCubbins emphasize
the power of the majority party in Congress. Unlike Krehbiel, these authors do not believe that the effect of parties
primarily stems from their nature as floor-voting coalitions. Rather, they argue, the power of the majority party
results from its control of the legislative agenda; the set of bills considered and voted on the floor. Cox and
McCubbins distinguish between “positive” and “negative” agenda power. The former refers to “the ability to push
bills through the legislative process to a final-passage vote on the floor.” The latter captures “the ability to block
bills from reaching a final passage vote on the floor” (Cox and McCubbins 2005, 20). In Cox and McCubbins’ (2005)
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model of parties as procedural coalitions, reelection-seeking legislators seek to overcome internal and external
problems of collective action and team production by delegating positive and negative agenda powers to senior
legislators from their own ranks. In the US House, the main agenda-setting offices are the committee chairs, slots on
the Rules Committee, and the speakership. The cartel (party) ensures that its members more or less monopolize
the agenda-setting offices. The senior party officials use their agenda-setting powers in such a way as to maximize
their party’s utility and to avoid party splits. In return, rank-and-file members accept the office holders’ decisions. In
short, as long as their leaders are able and willing to use agenda-setting powers effectively, parties do not have to
rely on discipline and sanctions to achieve unity and legislative outputs that are significantly different from the
legislative median.
This brief and incomplete review of methodologically individualist accounts of legislative party emergence
demonstrates why nominally equal legislators can have incentives to join parties, submit to party leaders, and work
in organizational hierarchies. Despite the advances we owe to formal scholarship in this respect, there is still a
significant gap between these parsimonious and relatively general models on the one hand and our descriptive
knowledge of the world of legislative parties on the other. The final section aims to illustrate that, and how formal
scholarship and empirical observations can be aligned more fruitfully in future research.
18.5 Conditions and Mechanisms: What do Legislative Parties do to Achieve Their Goals?
Despite frequent assertions about the crucial importance of parliamentary parties, much comparative empirical
research (and most formal work) has treated the inner workings (p. 387) of legislative parties as “black boxes.”
Tsebelis’s influential veto-player theory (Tsebelis 2002), for example, focuses on the preferences of legislative
parties, but treats them as exogenous to his models. Although veto-player theory highlights the importance and
cohesion of government parties, it seems fair to say that the modeling of preference heterogeneity within these
organizations remains one of the least developed parts of the theory. Other theoretical attempts to unlock the black
box of legislative parties such as “cultural” theories (e.g. Bale 1997) have not had much resonance, especially in
empirical comparative research. In contrast, much of what we do know about the inner workings of legislative
parties originates from descriptive and idiographic work (insightful accounts include Cowley 2002; Cowley and
Norton 1999; Ismayr 2012; Messerschmitt 2005; Schüttemeyer 1998). The downside of idiographic literature,
however, is that it is difficult to draw causal inferences about the effect of various institutional, organizational, and
other contextual variables because the effects that can be identified from this case material are, by their very
nature, overdetermined. In the final section of this essay, therefore, we will propose a number of variables that
need to be—and, in our view, can be—understood, if progress is to be made in understanding the conditions for
legislative parties to make a difference. This will identify some strategies for closing the gap between analytic
models and empirical work in this field.
The most fundamental (and variable) condition for legislative parties to make a difference is, firstly, the “partyness”
of government, that is, the extent to which “[d]ecisions are made by elected party officials or by those under their
control” (Katz 1987, 3). This is more a variable characterizing the political environment in which parties operate
rather than a property of the parties themselves. Partyness is not only crucial for the legitimacy of responsible
party government from a normative perspective, but also for the self-interested calculations of candidates for
public office. Only where the partyness of government is strong will candidates have strong incentives to join
political parties and thus accept the costs as well as the benefits of party membership. And only if parties provide a
mechanism for prospective and retrospective accountability do voters have incentives to be guided by
partisanship rather than relying on their information about individual candidates (see Cox 1987). Partyness is at its
peak when a single governing party is in a position to impose its policy positions without interference across all
policy domains and where the same party can monopolize all the offices and benefits that derive from control of
the legislative majority. The partyness of government tends to weaken: (a) under coalition government, separation
of powers, or minority government; (b) if the governing party is factionalized along policy lines; (c) if individual
legislators are able to develop a strong personal vote; (d) if the strongest parties have incentives to form cartels
among themselves; or (e) if the set of policy areas that the ruling party can control is small (Thies 2000). In the
latter cases, Krehbiel’s skepticism may be justified.
In a study of 17 European parliamentary democracies, Strøm et al. (2003) have sought to measure partyness in
government broadly conceived. One of their indicators is the ability of membership organizations outside the
Page 11 of 20
legislature to “screen” candidates for elected office and recruit suitable candidates from within their organizations.
(p. 388) Moreover, in parliamentary democracies partyness is strengthened if cabinet ministers are
overwhelmingly recruited from the ranks of the governing parties (rather than being technocrats or other non-
partisans) (Strøm 2003, 70). Partisan control is also enhanced by: (a) a high level of party identification among the
party’s voters; (b) a large proportion of parliamentary seats held by parties with no executive experience
(because such parties do not tend to present credible alternatives to the incumbent government); and (c) if
government parties have a high degree of control over administrative appointments. Partyness is often thought to
pertain only to governments formed by a single party. Yet, it makes sense to think of parties in a coalition
government as exhibiting a high degree of partyness (in effect, functioning as if they were a party) if: they are
credibly committed to a high level of policy discipline through, for example, a coalition agreement; if the level of
sincere policy disagreement between these parties is low; or if these parties experience a uniform electoral swing,
which indicates that the voters treat them as if they were a unified party (Strøm et al. 2003, 695–7).
Secondly, regardless of whether legislative parties are modeled as “long” voting coalitions or as procedural
cartels, a high degree of unity in legislative behaviour is an important condition for them to make a difference in
legislative output. Only if parties are united will they be able to effect policy decisions that are different from the
preferences of pivotal legislators. Legislative parties vary in their unity cross-nationally and over time (see Kam
2009; Kam, this volume). If party unity cannot be taken for granted, legislators who value their team must find ways
to protect it. How can this be achieved? It is customary to break party unity down into two main components:
“cohesion,” referring to the homogeneity of intraparty policy preferences; and “discipline,” reflecting the ability of
parliamentary leaders to enforce unity even in the absence of closely aligned policy preferences. Unity thus tends
to be the result of self-selection on the one hand and various intraparty mechanisms for agenda control, candidate
screening, and ex post sanctions on the other. Some of these mechanisms have been discussed earlier and in
Best and Vogel’s chapter in this volume. While the structural conditions for discipline can be measured cross-
nationally, the estimation of cohesion remains a challenge as recorded votes and similar indicators suffer from
selection bias (Hug 2013).
One way to promote party unity is to establish discipline by delegating responsibility for coordinating the actions of
party members to a central agent—the party leadership (Kiewiet and McCubbins 1993). Research on Congressional
parties, in particular, has generated a great number of important findings about legislative leadership (see Strahan
2011). Even outside the US, party leadership has received a great deal of scholarly attention, though the literature
has been less cumulative. The literature suggests that the ability of leaders to impose discipline depends on their
authority and resources both within their parties and in the chamber. Party leaders may (or may not) be able to
reward loyalty (e.g. through patronage) and penalize open dissent (e.g. by withholding support in candidate re-
selection). However, party leaders themselves must also be incentivized to maintain party unity in the chamber
and vis-à-vis the voters. After all, imposing discipline through “whipping” members into line may be costly for party
leaders and their political reputations (Laver 1999). Parties differ in the extent to which they offer selective (p.
389) incentives to leaders in order to overcome this second-order problem. If party leaders control the legislative
agenda, they may be able to use negative agenda-setting powers to prevent issues that split the party to reach the
floor. Alternatively, they may use their positive agenda-setting powers to push through legislation that enhances
the party’s reputation overall and benefit a large number of pivotal members (Cox and McCubbins 2005). Thus, in
empirical analyses, the link between agenda-setting powers, the authority of party leaders, and the unity of
legislative parties must and can be accounted for more systematically than in many existing studies.
Thirdly, party leaders need the capacity and incentives to monitor members’ behaviour, allocate rewards for
cooperative behaviour, and discourage shirking by imposing sanctions that drastically reduce the payoff for exit.
Legislative parties are relatively small groups of politicians whose compliance with party rules can be monitored
with relative ease (Saalfeld 1995a; Müller 2000, 323–4; Carey 2008). Nevertheless, there may be variations in this
transparency. If parties maintain a suitable organizational structure, members will have opportunities and
incentives to articulate their views on policy and other matters internally. As a result, the internal monitoring of
preferences will be most effective in organizations that provide sufficient opportunities for free internal deliberation
and discussion. The more legislators have reasons to believe that they can influence their parties’ positions on
important issues, the more incentives they will have to articulate their preferences.
For legislative parties to attract the interest and commitment of legislators, they must, fourthly, be able to
significantly support their members’ political and personal goals. They must therefore in the first place be
Page 12 of 20
sufficiently large and resourceful to serve those legislators’ ambitions. The size of a parliamentary party is a
function of the support it enjoys in the electorate on the one hand and its ability to maintain unity in the chamber on
the other. Since most legislatures are majoritarian (or in some situations super-majoritarian), effective political
parties typically have to be able to achieve legislative majorities on their own or in coalition with other parties. A
party’s ability to win votes in the legislature thus depends on the number of its members relative to others, as well
as on its bargaining power in negotiations with other legislative parties. In hegemonic systems with a single
dominant legislative party, or in two-party systems with a clear single-party majority, this party will, as long as it
remains unified, control the chamber’s median legislator, the legislative agenda, and hence the legislative
outcomes. Such parties may be able to offer significant office incentives to loyal legislators. Large parties also
have better opportunities to develop systems of internal specialization, which may facilitate the maintenance of
cohesion.
The expectations of actors will be shaped not only by the relative and absolute size of legislative parties, but also
by their stability both in terms of electoral volatility and their ability to maintain unity over time. Some legislatures
are characterized by a high degree of continuity in the number and size of their parliamentary parties. Others
witness considerable fluctuations, for example, in new democracies or periods of crisis and party-system
transformation. In the latter case, the time horizons of legislators can be relatively short, providing fewer incentives
to toe the party line, to invest in team (p. 390) production, and to develop a specialized longer-term organization.
High electoral volatility also tends to constrict the parties’ time horizons in bargaining over cabinet or legislative
coalitions (Lupia and Strøm 1995).
One of the most important inducements party leaders can offer to legislators is access to higher office within or
outside the legislative chamber itself, including most importantly, executive offices, but also legislative committee
chairs, speakerships, and other leadership positions within the party. Especially in parliamentary democracies,
sufficiently large and stable legislative parties give legislators chances of promotion within the legislative
organization, or to executive offices such as the cabinet. Larger and stable parties may also be capable of
establishing internal specialization which may give legislators access to legislative policy committees or to
managerial or leadership positions outside the formal government. Such office-holders may enjoy significant
agenda-setting powers in the legislative party. The relative attractiveness of legislative versus executive offices
matters. If the legislative arena offers attractive career opportunities, there will be incentives to invest time and
resources in internal specialization. If parliaments are no more than training grounds for government ministers,
however, the legislative parties may not be able to retain ambitious specialists.
Finally, members of legislative parties vary in the extent to which their members have attractive exit options. A high
level of group dependence (that is, unattractive exit options) is one crucial precondition for group discipline
(Hechter 1987; Saalfeld 1995b). If exit (meaning expulsion or resignation from the party) is very costly, legislators
have strong incentives to maintain party unity (see Congleton 2012). In many cases, withdrawing the party whip
from a member of parliament is the most severe sanction that can be imposed by the legislative party, usually for
indiscipline. Yet, the effectiveness of this form of punishment depends on procedural rules. Where the legislature’s
rules of procedure allow independent deputies to influence policy, and where the electoral system allows for a
significant “personal vote,” non-partisan or independent members may still enjoy some policy influence and some
prospects of political survival.
Various rules of the chamber impinge on the cost of exit from the party. In some chambers the rules of procedure
reserve most rights of legislative initiative and parliamentary activity to the legislative parties. In the German
Bundestag, for example, individual members are practically barred from introducing legislation, unless they are
supported by at least 5 percent of all members. The legislative parties (or a number of MPs from several parties
equivalent to the size of a parliamentary party as defined by the rules of procedure) also have the exclusive right
to table the main instruments of parliamentary interpellation. Rebels without a party thus lose virtually all their
potential influence and their ability to deliver particularistic benefits to their districts. They may have to balance the
cost of being marginal within the party and being virtually excluded from legislative business in the chamber (the
latter may still allow them to access the support services of parliament). Where they exist, such restrictions on
individual members’ rights to initiate parliamentary activities condemn independents to almost complete political
irrelevance in the chamber (if not in the media). The political cost of “exit” is thus extremely high in such
assemblies (p. 391) where parliamentary rules privilege parliamentary parties. This is in stark contrast to other
legislatures, such as the US Congress, where individual members have the power to introduce legislation.
Page 13 of 20
Related to this point is the extent to which legislative party leaders can control their members’ access to their ballot
and electoral endorsement. The process of candidate selection may have significant implications for the behaviour
of legislators in the chamber. Thus, constitutional and intra-party rules for candidate selection are important (Hazan
and Rahat 2009; see also Hazan in this volume). These rules may impose constraints on the ability of the
chamber’s median legislator to win stand-offs against groups of legislators that may be responsive to the party
median. “Legislators who are selected by party delegates are likely to be party players at most times, but may
nevertheless be predisposed to promoting the demands and interest of certain groups within the party—that is, the
groups that serve as their power base” (Hazan and Rahat 2009, 151). Party “selectorates” can vary across parties
and may potentially include all voters in a district (e.g. for parties with open primaries). The latter tends to weaken
party activists in the nomination process and create incentives for candidates to be responsive to local voters.4 At
the other end of a continuum, the selectorate may consist of a single party leader, which clearly creates
substantial incentives to adhere to the policies set by this leadership.
Overall, parties vary in the extent to which candidate selection is territorially centralized (Hazan and Rahat 2009,
33–71). Müller (2000, 319) observes that European party organizations typically have formal party-internal
selection mechanisms which directly or indirectly involve rank-and-file members. Because of the prevalence of
primary elections, US parties are outliers in that candidate selection is very decentralized and typically involves all
voters in the district (Hazan and Rahat 2009). In Europe, therefore, candidates tend to be their parties’ agents.
They work for the party’s goals. In return, the party conveys its label onto the party’s candidates. In the US system,
in contrast, there is a stronger personal element to the voters’ choices. Thus the mechanisms for candidate
selection are extremely important because they determine whether the preferences of the potential candidates that
come forward are aligned with the party’s overall ideological profile (through self selection) and because it may
equip legislative party leaders with sanctions against potential dissenters.
18.6 Concluding Observations and Future Research
Legislative parties can be hugely consequential for the way legislatures operate and, despite some controversy on
that score, for legislative outputs. Parties are stable coalitions of politicians, formed, because, in order to
accomplish anything in legislative politics, (p. 392) politicians need to cooperate. Transaction-cost economics
reminds us that reaching such goals requires the ability to overcome problems of opportunism and uncertainty
over long periods of time. Parties must be able to write agreements that protect the policies they adopt—giving
legislators incentives to stick with them. And party leaders who recognize the centrality of bargaining, electoral
considerations, and the shadow of the future are far more likely to succeed politically than those who neglect any
one of these considerations.
Research on legislative parties still tends to be bifurcated, consisting of formal theoretical work on the one hand
and descriptive studies on the other. The field would clearly benefit from better integration. On the one hand, the
formal literature offers a great deal of insight into the rationale for parties from the actors’ perspectives. Moreover,
a number of models in this literature has sparked fruitful methodological discussions about how to capture the
effects of legislative parties both theoretically and empirically. Despite this very rich body of scholarship, empirical
research on legislative parties is often parochial and seemingly disconnected from these theoretical debates. Yet
formal models also have their limitations. One is the simplifying assumptions that are often made about political
institutions. Where formal models focus on agenda-setting powers, the emphasis is very much on majority and
government parties (e.g. Cox and McCubbins 2005). But what about multiparty legislatures? And what if the pivotal
player is a minority party? What if legislatures (e.g. in bicameral systems or systems with supermajority
requirements) furnish minority parties with substantial powers to veto or delay legislation? Clearly, further work
needs to be done to account for such questions.
In some areas (such as the study of coalitions as well as in typical operationalizations of the pivotal-player
framework), parties still tend to be modeled as unitary actors despite frequent references to the need to relax this
assumption. The “black box” of intra-party preference heterogeneity, organization, and decision-making (and its
importance for legislative outcomes) has rarely been opened up. One reason is that measurement is difficult. We
thus have to recognize the considerable obstacles caused by the fact that many important variables (such as
sincere policy preferences) are non-observable and that attempts to capture them (e.g. recorded plenary votes)
suffer from selection bias.
Page 14 of 20
Theoretical work has also tended to be too parsimonious about how party leaders can maintain unity in the face of
preference diversity. The literature has placed a strong emphasis on hierarchy and discipline but often neglected
the enforcement problems that party leaders face (see e.g. Laver 1999). Descriptive work on a few parliaments, by
contrast, has produced rich, textured empirical accounts of intra-party policy-making (e.g. Schüttemeyer 1998;
Cowley 2002; Messerschmidt 2005), occasionally permitting scholars to trace processes of decision-making in
heterogeneous legislative parties. While empirically rich and suggestive, however, such accounts are susceptible
to overdetermination, selection bias, and a lack of generalizability.
For our knowledge of legislative parties to be more cumulative, future research should do more to ensure that
empirical research is informed by theoretical arguments, and vice versa. When formal models build on empirical
assumptions that are patently misleading, empiricists can do the discipline a considerable favour by pointing this
out and perhaps suggesting alternatives that would bring the models closer to the concerns of (p. 393) the real
world. Although it has been closing, a gap thus still exists between sophisticated formal models and empirical work.
In order to close it, we need to focus on the mechanisms of legislative party activity, especially in comparative
research.
We do believe there are opportunities to lift the lid on the black box of intra-party decision-making a little further
without giving up the quest for cumulative knowledge. Although legislators’ preferences are usually not observable,
one can employ the standard methodology of rationalist institutional analysis to ascertain whether they help us
explain phenomena that interest us. By utilizing fixed behavioural postulates about the preferences of relevant
actors, explicit stipulations about the effects of institutional rules (including arrangements within legislative parties),
and game-theoretic logic, we should thus be able to derive and test propositions about organizational behaviour
(see Diermeier and Krehbiel 2003, 131). And by drawing on typological distinctions such as those developed by
Heidar and Koole (2000) and comparative empirical work on party organization such as Janda’s (1983), scholars
can begin systematically to lodge assumptions about the preferences of politicians within more fine-grained
information about the parties’ institutional environment (e.g. the partyness of government, centralization of
candidate selection, control of ballot access, and the relative attractiveness of exit options), as well as about their
organizational features (such as their size, stability, and degree of internal hierarchy, centralization, and internal
specialization). Such an agenda, we believe, could hold great promise for the study of legislative parties.
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Notes:
(*) We would like to thank Simon Fink, Heike Klüver, Harald Schoen and, above all, Shane Martin for helpful
comments on earlier drafts of this chapter.
(1) . In most cases, it would suffice to define legislative parties as organized groups of members of a representative
assembly who were elected under the same party label. However, in some cases, such as the German Christian
Democrats, parties that have separate organizations outside the legislature may form a joint legislative party.
Heidar and Koole’s definition also helps exclude some legislative alliances that form purely in order to overcome
minimum size requirements imposed by a parliament’s standing orders (e.g., in the European Parliament).
(2) . Datenhandbuch zur Geschichte des Deutschen Bundestages

(<http://www.bundestag.de/dokumente/datenhandbuch/index.html>), Sections 5.9, 17.3, and 17.2, accessed 3
March 2013.
(3) . C-span home (2000), <http://legacy.c-span.org/questions/weekly35.asp>, accessed 3 March 2013.
(4) . Nevertheless, Brady, Han, and Pope (2007) found for US primaries that primaries may incentivize candidates
to adopt policy positions that are more extreme than the district median.
Thomas Saalfeld
Thomas Saalfeld is Professor of Political Science at the University of Bamberg and the founding Director of the Bamberg Graduate
School of Social Sciences.
Kaare W. Strøm
Kaare W. Strøm is Distinguished Professor of Political Science at the University of California, San Diego.
Page 20 of 20
Party Discipline
Party Discipline
Christopher Kam
Institutions
2014
For some time now, students of the US Congressional parties have debated whether party cohesion is largely a
function of the leaders successful efforts to impose discipline on their followers or merely a product of the shared
preferences of party members. Recent comparative contributions to this debate show that parliamentary
institutions can and do supply party leaders with the capacity to enforce discipline even when their members
disagree, and that discipline is a necessary aspect of party cohesion in any multiparty setting. However, party
leaders exercise their influence over a group of people who have:first, chosen to join the party;second, whom the
party has agreed to accept; and third, on whose support the leader may rely. Political scientists should focus their
efforts on understanding the connections between party cohesion and discipline on one hand, and the politics of
candidate and leadership selection on the other.
Keywords: party discipline, party cohesion, legislatures, political parties, roll-call voting
19.1 Introduction
IT is conventional to start an essay on party discipline by defining two closely related terms: party cohesion and
party discipline. Party cohesion is the degree to which members of a party are observed to work together in
pursuance of the party’s goals (Ozbudun 1970, 305). As such, determining whether or not a party is cohesive is a
wholly empirical matter. Party discipline refers to party cohesion that is generated and sustained by the actions of
party leaders. Party discipline is therefore a theoretical construct that stands as one possible explanation of why
Party A is more cohesive than Party B. It may be, for example, that A is more cohesive than B because certain
factors or strategies have enabled A’s leaders to impose discipline on their followers or undercut B’s leaders’
efforts to impose discipline on theirs. Alternatively, Party A may be more cohesive than Party B simply because A’s
members share policy preferences and B’s do not. In this latter case, A is not a disciplined party as much as
agglomeration of like-minded individuals. For some time now, and particularly for students of the US Congress and
US parties, the challenge has been to determine which of these two alternatives is the correct one. A widespread
practice of testing theories developed in the US context against comparative data has meant that this parties-or-
preferences debate has structured the empirical investigation of party discipline in comparative politics. It is easy
(and a mistake) to dismiss this work and the parties-or-preferences debate as irrelevant to parliamentary contexts
on the grounds that the monolithic unity of parliamentary parties leaves no room for legislators’ preferences to
affect their voting behaviour. My contention in this chapter is that considering parliamentary parties from this
parties-or-preferences perspective sharpens our insights into how parliamentary parties come to be so cohesive,
and clarifies the extent to which their cohesion depends on discipline. Equally, some of the in-built limitations and
implicit assumptions of the US Congressional formulation of the parties-or-preferences debate are laid bare when
party discipline is approached from a comparative perspective.
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(p. 400) 19.2 The Intellectual Context of Party Discipline in the US
There is a sense in which many of our current positive theories of party discipline are rooted in a 60-year old
normative critique of US political parties. The critique, set out in a report by APSA’s Committee on Political Parties
(APSA 1950), was as follows: American political parties were merely loose associations that were incapable of
enunciating coherent policy platforms let alone executing them (APSA 1950,p. 1). Legislation was produced on a
piecemeal basis by shifting coalitions. The system was inefficient in that it neither coordinated legislation across
policy areas nor addressed the government’s growing responsibilities (APSA 1950,pp. 15–16), and it was
irresponsible in that it obscured who was responsible for policy outcomes (APSA 1950, p. 19) and left the voter with
no political choice but to take “a chance with an individual candidate” (APSA 1950,pp. 27–28).
In its place, the APSA committee recommended a responsible and effective two-party system: each party would
develop and present to the electorate a coherent policy platform, and the winning party would use its cohesive
majority to translate its platform into an identifiable and rational legislative program for which it would bear the
credit or blame. Voters would in turn cast their votes knowing what each party stood for, that the incumbent party
was responsible for the policies that were now in place, and that the winning party could effect its platform
promises. In this fashion, the two-party system presented the voter with a clear and meaningful choice between a
governing incumbent and opposition challenger. The committee, in short, drew a clear link between party cohesion
and political accountability.1
Less clear, as Austin Ranney (1951) observed, was whether the APSA committee understood why American parties
were organized and functioned as they did. Ranney cited Lowell’s (1902) statistical analysis of party cohesion in
the US Congress and the British House of Commons as evidence that the weakness of party lines in Congress was
long-standing. This suggested to Ranney a logical relationship between party cohesion and constitutional context.
Thus, if the normative goal was to empower a popular majority (as it was in Britain), then disciplined parties and
cabinet government were the logical and feasible means to that goal. Americans, however, placed greater value
on minority rights than on majority power. Accordingly, the American constitution diffused (rather than
concentrated) power and provided (rather than deprived) minorities with vetoes to protect themselves. American
party leaders succeed—and could only succeed—by bringing together broad coalitions of minorities and “office-
seekers” around a flexible series of non-ideological appeals. What Lowell (1897) had understood and what the
APSA committee had failed to understand, Ranney concluded, was that American parties were adapted to the
American constitutional context; they could only be subject to normative evaluation on that basis.
(p. 401) Ranney’s plea that American parties be understood “as they were,” i.e., positively, found an audience.
From the 1950s onward, American political scientists produced a prodigious amount of positive and empirical work
on the US Congress and US parties. This subsequent literature is too large to cover here in any sequential fashion,
but summarizing it in that manner is unnecessary. The key point to appreciate is that this literature produced a
theoretical understanding of the challenges that members of Congress confront individually and collectively. The
central individual challenge is to secure re-election, and members do this mainly by passing legislation that serves
their constituents’ interests (Mayhew 1974). The democratic structure of Congress means that members cannot do
this unilaterally, however; they need to build majority coalitions to pass legislation. This presents members with a
series of collective challenges, to wit:
1. They have to identify a mutually satisfactory policy.2

2. Coordinate their votes to pass the policy.
3. Enforce the agreement to ensure that members do not renege on their deals.
The formal equality of legislators, the incentives to free-ride, and the inherent instability of majority rule all work
against arriving at a solution to these problems.
By the late 1980s, few Congressional scholars disputed this characterization of the legislative problem. Similarly,
most Congressional scholars agreed that the high volume of legislation and the high rate at which incumbents were
re-elected directly contradicted their theories; Congress members had patently solved the legislative problem.
Where Congressional scholars were in sharp disagreement were the reasons for the paradox. There were two
schools of thought on the matter. The first cast legislative organization as the solution to the legislative problem.
Proponents of this view (e.g. Mayhew 1974; Shepsle 1979; Shepsle and Weingast 1987; Weingast and Marshall
1988; Krehbiel 1991) argue that the very structure of the Congressional committee system operates to resolve the
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collective action problems that members face. The second school of thought argues that political parties were the
solution to the legislative problem (e.g. Rhode 1991; Cox and McCubbins 1993; Aldrich 1995). This view stresses
the role of congressional parties in resolving members’ collective action problems: party platforms aggregate
diverse interests into a coherent set of policies, party whips help members to coordinate their votes, and party
leaders distribute selective incentives (e.g. promotions to prestigious committees) to induce and reward loyalty to
the party line.
The disagreement between the organizational and partisan accounts of Congress sparked a debate. The central
issue was whether the existence and presence of parties in Congress affected how Congress functioned and the
policies it produced. Krehbiel (1993, 238) put the question starkly: “In casting apparently partisan votes, do
individual legislators vote with fellow party members in spite of their disagreement about the policy in question, or
do they vote with fellow party members because of their agreement about the policy in question?” Only in the
former case can one speak of parties (p. 402) as altering political outcomes; in the latter case, party members
vote as they please and parties are merely agglomerations of like-minded individuals.

Fig. 19.1A Krehbiel’s model of party cohesion: a situation of perfect cohesion regardless of the parties’
capacity to enforce discipline

Fig. 19.1B Krehbiel’s model of party cohesion: a situation where perfect cohesion results if and only if
parties have a capacity to enforce discipline
Krehbiel illustrated his argument by means of the simple spatial model shown in Fig. 19.1. The polygons L and R
represent the distribution of policy preferences within two legislative parties. The two parties have median policies
of l and r respectively, but in each party there are members who hold somewhat different positions. Assume that
members have Euclidean preferences and thus vote for the party policy (i.e., l or r) closest to their ideal point. If
the distribution of preferences is as it is in Fig. 19.1a, where all members of L are closer to their own party’s policy
position of l, and the same is true of members of R with respect to r, then a vote that pits l against r will see both
parties vote with perfect cohesion. In contrast, if the distribution of preferences is as it is in Fig. 19.1b, where some
members of each party are closer to the opposing party’s policy position than to their own party’s position, then
votes pitting l against r will generate disunity unless the parties are capable of disciplining their outlying members
to toe the party line. Absent direct measures of legislators’ policy preferences, one cannot identify whether a party
is united because its members have similar preferences (as in Fig. 19.1a) or because party leaders successfully
impose discipline on outlying members (Fig. 19.1b). This observability problem is a serious one in as much as it
undermines party discipline as a meaningful concept and throws into question the capacity of political parties to
alter legislative outcomes.
(p. 403) 19.3 Do Parties Matter and How Would We Know if They Did?
19.3.1 Agenda Control
Krehbiel’s central contention is that if preferences in the chamber are distributed as in Fig. 19.1a, then parties (and
hence party discipline) are logically irrelevant to an explanation of members’ voting decisions or legislative
outcomes. This conclusion follows only if the nature of the issues that come to a vote on the floor of the legislature
is independent of the process by which those issue are brought to the floor. There is a good deal of evidence that
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this is not the case (e.g. Saalfeld 2005; Carruba et al. 2006). It is possible, for example, that situations such as Fig.
19.1a come about because party leaders manipulate the legislative agenda. Specifically, leaders of the majority
party could employ positive agenda control to ensure that bills on which their members are in agreement (i.e., as in
Fig. 19.1a) are brought to a vote, and negative agenda control to ensure that bills on which their members are
divided (i.e., as in Fig. 19.1b) do not come to a vote. In so doing, the majority party acts as a procedural cartel
(Cox and McCubbins 1993, 2005), that is, as a collusive association that uses its control of the legislative agenda
to control the production and distribution of legislation.
Cox and McCubbin’s theory that legislative parties act as procedural cartels is consistent with two empirical
patterns. The first is that the volume of legislation pushed through the US House of Representatives varies with the
ideological homogeneity of the majority party: the more homogeneous the majority party, the greater the volume of
legislation on the agenda (Cox and McCubbins 2005). The second is that the House majority party is almost never
“rolled,” that is, it rarely incurs a defeat as a result of internal disunity. This suggests that majority party leaders are
either 1) successfully avoiding issues on which their own members are divided, or 2) effectively imposing discipline
on their members. In either case, party “matters” in the sense that majority party leaders are capable of affecting
political outcomes.
19.3.2 Agenda Control and Parliamentary Government
There is also evidence of agenda control at work in legislatures outside the US. Comparative work on Japan,
Sweden, and Italy, for example, shows that majority coalitions in these three countries are rarely rolled (Masuyama,
Cox, and McCubbins 2001; Cox, Heller, and McCubbins 2008). It is noteworthy that Japan, Sweden, and Italy are all
parliamentary systems. One of the hallmarks of parliamentary systems is the confidence relationship that exists
between the executive and legislative branches. In its classic Westminster formulation, the confidence convention
allows the executive (i.e., the cabinet) to govern provided it enjoys the confidence of the legislature, and to
dissolve the (p. 404) legislature should the latter refuse its confidence. In theory, this relationship generates
powerful incentives for cohesive and disciplined behaviour because a working majority of legislators can install a
cabinet (hence a set of policies and a distribution of perks) that they jointly prefer. Correspondingly, if the prime
minister and cabinet can elicit support from a majority of legislators, they can continue to govern as they see fit.
One of the central means by which prime ministers can elicit legislative support is to invoke the vote of confidence
procedure. The vote of confidence procedure arms prime ministers with the capacity to make a take-it-or-leave-it
offer to the legislature as a whole, but its main targets are the prime minister’s own supporters (Laver 2006). If the
prime minister makes a bill’s passage a matter of confidence and the measure fails, the government falls and
members of the governing majority must either give up their perks and move to the opposition benches or fight an
election with all the risks and costs that that entails. In this respect, the vote of confidence is a strong form of
positive agenda control; it allows the prime minister to advance not only legislation on which government members
agree but also legislation on which they disagree.
The vote of confidence is a two-pronged instrument in that it presents to the prime minister’s supporters both the
threat of early elections and the inducement of continued access to the perks of office. Two well-cited models of
the vote of confidence highlight these dynamics. In Huber’s (1996) model the prime minister makes a take-it-or-
leave-it policy proposal to the assembly and government members fall into line mainly because they fear an early
election. In Diermeier and Feddersen’s (1998) model, members of the governing coalition get to submit proposals
on how the perks of office are to be divided amongst themselves, and they collectively retain this right as long as
their proposals pass in the legislature. Thus in Diermeier and Feddersen’s model, government members fall into line
to maintain their access to the perks of government.
Taken together Huber’s and Diermeier and Feddersen’s models suggest that either dynamic (i.e., the threat of early
elections or the promise of continued access to the perks of office) is sufficient to induce unity among members of
the governing coalition. Empirically, however, it appears to be the carrot of office rather than the stick of early
elections that keeps governing parties united. First, several studies of the British and Canadian House of Commons
show that the most loyal MPs are those who either hold top front-bench positions or who hold positions that are
stepping stones into such positions (see, e.g. Gaines and Garrett 1993; Benedetto and Hix 2007; Kam 2009).
Second, the same studies also show that the most rebellious MPs are those who have been demoted from the front-
bench (and who are unlikely therefore to be ministers again), or those who failed to secure a promotion early in
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their parliamentary careers (and who are likely therefore to languish on the backbenches throughout their
careers). Finally, there is little evidence to support the hypothesis that party discipline is rooted in the fear of an
early election. In theory, the threat of an early election weakens as the parliamentary term progresses and the time
for mandated elections draws nearer. This would suggest that the governing party’s cohesion should decline over
the course of term, but Cox (1987, 86) finds no support for this hypothesis.
(p. 405) Regardless of exactly how the confidence relationship induces cohesion, it seems natural to credit it for
the fact that parties in parliamentary systems are significantly more cohesive than parties in presidential systems
(Powell 2000; Carey 2009). It is, after all, the presence or absence of a confidence relationship between the
executive and legislative branches that distinguishes parliamentary and presidential forms of government. The
logical difficulty with this position is that confidence convention explains and can only explain the cohesion of
governing parties. Consider the matter from a game-theoretic perspective: If a governing majority is perfectly
cohesive, it cannot be defeated, and hence any voting strategy adopted by opposition members is in equilibrium.
Yet, opposition parties in parliamentary systems are as highly cohesive as governing parties (Carey 2009; Depauw
and Martin 2009).3 Opposition parties, moreover, tend to vote so consistently against the government that voting in
most parliamentary systems takes on a government-opposition configuration (Hix and Noury 2011).

Fig. 19.2 Spirling and dewan’s model of government-opposition voting
Dewan and Spirling (2011) advance an agenda-setting explanation for these empirical patterns. Their model begins
with the observation that parliamentary governments have much greater control over the legislative agenda than
do opposition parties (see e.g. Döring 1995, 2001). Consider then a situation as in Fig. 19.2, with three government
members (g1, g2, g3) on the left of the policy space and the two opposition members (o1, o2) on the right, though
with 01 lying to g3’s left. The situation is thus very much as in Fig. 19.1b with some overlap between the two parties’
members. Assume that a government minister, say g2 can make a take-it-or-leave-it proposal to replace the status
quo, q, with some other policy, x. If voting were sincere, the best outcome that g2 could secure would be x = o1−q
(Romer and Rosenthal 1978). Now consider what the outcome would be if o1 and o2 could commit to vote against
any ministerial proposal. If so, g2 could at best obtain x* = g3−q, an outcome that both opposition members prefer
to o1−q. The opposition members’ commitment to vote en bloc against the minister’s proposals is therefore a
credible one. The government members’ best response is to vote en bloc for their minister’s proposal. The end
result is that the opposition votes cohesively against the government and vice versa.
As noted in the introduction to this chapter, it is easy to dismiss the parties-or-preferences debate as irrelevant to
parliamentary settings because the monolithic unity of parliamentary parties ostensibly leaves little room for
legislators’ preferences to affect their voting behaviour. Observe, however, that the government and opposition
parties in Dewan and Spirling’s model are cohesive rather than disciplined, and they are so for precisely the same
reason as in Krehbiel’s model, that is, due to the distribution of policy preferences within and between parties.
There is, however, an important and ironic point of difference between the two models, and it is that party (p. 406)
cohesion in the Dewan-Spirling model requires some overlap in the policy preferences of government and
opposition members.4 The real importance of this point of difference is not that it leads the two models to make
different predictions about the relationship between the distribution of policy preferences within the chamber and
party cohesion, but rather that it alters the logical relationship between legislators’ preferences and party
cohesion. Specifically, in the Dewan-Spirling model the distribution of policy preferences within and between
parties is merely a necessary condition for party cohesion (not necessary and sufficient as in Krehbiel’s model).
Sufficiency in the Dewan-Spirling model is provided by the additional condition of the government’s monopoly
control of the parliamentary agenda. Thus one is brought back to the idea that the high levels of cohesion
exhibited by parliamentary parties are in large measure a function of the strong forms of positive agenda control
that parliamentary governments enjoy.
Still, there are obvious limits to agenda control as an explanation of party unity. First, even in parliamentary
systems where party leaders enjoy significant agenda control, we observe leaders declaring “free votes” on
certain issues. Leaders may declare a free vote to distance their party from the issue, but they may also do so
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because they know that they cannot compel their members to toe the line. This sort of agenda control corroborates
rather than falsifies Krehbiel’s argument. Second, we observe parties maintaining cohesion even when they do not
fully control the agenda. Hix, Noury, and Roland (2007), for example, find that party groups in the European
Parliament are as cohesive on proposals initiated by the European Commission (i.e., matters on which party group
leaders lack agenda control) as on proposals submitted by the group’s own rapporteurs (i.e., matters on which the
party group possess agenda control). We are thus left in a position where our formal models indicate that (strong)
agenda control is a sufficient basis for party unity, but where our empirics demonstrate that agenda control is
rarely complete and (per Hix’s et al. results) unnecessary for party cohesion. There is no contradiction here, just a
signal that agenda control is but one of several possible means by which parties achieve unity.
19.3.3 Coefficients, Confounds, and Candidate Selection
Krehbiel defines significant party behaviour as “behaviour that is consistent with known party policy objectives but
that is independent of personal preferences” (Krehbiel 1993, 240). Given this definition, one might test for
significant party behaviour by regressing individual members’ vote(s) on some proposal on their ideological
preferences and their party affiliations, that is:
V OT Eij = b1 PREFERENCEi + b2 PART Yi [1]
where, VOTEij denotes member i’s vote(s) on some legislative proposal, j, PREFERENCEi is a measure of i’s
ideological preferences (e.g. i’s location on a left-right scale),5 and PARTYi is member i’s party affiliation.6
(p. 407) Considering party cohesion and party discipline in terms of this regression framework shows that
Krehbiel’s argument is simply a familiar omitted variables problem: If PREFERENCEi, is omitted from Equation 1, then
estimates of b2 will be biased away from zero, and the stronger the correlation between legislators’ ideological
preferences and their party affiliations, the more severe this bias will be. However, once a measure of legislators’
policy preferences is added to the model, b2≠ 0 appears to offer direct evidence that parties “matter,” that is, that
parties influence how members cast their votes. Estimating models such as Equation 1 is a popular means of
responding to Krehbiel’s challenge for exactly this reason (e.g. Ames 1995; Snyder and Groseclose 2000;
Ansolabehere et al. 2001; McCarty et al. 2001; Kam 2001; Cox and Poole 2002; Hix 2004; Battista and Richman
2011).
By adding to Equation 1 other variables that influence the legislator’s vote, the analyst can identify and understand
how legislators and parties respond to various pressures and incentives. Mughan et al. (1997), for example,
interact party affiliation and length of parliamentary service to investigate whether legislative socialization
reinforces the party loyalty of British MPs. More generally, the specification of Equation 1 is guided by the
assumption that legislators are trying to optimize some combination of policy, office, and votes (Müller and Strøm
1999). That is, legislators are trying to: 1) enact their favoured policies, 2) advance their careers, and 3) enhance
their re-election prospects. If the party leadership controls access to all three of these goods, then the legislator’s
decision to toe the party line is straightforward. Most studies, however, examine situations in which the legislator is
cross-pressured by the conflicting demands of two or more political principals. This is a common state of the world.
Hix, Roland, and Noury (2007), for example, consider how members of the European Parliament (MEPs) respond
when the position of their national party (which nominates the MEP) conflict with the position of their European
parliamentary group (which controls the flow of benefits to the MEP). Similarly, Saiegh (2011), Carey (2003), and
Morgenstern (2004) consider how Latin American legislators respond to presidential appeals to support positions
that conflict with their parties’ positions.
The general result in these works is that both b1≠ 0 and b2≠ 0. The common interpretation of this result is that both
“party” and “preferences” matter. The interpretation rests on b2 providing a valid estimate of the marginal impact
of party affiliation on legislators’ votes holding constant their preferences. The substantive and theoretical
significance of a statistical result of b2≠ 0 is not obvious, however. This is particularly the case when models such
as Equation 1 are applied to multiparty legislatures. A legislature with k parties, for example, will require the analyst
to estimate a vector of k-1 party coefficients (i.e., b2, b3...bk−1). The magnitude of these coefficients will vary and
will do so depending on which party one uses as the base of comparison. This complicates any statistical
comparison of “party” and “preference,” and it does so at more that just a technical level. The greater but less
visible complication is the fact that the party coefficients are influenced by the strategic environment inside the
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legislature. For example, if the party system and legislature are structured around two competing blocs of parties
(as in France or Sweden), Equation 1 will generate party coefficients that are quite different in magnitude across
(p. 408) blocs and much the same within them. This pattern reflects the fact that roll-call votes in this hypothetical
legislature generally pit the parties in the governing bloc against those in the opposition bloc. In consequence, any
interpretation of the party coefficients (e.g. as measures of party discipline) is contingent on the ratio of “bloc
cohesion” to “party cohesion.” This point is perhaps better appreciated if one imagines Equation 1 estimated on a
legislature in which a minority government secures support from a shifting set of opposition parties; in such a case,
the coefficient on any given party dummy reflects how often that party supported or opposed the government as
well as its cohesion.7
A deeper problem is that the standard interpretation of b2 rests on the implicit assumption that legislators are
randomly assigned to parties (Angrist and Pischke 2009). This is patently false. Legislators do not join parties at
random and parties do not choose legislators at random. Political scientists understand this with respect to the
candidate selection process, and they appreciate the disciplinary implications (e.g. Ostrogorski 1902/1964;
Schattschneider 1942; Rahat and Hazan 2001; Siavelis and Morgenstern 2008). When the party’s central
leadership controls candidate selection, leaders can threaten to prevent rebellious members from running on the
party label or to demote them to an unwinnable position on the party’s list, etc. On this view, the candidate
selection process is a disciplinary device that leaders use to control members’ behaviour after elections. There is,
however, another causal pathway by which the candidate selection process allows leaders to control their
members. This second pathway involves the party leadership using the candidate selection process as a
screening device to weed out potential misfits before elections. Put in the terms of Krehbiel’s spatial model, the
candidate selection process can be used by the leadership to screen out candidates with positions that are too far
from its own. This perspective implies that the party coefficient, b2, confounds a treatment effect of party discipline
applied after elections with a selection effect of the candidate selection process applied prior to elections.
The obvious question to come out of this line of argument is how large is the selection effect of the candidate
selection process. That is, how effectively are parties able to screen out misfits and what impact does this have, if
any, on the party’s cohesion? Saiegh (2011) tries to answer the question using data from a survey of Latin
American legislators to measure the policy positions of Chilean and Colombian legislators. The choice of countries
is deliberate: Chilean parties have strong control of their candidate selection processes and are highly cohesive;
Colombian parties have little capacity to prevent candidates from running on their lists and are quite fractious. Is it
therefore the case, Saiegh asks, that Chilean parties are more ideologically homogeneous and distinct than
Colombian parties? Indeed, the distribution of legislators’ policy preferences in the Chilean legislature is such that
the two blocs are quite distinct, whereas in Colombia the distribution of legislators’ preferences is such that the
memberships of the three main parties overlap one another.
Saiegh’s work probably represents the best effort to date to assess the selection effect of candidate selection on
party cohesion, but even so it suffers from an obvious weakness. The policy positions are derived from surveys of
legislators, whereas what one requires to test the hypothesis that parties screen out ideological misfits are data
from surveys of prospective candidates. Indeed, even data from candidate surveys may be insufficient; (p. 409)
the respondents to these surveys are adopted candidates (i.e., those whom the party has approved after
subjecting them to screening) and what are really required to test the screening hypothesis are data from the
people who applied to be candidates but whom the party turned away.

Fig. 19.3 Krehbiel’s model in a multiparty legislature
Nevertheless, let’s assume that parties can and do use their candidate selection processes to limit ideological
diversity within the parties. Assume, further, that all parties are successful in this endeavor. That is, all parties are
successful in ensuring that their candidates (and hence their legislators) are closer to their own party’s position
than any other. In a two-party system, this configuration of preferences is by itself sufficient to ensure that all
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parties maintain perfect cohesion. Consider the same situation in a multiparty setting. Fig. 19.3 depicts a three-
party system in which all members of the left, centre, and right parties are closer to their own party’s position (L, C,
and R, respectively) than any other party’s position. In this legislature, any vote that pits L against R will see the
centre party split down the middle unless the centre party’s leaders can impose discipline on their members.
This example affords three insights into party discipline. First, it suggests that members of parties that have
opponents on both flanks (e.g. the centrist parties in one-dimensional party systems) are more likely to find
themselves cross-pressured than members of parties that face competition on only one flank (e.g. the left-wing and
right-wing parties in one-dimensional party systems). All else being equal, then, centrist parties in one-dimensional
party systems should be less cohesive than their left-wing and right-wing opponents.8 Morgenstern’s (2004)
analysis of party cohesion in Latin American legislatures indicates that this is broadly the case.9 Second, the
example demonstrates that ideological homogeneity among party members is not sufficient to ensure party unity in
multiparty settings. Thus, if we observe highly cohesive parties in these environments, we know that something
(agenda-setting, discipline, etc.) must be at work. Third, this multiparty extension of Krehbiel’s model shows that
there are distinct limits to what candidate selection can contribute to party unity. No matter how successful the
centre party’s leadership is at screening out candidates who do not share the party’s views, the party will always
be at risk of disunity because its location in the party system constantly exposes its members to cross-pressures.
This last insight suggests a concrete hypothesis about party cohesion and discipline in multiparty settings, to wit: if
a centrist party (in a one-dimensional party system) is as (p. 410) cohesive as the left-wing and right-wing parties
in the party system, then it is either the case that:
1. The centrist party’s leaders are especially effective at eliciting loyalty by means other than candidate
selection.
2. The centre party’s cohesion is generated and sustained by forces that affect all parties equally, e.g.
legislative or electoral rules.
A number of related hypotheses might also be advanced. For example, the low marginal impact of candidate
screening on a centre party’s cohesion should induce centrist parties to devote proportionately fewer resources to
the ex ante screening of candidates and proportionately more resources to the ex post policing of its elected
members. There is a potential research program here on impact of candidate selection on party unity, but as noted
above, the data required to test these sorts of hypotheses are going to be difficult to acquire.
19.3.4 Selective Incentives
The degree to which leaders uses selective incentives to elicit loyalty is a theme that has surfaced at several
points in the chapter. The general structure of the problem is this: all legislators value some combination of policy,
office, and votes, but the average backbench legislator does not have much in the way of policy influence or office
perks. She or he does, however, have a vote in the legislature. In contrast, party leaders possess significant policy
influence and office perks.10 Leaders are rarely in danger of suffering a personal electoral defeat, and hence they
themselves do not need votes in the electorate; they need votes in the legislature. Thus, there is a basis for
exchange, the member giving their legislative vote to the leader and the leader compensating the backbencher
with some combination of policy, office, and votes (in the electorate).
Opportunities for these exchanges arise whenever the leader and backbencher disagree about party policy. The
disagreement may be purely ideological in nature (perhaps the leader is a bit too centrist for the backbencher’s
taste), or it may reflect the backbencher’s concern that the party’s policy threatens his or her re-election
prospects (e.g. the policy may be unpopular with the backbencher’s supporters). Unity results when the terms of
exchange are mutually agreeable; disunity, when there is a bargaining failure. Institutional variables affect both
range of feasible bargains and the degree to which the final terms favour the leader or the backbencher. Three
variables stand out in importance:
1. The degree to which the electoral system allows and induces legislators to build up a personal vote that is
independent of the party label.
An electoral system that prevents the legislator from building up a personal vote independent of the party
undercuts the motive to dissent at the outset (Hix 2004). Under a (p. 411) closed-list PR system, for example, the
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Party Discipline
MP’s electoral fate is tied wholly to the party’s, and dissenting from the party does nothing to change that fact. On
the contrary, if parliamentary disunity damages the party’s general electoral standing, it simultaneously damages
the MPs’ own prospects for re-election and hence cannot even be used as a credible threat by the MP to extract
concessions from the party leadership. Conversely, if the electoral system permits legislators to build up personal
vote that is independent of the party label, the legislator has an incentive to respond to an uncongenial party
policy by dissenting from party on the floor of the assembly to: 1) signal to voters that they do not agree with the
party’s stance, with the hope of 2) insulating themselves from the electoral unpopularity of the party’s policy.
2. The degree to which the internal organization of the legislature allows the backbencher to achieve her
policy and office goals of outside party channels and independently (i.e., as separable goods).
The effects of the legislature’s internal organization on the individual member’s incentive to toe the party line are
harder to pin down than the effects of the electoral system. This is because different institutional arrangements
may induce the same behaviour. Consider the behavioural implications of two stereotypical patterns of legislative
organization. In the first, policy influence is vested in a small set of higher offices and parties firmly control the
pathways to those office. These arrangements are typical of the Westminster form of parliamentary government,
with cabinet ministers dominating policy-making and parties in control of the professional pathways that lead from
the backbench to the cabinet. These arrangements are effective at eliciting loyalty because they impose a high
cost on the backbencher for rebelling, i.e., the loss of any possibility of a ministerial career, and with it, any
possibility of exerting policy influence.
In the second pattern of legislative organization office-holding and policy-making are separated (i.e., one need not
hold higher office to influence policy) and parties do not fully control the levers of policy influence.11 Under these
conditions, it may be more effective and less costly for the backbencher to toe the line on the party’s policy on the
assembly floor and use their policy influence to diminish its impact behind the scenes. A powerful committee
system, for example, may create the opportunity for a member to offset a general policy of budgetary restraint by
securing a public works contract for a large employer in their own district. Again, the final result may be party unity.
The same outcome is achieved by quite different legislative arrangements. The analytical challenge is therefore to
demonstrate that these same levels of party cohesion are achieved by different processes and further to show that
these processes are, in fact, institutionally contingent.
3. The degree to which the party leadership can use candidate selection and ballot access rules as ex post
constraints on the legislator.
A capacity to prevent a sitting legislator from running for re-election as a party candidate provides the party leader
with a significant last-mover advantage. The leadership’s (p. 412) last-mover advantage means that rank-and-file
members must condition their actions in anticipation of a future in which the party leadership has the means to stop
them running under the party label. This places the onus on the backbencher to establish a satisfactory record of
loyalty, and should he or she fail to do that, it is quite credible for the leadership to deny the backbencher’s
renomination as a party candidate.
19.4 Conclusion
Krehbiel pushed scholars to distinguish between party cohesion and party discipline. The theoretical stakes of
mixing up the two concepts are to impute to parties an influence over their members that is logically unnecessary
and perhaps empirically unfounded. Consider Krehbiel’s model in a multiparty context, however, and one discovers
that party discipline is a logical requisite of party unity. The challenge is to demonstrate this empirically. The
difficulty lies in the fact that we cannot automatically take data on party cohesion at face value. Not only can
institutions serve simultaneously as inducements to loyalty and threats to disloyalty (e.g. the confidence
convention), they can operating as ex ante filters or ex post sanctions (e.g. candidate selection rules). Different
institutions, moreover, may combine to produce the same level of party cohesion. Two parties operating under the
same set of institutions may exhibit different levels of cohesion because they occupy quite different positions in the
party system. Our immediate challenges are therefore mainly empirical in nature, requiring us to grapple with
issues of collinearity and (especially) nonrandom selection.
My review implicitly recommends that these challenges be met in the context of one of several possible research
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programs. Indeed, I have made clear that I see the relationship between party discipline and the candidate
selection processes as deserving of further scholarly attention, especially the extent to which candidate selection
procedures are used as screening devices. I say this for two reasons. First, there has been a surge of interest in
and subsequent theoretical work on the role of (adverse) selection in politics (e.g. Besley 2005; Mattozzi and Merlo
2007; Galasso and Nannicini 2011). This literature can provide a theoretical basis to empirical work. Second,
associated with this kind of research program are a number of interesting questions. For example, are the efforts
and resources that parties devote to candidate selection contingent on their strategic positions in the party
system? How do parties manage trade-offs between ideological compatibility and other desirable qualities, e.g.
competence? Is the contribution that closed-list PR electoral systems make to party cohesion largely due to the fact
that they give party leaders near complete control over their members’ political futures or to the strong incentives
that such electoral systems give to leaders to screen out candidates who might damage the party label? The
central challenge of any such research program will be to obtain data not just on individuals whom the party has
selected as candidates but also on those whom it has rejected. These data will be difficult to collect, but the return
on the investment to collect them promises to be high.
(p. 413) A second possible research program focuses on the relationship between the structure and stability of
the party leadership and party discipline. In many of the theories of party discipline set out above, party cohesion
is achieved because the party leadership can manipulate the options available to backbenchers. If the party
leadership controls the order in which candidates appear on the party list, for example, the backbencher’s choice
reduces to one of toeing the party line or being placed near the bottom of the party list and losing his or her seat.
Similarly, if the party leadership control the pathways to higher office, the backbencher’s choice reduces to one of
toeing the party line or surrendering any hope of promotion. This type of argument ignores a crucial alternative in
the backbencher’s choice, that is, to replace the party leader. A new leader may imply improved electoral and
coalition prospects or a different distribution of offices among party members (e.g. Laver and Shepsle 1996;
Schofield and Sened 2006; Iaryczower 2008; Giannetti and Laver 2009). This raises a number of interesting
possibilities. For example, the selection of party leaders may be conditional not only on the policies they promise to
pursue but also the distribution of perks that they promise to effect. Correspondingly, backbenchers may rebel
against the party line, not because they disagree with the party’s policy as such, but rather because they hope to
destabilize a leader under whom their careers have stalled. (This would explain why MPs in closed-list PR systems
rebel even when doing so ostensibly damages the party label and their own electoral prospects.) Cohesion may
therefore reflect a leader-induced equilibrium in policy, perks, and electoral and coalition prospects. Elements and
variations on these ideas exist in the literature (e.g. Strøm 1994), and hence in contrast to a research program on
candidate selection (where I see the challenge as being primarily empirical) the challenge of a research program
that embeds party discipline into a larger theory of intraparty politics will require more synthetic and theoretical
effort. The general opacity of intraparty politics (in parliamentary systems, especially) will nevertheless present
significant empirical challenges to any research program that tries to connect party discipline to the selection and
stability of party leaders.
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Yale University Press. (p. 417)
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University Press.
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Notes:
(1) . Bowler, Farrell, and Katz (1999), Powell (2000), and Carey (2009) offer more contemporary statements about
the connection between party discipline and accountability.
(2) . Mutually satisfactory policies might take the form of distributive bargains (Weingast and Marshall 1988) or
policies that members agree serve the public good (Fenno 1973). Policies may be obvious or found only after
members spend time investigating a policy area (Krehbiel 1991).
(3) . The fact that we observe little difference in the cohesion of governing and opposition parties in parliamentary
systems may be a statistical artifact. Kam (2009) looks at data on parliamentary dissent from Britain, Canada,
Australia, and New Zealand. Dissent occurs when an MP casts a vote on the chamber floor that is contrary to his or
her party’s instructions. Kam finds that governing parties experience dissent more frequently than do opposition
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parties, but that this dissent rarely involves more than a handful of members at any one time. In contrast, the
dissent in opposition parties tends to involve a proportionately greater number of members. Thus, governing
parties experience frequent but minor breakdowns in cohesion whereas opposition parties experience infrequent
but significant breakdowns. This pattern could well result in government and opposition parties having the same
average levels of cohesion.
(4) . If g3 were to the left of o1 in Fig. 19.2, for example, a vote that pitted x = o1-q against q would see o1 would
voting for x and o2 voting for q.
(5) . There is a debate about how best to measure legislators’ preferences (e.g. Vandoren 1990; Jackson and
Kingdon 1992; Ansolabehere et al. 2001), but it is not of direct concern here.
(6) . Let me emphasize that Equation 1 is a conceptual model; it might be estimated in a variety of ways depending
on the nature of the dependent variable and data generating process (e.g. a probit model to estimate members’
votes on a single roll-call or OLS to estimate the percentage of times that members dissented from their parties in a
large number of roll-calls).
(7) . These issues can be fixed (e.g. by controlling for bloc membership, the party’s governing or opposition status,
etc.), but only if the analyst understands the legislative context in which parties staked their positions and in which
members cast their votes.
(8) . The hypothesis cannot be stated so definitively if the policy space is multidimensional because such an
environment may expose all parties to competition on two or more flanks or leave them in competition with just one
party on one dimension.
(9) . Morgenstern notes this pattern, but he does not investigate whether it holds with other factors held constant.
For example, it is not clear whether centrist parties are less cohesive because of their position in the party system
or whether they are less cohesive because they happen to be more ideologically diverse than identifiably left-wing
or right-wing parties.
(10) . I leave aside the important question of whether leaders’ endowments of policy influence and office perks are
exogenous or endogenous to their positions.
(11) . These arrangements typified the pre-reform US House of Representative and characterize several Latin
American presidential systems (e.g. Columbia). Several continental parliaments (e.g. Italy, Spain, Netherlands) also
feature relatively powerful committee systems in which a legislator might exercise some independent policy
influence (see Damgaard 1995).
Christopher Kam
Christopher Kam is an Associate Professor in the Department of Political Science at the University of British Columbia.
Page 14 of 14
Legislative Party Switching

Carol Mershon
Institutions
2014
Legislative candidates and sitting legislators can and sometimes do change official party affiliation. The study of
legislative party switching offers important lessons about parties, legislatures, and democratic politics. As this
chapter shows, when we take seriously politicians’ willingness and ability to jump party, we shed fresh light on the
wisdom that politicians treat parties as vehicles for winning votes, securing office, and wielding policy influence.
We advance knowledge of parties as key components of democratic governance. We gain new insight into
legislative institutions as constraints on representatives’ behavior and as resources in the hands of strategic
politicians. We enlarge understanding of the roles played by elections in both democratic and authoritarian
regimes.
Keywords: political parties, legislative parties, intraparty politics, party switching, legislator ambition, strategic partisanship, legislative institutions,
party systems, representation
20.1 Introduction
LEGISLATIVE candidates and elected legislators can and sometimes do change official party affiliation—that is, switch.1
Whereas legislative party switching is rare in some contexts (e.g. Australia), it is “rampant” in others (Hicken 2006,
388, on the Philippines). What brings members of parliament (MPs) to switch party? What consequences do MPs’
moves have? What conditions increase or dampen switching? These are among the questions addressed in
research on legislative party switching.
It is essential to establish at the outset that legislative party switching is both perplexing and important. Legislative
parties are central to democratic legislative politics. Legislative parties organize decision-making, broker interests,
and structure politicians’ careers. Through their activities within legislatures, legislative parties create and recreate
the meaning of the party label that candidates for legislative office wear in election campaigns (e.g. Aldrich 1995,
2006, 2011; Cox and McCubbins 2005, 2007 [1993]; Cox 2006). Why would incumbents who earned their seats on
a party label discard that label once in office?
The puzzle deepens when legislative party switching occurs in parliamentary systems. In such democracies,
legislative parties are the building blocks of the executive: the cabinet is drawn out of the legislature and its
survival in office depends on continued legislative support. Accordingly, the conventional wisdom holds that the
design of parliamentary democracy reinforces party cohesion (e.g. Bowler, Farrell, and Katz 1999; Cox 2005
[1987]; Kam this volume).2 How could the cohesion induced by parliamentary design fail so patently as to lead MPs
to exit one party and enter another? Even under presidentialism puzzles emerge. Whereas few legislators switch in
the contemporary US House, the frequency of switching was notably greater in the 1830s and 1840s (e.g. Nokken
and Poole 2004). What explains such change over time?
Page 1 of 15
(p. 419) Legislative party switching can affect democratic representation. Legislative parties that remain as
relatively stable units from one election to the next can help voters evaluate incumbents retrospectively and also
make prospective decisions on legislative candidates. High rates of switching are often seen as complicating
policy-making and undermining voter ability to hold policy-makers to account (e.g. Herron 2002; Hicken 2006;
Reilly 2007).
The next section of this chapter outlines approaches to studying switching. The third part appraises the evolution
of the field, and the fourth treats frontiers of research. The conclusion identifies directions for future research. The
chapter as a whole demonstrates that studying switching enhances understanding of legislatures, political parties,
and democratic politics writ large.
20.2 Approaches to Studying Legislative Party Switching
The study of legislative party switching divides into two approaches, the strategic and the institutional. The
boundaries between the two schools are not watertight: adherents of the strategic approach examine how
institutions constrain and empower actors, and institutionalists often consider legislators as individual actors. Even
so, the schools differ in assumptions, analytic units, and methods.
Scholars taking the strategic approach to switching embrace rational choice institutionalism. They focus on the
individual legislative candidate or legislator who, as a rational actor, engages in a cost-benefit calculus as he or
she chooses to retain or change party affiliation. All contributors to this school assume that political ambition drives
politicians, although studies vary as to the specific goals assumed—votes, office, or policy, or a mix of the three.
Although the early literature separated formal theorizing from empirical analysis (Aldrich and Bianco 1992; Laver
and Benoit 2003), greater integration of formal and empirical models has since emerged (e.g. Desposato 2006;
Heller and Mershon 2008; Mershon and Shvetsova 2011, 2013a, 2013b). Even where hypotheses are not
extracted from a formal model, they are couched in terms of utility-maximizing behaviour (e.g. Reed and Scheiner
2003; Thames 2007; McLaughlin 2012). Tests of hypotheses proceed via varied statistical models.
More than their colleagues in the strategic school, institutionalists address the macro-level context for switching.
Aligning with historical institutionalism, these analysts weigh how legacies from the past and current inter-party
interactions shape politicians’ perceptions of and choices on partisanship (e.g. Kreuzer and Pettai 2003). For some,
relatively frequent switching serves as one indicator of weak party system institutionalization (e.g. Mainwaring
1999; Hicken 2009). Others are concerned less with individuals’ behaviour and more with what switching rates
mean for legislative processes and legislative institutionalization (e.g. Ilonszki 2007; Kopecký and Spirova 2008).
(p. 420) Reflecting these themes, qualitative methods prevail. Together, contributions to both schools document
that, even where legislative party switching is uncommon, it is not completely absent and its occurrence varies
over time. (For descriptive statistics on the incidence of switching in some 20 established and new democracies,
see Heller and Mershon 2009c, Table 1.2).
20.3 Evolution of the Field
This assessment focuses on types of questions explored and on the predominant strategic approach. Two
questions have anchored the research from its origins in the early 1990s: why does a politician jump party and
how does that action affect him or her? In pioneering formal work, Aldrich and Bianco (1992) demonstrate that
vote- and office-seeking candidates switch to maximize chances of electoral victory and that switching among
candidates is interdependent. Assuming office-driven sitting legislators, Laver and Benoit (2003) predict that the
largest party, if large enough to dominate the legislature, tends both to attract and willingly accept recruits; the
second largest party, by contrast, is usually an unattractive destination for would-be switchers. They observe that
shifting to policy-seeking motivations would transform their results: virtually all parties would draw entrants, and
MPs would be less likely to migrate to a dominant party.
Although neither study conducts tests against real-world data, other work develops hypotheses and yields
evidence on the extent to which electoral, office, and policy incentives induce politicians to switch.3 The available
data largely corroborate the notion that politicians as strategic actors choose party affiliations so as to enhance
their electoral prospects. As indicated by candidate or party performance at the last legislative election
Page 2 of 15
(Desposato 2006 on 1991–9 Brazil; Desposato and Scheiner 2008 on 1991–8 Brazil and 1993–4 Japan; Reed and
Scheiner 2003 on 1993–5 Japan; Thames on 1998–2002 Ukraine; Young 2014 on 1994–2007 Malawi), or party
popularity in opinion polls during the term (McMenamin and Gwiazda 2011 on 1993–2007 Poland), legislators exit
parties that are likely to reduce their chances for re-election and favour parties likely to boost those chances. Yet
some qualifications appear. For instance, a primary election challenge in the prior electoral cycle has no effect on
switching among 1960–95 US incumbents, although a dummy variable marking Southern Democrats, intended to
capture electoral realignment, increases switching (Castle and Fett 2000).
Varied evidence suggests that office and its perks influence representatives’ choices of affiliation. MPs with party
leadership positions tend to stick with their status quo parties (Castle and Fett 2000; Desposato 2006; McElroy
2003: on 1989–94 European Parliament). Incumbents serving on key committees remain loyal in some legislatures
(McElroy 2003), but not all (Desposato 2006; Mejía Acosta 2004 on 1979–2002 Ecuador); the exceptions
apparently reflect committee weakness (Mejía Acosta 2000, 14–15; Samuels 2008, 87–8, on Brazil). Even so, in
Brazil party leaders lure recruits with offers of committee posts (Ames 2001, 71–2), and switching is relatively
frequent early (p. 421) in the legislative term, when committee appointments are made (Desposato 2006).
Seniority induces legislators to stay put in some legislatures (McElroy 2003),4 has no effect in others (Castle and
Fett 2000; Heller and Mershon 2005; Desposato 2006: on 1996–2001 Italy; McMenamin and Gwiazda 2011), and
heightens the propensity to switch in still others (Mejía Acosta 2004). Context again requires attention. In some
settings, seniority increases a legislator’s autonomy so as to facilitate switching (Mejía Acosta 2004, 194); in
others, it helps qualify him or her for leadership offices and enhances his or her policy influence, buttressing
loyalty to the original party. Mixed findings on seniority emerge at first blush for early 1990s Japan (Cox and
Rosenbluth 1995; Kato 1998; Reed and Scheiner 2003), but resolve when interactive effects come into view: junior
MPs were relatively likely to defect from the Japanese Liberal Democrats because they were relatively likely to
support political reform (Reed and Scheiner 2003).
Findings on party size and government status indicate that politicians switch in search of both office and policy
rewards. The larger the legislative party, the less likely it is to suffer defections; MPs tend to move from smaller to
larger parties (McElroy 2003; Mejía Acosta 2004; Heller and Mershon 2005; Thames 2007). In a two-party system,
legislators in the majority refrain from switching (Castle and Fett 2000; Shor and Tomkowiak 2010: on 1993–2008
US, all 98 state partisan chambers). Governing parties (presidential ones in presidential regimes) likewise tend to
retain members, and representatives gravitate to governing (presidential) parties (Desposato 2006; Heller and
Mershon 2008 on 1988–2000 Italy; Mejía Acosta 2004; Thames 2007; Young 2014). These patterns make sense as
a resource story: relatively great size endows a party with perks and patronage and enlarges its capacity to shape
policy; the same applies to ruling parties in parliamentary and semi-presidential regimes and to presidential parties
in presidential regimes. Yet deviations appear, both for the finding on party size (two of four terms, Heller and
Mershon 2008; all four terms in McMenamin and Gwiazda 2011) and that on governing party (Heller and Mershon
2008; McMenamin and Gwiazda 2011).
Additional research discerns policy influences on legislative party switching. Support for political reform drove
defections from the Japanese Liberal Democrats (Desposato and Scheiner 2008; Reed and Scheiner 2003).
Generally, legislators whose votes conform to those of their party are relatively unlikely to switch (Castle and Fett
2000; three of four terms, Heller and Mershon 2008; Herron 2002 on 1998–2001 Ukraine), and MPs select parties
ideologically congenial to them (McElroy 2003; Desposato 2006; Desposato and Scheiner 2008; Thames 2007).
Yet an MP can vote with his or her party due to the lash of strong discipline more than underlying preference
agreement. Devising four vote-based measures of discipline, Heller and Mershon (2008) find that more disciplined
parties experience more switching.
As the field has evolved, scholars have probed how a legislator’s switch affects him or her somewhat less often
than what causes the legislator to make the leap. Grose and Yoshinaka (2003, 56) conduct what they term “a
partial empirical test” of the Aldrich-Bianco model against 1947–2000 data on US incumbents, and find that the
vote shares of switchers decline both in primary and general elections. Switching has also carried electoral costs
in Brazil (Pereira and Rennó 2003, 1994–98 data). Yoshinaka (2005) (p. 422) shows that switchers in the 1975–
2002 US House have received office rewards: they have been more likely than loyalists to benefit from violations of
the seniority norm in committee assignments. A range of work establishes policy effects of defection, showing that
mobile MPs align their votes with their new parties (e.g. Desposato 2009 on 1991–9 Brazil; Hug and Wüest 2011 on
1997–2001 Poland; McCarty, Poole, and Rosenthal 2001 on 1947–98 US House; Shor and Tomkowiak 2010). Other
Page 3 of 15
studies, with different measures and methods, emphasize that US switchers evince a significant shift in voting
behaviour only during eras of high ideological polarization (Nokken 2000 on 1947–97 House and Senate; 2009 on
1953–2002 House; Nokken and Poole 2004 on House and Senate, long eras).
The top two rows of Table 20.1 summarize research on the two foundational questions of this field. The third row
identifies a question confronted more squarely as the field has (p. 423) (p. 424) grown—the contextual
conditions affecting switching. Scholars leverage within-nation or two-country comparisons to address the issue,
as suggested above. Let us begin by considering politicians’ quest for votes. Under PR in Ecuador, the smaller the
district magnitude, the more MPs jump party; Mejía Acosta (2004) sees this behaviour as a sign of responsiveness
to well-defined constituencies in a system where voters care little about party label. Under open-list proportional
representation (PR) in Brazil, in districts where voters attend to policy and party label (as proxied by mean
education levels), relatively few MPs defect (Desposato 2006). Under open-list PR in 1991–2001 Poland, where
districts register an increase in unemployment, voters reward candidates who once belonged to a ruling party and
then switched to the opposition, and instead penalize candidates who remained with the governing parties
(Zielinski, Slomczynski, and Shabad 2005). Under the linked mixed-member electoral laws in Italy, electoral
mandate and clarity of party label interact to shape the likelihood of MP defection from both parties and multiparty
blocs (Heller and Mershon 2005). Under the unlinked mixed system in Ukraine, both PR and single-member district
(SMD) deputies are attracted to pro-presidential parties, although the former gravitate to parties that performed well
in the last election in the national PR vote, and the latter, to parties that performed well at the district level (Thames
2007).
Table 20.1 Research on legislative party switching: questions, findings, and references
Questions Findings References
Foundations and development
Why does Vote- & office-seeking candidates switch to Aldrich & Bianco 1992
an MP maximize chances of electoral victory
switch?
The largest party, if large enough to dominate the Laver & Benoit 2003
legislature, attracts office-driven mobile MPs
MPs exit parties likely to dampen their chances Desposato & Scheiner 2008;
for re-election & favour parties likely to increase McMenamin & Gwiazda 2011; Thames
those chances 2007; Young 2014 (but Castle & Fett
2000)
MPs with key legislative & party offices stay put; Castle & Fett 2000; McElroy 2003 (but
mixed findings on seniority Heller & Mershon 2005; Mejía Acosta
2004)
MPs switch to influence policy, as seen in moves Heller & Mershon 2008; Shor &
into large parties & governing parties; MPs switch Tomkowiak 2010; Thames 2007 (but
to ideologically compatible parties McMenamin & Gwiazda 2011)
How does Switchers incur electoral costs Grose & Yoshinaka 2003; Pereira &
switching Rennó 2003
affect an
MP?
Switchers benefit in committee posts Yoshinaka 2005
MPs align voting with new party post-switch Hug & Wüest 2011; Shor & Tomkowiak
Page 4 of 15
MPs align voting with new party post-switch Hug & Wüest 2011; Shor & Tomkowiak
2010 (when highly polarized: Nokken &
Poole 2004)
What MP switching varies with district education levels Desposato 2006; Mejía Acosta 2004
conditions & district magnitude
affect
switching?
Electoral consequences of switching vary with Zielinski, Slomczynski, & Shabad 2005
district economic conditions
Switching varies across MPs elected in different Heller & Mershon 2005; Thames 2007
tiers of mixed-member systems
Centralization of access to distributive goods Desposato & Scheiner 2008

affects switching
As polarization & the relative sizes of parties Shor & Tomkowiak 2010
vary across chambers, so does MP switching
Frontier of research
What Candidate selection rules exert a limited impact O’Brien & Shomer 2013
conditions on switching
affect
switching?
Vote pooling affects the presence & prevalence O’Brien & Shomer 2013
of switching
Switching varies little across parliamentary & Mershon & Shvetsova 2013b; O’Brien &
(semi-)presidential systems Shomer 2013
The approach of the next election dampens Mershon & Shvetsova 2013a, 2013b
switching
Distinct processes generate switching in different Mershon & Shvetsova 2013a, 2013b
electoral systems; relatively great switching
appears in legislatures elected by PR
Controlling for electoral rules, where ENPP is Mershon & Shvetsova 2013b
relatively high at the start of a term, switching is
relatively great
The longer democratic elections are held, the Mershon & Shvetsova 2013b
lower switching is
How do Extant members vote on prospective members; Desposato 2006; Heller & Mershon
party leader decisions on discipline condition MP 2009b
leaders affiliation decisions
recruit
switchers?
Page 5 of 15
Leaders adjust list & district placement Kato & Yamamoto 2009
Switching alters a party’s preference profile; Heller & Mershon 2008; 2009d; Kato &
leaders tolerate relatively great internal policy Yamamoto 2009
diversity
Leaders recruit to exceed (institutionally defined) Kato & Yamamoto 2009

decisive majority thresholds
How does Electoral competition may induce legislative Schofield 2009

switching switching
affect a
system?
Switching can disrupt a legislature’s decisive Giannetti & Laver 2001; Laver & Kato
structure between elections 2001; Mershon & Shvetsova forthcoming
2014
The greater the cumulative N switches during a Mershon & Shvetsova 2013b
term, the greater the electoral volatility at the
next election
Note: References in table illustrate but do not exhaust those cited in text.
Within- and few-nation comparisons also shed light on how context matters for politicians’ pursuit of office and
policy in choosing to change or retain affiliation. Whereas both sub-national and national legislators in
decentralized Brazil join their state governors’ coalitions to access pipelines to pork, neither sub-national nor
national legislators in highly centralized Japan do so (Desposato and Scheiner 2008). Incumbents in 1996–2001
Italy and 1993–95 Russia are relatively likely to jump party during those stages of the parliamentary cycle when the
calendar of legislative activity, as institutionally demarcated, highlights the salience of office benefits (Mershon and
Shvetsova 2008). In an era of high polarization overall, where US state chambers are especially polarized,
switching is especially low; as those chambers vary from strong dominance by the majority to near even division,
the switching rate among members of the majority rises, whereas that rate among minority members falls (Shor and
Tomkowiak 2010). The inference is that incumbents switch in response to the availability of office goods, as
structured by institutions. Moreover, legislators from a bare majority party seize the opportunity to bring the
chamber closer to a shift in majority control, with the policy implications that would ensue.
20.4 Frontier of Research
Investigation of the conditions affecting legislative party switching straddles the frontier of research, for only few
scholars to date have evaluated a common theoretical and/or statistical model across more than a handful of
countries. O’Brien and Shomer (2013) test hypotheses against an original dataset on 239 party-level observations
from 40 country-terms in 20 democracies. They find that intra-party candidate selection procedures have limited
impact on whether a party experiences any defections and on (p. 425) what share of MPs a party loses to
switching. Parliamentary and (semi-) presidential systems differ little in both the presence and prevalence of
switching. As O’Brien and Shomer (2013) operationalize features of electoral institutions, the only such feature to
influence switching is vote pooling (see Carey and Shugart 1995): where votes for a candidate are pooled across
an entire party, the presence and prevalence of switching are lower than in systems where votes are pooled at the
subparty level or no vote pooling occurs at all.5
Mershon and Shvetsova develop a formal model (2011; 2013b) of electoral deterrents and institutional
inducements to legislative party switching, and assess the model’s empirical implications against an original
dataset of 4,072 monthly observations of MP behaviour from 110 country-terms in eight democracies (2013b; see
Page 6 of 15
also Mershon and Shvetsova 2013a). They argue and demonstrate that the approach of the next legislative
election diminishes MP inter-party mobility. Additionally, incumbents elected under SMD rules avoid changing
affiliation early in the term. In this sense, the elemental democratic practice of regular elections imparts stability to
legislative party systems. They also discover that incumbents’ strategy on partisanship responds to benefits
offered during the term: MP inter-party mobility is relatively high during active stages of the parliamentary cycle
and is relatively low during dormant stages, as defined by legislative procedures and rules. The role of electoral
institutions figures prominently in their findings: two distinct processes generate the magnitude of switching in SMD
and PR systems; and overall, legislatures elected by PR exhibit greater switching than do those elected by non-PR
rules. Though their measures and methods differ from those used by O’Brien and Shomer (2013), Mershon and
Shvetsova (2013b) likewise find little variation in switching across parliamentary and (semi-) presidential systems.
Controlling for electoral rules (e.g. Cox 1997), where and when the effective number of parliamentary parties
(ENPP) is relatively low at the start of the legislative term, relatively few switches occur over the course of the term.
In models including both electoral rules and ENPP, the greater the passage of time since the first democratic
election, the more limited is legislative party switching (Mershon and Shvetsova 2013b). Once again, the practice
of free and fair elections lends stability to legislative party systems.6
A second question on the frontier is how party leaders recruit switchers. Relatively few scholars follow up on Laver
and Benoit’s (2003) emphasis on a party’s acceptance of new members. Desposato’s (2006) theory endogenizes
party decisions: if parties can regulate membership, their members vote simultaneously on which MPs can and or
cannot enter. If incumbents switch, as Desposato has it, they incur a cost for this “transaction” (e.g. fewer votes at
the next election or even the institutionally mandated loss of their seat). Yet the theoretical model is not isomorphic
with the statistical one. For instance, the theory scrutinizes the interaction between two actors, the legislator of
party A and the leadership of party B, whereas the statistical model examines the legislator’s choice of one among
multiple parties. The theory distinguishes between a switcher’s value-added to the new party and the policy
payoffs of the newchoice of affiliation, whereas the estimations use a measure that cannot distinguish between the
two.
(p. 426) Heller and Mershon (2009b) sketch a game in which party leaders’ choices on discipline condition MPs’
switching decisions; in making affiliation decisions, legislators anticipate voter responses. They test hypotheses
about the effect of entrants into and exits from a party on its policy position. Their results for 1988–2000 Italy show
that a party’s preference profile changes with exits and entrants, and suggest that “party leaders...ensure that
inswitchers [i.e. entrants] do not add constraints to leadership influence over party positioning” (Heller and
Mershon 2009d, 188).
A limited body of additional data speaks to leadership strategy on legislative switching. The 1988–2000 Italian
evidence indicates that legislative party leaders tolerate relatively great internal policy diversity so as to attract
recruits (Heller and Mershon 2008). Similarly, Kato and Yamamoto (2009) find that from 2000 to 2005 the leaders of
Japan’s second largest party, the Democratic Party (DPJ), accepted ideological heterogeneity to enlarge its ranks.
The DPJ also competed with the largest Liberal Democratic Party (LDP) by offering recruits more favourable deals
on list and district placement in the 2000 election than did the LDP; DPJ leaders thus tailored strategy to Japan’s
mixed-member electoral rules. For their part, LDP leaders in the 1990s sought entrants to enable the party to
overcome both a formal majority threshold and a higher decisive majority threshold, defined by the institutional
particulars of the Japanese Diet’s committee system.
These contributions notwithstanding, on the whole we know relatively little about the strategies that party leaders
adopt to attract newcomers to their ranks—or to reject would-be entrants or expel current members. Yet an
individual politician’s change of affiliation entails a relationship; an exit from one party requires a choice either to
enter another or, given the alternatives as defined by leaders of other parties, acquire independent status. The
two-way street deserves further theoretical and empirical study.
A third question on the frontier concerns the systemic effects of party switching. In office-driven analyses,
Giannetti and Laver (2001) and Laver and Kato (2001) examine how electoral party systems in Italy and Japan,
respectively, come under pressure for reconfiguration during the legislative term, as legislators seek gains from
party fissions and fusions. Schofield (2009; compare Schofield and Sened 2006) presents a formal model of
electoral competition based on electoral, office, and policy assumptions and also incorporating two kinds of
valence for agents. In this account, candidates under plurality rule may change affiliation and trigger partisan
Page 7 of 15
realignment; a high valence party leader under PR may switch to control the centre of the policy space. Schofield
(2009) uses the Israeli case to illustrate the latter possibility. Whereas Schofield focuses on electoral competition,
Mershon and Shvetsova (forthcoming 2014) develop a formal model in which sitting legislators switch party in
efforts to manipulate policy outcomes and control the core. They show the feasibility of system-level change
between elections both in the legislative party system and in the set of decisive coalitions, and they illustrate the
plausibility of their claims with evidence from the US, Canada, and Italy.
The inquiry into the systemic effects of switching regards not only how incumbents’ changes of affiliation may
disrupt the party system originating in the last election but also how changes in the membership of legislative
parties during a term may influence (p. 427) the party system at the next election.7 In one segment of their
analysis, Mershon and Shvetsova (2013b) redefine the unit as the legislative term, and investigate legislative
switching as a potential driver of change at the next election. They find that the greater the cumulative number of
switches during a term, the greater the electoral volatility at the next election. This result is robust to controls for
volatility at the prior election, term length, and the ENPP in place immediately after the prior election. What
incumbents do between elections to remake the parliamentary party system, as tapped by the (p. 428)
cumulative number of switches during a term, does much to explain electoral volatility after the term—so much so
that the impact of the usual suspect explanations ebbs away.
The relationship between the party leadership and a prospective switcher can affect, and be affected by, the
potential for change in a legislature’s decisive structure between elections. Legislative and electoral institutions set
the parameters of leadership recruitment strategies and can delimit decisive thresholds other than a formal
majority. The connections between questions on the research frontier deserve further exploration.
Consideration of the frontier thus leads naturally to the agenda of research ahead. Before turning to that topic,
however, it is crucial to bring to the frontier explicit discussion of an issue until now relegated to the background:
empirical research on legislative party switching displays substantial divergence in measures and methods. Table
20.2 spotlights the striking diversity in the field, even though it confines itself to two research questions and leaves
aside details on model specification. In fact, estimations differ markedly in which independent variables are
included and how independent variables are operationalized. To be sure, some differences in operationalization
reflect institutional context. For example, distinct electoral laws necessitate different measures for legislators’
electoral performance at the last election. Distinct measures of the dependent variable in part stem from variation
in the frequency with which legislative (or party) archives register a switch. Distinct questions demand different
measures of the dependent variable—which is why Table 20.2 restricts attention to only two questions. Yet the
overwhelming preponderance of single- and few-country studies in research on legislative party switching has
allowed and perpetuated remarkable divergence in functional forms of statistical models, choices of and measures
for independent variables, and measures of the dependent variable. The upshot is that cumulation of knowledge
and understanding in the field has been impeded.
Page 8 of 15
Table 20.2 Divergence in empirical research on legislative party switching
Unit Dependent variable Model References
Question: Why does an MP switch?
Legislator Dummy for LDP member i’s choice to exit Probit Reed &
party 1993–95 Scheiner 2003
Legislator-2 Legislator i’s choice of party r at 2 time Mixed conditional logit McElroy 2003
points in points in 1 term
term
Legislator- Legislator i’s cumulative N switches per OLS regression Mejía Acosta
Year year over 23 years 2004
Legislator Dummy for legislator i’s choice to switch Logit Heller &
during 1 term Mershon 2005
Legislator- Legislator i’s choice of party r during month Conditional logit Desposato
Month 2006
Legislator- Legislator i’s choice on affiliation in distinct 2-stage Heckman: 1st Thames 2007
Session legislative session during 1 term probit defection, 2nd
conditional logit
Legislator- Legislator i’s choice of party r during Conditional logit Desposato &
Cabinet distinct cabinet period Scheiner 2008
Legislator- Dummy for legislator i’s choice to switch, Logit Heller &
Switchperiod with i counted anew each time votes in new Mershon 2008
party
Legislator-15 Legislator i’s choice of party r during 15- Parametric survival McMenamin &
days day period of term analysis Gwiazda 2011
Question: What conditions affect switching?
Party per Dummy for whether party r sees any Logistit O’Brien &
term defections during a term; % of MPs exiting r Shomer 2013
during a term
Month in Count of switches during month; dummy for Zero-inflated Poisson Mershon &
term the fact of any switching during month regression; probit Shvetsova
2013a; 2013b
Note: Recall that some studies depicted in the upper panel also address, via within- or few-country
comparisons, the conditions affecting switching.
20.5 Conclusion
Page 9 of 15
What is next on the research agenda, given the accomplishments to date? Taking an immediate cue from Table
20.2, efforts to share datasets, replicate findings, and compare findings from extant model specifications with those
from novel specifications should be among the next steps in empirical research on legislative party switching. The
collection of data on individual candidates’ and incumbents’ choices of partisanship is a labour-intensive process,
which makes scholarly collaboration to exploit extant datasets in such ways all the more important. Collaboration to
enlarge current datasets and build new ones would follow logically.
Moreover, theoretical and empirical work could pursue three implications of questions on the frontier of research.
Whereas scholars have already pointed to the first implication, the latter two have so far received scant notice in
the field of legislative party switching.
(p. 429) How do individual politicians coordinate collective moves? Invoking Aldrich and Bianco (1992) on the
interdependence of switching, Heller and Mershon (2009a) observe that, to the extent that an individual legislator’s
switch affects a party’s legislative size, policy profile, and appeal to voters, it might prompt other switches. Moves
that promise to push a party above a decisive threshold within a legislature might spur others that bring it over the
top, or exits from a party might trigger more widespread flight (see Laver and Benoit 2003; Kato and Yamamoto
2009; Shor and Tomkowiak 2010, 24). The move of a prominent politician, in particular, might prompt additional
switches (see Schofield 2009). Heller and Mershon (2009a, 289–91) discuss these patterns as “cascades,” when
legislators travel (near-) simultaneously or in rapid succession. Hence coordination of choices on partisanship
would logically hinge on a party’s recruitment of new members and on the prospective systemic impact of
switching, both of which would reflect institutional conditions. Yet to date we have little understanding of such
processes. This area is ripe for investigation.
The depiction of coordination of switching just sketched presumes a sitting legislature. Extant research has done
little to grapple with potential differences in switching behaviour across non-incumbent legislative candidates and
elected legislators. To rephrase, the bulk of theoretical and empirical work focuses on incumbents, as the reader
can recall.8 It is at least plausible that the determinants of choices on partisanship among non-incumbent
candidates might vary systematically from the determinants of such choices among incumbents. Sheer physical
proximity and shared responsibilities performed under the same bundle of rules and procedures facilitate
communication among incumbents and would likely structure MP coordination of strategy on partisanship. It is
unclear how coordination on choices of affiliation would unfold when (prospective) non-incumbent legislative
candidates and legislators serving in office interact with each other. Party leaders’ efforts to lure non-incumbent
legislative candidates from other parties into their own party during an electoral campaign might differ from the
strategies they deploy for prospective members serving during a legislative term. Whereas incumbents can
observe immediate system-level effects of switching in the form of shifts in the partisan balance of power in a sitting
assembly, during an electoral campaign both incumbents and challengers must estimate the eventual effects of
switching on election outcomes. Thus comparison of switching behaviour among legislative candidates and sitting
legislators is terrain that is open for theoretical and empirical exploration.
Another implication to pursue regards the maintenance and unraveling of party unity in one-party dominant
authoritarian regimes. For example, Greene (2007; 2008) and Magaloni (2005; 2008; 2010) develop theoretical
models of interactions between the ruling party and opposition parties in electoral autocracies. Their theoretical
and empirical accounts are distinct. Only Greene (2007) explicitly builds on research drawn from the field of
legislative party switching; he adapts the Aldrich-Bianco (1992) model by incorporating programmatic goals.
Particularly in their empirical analyses of Mexico, the two scholars differ on the relative “causal importance of
voters versus party elites in ending dominant party rule” (Greene 2007, 9). Greene (2007, 175) reveals the ways
(p. 430) in which “the dynamics of individual-level recruitment [of elites] into the opposition create rigid
challenger party organizations...slow to innovate in the face of new opportunities” emerging in an electoral
autocracy. He argues and shows why the Party of the Democratic Revolution (PRD), in part a product of a 1988
splinter from the ruling Institutional Revolutionary Party (PRI),9 failed to defeat the PRI in 2000, while the National
Action Party (PAN) succeeded in doing so.
Gandhi and Lust-Okar (2009) underscore how much remains to be done in research on electoral autocracies. The
achievements and the limits of scholarship to date on legislative party switching suggest that one promising
avenue of work that would bridge and extend both fields would be to consider elite recruitment into opposition
parties, politicians’ coordination of strategy on partisanship, and the systemic effects of politicians’ changes of
Page 10 of 15
affiliation in one-party authoritarian regimes.
The study of legislative party switching opens new windows for understanding enduring questions in political
science that are at once theoretical and empirical. Research on legislative party switching sheds fresh light on the
wisdom that politicians treat parties as vehicles for winning votes, securing office, and exerting policy influence. By
examining political parties as malleable alliances of individual politicians, we acquire novel insight into legislative
institutions as constraints on representatives’ behaviour and as resources in the hands of strategic politicians. By
taking seriously politicians’ willingness and ability to change affiliation, we advance knowledge of political parties
as key components in the connective tissue of democratic governance, and we enlarge comprehension of both
the possibilities for party system change between elections and the roles played by elections in democratic and
authoritarian regimes.
Acknowledgements
I thank Will Heller, Olga Shvetsova, and the editors for their helpful comments.
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Laver, M. and Shepsle, K. A., 1999. How Political Parties Emerged from the Primeval Slime: Party Cohesion, Party
Discipline, and the Formation of Governments. In S. Bowler, D. M. Farrell, and R. S. Katz (eds.), Party Discipline and
Parliamentary Government, pp. 23–48. Columbus: Ohio State University Press.
McCarty, N., Poole, K. T., and Rosenthal, H., 2001. The Hunt for Party Discipline in Congress. American Political
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(eds.).The Third Wave of Democratization in Latin America: Advances and Setbacks, pp. 121–48. Cambridge:
Magaloni, B., 2008. Credible Power-Sharing and the Longevity of Authoritarian Rule. Comparative Political Studies,
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Magaloni, B., 2010. The Game of Electoral Fraud and the Ousting of Authoritarian Rule. American Journal of
Mainwaring, S., 1999. Rethinking Party Systems in the Third Wave of Democratization: The Case of Brazil.
Stanford: Stanford University Press.
McElroy, G., 2003. Party Switching in the European Parliament: Why Bother? Paper presented at the Annual
Meetings of the Midwest Political Science Association, Chicago. (p. 434)
McLaughlin, E., 2012. Electoral Regimes and Party Switching: Floor Crossing in South Africa’s Local Legislatures.
Party Politics, 18: 563–79.
McMenamin, I. and A. Gwiazda., 2011. Three Roads to Institutionalization: Vote-, Office-, and Policy-Seeking
Explanations of Party Switching in Poland. European Journal of Political Research, 50: 838–66.
Mejía Acosta, A., 2000. Weak Coalitions and Policy Making in the Ecuadorian Congress. Paper presented at the
2000 Meeting of the Latin American Studies Association, Miami.
Mejía Acosta, A., 2004. Ghost Coalitions: Economic Reforms, Fragmented Legislatures and Informal Institutions in
Ecuador (1979-2002). PhD dissertation, University of Notre Dame.
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Schofield and G. Caballero (eds.). Political Economy of Institutions, Democracy, and Voting, pp. 389–402. Berlin
and Heidelberg: Springer-Verlag.
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Mershon, C. and Shvetsova, O. 2013a.The Microfoundations of Party System Stability in Legislatures. Journal of
Politics, 75, 865–78.
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Electoral Arena. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press.
Mershon, C. and Shvetsova, O., Forthcoming 2014. Change in Parliamentary Party Systems and Policy Outcomes:
Hunting the Core. Journal of Theoretical Politics. Published online [doi:10.1177/0951629813511718].
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Heller and C. Mershon (eds.), Political Parties and Legislative Party Switching, pp. 81–108. New York: Palgrave
Macmillan.
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(1): 111–41.
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Institutional Incentives. Electoral Studies, 22: 425–48.
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Defections in Japan. British Journal of Political Science, 33: 469–90.
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S. Morgenstern(eds.), Pathways to Power: Political Recruitment and Candidate Selection in Latin America, pp.
76–91. University Park: Pennsylvania State University Press.
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Party Switching, pp. 55–79. New York: Palgrave Macmillan.
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Legislatures. Paper presented at the Annual Meetings of the American Science Association, Washington, DC.
<http://home.uchicago.edu/~bshor/research/switchers.pdf>. Accessed June 2012. (p. 435)
Thames, F., 2007. Searching for the Electoral Connection: Parliamentary Party Switching in the Ukrainian Rada,
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Yoshinaka, A., 2005. House Party Switchers and Committee Assignments: ‘Who Gets What, When, and How?’
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Incentives of Fluid Party Systems. World Politics, 57: 365–95.
Notes:
(1) . The consensual definition of a switch is “any recorded change in party affiliation on the part of a politician
holding or competing for elective office” (Heller and Mershon 2009c, 8). Party splits, mergers, and start-ups thus
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involve switches. A switch can also entail acquiring or abandoning independent status.
(2) . Note the distinction between party cohesion (the observation of elected MPs acting as a bloc) and discipline
(institutions and instruments that generate cohesion; e.g. Bowler, Farrell, and Katz 1999; Kam this volume).
(3) . On more recent formal models, see below. The empirical discussion here cannot be exhaustive and uses two
criteria for selecting country cases, subject to the constraint of available work: it assures variation both in
frequency of switching and in such systemic parameters as electoral rules, regime type (presidential versus
parliamentary), and age of democracy. The first citation of a study indicates its empirical scope.
(4) . This result holds for one of two model specifications; in the other specification seniority has inconsistent
effects across parties (McElroy 2003). We return to the issue of differences in model specifications.
(5) . To be sure, the institutional context for politicians’ choices of affiliation is in part subject to change given
politicians’ decisions. Relatively few studies look at the diverse kinds of institutional restrictions on switching (e.g.
Janda 2009; McLaughlin 2012). There is as yet no consensus on the conditions under which politicians enact such
restrictions or abide by them.
(6) . As Mershon and Shvetsova (2013b) recognize, their results on the import of institutions might be limited by the
number of countries in their dataset. Their central argument about the ebb and flow of electoral deterrents and
institutional inducements to inter-party mobility during the parliamentary cycle is robust to the introduction of
country fixed effects and to a range of model specifications.
(7) . As noted, still another sort of systemic consequence has been investigated: individual legislators’ moves from
one party to another effect changes in the array of preferences within parties (Heller and Mershon 2009d).
(8) . Aldrich and Bianco [1992] address switching among non-incumbent and incumbent candidates in electoral
competition but assume that sitting legislators do not switch once in office.
(9) . Unlike some scholars (e.g. Bruhn 1997; Magaloni 2005), Greene does not see the 1988 splinter as central to
the PRD’s organization. He finds in a 1999 survey of party that “PRI defectors...[constitute] a strikingly small
proportion of PRD elites” (Greene 2007, 154).
Carol Mershon
Carol Mershon is Associate Professor, Department of Politics, University of Virginia.
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Legislative Institutions and Coalition Government

Lanny W. Martin and Georg Vanberg
Institutions
2014
Coalition governance requires multiple parties with conflicting policy goals to govern jointly. The need to
compromise, coupled with separate electoral accountability, introduces tensions into multiparty cabinets that are
muted in single-party governments. In this chapter, we review recent scholarship that explores how parties that
participate in coalition make use of parliamentary institutions to confront these challenges. In particular, the
legislative process can allow parties to engage in position-taking to distinguish themselves from their coalition
partners, and to scrutinize and amend legislation introduced by ministers associated with other parties. The precise
nature of legislative institutions, most importantly, the strength of the committee system, is crucial in doing so. We
provide cross-national data on the strength of legislative institutions and discuss the broader implications for the
importance of legislatures in parliamentary systems.
Keywords: coalition government, legislatures, committee systems, policy-making, delegation, cabinet ministers
21.1 Introduction
COALITION governance is the norm in contemporary representative democracies. In Europe alone, roughly 70 percent
of cabinets formed between 1945 and 2010 were comprised of more than one political party (Gallagher, Laver, and
Mair 2011, 434). One distinctive feature of coalition governance is that it constitutes (in game-theoretic
terminology) a mixed-motive game. On the one hand, to be perceived as an effective and competent
administration and to pursue a common set of goals, coalition partners must cooperate and accommodate one
another on policy.1 Put simply, multiparty government requires compromise; on the other hand, compromise is
(potentially) costly. Parties’ policy preferences, induced in part by the underlying preferences of the constituencies
they rely on for electoral and financial support (Mayhew 1974; Strøm 1990a; Müller and Strøm 1999), diverge to
some extent. Policy outcomes that depart too far from a coalition party’s commitments, or even the perception that
the party is too compliant in its relations with its partners, can be harmful. Multiparty government is thus always
characterized by a tension between the need to compromise and the desire of coalition parties to pursue, and be
seen to pursue, their policy agenda in unadulterated form—a tension that increases as the policy positions of
coalition partners become more divergent.
The friction between the necessity of compromise and the costs of giving away “too much” arises in large part
because, under coalition government, parties must make policy jointly but are held accountable separately by
voters. Unlike single-party governments, in which one party controls the levers of power and faces voters as an
entity, the parties that participate in coalition must compete independently—including against their coalition
partners (Strøm, Müller, and Smith 2010, 519).2 The fact that voters are able to (p. 437) “discriminate” among the
parties that comprise a coalition implies that parties can be punished at the ballot box if voters perceive them as
ineffective representatives of their interests, or disapprove of policy compromises that are reached. This possibility
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is all the more threatening in light of the principal-agent problem lurking in the relationship between the party elite
and party supporters. Supporters may sense that party leaders face private incentives to be accommodating in
their dealings with coalition partners in order to reap the (office) benefits of participating in government. As Laver
and Schofield (1990, 24) put it:
The general rule is that the rank-and-file, more concerned with ideology and less in line for the other spoils
of office, tend to resent the policy compromises necessary to enter coalition and hence to oppose them.
The parliamentary leaders, at least some of whom will become cabinet ministers, are more inclined to see
the virtue of policy compromises if these increase the chance of the party going into government.
A critical implication is that coalition governments must confront challenges in policy-making from which single-
party governments are largely immune. While recognizing the importance of cooperation and compromise, each
party faces strong incentives to distinguish itself from its partners, and to signal to its target audiences that it is
advancing their interests. In part, doing so is a matter of good public relations. But it is also a matter of “delivering
results” by shaping government policy in ways that are amenable to a party’s voters, even if this is potentially
costly from the perspective of other coalition members. As a result, coalition compromises are always under
potential pressure. Parties may be tempted to engage in activities that undermine an agreement and, as we discuss
later, often have opportunities to do so. In this sense, policy agreements under coalition government are more
difficult to enforce than under single-party government.3 Of course, party leaders are aware of the fact that
opportunistic behaviour by coalition partners constitutes a threat. Parties that participate in coalition thus have
good reason to “keep tabs” on their partners, and to devise means by which they can monitor, and potentially rein
in, opportunistic behaviour (Thies 2001; Strøm, Müller, and Bergman 2008; Martin and Vanberg 2011).
In summary, the fact that coalition governance requires multiple parties to govern jointly in the face of separate
electoral accountability leads to the following three observations:
1. Coalition parties have incentives to engage in position-taking to distinguish themselves from their partners
and court target constituencies.
2. Coalition parties have incentives to move policy in ways that favour target constituencies, even if this
means reneging on agreed-upon compromises with their partners.
3. Coalition parties have incentives to monitor and rein in the opportunistic behaviour of their partners.
Over the past decade, a substantial literature has emerged to examine how parties deal with the challenges of joint
governance (Hallerberg andvon Hagen 1999; Thies 2001; (p. 438) Martin and Vanberg 2004, 2005, 2008, 2011,
2013; Kim and Loewenberg 2005; Strøm, Müller, and Bergman 2008; Strøm, Müller, and Smith 2010; Carroll and Cox
2012; Fortunato 2012). In this chapter, we focus on how coalition partners use legislative institutions to do so. For
quite some time, legislatures have been perceived as marginal to policy-making in parliamentary systems, mere
rubberstamps for decisions taken at the cabinet level (Mezey 1993; Laver and Shepsle 1996). Recent scholarship
has challenged this view, leading to a renewed appreciation of the role of legislatures in the policy-making process.
We review and assess some of these developments, beginning with the small but growing literature that examines
how parties use legislative institutions to engage in position-taking, i.e., to establish and maintain a separate
identity from their coalition partners. We then turn to the literature that considers how legislative institutions allow
parties to police the implementation of policy compromises and to shape policy-making, particularly by constraining
the influence of cabinet ministers.
21.2 Legislative Institutions and Position-Taking
Recent work at the intersection of coalition politics and mass voting behaviour has shown that voters use coalition
participation as a heuristic device that influences their perceptions of party policy positions (Fortunato and
Stevenson 2013). Specifically, voters (especially those who are less attentive to day-to-day politics) tend to
perceive coalition partners as more ideologically similar than non-partners, even if their stated policy positions in
election campaigns are quite distinct. Related work finds that voter perceptions of too much ideological closeness
lead to greater electoral losses for coalition partners (Fortunato 2012). Taken together, these results suggest that
coalition parties face electoral incentives to manage voter perceptions, and to work to maintain a separate identity
by taking advantage of opportunities to reaffirm their position to core supporters, and to highlight the differences
between themselves and their partners.
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There are obviously important extra-parliamentary avenues that parties may use to accomplish this, such as
election campaigns, press conferences, public appearances, and so on. But the parliamentary process also
provides opportunities for doing so. These opportunities allow parties to manage perceptions because they provide
publicity that can be picked up by media coverage and communicated to party activists and constituents.
21.2.1 Parliamentary Speech
The legislative process in most parliamentary democracies provides possibilities for individual legislators to speak
on important policy issues. Parties that govern jointly could (presumably) use these speaking occasions to
differentiate themselves (p. 439) from their partners. To date, scholars have examined two different types of
legislative speech-making: parliamentary question time and parliamentary debates on government-sponsored
legislation. The extent to which coalition parties use parliamentary speech to engage in position-taking appears to
differ across these venues.
For example, in an investigation of the Belgian parliament, Dandoy (2011) finds a negative link between coalition
membership and the number of written questions submitted to government ministers. That is, the bulk of questions
tend to be submitted by the opposition.4 In a separate study of the Belgian and Danish parliaments, Vliegenthart
and Walgrave (2011) also show that opposition parties are more likely to ask questions than government parties,
especially on issues that are salient to them and that receive significant media coverage. In short, the limited
empirical evidence available to date suggests that question time primarily serves as a forum for the opposition, not
members of the government.5
With respect to debates on government legislation, however, findings are consistent with the idea that coalition
parties use speaking opportunities for position-taking. Martin and Vanberg (2008), for example, focus on legislative
speeches on government bills in the Netherlands and Germany. When dealing with internally divisive legislation,
where at least one party in the government must make significant compromises, coalition party leaders must be
particularly concerned about the reactions of their supporters. Party leaders have greater incentives to justify the
party’s position on such legislation and to convince supporters that the party has fought hard to represent their
interests. Such efforts are likely to be reflected in more extensive participation in legislative debate since party
representatives need to lay out a convincing argument for the compromise. Indeed, Martin and Vanberg (2008)
demonstrate empirically that coalition parties speak significantly more on the issues that divide them. They also find
that the tendency for more extensive debate on divisive legislation increases markedly as elections draw near,
which suggests that partners are using their speeches to differentiate themselves to their activists and core
electoral constituencies.6 In contrast to the findings on parliamentary questions, it thus appears that debates on
government legislation are a key forum for coalition parties to distinguish themselves from their partners.
21.2.2 Legislation and Amendments
The opportunity to introduce legislation provides an obvious opportunity for position-taking by highlighting which
issues are on the agenda for a party as well as the substantive position that the party takes on these issues. As
Martin and Vanberg (2011, 13) point out:
The unveiling of a legislative proposal by a minister is a salient event that usually generates significant
media attention and provides an opportunity to hold press conferences and to make statements to party
activists. Parties can point to their legislative (p. 440) initiatives in election campaigns and
communications with key constituencies. That is, writing legislation that favours the party’s goals, and
perhaps even incorporates draft language adopted from suggestions by support groups, provides tangible
evidence of the party’s efforts, and is therefore an attractive way to curry favour.
Recent work by Fortunato (2012) shows that legislative amendments can also serve a position-taking purpose for
government parties. Building on the work of Fortunato and Stevenson (2013), he links the incentives of coalition
parties to offer amendments to voter perceptions of the ideological closeness to their partners. When voters view a
partner party as ideologically similar to the party of the minister proposing a bill, the partner has greater incentives
to differentiate itself by offering more extensive amendments. His empirical analysis of amendment activity in
Belgium, Denmark, and the Netherlands supports this claim, suggesting that parties actively use the ability to offer
amendments to mitigate the electoral costs of coalition participation.
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21.3 Policing the Coalition Bargain
The previous section focused on parliament as an arena for position-taking by coalition partners. In this section, we
turn to a use of legislative institutions that has a more immediate impact on policy outcomes. Specifically, we
discuss how, in some cases, legislative institutions can give coalition partners the opportunity to police—that is, to
scrutinize and amend—the policy proposals of cabinet ministers. First, we briefly outline the nature of the policing
problem. Then, after highlighting several mechanisms present at the cabinet level that may help coalition parties
solve this problem, we discuss the possible solutions provided by legislative institutions.
The scope and complexity of the policy areas in which governments in advanced industrial democracies are
active makes delegation and specialization in drafting legislation inevitable. Although they play a central role in
setting policy priorities, and developing the broad outlines of government policy, it is simply impossible for the 20 or
so politicians who sit at the cabinet table to develop the expertise required to develop and assess concrete policy
alternatives, or to draft legislation that satisfies technical and legal requirements (Laver and Shepsle 1994, 1996).
To accomplish these tasks, cabinets have developed internal specialization by delegating significant responsibility
for policy-making to cabinet ministers, and they have provided these ministers with an extensive staff (with the
requisite technical expertise) to develop policy initiatives within their jurisdictions. As a result, the minister with
jurisdiction in a specific policy area enjoys a considerable informational advantage over his cabinet colleagues,
and thus takes the lead in developing policy proposals in that area.7
Although delegation is unavoidable, and provides obvious benefits, the fact that it endows cabinet ministers with a
privileged position in the policy process raises a threat common to delegation relationships. Ministers, as agents of
the cabinet, may abuse their (p. 441) discretion in an attempt to further their party’s goals, that is, to move policy
outcomes in a direction favoured by their target constituencies (thus reaping the position-taking benefits discussed
earlier).8 We refer to ministerial attempts to do so as ministerial drift. The informational advantage ministers enjoy
puts them in a unique position to engage in such drift. For example, suppose a cabinet minister presents a bill that
appears to stray from a coalition agreement and instead advantages his party. The minister argues that the bill
represents the best approximation of the compromise agreement among the feasible alternatives. Determining
whether this is an accurate description or a cover for ministerial drift may not be obvious for other members of the
cabinet. Moreover, even if they believe it is feasible to implement a policy they regard as superior, it may not be
clear what changes to the bill would be required in order to achieve the alternative policy.
In the face of this threat, implementing policy agreements that represent genuine compromises among the positions
of the government parties requires coalition partners to find ways to counteract the influence of “hostile” ministers,
and to reduce the opportunities for successful ministerial drift. To do so, parties must be able to accomplish two
tasks:
1. They must reduce the informational advantage of ministers so that they can assess ministerial draft bills,
and offer alternatives should the proposed bill be unacceptable.
2. They must have an opportunity to press for changes to ministerial drafts.
Putting it differently, the ability to police ministerial drift consists of two tasks: monitoring and correcting ministerial
proposals. As scholars have become increasingly interested in understanding how coalition cabinets govern
between their formation and termination (the traditional focus of coalition scholarship), they have begun to
investigate how parties solve the challenges posed by the need to monitor and correct hostile ministers.
21.3.1 Policing Outside Parliament
Within limits, such oversight can occur directly at the cabinet level. For example, governments sometimes create
inner cabinets made up of leaders of the coalition parties, as well as issue-based cabinet committees, to vet policy
proposals (Müller and Strøm 2000). Andeweg and Timmermans (2008) present evidence that coalition parties use
these internal mechanisms quite often, but importantly, they find that partners are systematically less likely to use
them (relative to other conflict resolution mechanisms) on particularly divisive issues. And in principle, of course,
such cabinet-level mechanisms face an important constraint. The same forces that require delegation in the first
place also imply that cabinet-level monitoring can only be employed for a subset of policies—it is simply impossible
for the cabinet to draft jointly all policy proposals. We therefore (p. 442) have little reason to believe, theoretically
or empirically, that cabinet-level institutions are sufficient as policing devices in multiparty governments.
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Cabinets must therefore turn to institutions outside the cabinet to manage the tensions among coalition partners.
Andeweg and Timmermans (2008) highlight two mechanisms, in particular, that may be important in this regard.
First, they draw attention to the impact of coalition committees, which consist of leading ministers in the cabinet and
party leaders outside the government. As they point out, such devices have often been used in Italy to discuss the
government’s general policy agenda and to deal with severe political crises. Party summits constitute another
potentially important mechanism. These occasions (used most often in Belgium) bring together party leaders
outside the government to discuss contentious political issues and to lay the groundwork for compromise between
coalition partners, especially in times of crisis. Notably, Andeweg and Timmermans (2008) demonstrate that
governments are more likely to use external policing devices (relative to the internal ones discussed earlier) on
more divisive issues for the coalition. Unfortunately, their empirical analysis treats coalition committees and party
summits jointly with two other external mechanisms—a committee of parliamentary leaders and a committee of
ministers and parliamentary leaders—that are (partially) external to the cabinet but are not external to the
legislature. Thus, within their study, it is not possible to conclude whether the institutional mechanisms that are
used most often by coalition partners to deal with divisive issues are located inside or outside parliament.
Other work has placed emphasis on another policing device outside parliament, the position of the junior minister
located within government departments. In many parliamentary systems, cabinet ministers are assisted in their
duties by these junior ministers (JMs). As political appointees just below the level of cabinet ministers, JMs serve as
the second-in-command within a department (ostensibly being groomed by their parties for future ministerial duty).
At the same time, a junior minister who is strategically placed within a hostile ministry (i.e. a ministry controlled by
another coalition party) can serve as a shadow who can provide pertinent information about a minister’s policy
activities. The analysis by Thies (2001) of JM appointment patterns in Italy, Germany, the Netherlands, and even
within the factionalized Japanese Liberal Democratic Party (LDP), shows clear evidence consistent with such
monitoring. Similarly, Lipsmeyer and Pierce (2011), in an analysis of 12 post-war European democracies,
demonstrate that shadow junior ministers are more likely to be appointed when coalition partners are ideologically
further apart, especially on salient policy issues.
Martin and Vanberg (2011) provide a complementary analysis of how parties make such appointments by
examining how the effect of ideological differences on shadow JM appointments may be conditional on party size.
In light of the fact that junior ministerial positions, like cabinet posts, are distributed proportionally across coalition
partners, large parties (those contributing more than half the coalition’s parliamentary seats) are relatively
unconstrained in the appointment of JMs. In principle, they have a sufficient number of JM slots to monitor all
ministries controlled by other parties. In contrast, small coalition partners (those contributing less than half the
parliamentary (p. 443) seats held by the coalition) do not have sufficient JMs available to monitor all hostile
ministers, and must thus choose where to place them. The value of inserting a shadow JM into a ministry rises as
the divisions grow among the coalition partners on the issues under the jurisdiction of the ministry. If coalition
parties make use of JMs as monitoring devices, one would therefore expect (a) that large parties are likely to
shadow most hostile ministers, and that this likelihood is not very sensitive to the divisions within the coalition, and
(b) that small parties will strategically place their (limited) JMs in those ministries dealing with policy issues that
divide them from their partners. In an analysis of JM appointments over a 20-year period in Germany, the
Netherlands, Ireland, and France, Martin and Vanberg (2011, 89ff) find strong support for these expectations. Two
important points arise from their analysis. First, regardless of the level of divisiveness, large parties always have a
high probability (above 50 percent) of monitoring their coalition partners. Second, small parties are highly sensitive
to intra-coalition divergence in making appointments, reserving their JMs for those ministries that most divide them
from their partners.
Although junior ministers are an important asset in monitoring cabinet ministers, two reasons suggest that parties
cannot exclusively rely on JMs to control ministerial drift. One is that small parties, as discussed above, are
constrained by the fact that they simply do not have sufficient JM slots to monitor all ministries. More importantly,
while junior ministers are in a good position to provide information about ministerial draft bills to their party, it is less
clear that they are in a position to force change to a ministerial draft. The reason is simple: the problem posed by
ministerial drift emerges in the first place because ministers have powerful incentives to reap the position-taking
benefits attached to introducing bills that are pleasing to their target audiences. This is particularly true in issue
areas in which there are significant divisions within a coalition. As a result, even if a shadow junior minister can flag
ministerial drift at the drafting stage, ministers may rebuff attempts to change bills prior to introduction, even if they
Page 5 of 12
expect subsequent changes to their initial proposal. Forcing change to bills is likely to require a different
mechanism. This leads naturally to a final set of policing institutions—those located inside the legislative arena.
21.3.2 Policing Inside Parliament
At least formally, parliaments debate and scrutinize legislation, can amend legislative proposals, and (in most
cases) must consent to the adoption of laws. In principle, therefore, the parliamentary process would appear to be
a natural arena for policing cabinet ministers. However, whether members of parliament can play such an active
role in the policy-making process depends on the extent to which they can effectively exercise their formal powers
to scrutinize and amend legislative proposals. As scholars have long recognized, the nature of the legislative
committee system plays a critical role in this regard, primarily because an institutionalized standing committee
system provides opportunities for policy specialization that is critical to effective scrutiny, deliberation, and (p.
444) amendment of policy proposals (see, for example, LaPalombara 1974; Lees and Shaw 1979; Mattson and
Strøm 1995).
A significant and well-established literature has identified a number of features of the legislative committee system
that make it more likely that legislators can use the legislative process to engage in information acquisition
(monitoring) and press for substantive changes to draft bills (correction).9 These features, documented for a large
number of European parliaments by Mattson and Strøm (1995) and Harfst and Schnapp (2003), include:
1. The number of legislative committees: A larger number of committees allows more effective policy
specialization.
2. Correspondence between committee and ministerial jurisdictions: Committees that correspond to
the jurisdiction of ministries will encourage specialization that maps onto ministerial draft bills.
3. Size of committees: If committee membership becomes too large, members are less likely to specialize,
and the committee itself becomes unwieldy.
4. Binding plenary debate before the committee stage: Plenary debates that bind committees limit the
ability to deliberate and propose changes.
5. Right to compel witnesses and documents: Committees with wide-ranging powers to compel
documents and testimony are better able to scrutinize proposed bills.
6. Rewrite authority: Committees that have the authority to rewrite bills are better able to push for changes
than those that must rely on amendments sponsored from the floor.
In addition to the nature of the committee system, there are two other features of the broader legislative process—
and in particular, the relative power of parliament and cabinet ministers—that are critical to the ability of legislators
to effectively monitor and correct government-sponsored legislation. These are the presence of urgency
procedures that allow ministers to restrict the time frame of the legislative process, and the guillotine procedure,
which gives ministers the right to reject proposed amendments and force an up-or-down vote on a bill. The
presence of such restrictive legislative procedures reduces the opportunity for parliamentary influence on policy
(see also Huber 1992).
Scholars have long argued that strong committee systems can provide opposition parties with influence over policy
(Strøm 1990b; Lijphart 1999; Powell 2000). But strong legislative institutions do not only empower the opposition—
they can also help parties in government to confront and deal with the challenges of multiparty governance. In
particular, they provide an important vehicle for managing the intra-coalition tensions that result from the threat of
ministerial drift. Strong committee systems can allow parties to reduce the informational advantage of ministers by
engaging in effective scrutiny, and to counteract instances of ministerial drift by proposing changes to draft bills
(Martin and Vanberg 2004, 2005, 2011; Kim and Loewenberg 2005; Carroll and Cox 2012).
(p. 445) Expanding on the idea that a strong legislative committee system may allow coalition parties to keep tabs
on their partners, Kim and Loewenberg (2005) focus on the distribution of legislative committee chairs in Germany.
Echoing Thies’ claim that parties systematically appoint junior ministers to shadow their coalition partners, Kim and
Loewenberg argue that government parties can use legislative committee chairs in a similar manner by insisting on
appointing chairs for those committees that shadow ministries held by their coalition partners—an expectation that
is clearly borne out by the data. Carroll and Cox (2012) extend this work by examining committee chair
assignments in 19 parliamentary democracies. They show that the greater the policy disagreement between a
Page 6 of 12
minister’s party and its partners, the more likely the minister is to be shadowed.
Demonstrating that parties attempt to control committee resources (in particular, committee chairs) in a manner
that is consistent with the use of legislative committees as intra-coalition policing mechanisms is clearly an
important step. A critical second step is to understand how these institutions are employed in practice. Do parties
use the legislative process to engage in scrutiny and correction of ministerial draft bills? And if so, is the strength of
legislative institutions critical to their ability to do so?
Answering these questions requires a research design that varies (a) the internal divisions within a coalition on
specific policy proposals in order to determine whether the threat of ministerial drift (which depends on policy
divisions) drives legislative activity, and (b) the strength of legislative institutions in order to determine whether the
nature of legislative institutions matters for the ability to police cabinet ministers. Martin and Vanberg (2011)
present an analysis of the legislative history of approximately 1,300 governments bills across five European
democracies that employs such a design.

Fig. 21.1 Ranking of policing strength for 16 European parliaments
Source: Martin and Vanberg (2011).
Building on the work of Mattson and Strøm (1995) and Harfst and Schnapp (2003), Martin and Vanberg (2011, 44ff)
develop an index of legislative policing strength based on the eight features of legislative institutions discussed
earlier for 16 European parliaments. This index, summarized in Fig. 21.1, comports well with existing assessments
of legislative strength, grouping “strong” legislatures in the Netherlands, Austria, Luxembourg, Germany, and
Denmark at one end of the scale and “weak” legislatures in France, Ireland, and the UK at the other end.10 It also
demonstrates clearly that the strength of legislative institutions—and hence the potential for coalition parties to use
the legislative process to police the coalition bargain—varies considerably across legislatures. Out of this larger
set, Martin and Vanberg consider three legislatures that feature strong legislative institutions (Denmark, Germany,
and the Netherlands) and two in which legislative institutions are weak (France and Ireland).
To capture variation in the internal divisions of coalitions on different policy proposals, Martin and Vanberg (2011)
rely on expert surveys conducted by Laver and Hunt (1992) and Benoit and Laver (2006) that provide estimates of
party policy positions on several dimensions, along with estimates of each dimension’s saliency to the party. To
demonstrate that legislative activity is driven by the need to monitor potential ministerial drift, they select all
government-sponsored legislation for a 20-year period (p. 446) that matches onto these dimensions, providing
them with a data set of roughly 1,300 government bills.
Their findings show that in systems where parliamentary institutions are strong, coalition governments are able to
use those institutions to resolve their agency problems. Partners in these systems are able to use the process of
legislative review to gather information on ministers’ policy proposals (i.e. engage in greater monitoring), and are
more likely to do so on conflictual issues. Moreover, partners are more likely to force changes to these proposals
when they diverge significantly from the coalition compromise. Their analysis also reveals an interesting interaction
between parliamentary and cabinet-level institutions in these systems. Specifically, when coalition partners have a
shadow junior minister placed in the proposing ministry, the degree of scrutiny by parliamentary committees is
smaller than when no shadow JM is present. That is, shadow junior ministers tend to play a substitute role for strong
committees in terms of information-gathering. When it comes to acting on this information, however, shadow junior
ministers do not serve as a substitute for the legislative process. Bills on which coalition partners disagree are
Page 7 of 12
amended to a greater extent by legislative committees, and this holds true regardless of whether the minister is
shadowed by a junior minister. In contrast, where parliamentary institutions are weak, coalition partners are
effectively unable to police the coalition bargain during the period of legislative review. Importantly, they find no
evidence in either setting that opposition parties are able to use legislative institutions to police government
ministers. That is, rather than facilitating oversight by parliament over the cabinet as a whole, strong legislative
institutions are important primarily for resolving internal coalition tensions.
(p. 447) 21.4 Possible Extensions
As we argued at the beginning of the chapter, the friction between the necessity of compromise in multiparty
governments and the costs of giving away too much arises because coalition partners must make policy jointly but
are held accountable separately by voters. Legislative institutions represent one set of tools that coalition parties
can use to reduce this friction. While research on how coalition partners are able to accomplish this task is still in
its early stages, the results so far are promising, and we see several ways forward as scholarship in this area
expands.
First, regarding position-taking—and specifically, the use of legislative speech by coalition partners—we believe
scholars should further explore the conflicting results for parliamentary questions versus parliamentary debates on
legislation. Recall that research on parliamentary question time, unlike research on legislative debates, has found
no evidence that coalition partners use their speaking opportunities for position-taking. One reason for this may
simply be that research on questions has not yet examined in detail the types of issues on which government
ministers are being questioned. That is, while it may be true that coalition partners ask fewer questions of ministers
than opposition parties (as recent empirical work has suggested), it may also be the case that when coalition
parties choose to ask questions they do so very selectively. In other words, similar to what Martin and Vanberg
(2008) demonstrated with respect to legislative debates, coalition partners may use their questioning opportunities
to discuss those issues that best allow them to differentiate themselves from the party of the minister. They may be
even more likely to do so with the approach of the next election.
More generally, we believe that there is great promise in moving beyond analysis of the incidence or length of
questions and speeches to focusing on their content in order to assess whether they serve to maintain a distinct
electoral identity. Fortunately, the growing amount of speech data available electronically, combined with recent
advances in automated content analysis techniques (Laver, Benoit, and Garry 2003; Slapin and Proksch 2008;
Monroe, Colaresi, and Quinn 2008; Klebanov, Diermeier, and Beigman 2008), make such approaches increasingly
feasible.
Second, we believe that research on the use of legislative institutions as coalition policing devices can develop
further on several fronts. One immediate task is to examine in more detail how specific legislative procedures and
structures affect the ability of coalition partners to monitor and correct ministerial actions. Different parliaments,
even those on the “strong” side of the scale in Fig. 21.1, exhibit significant variation in the features (and
combinations of features) available to coalition partners (see Martin and Vanberg 2011, 46). It may be the case that
some of these features are theoretically and empirically more important than others in ensuring that the possibility
of ministerial drift is diminished.
Research should also further explore how extra-parliamentary institutions interact with legislative institutions to
affect multiparty governance. Martin and Vanberg (2011) (p. 448) provide evidence that shadow junior ministers
are able to provide critical insider information to their parties on legislative committees that allow them to better
scrutinize ministerial initiatives, but that they have little role to play, at least in strong parliaments, in amending
these initiatives. As we discussed earlier, however, there are several other institutions at the cabinet level, and
outside the cabinet and parliament, that may serve a similar role as the junior minister position, and these
institutions may be able to force changes to legislation even before it is introduced in parliament. In general, we
know very little about when and why multiparty governments use these devices, or how government parties might
use them in tandem with legislative institutions to police the coalition bargain.
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Notes:
(1) . For purposes of this chapter, we treat parties as “unitary actors” and abstract away from the dynamics of
internal party factions (see Laver and Schofield (1990) for a discussion of the unitary actor assumption in coalition
research).
(2) . Strictly speaking, of course, some electoral systems do allow voters to discriminate among factions within a
party. For example, in the Japanese electoral system between 1925 and 1994, voters had to cast a single vote for
a candidate running in a multimember electoral district, which often forced candidates from the same party to
compete against one another. The incentives created by this system in part explain the factionalization of the
ruling LDP, which faced many of the same internal tensions that are common to coalition governments (see Thies
2001).
(3) . As Aldrich (1995) has argued, the tensions introduced by separate electoral accountability constitute one
reason for the formation of parties as organized entities. By forming stable long-term coalitions, factions within a
party make compromise agreements easier to enforce. A related literature has investigated the implications of
separate accountability on fiscal outcomes, arguing that coalition governments are less able to engage in fiscal
restraint than single-party governments (e.g. Bawn and Rosenbluth 2006; Persson, Roland, and Tabellini 2007;
Martin and Vanberg 2013).
(4) . This also appears to be the case at the level of the European Parliament, where questions to EU
commissioners are used primarily by national opposition parties, rather than government parties (Proksch and
Slapin 2011).
(5) . Russo and Wiberg (2010) examine the strength of questioning procedures, i.e., the extent to which legislative
institutions allow confrontational questioning of ministers, and effective information gathering. They conclude that
countries dominated by coalition governments tend to have weaker procedures than countries dominated by
single-party governments. This suggests that using question time as a position-taking opportunity may generally be
more difficult in coalition systems.
Page 11 of 12
(6) . Opposition parties also tend to give longer speeches on legislation that divides them from the proposing
minister, but notably, their speeches are roughly half as long as those of the minister’s partners, even after
controlling for party seat share. There is also no change in this tendency over the course of the electoral cycle.
(7) . Of course, the relationship between ministers and their civil servants also raise principal-agent dynamics that
are central to policy-making (see, especially, the seminal work of Huber and Shipan 2002). We put these
considerations aside for purposes of the current focus on cabinets and parliaments.
(8) . The recognition of this threat, of course, provides the basis for Laver and Shepsle’s well-known model of
ministerial autonomy (Laver and Shepsle 1990, 1996). Recognizing the privileged position of ministers, one
alternative is to assume that each minister will take advantage of his or her discretionary authority to implement
their most preferred policy in their domain. The resulting coalition policy is defined by the jurisdiction-by-jurisdiction
intersection of these policies (and therefore is highly sensitive to the particular allocation of portfolios). This
outcome is self-enforcing and not subject to the agency problems discussed here. We should note that Laver and
Shepsle did not intend their model as an accurate representation of coalition policymaking; rather, the model
serves the purpose of making it possible to endogenize expectations of policy-making into a theory of coalition
formation.
(9) . Some of the central contributions are Polsby (1975), Loewenberg and Patterson (1979), Mezey (1979), Mattson
and Strøm (1995), Norton (1998), Döring (1995), and Harfst and Schnapp (2003). For a review of this literature, see
Mezey (1993) and Gamm and Huber (2002).
(10) . The specific values of the index are as follows: Netherlands (0.88), Austria (0.81), Luxembourg (0.76),
Germany (0.68), Denmark (0.62), Sweden (0.48), Finland (0.39), Spain (0.33), Norway (0.30), Italy (0.28), Belgium
(0.26), Portugal (0.24), Greece (−0.51), France (−1.18), Ireland (−1.84), and UK (−2.51).
Lanny W. Martin
Lanny W. Martin is Associate Professor of Political Science, Rice University.
Georg Vanberg
Georg Vanberg, Professor of Political Science, Duke University
Page 12 of 12
Institutional Foundations of Legislative Agenda-Setting

Bjørn Erik Rasch
Institutions
2014
This chapter examines the institutional foundations of agenda-setting in legislatures. It first reviews some of the
most influential research on agenda-setting under majority rule and provides an overview of procedural rights and
institutional mechanisms of legislative agenda-setting. It considers four categories of procedural rights and
institutional mechanisms: the ability to schedule issues and control the timetable of the legislative process; the
ability to formulate proposals and amendment rights; veto rights and gatekeeping; and sequencing and ordering
with respect to legislative voting. It then discusses agenda-setting in parliamentary governments and concludes by
highlighting some areas for future research.
Keywords: agenda-setting, legislatures, majority rule, procedural rights, timetable, amendment rights, veto rights, gatekeeping, legislative voting,
parliamentary governments
22.1 Introduction
IN legislative politics, agenda-setting institutions regulate which issues and proposals are to be considered, and
how the issues are finally decided. Work on agenda-setting is central to legislative research and the number of
studies on the subject is large and rapidly growing. The analyses comprise at least three main strands of research.
The various bodies of literature for the most part seem to be living side-by-side without much interaction or cross-
fertilization. First, there is a substantial literature in public opinion and communication research, analysing the
extent to which the mass media determine—not what people think—but the issues they think about and how they
think about them (Cohen 1963; McCombs and Shaw 1972). Over the years scholars have taken one step back and
asked “Who sets the media agenda?”—not just “Who sets the public agenda?” (McCombs and Shaw 1993: 60).
The concepts of framing and priming have gradually achieved a prominent role, as the way an issue on the
agenda is framed tends to have behavioural consequences (Chong and Druckman 2007; Iyengar 1991; Scheufele
and Tewksbury 2007). A second major line of research focuses on policy agenda dynamics as a consequence of
allocating scarce attention (Dearing and Rogers 1996; Baumgartner and Jones 1993). The common core of this
research is to try to understand the underlying forces of “how new ideas, new policy proposals, and new
understandings of problems may or may not be accepted in the political system” (Baumgartner et al. 2006, 960).
To some extent the current comparative research on policy agendas rests on classics such as Schattschneider
(1960), Bachrach and Baratz (1962), and Kingdon (1984), who emphasized the importance of being able to
structure what alternatives to consider and (p. 456) the sources of bias in issue definition and mobilization of
support. The third strand of research deals with institutional aspects of agenda-setting and their consequences for
policy outcomes, and comprises models of social choice problems and voting agendas within legislative settings
(e.g. Riker 1982; Krehbiel 1988; Miller 1995). The literature that considers agenda-setting as a major determinant of
final stage decision-making is in itself vast and varied and it is the one on which this chapter rests.
Page 1 of 22
The outline of research strands above parallels Riker’s (1993, 2) comments on the path to final choice in politics. At
the most general level there is a feasible set of possible subjects for collective decisions. From this, a set of
considered issues is formed. Here the media obviously plays a role, but also various rules and regulations as well
as politicians’ rhetorical and strategic manoeuvres. At the next step, the actors shape a set of admissible
alternatives—the alternative set—from which one is eventually chosen. The entire path from things people talk
about (feasible set) to the final choice is an agenda.
Referring to the alternative set, agenda-setting has to do with adding (or generating), blocking (or delaying), and
sequencing (or ordering) of alternatives before or until an outcome is reached. The first variant of agenda power is
positive, ensuring that alternatives are considered. The second type is negative: the ability to prevent alternatives
from consideration. The third sequencing type of agenda-setting is sometimes called agenda control (e.g. Epstein
and Shvetsova 2002). As this type relates to a fixed alternative set, it is agenda control in a very narrow sense.
Broadly speaking, agenda control also includes the positive and negative aspects in addition to sequencing. The
term “control” in this context does not mean that the agenda-setter necessarily determines the outcome of the
decision-making process. Rather, agenda control could be strong or weak, ranging from situations where the
agenda-setter can design an agenda that yields whatever policy outcome the setter wishes to situations with
significant limitations on the ability to form the agenda and affect the final outcome.
The remainder of this chapter is divided into four sections. The next section reviews some of the most influential
research on agenda-setting under majority rule. In the section thereafter, there is an overview of procedural rights
and institutional mechanisms of legislative agenda-setting, mechanisms which could be relevant in a wide range of
government structures, before agenda-setting in parliamentary systems is discussed in more detail. The final
section concludes and points to some areas for future research. This chapter will notsystematically review recent
literature explaining variation in agenda-setting institutions in democracies, although some insights from this
research are mentioned in passing.1
22.2 Agenda-Setting Under Majority Rule
A theoretical result at the heart of the group decision research on agenda-setting is McKelvey’s (1976; 1979)
global cycling (see also Schofield 1978) and agenda theorems. The results demonstrate how extremely powerful
an agenda-setter could be in multidimensional settings. The phenomenon of cyclical majorities has been
discovered, (p. 457) forgotten, and rediscovered many times at least from the thirteenth century on (McLean
1990; Colomer 2013). If there is a majority cycle, preferences alone cannot designate a unique winner among the
cycling alternatives and institutional details such as the order of voting and other agenda restrictions become
crucial. Arrow (1963), more generally, demonstrated the fundamental tension between consistency and actor
influence; given any reasonable (non-dictatorial) procedure, as long as the preferences of participants are taken
into account, “meaningful” social choices can no longer be guaranteed.

Fig. 22.1 Three actors A, B, and C and the majority winset of the status quo (SQ) as shaded areas
McKelvey showed that, in a multidimensional decision-making situation, if no majority winner exists, the cyclic set
comprises the entire multidimensional issue space. No matter which alternative we focus on, it can be beaten by
some other alternative in a majority contest. We can begin anywhere in policy space, and by means of majority
rule end up anywhere else; for any two alternatives in policy space, it is possible to arrange a sequence of
majority ballots leading from the first one to the second. Thus giving meaning to the phrase “if majority rule breaks
Page 2 of 22
down, it breaks down completely”—and it “almost always does.”2
The disequilibrium or “chaos” result has an important agenda implication: it can be exploited by a strong agenda-
setter. If there is an agenda-setter with complete control over proposal-making and the sequence of voting, it is
possible—in a democratic way by means of majority rule—to move from any status quo point in policy space to the
agenda-setter’s ideal point. Fig. 22.1 illustrates this in the simplest way possible. Assume, in a two-dimensional
policy space with Euclidian preferences, that we have three actors A, B, and C and a status quo (SQ) as shown in
Fig. 22.1a. Decision-making alternatives, or potential outcomes, are points in policy space, and their distance from
an actor’s ideal point reflects preferences—the closer the better an alternative is. Any two actors constitute a
majority. Actor A controls the agenda. Now, if A proposes P it will be supported (p. 458) by a majority of actors A
and B, as it is a proposal inside the petal-shaped win set of the status quo (the shaded areas of overlapping
indifference curves in Fig. 22.1a). Thus, after P has been adopted it becomes the new status quo. Next, the
agenda-setter proposes A (the agenda-setter’s most preferred alternative is within the shaded majority win set in
Fig. 22.1b), and the agenda-setter plus actor C make sure that A beats the new status quo established at the
previous stage of the decision-making process. Of course this example is very simplistic, but if no Condorcet
winner exists in the setting where the alternatives constitute a continuous, multidimensional space, majority rule in
principle may wander anywhere; an actor who determines the alternatives to vote on—as well as the sequence of
voting—also in fact dictates the outcome. There always exists a path leading to the agenda-setter’s ideal point as
the legislative decision, provided each actor votes sincerely in each of the pairwise ballots between a proposal
and the current status quo presented to him or her. In other words, at each stage of the voting process, actors
vote as if it is the last one (implying that there is no incentive for strategic voting). Thus, there is also a fundamental
asymmetry with regard to information: the agenda-setter has perfect information and the ability to plan far ahead,
while others have no choice but to act myopically because the agenda-setter’s proposals and agenda design—
including the planned sequence of binary comparisons—are unknown to them.
Interpretations of the disequilibrium result vary. Riker (1980: 443) emphasized that “disequilibrium, or the potential
that the status quo be upset, is the characteristic feature of politics.” In other words, anything can happen. Others
underline the logical rather than behaviour or descriptive nature of McKelvey’s insights (Austen-Smith 1999; Cox
and Shepsle 2007). The results help to understand the condition of majority rule and properties of preference
aggregation rules; we will neither observe fundamental instability nor complete agenda dominance. It can
nevertheless be useful to comment on the realism of the McKelvey agenda setup.
Why is it difficult in practice to move to any alternative in multidimensional policy space regardless of where the
status quo is located? First, voters might be unable both to perceive and to act on marginal differences between
alternatives. It will be difficult to make majority improvements whenever the majority win set is small and options
confronting voters are very close to each other. The possibility of consistent behaviour even under these
circumstances is crucial to the agenda result (e.g. Skog 1994). Second, to be able to move by means of majority
rule between any two points in policy space, the voting body in many cases would have to move through a large
number of carefully devised pairwise ballots. Such elaborate agendas would typically need to incorporate extreme
positions as intermediary winners, which in practice would be highly unlikely. It is much easier to design agendas
that lead inward toward centrally located alternatives rather than outward to more and more extreme proposals
(Feld et al. 1989). Third, related to the previous point, in any democratic voting body, the voting sequence typically
is announced and known to the voters when voting begins. Piecemeal, pairwise voting behind the agenda-setter’s
veil of ignorance, as in McKelvey’s world, never takes place in legislative politics. If, on the other hand, the entire
agenda is known to the voters before voting begins, questions of strategic behaviour emerge. This, in turn, (p.
459) limits what a monopolistic agenda-setter is able to achieve (e.g. Shepsle and Weingast 1984). Fourth, the
picture changes even more when we begin to add more realistic institutional structure and detail. In many real-
world voting bodies, the status quo is typically voted last (Shepsle and Weingast 1982; Rasch 2000). Depending
on the method of voting, this restriction often means that the outcome of the decision-making process is either
status quo or some alternative in the win set of status quo. Obviously, it is no longer the case that “anything may
happen.” Similarly, division-of-labour arrangements and specialized organizational patterns may transform
complex, multidimensional situations into a sequence of issue-by-issue decision-making processes, each of which
is one-dimensional. This creates a structure-induced equilibrium, i.e. a stable point in policy space resulting from
the sequence of single-issue decisions (Shepsle 1979).3 Where this equilibrium is located in policy space will
depend, among other things, on what kind of additional agenda restrictions apply for the one-dimensional cases.
Page 3 of 22

Fig. 22.2 The setter model with various locations of the status quo (SQ) relative to the ideal points of an
agenda setter (A) and a veto player (M)
A closer look at the unidimensional situation is in order. We assume a standard spatial model with a single issue as
in Fig. 22.2. The line represents a continuum of alternatives or policy choices. Each participating actor has an ideal
point somewhere on the line, and various alternatives are evaluated as better the closer they are to the actor’s
ideal point. In a group of actors, be it voters or members of a particular voting body, a median actor divides the
group into two equal parts. This actor’s ideal point is a median alternative or the true majority winner of this setting
(Black 1958).
A very important result in this context is the so-called setter model due to Romer and Rosenthal (1978). It focuses
on the effect of monopolizing agenda-setting and restrictions on rights to propose. Suppose there are two actors: a
proposer or agenda-setter with A as the ideal point and a veto player with M as the ideal point. Decision-making
takes place in two stages. First, the agenda-setter makes a proposal. Second, the veto player votes the proposal
up or down. If the proposal is rejected, the status quo prevails. The second stage actor only has a simple take-it-or-
leave-it choice, with no ability to (p. 460) make alternative proposals. This is something that the agenda-setter
may exploit. Thus, if the distribution of preferences is as in Fig. 22.2a, the agenda-setter can get adopted any
proposal in the interval between the status quo (SQ) and SQ*. With M as the veto player’s ideal point, this actor is
indifferent between SQ and SQ* (both are equidistant from M) and will accept a proposal very close to SQ*. Now if
we gradually move SQ to the right, SQ* approaches A as in Fig. 22.2b. This means that the status quo becomes
worse from the point of view of both actors, but also that the proposal from the agenda-setter will be (gradually)
worse as seen from the veto player (but still viable). We also note that if the agenda setter’s ideal point A is
between SQ and SQ*, it is, of course, adopted (Fig. 22.2c). Finally, with the status quo between the ideal points of
the two actors, no proposal will be forthcoming and the status quo prevails.
The setter model has been applied in a wide range of settings. Originally, Romer and Rosenthal (1978) analysed
school-board financing at the local level in a US state. In this context, the school board has exclusive control of the
agenda, and its proposal is voted up or down in a referendum. The authors showed that even if the agenda-setting
school board wants a more expansive proposal than the median voter, it can get it by forcing a referendum choice
between the setter’s proposal and the status quo or fallback position. Many types of fallback options or reversion
points could be relevant (e.g. zero expenditures or the previous year’s expenditure), and, paradoxically, the
worse the reversion point, the more extreme the setter’s proposal can be and still be adopted. It would be in the
interest of an agenda-setter, if possible, to try to frame the fallback option accordingly.
In the setter model, it is crucial that the second-stage actor cannot make proposals. That, of course, would
undermine the power of the agenda-setter and drive policy outcomes in the direction of M—the veto player’s ideal
point, the median voter, or the Condorcet winner—depending on the context in which the model is applied. In one
of their models Cox and McCubbins (2005) consider agenda-setters with the ability to block proposals from
reaching the floor, but if proposals are allowed, they may be amended by a floor majority. The agenda-setter on
any issue therefore chooses between SQ and M, and provided M is preferred, a proposal is forthcoming. This
makes the agenda-setter noticeably weaker than in the Romer and Rosenthal model, but the authors show that the
setter still has a significant capability to affect policy changes by means of preventing or allowing decisions to be
made on specific issue dimensions.
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The veto-player approach developed by Tsebelis (2002) can be used to analyse policy change in all political
systems regardless of regime, and it both rests on and elaborates some of the basic models presented above. Veto
players are individual or collective actors whose agreement is necessary for the change of status quo. They are
either institutional—typically specified in the constitution or other formal rules—or partisan. Agenda-setting is
central to the approach and it is an essential feature of its many empirical applications (e.g. König et al. 2010;
Rasch and Tsebelis 2011; Ganghof 2003). However, in the basic theoretical setup agenda-setters have
advantages that mirror those of McKelvey and Romer and Rosenthal; in a sense, it is Romer and Rosenthal in
multidimensional disguise. Decision-making has two stages. The agenda-setter (p. 461) makes a proposal before
a take-it-or-leave-it decision takes place. In this situation, the veto player who sets the agenda “can consider the
win set of the others as his constraint, and select from it the outcome he prefers” (see proposition 1.5 in Tsebelis
2002, 34). This would not be the case if other veto players could also make proposals. If we look back at Fig.
22.1a, and consider A as agenda-setter, this actor would propose something that is as close to the ideal point as
possible—i.e. PA —and get it accepted by a majority. B as agenda-setter similarly would have proposed PB.
Another observation from the veto-player theory should be mentioned as it deepens our understanding of agenda-
setting advantages in decision-making processes. If the size of the win set of the status quo shrinks, the
significance of being an agenda-setter drops. Assuming that the location of the status quo remains the same,
reduction of the win set could be a consequence of increased policy distances between the veto players or it
could be the result of adding more veto players. In Fig. 22.1a it would not matter much if B or C is the agenda-
setter, because of the tiny (shaded) win set in the intersection of the two actors’ indifference curves. If the ideal
point of B was much closer to C, it would have mattered a great deal who had the right to formulate the proposal.
The other side of this coin is that being an agenda-setter becomes more significant the more centrally located the
agenda-setter is relative to the other veto players.
To briefly summarize this section, we started out with McKelvey’s (1976) insights that if no equilibrium in
multidimensional policy space exists, a well-informed agenda-setter may create a sequence of binary majority
ballots leading from any status quo position to the agenda-setter’s own ideal point as the outcome of the decision-
making process. Structure and organization potentially reduces instability; if decisions are made dimension-by-
dimension, a stable outcome is produced. This is the case with Shepsle’s (1979) structure-induced equilibrium. The
stable outcome is simply the intersection of issue-by-issue medians. However, the extent to which the median will
actually be the decision on each dimension depends, among other things, on the prevailing restrictions on agenda-
setting. Romer and Rosenthal (1978), for instance, show how a monopolistic agenda-setter may gain by offering
restricted take-it-or-leave-it choices to a second-stage veto player. This typically generates non-median outcomes.
22.3 Procedural Rights and Mechanisms of Agenda-Setting
In this section we will take a closer look at various institutional aspects of legislative agenda-setting. The models so
far have been simple in the sense that there is an agenda-setter with exclusive proposal rights and one or more
other actors with the opportunity to veto proposals. The rules are complex regarding who can propose or reject,
and also how and when this might be done. Legislative processes are marked by bewildering, idiosyncratic details,
and the challenge is to extract more general (p. 462) mechanisms that frequently recur. The various procedural
rights and institutional mechanisms will be grouped into four categories: the ability to schedule issues and control
the timetable of the legislative process; the ability to generate proposals; the ability to block policy changes; and
finally, the ability to sequence or order options at the final stage of decision-making. This list is not exhaustive, but
it includes all the main types of agenda-setting that are discussed in the relevant literature.
22.3.1 Timetable Control
Agents with agenda-setting power are found in legislative processes everywhere. Cox (2006) uses the legislative
state-of-nature as an analytical tool to help explain why. Imagine a completely unregulated assembly whose main
task is still to legislate. Without any rules, anyone who wishes may introduce bills and amendments, and because
all who wish may speak, there will be no limits to debate. Even with simple majority as the decision rule, it would be
very easy to obstruct any legislative process. In effect, something close to unanimity would emerge as the de facto
decision rule. All kinds of coordination, bargaining, and collective-action problems would easily surface. Gains from
trade are unlikely to be realized; lack of trust hinders logroll arrangements. Unless the assembly decides on just a
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few issues, severe plenary bottlenecks are unavoidable. In the state-of-nature the assembly has no real ability to
legislate or act.
One of the few viable ways to get around the problems is to organize and regulate. Accordingly, in all real-world
legislatures, offices endowed with special agenda-setting power have been created, be they legislative or
executive. Procedures specified in formal rules regulate access to plenary time, the right to formulate proposals
and amendments, how to vote (both on offices and motions), etc. Still, plenary time is an issue in any modern
democratic legislature. Bills, with very few exceptions, can only pass after they have been debated and received a
sufficient number of votes in a plenary session. Scarcity of time in busy legislatures is something agenda-setters
will have to consider, as it is a fundamental constraint on what they can do. It becomes important who fixes the
legislative timetables and makes it possible to prioritize among (potential) proposals. The works of Döring (1995a,
2001) and Cox (1987) were among the first to bring scholarly attention to the significance of time constraints in
legislative agenda-setting.
There are many aspects to timetable control. It can have to do with the scheduling and length of parliamentary
debates, but also the question of which issues to prioritize and which to ignore. Control of the timetable is a tool
that can help to keep divisive issues off the agenda. In this way it is possible for an agenda-setter—for example a
majority coalition—to reduce the need for disciplinary measures or incentives to preserve the coalition. Döring
(2003), in a comparative study of European parliamentary systems, demonstrates a link between scheduling
advantages of agenda-setting governments and party discipline. Cox and McCubbins, alone and in combination
with various co-authors, have also emphasized this relationship in series of case studies.4 A majority party can
achieve what it wants in legislative processes by party discipline and control (p. 463) of votes on the floor as well
as by controlling the legislative timetable: “the high levels of coalition discipline observed in roll-call votes are as
much a function of governmental agenda control—specifically, the ability of the coalition to prevent bills that would
split its members apart from being voted on the floor—as they are of the carrots and sticks that governing parties
use to whip their members into line,” Chandler et al. (2006: 27) writes in a study of the German Bundestag. The
methods of agenda-setting and incentives to some extent are substitutes for each other.
Despite detailed regulations of the timetable in modern legislatures, obstruction by means of talk is still available as
a possible strategy in some settings. A well-known example is the filibuster of the US Senate (Binder and Smith
1997; Wawro and Schickler 2006). The filibuster enables a minority of senators to block proposals favoured by a
majority.5 However, a vote by 60 senators can end debate and bring the matter to a conclusion. In this way, the de
facto decision rule is transformed from majority to three-fifths supermajority. The logic is the same as in Cox’s
(2006) argument that in the legislative state-of-nature, filibustering and other obstruction tactics would make
something close to unanimity the actual decision rule. Another example of cloture is the British House of Commons’
parliamentary “guillotine,” a vote by which debate can be ended at a fixed point in time and that also may cut off
opposition amendments. Cloture is a strong instrument if it is used with discretion by an agenda-setter.
Timetable control has been discussed first in this section, but it is worth noting that the exercise of scheduling
tactics and the like presupposes some kind of positive or negative agenda power. Without the ability to initiate,
delay, or block legislation, no real timetable influence is possible at any stage of the legislative process.
22.3.2 Proposal and Amendment Rights
The right to initiate or formulate proposals is a positive or constructive power in legislative politics. The same is true
with respect to amendment rights; this is a right to propose changes to one or more issues already under
consideration. Proposal rights can be monopolized or concentrated in the hands of an agenda-setter as in the
models of McKelvey and Romer and Rosenthal, or more or less decentralized or dispersed. In the same manner,
amendment rights are either open to all the actors involved, or restricted in some way or another. In legislatures
around the world, a whole range of restrictions on amendment activity is possible, and details in their
institutionalization vary considerably. The extreme case of monopolized agenda-setting implies that only the
agenda-setter can formulate proposals; no other actor can bring amendments onto the agenda for consideration,
and decision-making takes place under a closed rule. Restrictive (debate and amendment) rules in today’s
democratic legislatures are endogenous, and can be modified by the assemblies themselves. Thus, restricting the
right to rewrite proposals from an agenda-setter, be it a legislative committee or an executive, is a way in which the
legislators explicitly (in constitutions or other formal rules) or implicitly (in political norms or practice) restrict their
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own freedom of action (Fiorina 1987). Although it (p. 464) sounds puzzling, in a strategic perspective, actors may
in some cases wish to tie their hands to achieve better outcomes than they otherwise would do (Schelling 1960;
see also Dixit and Nalebuff 1991 and Elster 2000).
The agenda-setting capacity of legislative committees and their relationship to the floor of a parent chamber are
thoroughly analysed. Are restrictive rules that give committees an upper hand common? Are nonmedian outcomes
the result of using restrictive rules? Often legislative committees have a party composition mirroring the parent
chamber, and they typically operate on the basis of delegated authority from the chamber (Mattson and Strøm
1995). If there is a majority party in the chamber, the same majority usually controls the committee. The formal
powers of committees vary considerably among legislatures (e.g. Martin 2011). The same is true with respect to
their role in legislative agenda-setting. Committees will scrutinize bills and collect and control relevant information.
They will propose amendments and make recommendations for the final decisions on the floor. Minority views are
often part of the committee report. Committees seldom have a right to initiate legislation on their own, but they may
still have considerable authority to craft (or rewrite) bills and influence how bills will be handled on the floor. Their
agenda power, therefore, tends to be of a (limited) positive and a (limited) scheduling kind. In modern legislatures it
may be difficult to propose amendments spontaneously in plenary debates or directly on the floor just before
voting, making committees the arena through which amendments emerge.6
This outline suggests that legislative committees in general have a weaker agenda-setting capacity than the first-
stage actors in models such as the ones in Romer and Rosenthal (1978) and Shepsle (1979). Numerous case
studies from the US Congress and European parliaments point in the same direction (see e.g. Schickler and
Pearson 2009; Dion and Huber 1996; Carson et al. 2011; Weingast 1989; Krehbiel 1991; Cox and McCubbins
2005; Döring and Hallerberg 2004). Nevertheless, committees may have sufficient agenda control to move
outcomes away from the floor median. For instance, the Rules Committee of the US House of Representatives has
the ability to craft special amendment rules in legislative processes. In one study, Monroe and Robinson (2008)
show how the majority party in the House, by means of restrictive rules that make it possible to offer up-or-down
committee proposals to the floor, achieves biased policy outcomes. This could happen even if committees are both
representative and responsive to the parent chamber, provided that the median of a majority party or majority
coalition diverge from the floor median (e.g. in cases of a centre-left or centre-right majority), and this majority
wants an outcome closer to the majority median. This is different from the discussion in Shepsle and Weingast
(1987). Their point of departure was committees composed of preference outliers, and they asked how committees
could prevail in relation to a chamber with all the necessary tools to amend nonmedian proposals. The answer was
institutional: the decision-making process, in contrast to Romer and Rosenthal’s two-stage model, possibly ends in
a third, conference committee-stage under a restricted rule. In the up-or-down decision at the latter stage, the first-
stage, agenda-setting committee may represent the parent chamber. Both the nature and effect (p. 465) of this
so-called ex post veto mechanism are, however, highly disputed (see, in particular, Krehbiel 1987).
The members of a legislative committee are almost everywhere a small minority compared with the parent
chamber. The parent chamber typically controls committee composition as well as the rules under which the
committees operate. Therefore, committees are only minority agenda-setters in a nominal sense; restrictions on
amendment activity and the like are typically accepted because it is a principal-agent relationship where the same
majority constellation dominates both the committee and the chamber. True examples of minority agenda-setting
do, however, exist in other contexts. One example is the “rule of four” of the US Supreme Court (Vermeule 2007).
Any group of four out of the nine justices is authorized to put a case on the court’s calendar for plenary hearings.
Similarly, discharge petitions to force bills out of committees of the US House earlier operated on a submajority rule
(Binder 1997; Pearson and Schicker 2009). Nussberger et al. (2010: 15) mention several examples of rules giving
parliamentary minorities a positive competence to initiate and decide, but emphasize that minority rights of this
type are “most often used for procedural issues, or issues related to parliamentary oversight and scrutiny.”
The value of proposal rights varies. Loewen et al. (2014) take advantage of a unique institutional feature of the
Canadian House of Commons to investigate the effect of being able to make proposals. In this parliament, the right
of non-cabinet members to propose legislation is assigned by lot. Those who were granted the right to propose,
and actually did introduce legislation, fared better at the polls than those who did not get the opportunity to make
proposals. The reason for this was that mainly these legislators tended to get more campaign contributions.
22.3.3 Veto Rights and Gatekeeping
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Just like positive agenda power, negative agenda power rests on complex and diverse rules and institutions.
Negative agenda power is the ability to veto in one way or another.7 An absolute veto can block a decision from
being made and is therefore a stronger instrument than a suspensory veto—merely the ability to delay a decision
for a certain period of time. A take-it-or-leave-it veto is, as we have already seen, less valuable for an actor than
one in which amendment rights are attached (that is, an amendatory veto of some kind).8 Furthermore, a veto can
be comprehensive or restricted. The line-item or partial veto is an example of the latter type. In some situations, an
override option exists as a way to counter an unwanted veto.
Under the United States Constitution, the president should sign or return a bill from the Congress within ten days
(Article I Section 7; see e.g. Kennedy 1977). This means that the president can block a bill in two ways, either by
sending it back to the legislators together with the president’s objections (regular veto), or, in cases where
Congress adjourns during the ten-day period, by not signing it (pocket veto). The regular veto can be overridden
by a two-thirds majority in both houses. The pocket veto is not really a (p. 466) formal veto. The way that
Congress can counteract such vetoes is to simply reintroduce the legislation. Over the two centuries after 1789
there were slightly more than 1,400 regular vetoes and approximately 1,000 pocket vetoes (McCarty and Poole
1995; Cameron 2000). Less than 10 percent of the (regular) vetoes were overridden.
The veto game renders the president rather weak. Congress is the agenda-setter, and the president only has an
up-or-down choice. The president cannot introduce bills. Compared with the Romer and Rosenthal model, the
agenda-setter even has a third-stage override option (although with a qualified majority requirement). However,
this simple interpretation is disputed. It can be argued that modern presidents have actually assumed a larger
legislative role. Because of their national mandate and standing with the people, they have captured some of the
initiative and proposal power in legislative processes.
Some would view the position of the US president as weaker than the position of the French president, for instance.
Huber (1996), in an analysis of the French Fifth Republic, notes that the president cannot introduce, amend, or veto
legislation. Formally then, the French president has neither positive nor negative agenda power in legislative
processes. The French prime minister does, however, influence legislative processes strongly, reflecting the
unquestionably parliamentary logic of the system.9
Bicameralism, found in about one-third of parliaments in the world, is another setting where intricate combinations
of positive and negative agenda-setting are found (Tsebelis and Rasch 1995; Tsebelis and Money 1997). Unlike
legislative committees, legislative chambers are almost always independent of each other with respect to
recruitment (elections) and authority; one chamber is not a principal and the other an agent. Chambers often mirror
each other when it comes to agenda-setting capacities, but in some countries only one of the chambers can
introduce bills, and the other chamber may veto (with or without rights to amend), or delay. Also the number of
decision-making stages varies, from two as in the Romer and Rosenthal framework, to a potentially infinite number
(for examples, see Tsebelis and Money 1997, 56–62). A grasp of these details and how they interact with the party
system is essential to understand the legislative power of each part of the legislature; it is not sufficient merely to
consider the extent to which chambers are politically symmetric.
It is worth noting that a gatekeeping right is also a kind of veto (Denzau and Mackay 1983; Krehbiel 2004). By
keeping the gates closed—and vetoing any proposal—an actor will have a “unilateral ability to impose the status
quo” (Crombez et al. 2006, 331); only changes that are in the interest of the gatekeeper take place. Often an actor
is said to have a gatekeeping right if it has an exclusive right of initiative, but as Crombez et al. (2006) emphasize,
this proposal right will not be sufficient to preserve the status quo if other participants in the larger legislative
process can compel the agenda-setter to act. The authors look closer at various familiar instances of presumed
gatekeeping institutions, and find that gatekeeping in a strong sense hardly ever exists in legislative politics. For
instance, nowhere do gatekeeping rights seem to be granted to legislative committees (e.g. because discharge or
similar measures are available to the parent chamber), or in the case of the European Union, both the Parliament
and the Council may demand that (p. 467) the Commission, which has the right to initiate legislation according to
the consultation and co-decision procedures, make a proposal.10
A strict germaneness rule could be seen as a gatekeeping tool for legislative committee. It will have the authority to
disregard non-germane proposals. Nevertheless, such proposals could reach the floor by other channels, andin
some systems, provided they have sufficient backing, could come directly from the floor.
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22.3.4 Sequencing and Ordering
If more than two alternatives exist on an issue after committee bargaining and floor debates, for instance in the
form of opposition amendments to a government bill, some kind of voting procedure is needed to reach a decision.
Voting procedures consist of a balloting method in combination with decision rules (Merrill 1988). The balloting
method determines how and in what form votes are cast. In legislatures, common methods are a show of hands, roll
call, voice, division lobbies, and increasingly, electronic voting devises (Saalfeld 1995). Decision rules could be
very complex, and include the requirement for winning (plurality, majority, etc.) as well as rules determining the
voting sequence in the event that more than one ballot is necessary to reach a decision.
A number of voting procedures are analysed in the literature (Riker 1982; Nurmi 1987; Miller 1995). In practice,
only two voting procedures seem to dominate floor voting in legislative assemblies: the amendment procedure or
the successive procedure, or some variant of either of these (Rasch 2000). The former is the Anglo-American
approach, voting alternatives two-by-two in a predetermined order. At each stage, one alternative is eliminated,
and the winner meets the next one in line (until no alternative is left). The last alternative to enter the process is
often the status quo, meaning that the outcome will be either the status quo or some proposal beating the status
quo. With n alternatives on the agenda, exactly n-1 ballots take place before voting ends.
The successive procedure works by voting the alternatives one-by-one in some order typically decided in
advance by the parliament itself. Voting, therefore, begins with an up-or-down vote on a single alternative (the first
in the voting order). If a majority supports it, a decision has been reached, and no more voting takes place; all
other alternatives are eliminated. If the first alternative is voted down, however, the second alternative is pitted
against the (n-2) remaining alternatives. Voting continues until one alternative gains a majority, possibly at the final
stage when only two alternatives are left, one of which might be the status quo. With n alternatives on the agenda,
from 1 to n-1 ballots take place.
Both parliamentary voting approaches are sensitive to ordering—the successive procedure highly so (e.g. Rasch
1995; Nurmi 2010). In general, Black’s (1958, 40) claim that “the later any motion enters the voting, the greater its
chance of adoption” applies to both procedures (Niemi and Gretlein 1985; Niemi and Rasch 1987). If preferences
are cyclical, the voting order and the agenda-setting mechanism are crucial to the outcome; any one of the
alternatives in a (top) cycle stands a chance of being adopted. If a Condorcet (p. 468) winner or median
alternative exists, however, the ordering of alternatives becomes less important under the amendment procedure,
provided legislators vote sincerely. For the successive procedure, ordering still can affect the outcome and easily
lead to the defeat of the median alternative if it is placed too early on the agenda (even if everyone votes
sincerely). In addition to ordering, deleting or adding alternatives may affect the outcome in non-obvious ways.
Amendment activity, therefore, can also be used as tactical manoeuvres, as in the cases of killer and saving
amendments (Enelow and Koehler 1980; Jenkins and Munger 2003).
It is worth noting that one of the countermoves to an unfortunate voting order is strategic voting. For example, if the
Condorcet winner is voted too early under the successive procedure, it can be saved if a sufficient number of
legislators act strategically (McKelvey and Niemi 1978).
Floor voting problems only occur if proposal rights are widespread. In parliamentary systems, government bills are
only seriously challenged if parliamentary factions have resources and skill to formulate alternative proposals.
Similarly, if a disciplined majority party or majority coalition exists, voting-order problems seldom if ever surface.
Undisciplined parties or minority governments potentially make the floor voting stage more volatile and vulnerable
to order of voting effects.
Nevertheless, parliaments do not seem to experience severe problems at the voting stage very often. Voting by
legislators also mainly appears to be sincere, although examples to the contrary can be found (Pool and Rosenthal
1997). One reason is that parliaments handle issues in such a way that they become unidimensional (Shepsle
1979). If a median voting order is used, that is, one in which voting begins with the most extreme proposals and
then gradually approaches alternatives in the centre of the preference distribution, legislators will end up with the
median alternative as the decision and incentives to vote insincerely will be weak or non-existent (Hylland 1976;
Rasch 2014).
22.4 Parliamentary Governments and the Legislative Agenda
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22.4 Parliamentary Governments and the Legislative Agenda
The number of democracies in the world today is higher than atany other time. The majority of these democracies
have adopted a parliamentary constitution, that is, one based on assembly confidence (Strøm 2000; Strøm et al.
2003; Cheibub 2007). Assembly confidence systems are those in which governments, in order to gain and stay in
power, must be at least tolerated by a legislative majority. The vote of confidence procedure exists in most
parliamentary democracies, and is important to understand the standing of governments in legislative processes
(Huber 1996a; Diermeier and Fedderson 1998; Döring and Hönnige 2006).11 This procedure makes it possible for
the government to propose a bill without allowing amendments (thus, it is a restrictive (p. 469) procedure) and
link the fate of the bill to the survival of the government. Nevertheless, it is the no-confidence procedure, or the
vote of censure, that captures the essence of parliamentarism.12 However, only around 5 percent of no-
confidence motions in advanced parliamentary democracies result in termination of governments, indicating that
most no-confidence motions are not intended for adoption (Williams 2011). Instead, these proposals may represent
an opportunity for opposition parties to signal policy priorities and to gain vote shares.
In legislative processes, the interaction between executives and legislatures is structured by agenda-setting rules
(Tsebelis 2002: 92). A standard view in the literature is that in parliamentary systems, governments control the
agenda, while in presidential systems the legislature is the agenda-setter. We have mentioned already the limited
role of the United States president in legislative processes; agenda power is vested in the Congress. The US
system, however, is quite unique. Presidential systems in general are fairly diverse when it comes to legislative
agenda-setting (see, e.g. Cheibub and Limongi 2011; Amorin Neto et al. 2003; Figueiredo and Limongi 2000). The
same is even more notable in parliamentary systems; the variation in agenda-setting institutions is immense, as is
the resulting diversity in strength of the government in legislative processes (Döring 1995; Bergman et al. 2003).
The contrast to standard assessments of the role of the government found in parts of the literature is striking. Obler
(1981, 127), for example, says that under parliamentarism, “legislators do not legislate. Executives legislate.”13
Governments “can normally control the assembly,” Blondel (1990, 241) similarly claims. As a result, he continues,
governments “can see to it that laws are passed in the shape which they wish these to have.”14 According to
Tsebelis (2002, 93), every parliamentary government “is able to impose its will on parliament.” How is it possible for
the government to impose its will, despite the fact that the legislature is the principal and holds the destiny of any
government in its hands through the no-confidence procedure? I will indicate four governmental advantages that
should be part of the answer: drafting power advantage; majority advantage; positional advantage (policy
centrality); and the availability of restrictive procedures (institutional advantages).15
One reason for the strength of governments in parliamentary systems is that in most places they virtually have a
monopoly on drafting power. Drafting legislation in modern societies requires expertise and other resources that
parliamentary legislatures normally lack. Serious legislation, therefore, typically will have to emerge from
governmental offices. This is succinctly captured in the following quote from Laver and Shepsle (1994, 295):
If the government has a tight grip on the parliamentary timetable and a near-monopoly of both the
information and the drafting skills needed to prepare legislation, then it may be very difficult for opposition
parties to get significant draft statutes onto the legislative agenda. This will effectively prevent the
legislature from imposing specific policies on an unwilling cabinet.
Another reason is that around two-thirds of all cabinets control a majority of seats in parliament (e.g., Strøm 1990).
The parliament and government are not independent, (p. 470) unified actors; moving beyond the two-body
image, the ties of parties unify the government and their backers in parliament (Andeweg and Nijzink 1995;
McGann 2006). Majority status combined with control of the government apparatus’s drafting power, also gives the
government negative agenda power. For example, as long as parliaments have proposal rights with only limited
drafting power, governments may successfully keep divisive issues off the agenda to avoid challenges to coalition
unity.16
Minority governments will also clearly enjoy far-reaching drafting power. However, these governments do not
necessarily have the support needed to avoid unwanted issues from being placed on the legislative agenda, and
mostly lack this kind of negative agenda power. They could still be able to shape legislative outcomes, to the
extent they have the positional advantage of being located in the middle of the policy space (Tsebelis 2002; Rasch
and Tsebelis 2011). Non-central minority governments are hardly viable unless they have a tool-box of strong,
Page 10 of 22
institutional measures at their disposal.
The confidence vote has already been mentioned as an important procedure in the hands of parliamentary
governments. In practice, the procedure is used very infrequently, but it is always present as a potential threat of
resignation (and perhaps new elections). By attaching confidence to issues, governments force an up-or-down
vote and amendments from the floor become irrelevant. Parliament has a choice between, on the one hand, a
government and its policy proposal, and on the other, status quo with regard to policy accompanied by a
governmental crisis.
In some parliamentary systems, a more general and ordinary way to avoid damaging effects of unfriendly
opposition amendments is to give the government last-offer authority. This is “the ability to offer amendments
toward the end of the process when no one else can” (Heller 2001, 783). In a sense it is like adding a new
decision-making stage where amendment rights are restricted to a privileged actor, notably the original proposer in
the case of government bills. However, forms of last-offer authority are more widespread with respect to financial
legislation than ordinary legislation. According to Heller (2001), last-offer authority should be particularly useful for
minority governments. Compared to the confidence vote, it is certainly a much less dangerous way to restrict
amendments and potentially break up opposition coalitions.
The French constitutional system, which entirely follows a parliamentary logic in lawmaking, grants two important
instruments to governments: the package vote (vote blocqué) and the guillotine variant of the confidence vote
(Huber 1996; Brouard 2011; Cheibub and Limongi 2012).17 Both instruments sharply restrict the role of the
legislature. The package vote (Article 44.3 of the constitution) enables the government to force a take-it-or-leave-it
vote in parliament on a selective package of issue proposals and any amendments that the government should
want to incorporate. The guillotine (found in Article 49.3) permits the government to attach the fate of a bill to a no-
confidence vote in the National Assembly. There will be no vote on the government bill itself and if a no-confidence
motion is not introduced and accepted by a majority within 48 hours, the government bill is considered as adopted.
Again, the government steers clear of any amendments from the floor of the parliament, and if the parliament votes
at all, it is an up-or-down decision on the continuation of the government.
(p. 471) Few parliamentary systems seem to have such strong institutional tools as governments in the French
Fifth Republic; they will have to lean on other advantages to stay in power, such as majority status or a central
position in policy space (Rasch and Tsebelis 2011a, 272). Huber (1992) shows that the more complex French
government bills become, the more likely it is that restrictive procedures are invoked. Also, these procedures are
more frequent the weaker the status of the government; weak governments are more dependent on institutional
advantages. Government coalitions, furthermore, can invoke restrictive procedures on bills as a protection from
embarrassing debates and votes on the floor. With respect to policy, one of the main purposes of the package vote
and the guillotine, is to protect outcomes of the bargaining on which the government bill rests.
To gain insights into the workings of the French parliamentary system, Huber (1992; 1996) adapted the Romer and
Rosenthal (1978) setter model, and other models developed to understand the relations between committees and
the floor of the United States Congress. Similar models are also built to better grasp intra-governmental agenda-
setting in legislative processes. Laver and Shepsle’s (1996) model of ministerial government assumes that each
minister almost monopolizes proposal power. A minister has the positive ability to propose, as well as a negative
power to keep the gates closed and thereby ward off unwanted proposals. Tsebelis (2002) and Cox and
McCubbins in various papers, emphasize ministers’ veto rights rather than their right to propose. Parties in
government possess a veto over the entire set of issues that the government faces. Therefore, no minister holds
unilateral proposal power.
As a final note in this section on parliamentary government, few analyses of legislative–executive relations
consider the role of anticipation more closely. Legislative decision-making is intricate and complex, and comprises
different types of bargaining processes (Froman 1967). In parliamentary systems, if governments need to establish
majority coalitions on issues before floor voting, ministers (or their supporters in parliament) may use traditional
bargaining tools such as persuasion, problem-solving, compromise, side-payments, and logrolling to get their
policies adopted. A different approach is anticipated reactions, which is a kind of implicit bargaining where the
actors’ offers and counter-offers are unknown or vague. The government anticipates the parliament’s preferences
and drafts bills accordingly. If this mechanism works successfully, every government bill will be adopted without
Page 11 of 22
changes and all private members’ bills will be rejected. A government that lacks powerful instruments of agenda-
setting or bargaining will have to resort to anticipated reactions in its day-to-day proceedings in order to survive.
22.5 Concluding Remarks
This chapter makes no claim to be a general survey of agenda-setting theory and models as a whole. The focus
has been on institutional aspects. Legislative agenda-setting has to do with the scheduling of issues and timetable
control, the ability to generate proposals, the (p. 472) ability to avoid or block proposals, and finally, the ability to
sequence or order options on the floor. The chapter has reviewed some of the most influential research on
agenda-setting under majority rule, beginning with work related to McKelvey’s global cycling and agenda theorems
and Romer and Rosenthal’s setter model. These models entrust crucial policy influence to actors that control the
agenda. The subsequent overview of procedural rights and institutional mechanisms of legislative agenda-setting
does, however, show that agenda-setting in real-world assemblies is typically much more restricted than in the
original models. The agenda-setter in general seems to be less powerful, and the mechanisms by which the setter
gains influence are often subtle and intricate.
Page 12 of 22
Table 22.1 Examples of the distribution of selected agenda powers in different institutional settings. The
expression “open-rule veto” is used in situations where consent by the actor in question is required, and this
actor can also amend the proposal under consideration (i.e. a veto with amendment rights attached)
Setter Model Legislative Committees Bicameralism U.S.-Type Parliamentarism

Presidentialism
First-Stage Committee Chamber 1 Congress Government

Actor
Proposal Delegated Proposal Proposal Proposal Right Proposal Right

Right Right Right Timetable with
Gatekeeping Jurisdictional Restriction Sequencing Control Drafting
Right (Limited Timetable Power Sequencing Capacity
Control and Scheduling (Open Rule Power Timetable
Power) Veto) Veto Override Control (Issues)
Additional
Instruments:
Confidence
Vote
(Resignation
Threat)
Dissolution
Power
Last Offer
Authority
Second- Parent Chamber Chamber 2 President Parliament

Stage Actor
Closed Rule Proposal Right Proposal Closed Rule Proposal Right

Veto Open Rule Veto Right Veto with
Timetable Control Sequencing (Policy Limited Drafting
Sequencing Power Power Initiative) Capacity
Open Rule Open Rule Veto
Veto Sequencing
Power
Additional
Instrument:
No-Confidence
Vote (Removal
Threat)
Principal-Agent Principal-Agent
Relationship Relationship
Legislative agenda-setting is a vigorous and dynamic research area, continuously producing new insights.
Research dealing with other decision-making processes than (p. 473) ordinary legislation, such as budgeting
(state budgets) and changes in standing orders (parliamentary rules of procedure), is sparser and the
understanding of agenda-setting less conclusive.18 In government formation, the allocation of procedural rights in
investiture rules has so far not been systematically investigated.19 Implicit and informal agenda-setting rules under
negative forms of parliamentarism (where an investiture does not exist) are even harder to grasp. Similarly,
analyses of agenda-setting in constitutional reform processes (Denzau 1985; Martin and Rasch 2013) and
Page 13 of 22
elections to various positions and offices by legislators (Jenny and Müller 1995; Sieberer 2013) are few and far
between.
In the coming years we will see that agenda models travel to decision-making areas and processes that need
closer examination. Another type of development likely to occur is movement further away from two-stage
decision-making models. The complexities of legislative processes are striking. Naturally, few studies take all the
relevant institutional details into account because it would make them intractable. The challenge is to
conceptualize institutional features in such a way that the dimensions along which they vary are reduced. As an
example, the veto-player approach (Tsebelis 2002) has proved to be a sufficiently general and extremely
productive tool of this type; the challenge is to create something as efficient that is richer in institutional detail, to
better understand the role and importance of institutions in legislative agenda-setting.
Acknowledgements
I thank the editors for helpful comments and suggestions. This research has been supported by the Norwegian
Research Council (FriSam project no. 222442 on The Evolution of Parliamentarism and Its Political
Consequences).
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Notes:
(1) . Examples could be the “equilibrium institutions” literature (Riker 1980; Shepsle 1986), but also empirical
studies such as Zubek (2011), Zucchini (2011; 2011a), and Sieberer (2006), linking party system characteristics
and agenda institutions in parliamentary systems.
(2) . See e.g. Shepsle (1986, 51) for further references. Plott (1967) showed that under all but extreme and unlikely
circumstances, no equilibrium in multidimensional policy space exists.
(3) . It must be an institutional arrangement in which legislative decision-making can be divided into separate
decisions in different jurisdictions, each of which is unidimensional. In practice, committee systems in legislatures
may be more or less in accordance with such a one-to-one relationship between committee jurisdictions and issue
dimensionality, that is, choice situations that make legislators’ preferences single-peaked (Black 1958).
(4) . E.g. Cox, Masuyama, and McCubbins 2000; Cox 2001; Amorin Neto, Cox, and McCubbins 2003; Cox and
McCubbins 2005; Chandler, Cox, and McCubbins 2006; and Akirav, Cox, and McCubbins 2010.
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(5) . Filibustering does not always lead to the intended result. Strøm Thurmond conducted the longest filibuster ever
by a US senator (24 hours and 18 minutes), but did not succeed in derailing the passage of the Civil Rights Act of
1957.
(6) . A systematic overview of restrictions on individual MP’s right to initiate legislation in parliaments of Western
Europe is found in Mattson (1995, 457–68). He distinguishes between numerical limits (a certain number of
legislators has to back the initiative), time limits (regulates when proposals can be introduced), technical
requirements, and limitations on the content of proposals. Mattson also mentions that it would be a restriction on
MPs’ rights to propose if committees were able to kill initiatives without reporting them to the floor. See also
Bräuninger and Debus (2009).
(7) . Various kinds of executive veto rules are analysed by Schwarts (1999). An overview of veto and override
possibilities in bicameral settings of presidential systems can be found in Cheibub (2002, 115).
(8) . The origins and consequences of amendatory vetoes in Latin America are analysed in Alemán and Tsebelis
(2005).
(9) . More on parliamentarism in the next section.
(10) . Patty (2007) argues that the discharge procedure in the US House is far from purely majoritarian. Support of
either the speaker of the House or a majority of the Rules Committee is necessary to ensure floor consideration of a
bill.
(11) . Iceland is a parliamentary democracy without the confidence vote. The 1944 constitution was to a large
extent modeled after the Danish constitution, but the confidence procedure did not travel. The Swiss government
emerges from the legislature, but as the government does not rest on confidence in its day-to-day proceedings,
and cannot be voted out of office between elections, it is not a case of parliamentarism.
(12) . The mirroring instrument that parliamentary governments often—but not always—control (in one way or
another) is the ability to call early elections (see e.g. Lupia and Strøm 1995; Smith 2004; Brunclik 2013).
(13) . A similar statement is made in the opening section of Laver and Shepsle’s (1996) book on making and
breaking governments: “it is difficult in most parliamentary democracies for anyone outside the executive to have
a significant impact on the process of legislation.”
(14) . On legislative passage rates under different constitutions, see e.g. Saiegh (2011) and Diermeier and Vlaicu
(2011).
(15) . In Tsebelis and Rasch (2011), the three latter methods are discussed in a slightly different manner
(institutional, partisan, and positional).
(16) . See contributions by Cox, McCubbins, and their various co-authors.
(17) . Brouard (2011, 41) also mentions three other instances of restrictive rules in the constitution (Articles 40,
41.3, and 45).
(18) . See e.g. Heller (1997) on bicameralism and budgets and Sieberer et al. (2011) on rules of procedure in
selected parliaments.
(19) . See related research by e.g. Laver and Shepsle (1993) and Bloch and Rottier (2002).
Bjørn Erik Rasch

Bjørn Erik Rasch is Professor of Political Science and Deputy Dean for Education at the Faculty of Social Sciences, University of
Oslo.
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LawMaking
LawMaking
Sebastian M. Saiegh
Print Publication Date: Jun 2014 Subject: Political Science, Comparative Politics, Law and Politics
2014
This chapter examines the lawmaking process in democratic countries, focusing on how the government and
cross-pressured legislators interact with each other. It considers how the possibility of success or failure is
influenced by uncertainty and how incentives may drive legislators to change their voting intentions. It discusses
the factors that allow chief executives to enact policy changes through statute law, as well as the role and
influence of governments and legislatures in creating law. In particular, it highlights two major factors that shape
lawmaking: the unpredictability of legislators’ voting behavior, and the availability of resources to engage in vote-
buying. It also looks at the influence of vote-buying on winning coalitions.
Keywords: lawmaking, democratic countries, legislators, incentives, chief executives, statute law, legislatures, voting behavior, vote-buying,
coalitions
23.1 Introduction
ON 27 July 2002, the Republican-controlled Congress granted President George W. Bush “fast-track” authority to
negotiate international trade pacts. Most legislators voted along party lines: Democrats opposed the bill and
Republicans supported it. Yet, fearful that free trade would cost jobs in their districts, many Republicans broke
ranks and joined the opposition. Meanwhile, Democrats from export-dependent districts were supportive of the
measure. Democratic leaders, however, wished to keep most of their party voting against the bill to force
Republicans from vulnerable areas to cast a “yes” vote that could be used against them in the November election.
With such powerful crosscurrents, Republican leaders were wary of forcing members to take such a controversial
vote. Senior administration officials worked with the majority whip to round up votes. When the bill came to the
floor, these efforts paid off—a handful of Republicans succumbed to these pleas, including two legislators who
changed their votes after securing commitments from Bush to help their districts. The government also picked up
the votes of five additional pro-business Democrats who resisted pressure from their party leadership. With victory
assured, Republicans in districts with strong anti-fast-track constituencies were let off the hook by their leaders,
and voted “no.” At 3:30am, the House passed the Trade Act by a razor-thin 215 to 212 vote, with 190 Republicans
and 25 Democrats making up the majority.
President Bush was not so fortunate a few months later. On 1 March 2003, US government officials were stunned
when Turkey’s parliament narrowly rejected a government bill to let 62,000 American troops on Turkish soil. The
defeat also took Turkey’s political leaders by surprise. Prime Minister Abdullah Gül and the chief of the governing
party, Recep Tayyip Erdoğan, supported the resolution, and both men urged their party, which controlled a large
majority of the parliament, to support it. The US military wanted to open a second front against forces in Kurdish-
controlled northern Iraq, using Turkey as the launch-pad. Erdoğan endorsed the request, arguing that the
American relationship (p. 482) was too valuable to spurn. But the American request placed Turkey’s parliament in
a difficult position, as polls indicated that as many as nine out of ten Turks opposed involvement in a war against
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Iraq. Hours before the vote, Erdoğan and Gül held a straw ballot of the 300-plus Justice and Development Party
members who dominated the 550-seat parliament. Only about 50 members, made up of the party’s core of Islamist-
minded politicians, expressed opposition. The alleged support should have given the resolution a comfortable
majority. Erdoğan, however, underestimated the strength of dissent within his own party. More Turkish lawmakers
supported the measure than opposed it (the final vote was 264 votes in favour to 251 against), but the resolution
failed because there were 19 abstentions. Under the Turkish constitution, a resolution can become law only if it is
supported by a majority of the lawmakers present. Presuming that the measure had passed, many lawmakers left
the parliament and boarded planes to return home. By the time Gül and Erdoğan realized they had miscalculated, it
was too late to change the outcome.
These two examples illustrate several general features of statutory lawmaking: how the government and cross-
pressured legislators interact with each other; how uncertainty affects the possibility of success or failure; and how
legislators’ voting intentions may change in response to incentives. They focus on government-sponsored
legislation and highlight an intriguing puzzle. In most contemporary democracies governments play a dominant role
in the lawmaking process. They sponsor a significant proportion of bills, and in one-third of the national legislatures
in the world, the right to introduce legislation in the areas of taxation, public expenditure, and government debt is
reserved for the executive (Fish and Kroening 2009). For instance, among 19 Latin American presidential systems,
the role of the legislature with regard to budgetary legislation is highly limited except for Bolivia, Costa Rica,
Guatemala, Honduras, and Paraguay (Payne et al. 2002; Aleman and Tsebelis 2005). Parliamentary governments
play an even more dominant role in the lawmaking process; in Britain, for example, the government can determine
what is to be debated and voted on, with the exception of a few Opposition and Private Member Days (Saalfeld
1995).
Given their proposal powers, government-sponsored bills should seldom be defeated. If a government knows that a
bill will not have enough support, it can just refrain from sending it to the legislature and save face. And, while it is
true that instances where government bills make it all the way to the floor of the legislature to be voted down are
exceptional, they do occur. Indeed, even on the floor of the British House of Commons, which may be regarded by
many as the least possible scenario for a government to lose a vote, divisions in which a whip was imposed and
the government was defeated have occurred (Norton 1980).1
This chapter discusses the factors that allow chief executives to enact policy through acts of government that
carry the force of law.2 It examines the role and influence of the government and the legislature in creating law.
The main argument presented here is that variations in legislative passage rates are the consequences of
differences in uncertainty, not partisan support. In particular, two major factors that shape lawmaking are identified:
the unpredictability of legislators’ voting behaviour, and the availability of (p. 483) resources to engage in vote-
buying. As such, this chapter not only provides an explanation of the variation in governments’ legislative
performance, but also expands our understanding of legislative policy-making, agenda control under uncertainty,
and party discipline in legislatures.
In the next section, there is a brief discussion of how the lawmaking process in democratic countries works. In
section 23.3 the two main ideas of this chapter are introduced: (1) the notion that differences in uncertainty drive
the variations in chief executives’ ability to enact policy changes through statute law; and (2) the view that in the
presence of vote-buying, winning coalitions will not be oversized (they will be either strictly minimal, or they will
include a majority of legislators plus one). I contrast these ideas with conventional views on statutory policy-making
and vote-buying in section four. In the following section, I document how uncertainty and vote-buying shape
lawmaking. The final section concludes.
23.2 The Lawmaking Process
In all democratic countries, legislatures are the authoritative source of statutory law. Only subordinate to
constitutions, statutory law is superior to all other forms of legislation, including administrative regulations. The
details of the legislative process vary from country to country. However, there are some fundamental steps that
most bills are taken through in order for them to become laws. In most democratic legislatures, they are formally
introduced to the “floor” (or plenary committee), then they are referred to committees, and from committees, they
are “reported” back to the floor for debate and voting. In bicameral legislatures, this sequence is repeated
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separately in each chamber, and then special procedures are required to obtain agreement of both chambers on a
single text (Olson 1994).
In most legislative bodies, committees are the workhorses of the legislative process. The possible roles of the
committees, however, vary from country to country, depending on the governing system, strength and
organization of political parties, available resources, and other political factors. In some legislatures, committees
have the power to prevent unwanted legislation from being further considered; in others, the committee stage may
be merely a formality.
Instances where bills make it all the way to the floor and are voted down are exceptional, but do occur. In general,
though, proposals “die” in other ways. Their fate depends on legislative procedure in each country, and in
general, can be any of the following: a negative committee report which kills the bill; no committee report so the bill
never leaves the committee; a positive committee report, which makes it possible for the floor to debate the bill, but
does not guarantee that the bill will come up for debate; and outright defeat of the bill on the floor.
In most countries, bills that are not considered during a legislative year expire and have to be introduced again to
the legislature in the following period. But in some other (p. 484) countries, legislative proposals can carry over
into the following year. Therefore, if a bill does not reach the floor, its “death” can be automatic after some period
of time or can “languish” in the legislature for a longer period. The lifetime of bills before lapsing if they are not
adopted varies considerably between countries. In some countries a bill must be passed within the legislative
session in which it is introduced. Otherwise, the bill has to be reintroduced in the next session. In some other
countries, the lifetime of a bill is equal to that of a legislative term. Therefore, bills do not lapse unless the legislative
term expires. Finally, in some other countries bills never lapse, except when they are explicitly rejected by a vote.
After a bill is approved by the legislature, it needs to be enacted or promulgated. In parliamentary democracies,
bills must receive the head of state’s assent before becoming laws; but, in practice, this final stage in the legislative
process is just a formality (Fish and Kroening 2009).3 In most presidential regimes, however, the executive has the
opportunity to reject legislation through the veto process. In turn, legislators may override a president’s veto and
enact legislation without his/her signature. In most presidential democracies, a supermajority is required to
override. The threshold in this case is typically two-thirds, although in some countries it is three-fifths or four-fifths.
In a few presidential democracies, the executive has veto power, but a majority in the legislature can override it
(Fish and Kroening 2009).4
23.3 Ruling by Statute
The sequence of steps outlined above provides a succinct description of how the legislative process works in most
democratic countries. Usually, the process begins with the introduction of a bill. Legislative proposals may be
introduced by the government, by individual members of the legislature, by the chambers, by the head of the state,
by groups of people, or by the committees.
In parliamentary democracies, governments usually propose at least 70 percent of the legislative agenda, and
roughly 80 percent of what they propose is actually adopted. Individual legislators, in turn, are responsible for 27
percent of the bills introduced in parliament, and less than 20 percent of these proposals become laws. In contrast,
in presidential regimes, the executive branch proposes a little more than 25 percent of the legislative agenda, while
individual legislators are responsible for the introduction of more than 72 percent of the bills presented to the
legislature. It is far more difficult for individual legislators than it is for the government, however, to obtain approval
for their bills. While roughly 65 percent of government-sponsored bills become laws, only 20 percent of the
proposals introduced by individual legislators reach that status.5
Taken together, these figures indicate that chief executives play a predominant role in the lawmaking process.
They also indicate, however, that conceiving law production in monopolistic terms would be too far-fetched (Crain,
Holcombe, and Tollison 1979; (p. 485) Cox and McCubbins 1993). If agenda control is divided into a number of
agenda-setting centres with different procedural prerogatives (as it occurs in many democratic countries), and
party discipline is not taken for granted, then it is clear that statutory implementation of policy is a complex
phenomenon, which usually depends on the interactions between the executive and the legislature. As such, in
order to understand how lawmaking works in contemporary democracies, we need to examine the various
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combinations of institutional and partisan considerations that determine whether or not legislators will support a
chief executive’s legislative agenda.
Most scholars point out that the powers that the executive derives from partisan support in the legislature can be
as important as those derived from authority constitutionally vested in the office. And, numerous studies have
noted that party systems influence the workability of executive–legislative relations. For example, focusing on the
experiences of the Weimar Republic, the Third and Fourth French Republics, and Italy during the Cold War, some of
the scholarly literature in the mid-1990s claimed that extreme executive–legislative conflict would inevitably lead to
government deadlock and/or regime breakdown (Linz 1990; Mainwaring 1990; Stepan and Skach 1993; Linz 1994;
Valenzuela 1994; Mainwaring and Scully 1995; Linz and Stepan 1996; Huang 1997).
In the case of presidential regimes, according to this view, when party systems fail to provide the president with
sufficient legislative support, “...there is no alternative but deadlock...” (Mainwaring and Scully 1995, 33), and
“...the norm is conflictual government...” (Jones 1995, 38). Therefore, “...the very notion of majority government is
problematic in presidential systems without a majority party...” (Huang 1997, 138), “...stable multiparty presidential
democracy...is difficult...” (Mainwaring 1990), and “...presidential systems which consistently fail to provide the
president with sufficient legislative support are unlikely to prosper...” (Jones 1995, 38). Or, as Tsebelis (1995) put it
“...in regimes where government change is impossible (except for fixed intervals like in presidential regimes),
policy immobilism may lead to the replacement of the leadership through extra-constitutional means...” (p. 321).
Conflicting arguments and findings about the effect of partisan support on legislative policy-making, however, leave
open the questions of why and when governments are able to successfully enact policy changes through statutes
(Isberg 1982; Saalfeld 1990; Shugart and Carey 1992; Lupia and Strøm 1995; Foweraker 1998; Cheibub et al.
2004; Cheibub 2007). The conventional wisdom states that governments’ legislative passage rates depend on their
degree of partisan support. According to this view, if a chief executive’s party holds a majority of seats in the
legislature, and if all of its members favour his or her proposal over the existing policy, then he or she can
confidently anticipate a legislative victory. Conversely, if the chief executive’s party is in the minority, then the
partisan distribution of seats would have an opposite effect on his/her legislative passage rates.
For example, in his discussion of law production in parliamentary democracies, Tsebelis (1995b, 96) claims that
“...problems between government and parliament arise only when the government has a different composition from
a majority in parliament...” The implicit assumption is that a shared partisan affiliation automatically (p. 486)
translates into legislative support. What would happen, though, if partisan identities do not necessarily reflect
legislators’ policy positions?
23.3.1 The Consequences of Uncertainty
Governments’ legislative defeats are typically associated with situations where chief executives cannot fully
predict legislators’ voting behaviour. The source of the uncertainty is the existence of cross-pressured legislators.
Lawmakers either belong to the governing party/coalition or the opposition, and this is common knowledge.
Legislators, however, may also be responsive to a particular group of supporters. These may include voters in the
legislator’s district, wealthy donors, party activists, as well as party elite members in charge of the candidate
selection process. Therefore, even if governments can observe the partisan distribution of the legislature, they
may still be unable to identify the policy preferences of legislators’ supporters. Given their prior beliefs about the
latter distribution, chief executives may send a proposal to the legislature. Yet, as the Turkish example
demonstrates, the leaders of the governing party may lose such legislative gambits by miscalculating their support.
A government may, of course, try to handle the effects of cross-voting with “deep pockets” or “big sticks.” But, if
the total cost of securing these votes exceeds the value of policy change, the government may be better off by
conceding defeat.
The emphasis on the unpredictability of legislators’ behaviour elucidates the empirical puzzle posed by chief
executives’ legislative defeats. It also leads to some clear empirical implications regarding the relationship between
legislators’ induced preferences and statutory policy-making. The existence of a winning voting coalition depends
on the partisan distribution of seats in the legislature but also on the distribution of the policy preferences of
legislators’ supporters. If a legislator’s partisan identity accurately predicts his or her constituency’s ideal policies,
then a chief executive may be able to calculate more accurately how he/she will cast his or her votes. In contrast,
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if partisanship is weakly correlated with constituency interests, chief executives are more likely to make mistakes.
Thus, a systematic relationship exists between a set of factors that generate more unpredictability and the passage
rates of executive-initiated legislation. For example, the extent to which legislators represent a “national” rather
than a “local” constituency is an important institutional factor that affects the correlation between partisan’s and
districts’ ideal policies.
23.3.2 Buying Legislative Votes
The Republican party’s success at mustering enough votes to secure the passage of the “fast-track” bill illustrates
the government’s ability to incentivize legislators to adopt the chief executive’s preferred policy outcome. These
incentives are ubiquitous in legislative policy-making, and common terms, such as “horse-trading” or “deal-
making” reflect (p. 487) the phenomenon of vote-buying. Governments may resort to their “pocketbook” in order
to handle the effects of cross-voting. However, chief executives would only offer compensation if the resulting
outcome would make them better off than being defeated at a sufficiently low cost. If the executive could offer
rewards under the condition that legislators be decisive, this cost would be negligible (by promising to reward at
least one more voter than he/she needs to win, all legislators become non-decisive, and no payments need to be
made). Yet, in deciding how to vote, legislators usually have to balance their own ideal policy, the executive’s
wishes, and the pressures from specific constituencies. Legislators’ responsiveness to their constituencies makes
it impossible to use a compensation scheme that is contingent on the collective legislative outcome. On the other
hand, since enacting legislation implies winning a majority of votes, the chief executive should often be interested
only in corralling just enough votes to win. As the “fast-track” example highlights, whenever their votes are non-
decisive, some legislators will be free to vote with their constituencies.
Indeed, vote-buying opportunities depend on the properties of statutes, and the way in which they are produced.
Legislation possesses the characteristics of a public good. If a new tax rate is introduced, it will please those
legislators who favour it and will displease those who do not. But, as Barry (1980) notes, the gains are not confined
to those who voted on the winning side nor are the losses confined to those who were on the losing side. The
exceptions, of course, are legislators who can unilaterally change the outcome (i.e. when a vote is tied or is within
one vote of a tie). Hence, whenever additional votes are needed, a strategic chief executive may only need to buy
enough votes to ensure that all (none) of the cross-pressured legislators who like (dislike) the proposal find
themselves in a position to unilaterally change the outcome. And, occasionally it may be cheaper for a chief
executive to buy some votes and add enough legislators to the winning coalition so that no opposition legislator is
actually decisive. Therefore, an important implication of the characterization of legislative behaviour proposed
here is that, in the presence of vote-buying, super-majority coalitions will fail to exist: winning legislative coalitions
will be either strictly minimal or they will be composed by a strict majority plus one single additional legislator.6
23.4 Governments’ Legislative Passage Rates
Scholars of comparative politics have traditionally argued that chief executives, both under presidentialism and
parliamentarism, require adequate partisan support in the legislature to govern (in the case of the former), as well
as to survive in office (in the case of the latter). In addition, arrangements determining the distribution of power
among the branches of government are usually regarded as structural factors that shape the policy-makers’
incentives, and in turn, affect statutory policy-making. (p. 488) George Tsebelis’ work on veto players is a case in
point. It spawned a plethora of studies on the capacity of different political systems to produce policy change
(Tsebelis 1995a; 2002).
Most of these studies, however, fail to explain why and when chief executives are unable to successfully enact
policy changes through statutes. In the case of parliamentary regimes, the theoretical literature often assumes that
the potential for policy immobilism only exists when multiple and polarized veto players have representation in the
government (see Tsebelis 1995b). In the case of presidentialism, most models are extensions of the theory of
voting in legislatures and focus mostly on ways in which presidents can successfully pass their policy proposals. In
particular, they assume that a chief executive will likely only send a bill to the legislature if the median legislator
prefers a policy change to the status quo. Otherwise, assuming that suffering a legislative defeat will entail a
political cost for the chief executive, he/she may be better off by not sending any legislation to the legislature at all.
Following this logic, many scholars have developed models of statutory policy-making where proposers are never
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defeated (Shepsle and Weingast 1987; Alesina and Rosenthal 1995; Groseclose and Snyder 1996; Heller 2001).
For example, Shepsle (2010) offers no explanation as to why a proposer would send a bill that will be defeated,
other than a proposer’s own sheer stupidity.7
Some scholars argue that chief executives may sometimes choose to be defeated in order to send a particular
signal to the general public (Matthews 1989; Ingberman and Yao 1991; Groseclose and McCarty 2001). According
to this view, a chief executive may occasionally adopt a strategy of “triangulation,” positioning herself between her
own party and the opposition forces in the legislature to build popularity. If there are opposition forces in the
legislature that need to be exposed in front of the general public, then this strategy may be palatable for a chief
executive. Yet, if the public views the legislature as a natural extension of the chief executive’s authority, it may
not be a good idea for her to force defeats too frequently.
23.4.1 The Role of Information
The main problem with the aforementioned accounts is the well-known “Hicks paradox,” which holds that
bargaining failures such as strikes, wars, vetoes, or legislative defeats are irrational in a setting of complete and
perfect information (Kennan 1986; Gartzke 1999; Cameron 2000). If a chief executive has complete information,
then for every possible bill, he or she could be able to strategically tailor the legislative agenda to his/her degree of
legislative support. And, per the law of anticipated reactions, legislative passage rates should always be 100
percent.
Expectations would change if one believes that legislators’ preferred policies cannot be fully predicted in advance.
Suppose that a chief executive has to propose to a legislature composed of legislators who belong to political
parties, but who must respond to various pressures. In particular, assume that in deciding how to vote, legislators
consider (p. 489) a variety of influences, including their personal values, announced positions, the views of their
constituents, and the preferences of party activists as well as their party leadership. If these pressures are not
aligned, then legislators are cross-pressured (Fiorina 1974; Fenno 1978; King and Zeckhauser 2003).8
The fact that legislators account for different sets of interests when deciding how to vote is well documented in the
literature (Covington 1988; Kalt and Zupan 1990; Jackson and Kingdon 1992; Levitt 1996; Londregan 2000). Most
of the theoretical models mentioned above, however, do not incorporate these constraints in legislators’ voting
decisions.9 An exception is Denzau et al. (1985); they examine the idea that principals (supporters) not only
induce preferences in agents (legislators) but also constrain their mode of behaviour. As they note, lawmakers
vote in the legislature, but they secure support, resources, and electoral rewards outside the legislative arena.
Thus, legislators are judged not only by the collective choices made by themselves and their colleagues, but also
by their own individual actions (Fiorina and Noll 1978; Denzau et al. 1985; Rasmusen and Ramseyer 1994;
Groseclose and Milyo 2010).
From the chief executive’s perspective, the fact that a group of legislators may face conflicting influences, implies
that in order to behave strategically he or she needs to assess how these legislators would cast their votes.
Legislators are usually elected as members of organized parties, and their partisan affiliations are public
information. In addition, a legislator’s membership in a given political party/legislative bloc is often stable over
time.10 In other words, a legislator’s partisan affiliation does not vary across issues; and certainly not in
conjunction with a bill’s content. In contrast, a legislator’s position regarding a specific bill will depend on the
proposal’s content. Therefore, although the partisan composition of the legislature is a priori observable,
legislators’ induced preferences are not. Here, then, lies the main difficulty that even the most strategic chief
executives must confront.
23.4.2 Empirical Assessment
How can one evaluate a chief executive’s statutory performance? An understanding of the differential abilities of
chief executives to create statute law is hampered by the theoretical limitations described above. It is also
hindered by the lack of truly cross-national research on this topic.
While the study of presidential legislative success in the United States has a long and fruitful tradition, these
analyses seldom provide systematic comparisons with other countries. Likewise, most comparative research on
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this topic relies on either case studies of particular acts of government or from country studies. The studies in
Döring (1995) likely constitute the clearest effort to carry out a comparative study of lawmaking.11 As Gamm and
Huber (2003) point out, however, most of these studies were motivated by theoretical frameworks developed to
examine the US Congress. A few of them examine statutory policy-making applying a more general theoretical
approach. Yet, they rely almost overwhelmingly on data published by the (p. 490) Inter-Parliamentary Union in
1986 (see Tsebelis 1995a). Such data are at most outdated or even inappropriate to study governments’ legislative
passage rates under different conditions.
Another substantial impediment to conducting research on statutory policy-making at the cross-national level is the
lack of a clear definition of legislative success. Students of executive–legislative relations use several measures
and various units of analysis. In fact, passage, success, productivity, support, concurrence, dominance, control,
and influence all appear in the scholarly literature (Edwards 1980; 1989; Shull 1983; Bond and Fleisher 1990;
Peterson 1990), and are sometimes used interchangeably.
A commonly used indicator is legislative output. This measure, however, is not necessarily the inverse of gridlock.
Therefore, it is not a good indicator of a chief executive’s capacity to pass his/her agenda. Another frequently
used measure calculates the percentage of all bills approved by the legislature that are of executive origin. This
indicator speaks to the question of who initiates laws. It does not reveal, however, anything regarding the ability of
a chief executive to win approval for his or her legislative initiatives. Other measures are constructed using
legislative roll-call votes. The party roll rate is a case in point. This indicator typically seeks to reflect the
government’s control of the agenda; but it does not count the failure to pass a bill that the government likes as a
roll (Cox and McCubbins 2005).
It is safe to assume that in most if not all cases, chief executives are not only concerned with whether their
initiatives are considered by the legislature, voted upon, or almost pass, but also if the proposed legislation is
enacted into law. Moreover, statutes are the definite measure of legislative output, whereas votes and positions on
issues are merely means to an end of an uncertain consequence. Therefore, if the primary aim is to investigate
how successful chief executives are in promoting their policy agendas in the legislature, it is most appropriate to
use a box score. This indicator is calculated as the percentage of executive initiatives approved by the
legislature.12 It is analogous to a batting average (i.e. number of hits as a proportion of times at bat). As such, it
summarizes a chief executive’s record of wins and losses (Bond et al. 1996). Despite some of its limitations, the
box score is a tangible indicator that makes it possible to compare different chief executives and to assess their
relative performance under varying circumstances. Indeed, as Rivers and Rose (1985) and King and Ragsale
(1988) note, this is an ideal measure from a conceptual standpoint.13

Fig. 23.1 Distribution of chief executives’ box scores
Fig. 23.1 presents the distribution of box scores in a sample of 52 countries in Western and Eastern Europe, North
and Latin America, Asia, and the Middle East for the period between 1946 and 2008.14 Two important trends are
worth mentioning. First, the approval rates of executive-initiated bills vary considerably across countries and
through time within countries. Second, on average, three-quarters of chief executives’ initiatives are approved.
This simple example underscores the importance of a theory of statutory policy-making. The empirical patterns
indicate that government’s legislative defeats are hardly extraordinary events. They also present a direct
challenge to the conventional wisdom: legislative passage rates are seldom 100 percent. Hence, any reasonable
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theory (p. 491) of statutory policy needs to account for the variation in chief executives’ passage rates reflected
in Fig. 23.1.
23.5 Statutory Policy-making

Fig. 23.2 Box scores by government status
What are the main factors that allow chief executives to rule by statute? What combination of institutional and
partisan considerations determines whether or not legislators will support their agenda? Do chief executives in
minority governments have lower box scores than those under majority governments? Does the coalition status of
the government affect these scores? The distribution of chief executives’ box scores presented in Fig. 23.2 can
address these questions.15
Prime ministers who lead single-party majority governments enjoy the highest average legislative passage rates
(88 percent), followed by those who rule under minority coalitions (84 percent).16 Prime ministers who rule under a
majority coalition are the least effective ones (with an average box score of 76 percent), followed by those leading
single-party minority governments (with an average box score of 82 percent). Still, as the data indicate, even
under parliamentarism, single majority governments do suffer legislative defeats (including Westminster-type
governments). In the case of presidentialism, single-party minority governments exhibit higher passage rates (an
average of 70 percent) than do coalition majority (66 percent) and coalition minority (62 percent) administrations.
As Cheibub et al. (2004) note, government coalitions tend to form when the policy distance between a minority
party in government and the rest (p. 492) of the parties in the legislature is large. Therefore coalition
governments are typically quite heterogeneous and have more players who could potentially veto a change.
Notice also that single-party minority presidents do not fare much worse than coalition governments. On average,
62 percent of single-party minority presidents’ bills are approved by the legislature. Hence, it is clear that
legislative paralysis is a relatively rare phenomenon, even under presidentialism. Moreover, it is apparent from
these data that prime ministers possess higher legislative passage rates than presidents: the percentage of
government bills approved in the legislature is higher under parliamentarism than under presidentialism, regardless
of government coalition or majority status.
The patterns presented in Fig. 23.2 suggest that a relationship exists between chief executives’ legislative passage
rates, their country’s constitutional structures, as well as the status of their governments. To evaluate the
performance of chief executives in a multivariate setting, I estimate a statistical model with chief executives’ box
scores as my dependent variable and cross-country differences in institutional design as the primary correlates of
interest. I also control for some additional features, such as the share of seats held by the government, the
government status, electoral rules, and the structure of the legislature.17 The dependent variable is the proportion
of bills initiated by chief executive and approved by the legislature of his/her respective country in a given year
(expressed in its logit transformation). Table 23.1 presents two alternative specifications.18
Table 23.1 Governments’ legislative passage rates: multivariate analysis.
Country Clustered Regional Effects
Non-Westminster Parliamentary -1.896** -1.941**
(0.531) (0.252)
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(0.531) (0.252)
Semi-Parliamentary -1.962** -2.007**
(0.529) (0.275)
Presidential -2.645** -2.379**
(0.533) (0.388)
Government’s Seat Share 1.595* 1.785**
(0.623) (0.446)
Coalition Government -0.648** -0.547**
(0.203) (0.114)
Electoral Rules 0.795** 0.210
(0.261) (0.208)
Average District Magnitude 0.004 0.004*
(0.002) (0.002)
Seats from National District 1.346* 1.555**
(0.618) (0.456)
Bicameral System 0.193 0.129
(0.283) (0.144)
Asia 0.681*
(0.296)
Latin America -0.466
(0.372)
Eastern Europe -0.289
(0.313)
Middle East -0.729**
(0.249)
Intercept 2.249** 2.314**
(0.563) (0.321)
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(0.563) (0.321)
N 272 272
R 0.473 0.52
Notes: Standard errors are in parentheses.
(*) indicates significance at a 10% level;
(**) indicates significance at a 5% level;
(***) indicates significance at a 1% level.
The results indicate that, relative to Westminster-style parliamentary systems, passage rates are lower in non-
Westminster parliamentary countries, in semi-parliamentary regimes, and especially under presidentialism.19 One
additional result is worth noting here. Both specifications reveal that, ceteris paribus, passage rates are higher
under electoral systems in which legislators represent a national constituency. This finding buttresses my argument
regarding the effect of the degree of predictability of legislators’ behaviour on chief executive passage rates.
Under conditions of more certainty, namely when legislators represent a national rather than a local constituency,
governments can (p. 493) (p. 494) more accurately assess how the legislature will vote and thus achieve
greater legislative success.
One possible explanation for the patterns presented in Fig. 23.2, though, is that the box score data are subject to a
form of self-selection bias that favours chief executives under parliamentary systems. As Cheibub et al. (2004)
note, since prime ministers risk losing the confidence of the legislature when they are defeated, they must be
careful in proposing legislation. Presidents, as the argument goes, can be more reckless: if they are indifferent to
the status quo, they can initiate bills expecting to be defeated in order to embarrass the opposition.
But, is it really the case that prime ministers are more careful when they propose legislation? According to the data,
in a given year, the representative prime minister introduces 131 pieces of legislation, while the average president
initiates 109 pieces of legislation.20 A difference of means test indicates that the null hypothesis cannot be rejected
at conventional levels. Thus, there is no difference between the number of bills initiated by the two types of chief
executives. In other words, at least with regard to the amount of legislation introduced by the executive to the
legislature every year, the evidence indicates that prime ministers are not necessarily more cautious than
presidents.

Fig. 23.3 Bill initiation and statutory achievements
It might be argued that a chief executive’s carefulness is reflected in the content rather than the amount of
legislation. Unfortunately, the argument cannot be put to a test using the available data. Nonetheless, it is still
possible to gauge how “strategic” chief executives are when it comes to bill initiation. In particular, the data can be
used to address the following questions: (1) is it true that some chief executives can manage to fatten their
“batting average” by withholding legislation?; and (2) what is the relationship between bill initiation and statutory
achievements? Fig. 23.3 shows the number of executive-initiated bills approved by the legislature as a function of
the total number of proposals introduced by the chief executive in a given year (i.e. the box score’s numerator and
denominator, respectively).
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(p. 495) The dashed line in Fig. 23.3 represents the predicted number of executive-initiated laws obtained from a
linear regression, where the number of executive-initiated laws is regressed on the number of executive bills. The
shaded areas are the 95 percent confidence intervals around these estimates. The data clearly indicate that chief
executives’ legislative achievements and bill initiation have a linear relationship; the predicted number of
executive-initiated legislation increases monotonically in the number of bills a chief executive sends to the
legislature. As such, these patterns suggest that the box scores remain somewhat constant irrespective of the
number of bills an executive initiates.
The evidence thus rejects the notion that chief executives can obtain higher passage rates by initiating less
legislation. It also indicates that the difference between presidentialism and parliamentarism regarding passage
rates is unrelated to bill initiation. Finally, even though the data are not rich enough to test the claim directly, the
patterns in Fig. 23.3 suggest that chief executives under different constitutional structures do not necessarily
successfully adjust the content of their bills all the time either.
23.5.1 Incentivizing Legislators
Governments may need to incentivize legislators to support their policies, and may do so in a variety of ways.
Sometimes, party leaders can use the carrot of advancement and the stick of non-advancement to impose a
certain degree of organizational loyalty on their membership. In countries with inchoate party systems, however,
governments may have difficulty in controlling individual legislators through a party machine. In these contexts,
monetary payments may be the government’s currency of choice. Studying legislative vote-buying involving
outright bribery can be, of course, quite difficult. The illegal nature of these transactions presents a formidable
obstacle when it comes to their empirical identification. While accusations of corruption and horse-trading are
ever-present in legislative policy-making, it is rare to acquire such information. England during the period before
the accession of George III and the aftermath of the American Revolutionary War (1754–83) presents a unique
opportunity, because detailed recordsexist of the monetary payments made to members of the legislature in
exchange for their support.
Historians often refer to this period as the era of personal parties in the British House of Commons. This
characterization is a misleading guide to the political independence of Members of Parliament (MPs), given that
many of them literally owed their seat to a patron. It still conveys some idea of the lack of party distinctions during
this era. By 1754 it was universally recognized that the old party denominations of Whig and Tory had lost their
meanings (Namier and Brooke 1964). In addition, no modern-day party organizations existed. Instead, political
loyalties emerged mostly out of networks of personal relationships, and the distribution of positions and sinecures
in the national and provincial bureaucracies (Namier 1957; Palmer 1959; Speck 1977; Cox 1987).
(p. 496) The lack of programmatic parties posed a serious challenge for orderly and stable government because
the behaviour of individual legislators was quite unpredictable. Indeed, prime ministers were frequently frustrated
by the elusiveness of MPs’ political allegiances. As William Pitt the Elder put it, Commoners were “not disciplined
troops” (Namier and Brooke 1964). Dealing with the “whims and caprices” of parliament required more than
patience. The methods used by the king and ministry to secure a responsive legislature can be summarized in one
word—influence. Influence meant primarily patronage, the award of honors, titles, promotions, pensions, and
sinecures (Palmer 1959). While officeholders and pensioners represented a high proportion of the active MPs, it
was widely accepted that such emoluments should not deprive them of their independence. Therefore, placemen
did not provide the government with an “automatic majority” (Holmes and Szechi 1993). In fact, the passage rate
of government’s legislative initiatives amounted to 74.8 percent between 1760 and 1800 (Hoppit 1996).
The use of influence was thus first and foremost a response to the unpredictability of legislators’ behaviour. Indeed,
since the matter was essential for governments, it was handled in a systematic fashion. The Treasury played a key
role. In addition to controlling public patronage, which was distributed to MPs and then to their constituents, the
Treasury carried a further source of political power—the secret service money. These funds were entirely at the
king’s disposal and he was not held accountable to Parliament for their expenditure. Therefore no one, except the
persons immediately concerned, knew how it was spent (Namier and Brooke 1964). A proportion of this money
went to genuine secret service purposes, but the funds were also used to dole out pensions to MPs (Namier 1957).
The king’s private accounts, the books containing the details on the allocation of secret service money, survived
for three periods: when Newcastle headed the Treasury (March 1754 to November 1756 and July 1757 to May
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1762); Rockingham’s first administration (July 1765 to July 1766); and the last three years of the North Ministry,
which lasted from 1779 to 1782 (Namier and Brooke 1964). This material makes it possible to discern the nature of
these pensions and the type of MP who received them.21
According to Namier and Brooke, 16 MPs were in receipt of secret service pensions in 1762, whereas ten MPs
received pensions in 1780. These numbers were not exceeded at any time during this period, and by August 1782
only three MPs were left on the secret service list (Namier and Brooke 1964). The value of these pensions,
according to Namier and Brooke, ranged from £500 and £1,000 per annum (Namier and Brooke 1964, 125). A long-
standing controversy surrounding the nature of these payments exists (Namier 1957; Palmer 1959; Cannon 1984;
and Holmes and Szechi 1993). However, the fact that these funds were disbursed with absolute discretion, and that
their recipients were amongst the neediest of legislators, suggests that they were ideally suited to buy the support
of potentially decisive legislators. In addition, as argued above, if a government engages in a vote-buying strategy,
it may need to buy just a few votes to craft a minimum-winning coalition. Secret service payments should thus be
concentrated in a few MPs and be relatively modest in monetary terms.
At the time of Newcastle’s first term at the Treasury (March 1754 to November 1756), the government’s supporters
in the House of Commons numbered as many as 368. Had (p. 497) these MPs held together, they would have
been an invincible majority, but they were a notoriously fickle lot. A straightforward way to assess the “cost” that
the Duke of Newcastle had to pay to muster sufficient support for his measures is to examine the records of votes
for each MP during his tenure in office. For the period between 1747 and 1762, the only complete analysis of a vote
is the so-called Mitchell Election division list (Colley 1976). The list records the critical vote in the Commons on24
March 1755 by which two elected MPs were disqualified in favour of Treasury candidates.22
Newcastle obtained the exact number of votes he needed to prevail (209 out of 416). An examination of legislators’
votes suggests that the government was able to create a minimum winning coalition and benefit from “bandwagon”
effects: eight votes were provided by a group of legislators who were in receipt of secret service pensions, and
another 15 from MPs who changed their previously announced votes. No historical evidence exists suggesting that
members of the latter group received bribes to change their votes, but legislators in the former group are worthy of
examination. These MPs received secret service pensions throughout Newcastle’s administration, and, with one
exception, these sums were not in exchange for salaries as a government’s placeman. These legislators received
on average £2,712 between 1754 and 1762. In contrast, pensioners who voted against Newcastle’s candidates did
not receive multiyear pensions, and on average were paid £1,720 during the same period.23
Turning now to North’s ministry, there were 241 MPs who supported the government, 237 who voted with the
opposition, and 31 uncommitted legislators (Namier and Brooke 1964). Table 23.2 presents summary statistics for
55 salient divisions that occurred between March 1779 and March 1782. The data indicate that the mean
attendance at the time of casting a vote in a division (net of absentees and paired votes) consisted of roughly 205
MPs, including a minimum of 39 on 28 June 1780 and a maximum of 467 on 15 March 1782.24
Table 23.2 Divisions in the House of Commons (1779–82)
Mean Standard Deviation Minimum Maximum
Total Number of Votes 205.6 151.82 39 467
Margin 32.7 27.2 1 108
Notes: This table presents summary statistics for 55 salient divisions that occurred during North ministry’s last
three years (March 1779 to March 1782). Data reported in Ginter (1995) and Hoppit (1996).
Note that the average margin by which divisions were decided was 32 votes, one more vote than the number of
uncommitted legislators. Given that fewer than five active MPs were left on the secret service list by March 1782,
the evidence in Table 23.2 suggests that the North government benefited from “bandwagon” effects in legislative
voting.
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(p. 498) In contrast to England under George III, in countries with strong partisan organizations, governments can
use partisan resources rather than outright bribery to obtain legislative support. Specifically, party leaders can
exert influence on legislators’ behaviours by two avenues: the prospect of nomination; and ideological screening
(Londregan 2002). To understand how partisan resources can work as a substitute for outright bribery, I focus on
candidate selection, seeking to understand the manner in which party leaders use the carrot of advancement and
the stick of non-advancement to impose a certain degree of “party unity” on their legislators (Carey and Shugart
1995; Mainwaring 1998; Morgenstern 2004).
The conventional wisdom identifies three institutional factors that can bolster the role of national party leaders and
reduce the incentives for legislative dissent: (1) strong leadership control over party labels; (2) vote pooling,
where votes are counted, aggregated, and translated into legislative seats at the party level and not at the faction
or individual level; and (3) a ballot structure that allows voters to cast only one vote for a party list (Carey and
Shugart 1995; Nielson 2003; Wallack et al. 2003). At the party level, procedures for nominating candidates can
vary across organizations. For instance, in some party organizations the founder or top leader nominates all
candidates and rank-orders the lists; other parties use a convention or a closed primary to settle the issue. And yet
in other parties, an open primary may define the ranking of the candidates (Alcantara 2004; Siavelis and
Morgenstern 2008). As Siavelis and Morgenstern point out, open-list systems provide incentives for candidates to
cultivate a personal vote. If district magnitude is small and parties wield significant control over nominations,
however, much higher levels of party loyalty and less of a tie to constituents may result, with important
consequences for legislative behaviour (Siavelis and Morgenstern 2008).
How do these party-centred electoral rules affect statutory policy-making? The data on electoral systems collected
by Johnson and Wallack (2009) can be used to answer this question. If individual candidates face few or no legal
impediments to appear on the ballot, it can be stipulated that they possess unrestricted access to a party label.
These situations occur under single-member districts if parties allow independent candidates and/or use primaries
to select candidates. In contrast, candidates face restrictions if: (1) parties control access to the ballot, even if
they do not control the order in which candidates will receive seats. These situations arise under open lists where
intra-party preference votes significantly influence candidate selection, and under single-member districts where
parties control access to the list; (2) parties control access to ballots as well as the order in which individuals fill
the seats won by the party. These situations include closed-list multimember districts and open-list multimember
districts with little or no de facto change in list order (Johnson and Wallack 2009; Wallack et al. 2003).

Fig. 23.4 Electoral rules and passage rates
Fig. 23.4 presents the effects of party-centred electoral rules interacted with constitutional structure, on chief
executives’ legislative passage rates.25 The results lend credence to the notion that party leaders can use
institutional carrots and sticks to reward voting loyalty and punish dissent. They also indicate that these findings
are (p. 499) not an artifact of parliamentary democracies possessing more unified parties.26 The impact of ballot
access on chief executives’ box scores is negligible under parliamentarism when the government is in the minority.
The passage rates of majority governments under parliamentarism, however, are considerably higher when
individual candidates have restricted access to party labels. On average, prime ministers who are backed by a
parliamentary majority under unrestricted ballot access rules, tend to obtain passage for 75 percent of their bills. In
contrast, when parties possess control over candidates’ access to the ballot, the average box score of a
majoritarian prime minister increases to 82 percent. This difference is not only statistically significant, but also
substantively important. The average legislative passage rate for presidents is 65 percent. Therefore, even if they
are ruled by majority governments, parliamentary democracies resemble presidential ones when parties lack
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control over candidates’ access to the ballot.
Turning to presidentialism, the impact of ballot access is more pronounced when the president is in the minority. In
this case, though, chief executives appear to enjoy higher passage rates when candidates have unrestricted
access to the ballot. The average box score for minority presidents with unrestricted ballot access is 78 percent,
compared with only 50 percent when party-centred electoral rules exist. Thus, minority presidents seem to have
less difficulty in mustering additional support for their initiatives when partisan control over ballot access is weak.
Given the weaker party loyalty generated by these kind of electoral rules, presidents will be able to sway some
opposition votes into their camp. When partisan control is high, in contrast, minority presidents are substantially
hindered. In this case, facing a very disciplined opposition bloc will make it more difficult for presidents to woo
these legislators. Finally, under the scenario of the government controlling a majority of seats, ballot access
produces an insignificant effect on presidents’ legislative passage rates.
(p. 500) An important implication of these findings is that “strong” political parties are hardly the sine qua non of
successful governance in presidential systems. Instead, strong parties are like a double-edge sword: they can be
helpful in passing legislation when the government is in the majority, but not when the government is in the
minority. Hence, a common assertion in the literature stating that new democracies, particularly new presidential
democracies, need strong political parties to improve their performance seems to be unwarranted.
23.6 Conclusions
More than 40 years have passed since the late Samuel P. Huntington argued that Great Britain, the United States,
and the Soviet Union belonged to the same category of political systems. According to his landmark expression, in
“...all three systems the government governs...’” (Huntington 1968, 1). What he meant was that in these countries,
the cabinet, the president or the politburo could successfully enact policy changes. The issue of governance or
governability has been a central concern for political scientists and policymakers alike. Yet, scholars also
generally focus their attention on the other side of the coin: the question of whether government decisions are
attuned with citizens’preferences (Przeworski et al. 1999). Indeed, one of the most important challenges related to
the quality of democracy is how to improve governability whilesimultaneously protecting government
responsiveness or accountability.
Back to Huntington’s observation, how can one determine if a government actually governs? Or, what are the main
factors that allow presidents and prime ministers to enact policy through acts of government that carry the force of
law? The theory of statutory policy-making discussed in this chapter emphasizes the plight of governments that
have to face unpredictable legislators. Central to the analysis is the idea that in deciding how to cast a vote,
legislators take into account a variety of influences. The conventional view deems both agenda-setting powers and
partisan support as essential to chief executives’ statutory policy-making abilities. Constitutional arrangements and
partisan configurations certainly influence statutory policy-making. These features, however, are not the key to
understanding why governments suffer legislative defeats. The fact that the agenda-setter model predicts that
proposers should never be defeated underscores the importance of uncertainty. And, as this chapter
demonstrates, it is very important to take into account the subsidiary role of “vote-buying” and of partisan sticks
and carrots.
Appendix A
(p. 501) Appendix A
Country Period Region
Argentina 1983–2003 Latin America
Australia 1974–9, 1997–2006 Oceania
Austria 1974–9, 1985 Western Europe
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Bangladesh 1973–9, 1991–9 South Asia
Belgium 1968–87, 1989–91, 1993–6 Western Europe
Bolivia 1995–2000 Latin America
Brazil 1946–63, 1968–81, 1983–2006 Latin America
Canada 1946–67, 1969–76, 1994–2006 North America
Chile 1990–2005 Latin America
Colombia 1982–83, 1986–7, 1992, 1995–9 Latin America
Costa Rica 1958–69, 1975, 1986–2003 Latin America
Denmark 1953–2001 Western Europe
Ecuador 1979–2001 Latin America
Fiji 1974–9 Oceania
Finland 1962–5, 1975–9 Western Europe
France 1946–83 Western Europe
Germany 1949–4 Western Europe
Greece 1978–82 Western Europe
Honduras 1990–6 Latin America
Hungary 1990–3 Eastern Europe
Iceland 1951, 1961, 1971, 1977–81 Western Europe
India 1955–71, 1976–2007 South Asia
Ireland 1974–9, 1985–7, 1989–91, 1998–2008 Western Europe
Israel 1957–69, 1974–82 Middle East
Italy 1948–57, 1960–1, 1963–73, 1975–96 Western Europe
Ivory Coast 1965–70 Africa
Japan 1947–80, 1988–97 East Asia
Jordan 1974–9 Middle East
Kuwait 1974–9 Middle East
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Lebanon 1953–72 Middle East
Malaysia 1974–9 South-East Asia
Malta 1974–82 Western Europe
Mexico 1982–2002 Latin America
Netherlands 1974–82 Western Europe
New Zealand 1974–82 Oceania
Panama 1994–2001 Latin America
Paraguay 1990–2002 Latin America
Peru 1995–2002 Latin America
Poland 1991–5 Eastern Europe
Portugal 1976–2001 Western Europe
Russia 1996–9 Eastern Europe
South Africa 1974–9 Africa
South Korea 1960, 1988–99 East Asia
Spain 1974–99 Western Europe
Sri Lanka 1974–9 South Asia
Switzerland 1974–9 Western Europe
Turkey 1983–2000 Middle East
United Kingdom 1946–79, 1997–2005 Western Europe
Uruguay 1985–2002 Latin America
Venezuela 1959–88 Latin America
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Additional Sources:
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Brazil: Argelina Cheibub Figueiredo (IUPERJ)
Canada: <http://www.parl.gc.ca>.
Canada: <http://www2.parl.gc.ca>.
Chile: Eduardo Aleman (University of Houston)
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(p. 502) (p. 503) (p. 504)
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(p. 505) Appendix B
Fig. 23.4 shows the effects of party-centred electoral rules, and their interaction with constitutional structure, on
chief executives’ legislative passage rates. The following approach was used to generate these results. As a
dependent variable I used the proportion of bills initiated by a chief executive and approved by the legislature of
his/her respective country. Then I estimated two separate models, one for the sample of presidential democracies
and the other one for non-Westinster parliamentary countries using ordinary least squares (OLS). The following
explanatory variables are considered:
Presidential, Mixed, and Non-Westminster Parliamentary. Each of these variables takes the value of 1 if
the country has the referred constitutional structure, and 0 otherwise. Constitutional structures were classified
according to the criteria developed by Cheibub (2006). The following countries were coded as Westminster-
style systems: Canada, Bangladesh, Ireland, Malta, United Kingdom, and New Zealand.
Coalition Government. This is a binary indicator that takes the value of 1 if the government is a multi-party
coalition, and 0 otherwise. A government is considered to be a multi-party coalition if two or more political
parties represented in the national legislature hold cabinet positions. Source: Cheibub et al. (2004) and the
author’s own calculations.
Ballot Access. This is a dummy variable that takes the value of 1 if individual candidates have restricted
access to a party label. These situations occur when: (i) parties control access to the ballot, even if they do not
control the order in which candidates will receive seats; (ii) parties control access to ballots as well as the order
in which individuals will fill the seats that the party wins. The variable takes the value of 0 when candidates face
few or no impediments to appear on the ballot. These situations occur under single-member districts if parties
allow independent candidates and/or use primaries to select candidates. Source: Johnson and Wallack 2009;
Wallack, et al. (2003).
Average District Magintude. This variable measures the standard magnitude of the average district in the
lower house of the national legislature. Source: Johnson and Wallack 2009; Wallack, et al. (2003).
Majority Government. This is a binary indicator that takes the value of 1 if the government controls a
majority of seats in the lower house of the national legislature, and 0 otherwise. Source: Cheibub et al. (2004)
and the author’s own calculations.
To capture the interaction between the government status and the electoral rules, I also included the multiplicative
term, Majority Government*Ballot Access. Table 23.B1 presents the results. In both models, standard errors
are robustly estimated and the disturbance terms for each country are allowed to be correlated:
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Table 23.B1 Ballot access and passage rates
Parliamentary Presidential
Coalition Government 1.655 -0.547**
(4.907) (0.114)
Chief Executive’s Seat Share 44.359** 11.731
(10.868) (30.011)
Majority Government -9.508 -3.821
(7.499) (4.620)
Ballot Access -2.928 -27.285**
(5.563) (5.145)
Average District Magnitude 0.115* 0.206
(0.041) (0.256)
Majority Government Ballot Access 9.733 22.065*
(6.608) (8.641)
Intercept 64.083** 71.908**
(5.012) (13.514)
N 151 180
R 0.24 0.36
Notes: Standard errors are in parentheses.
(*) indicates significance at a 10% level;
(**) indicates significance at a 5% level;
(***) indicates significance at a 1% level.
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Notes:
(1) . According to Boothroyd (2001), between 1918 and 2001 there were 118 divisions in which the government
was defeated. Most of these government defeats were concentrated in the period 1974–9 and had to do with
economic issues (amendments to Finance Bills) and with the Scottish and Welsh referendums. Even a very strong
prime minister, Margaret Thatcher, experienced parliamentary defeats. The belief that a defeated government
should reverse its decision, seek a vote of confidence, or resign was common during the period 1945–70 (when
governments were only very rarely defeated). As Boothroyd notes, only when Heath’s government was repeatedly
defeated was there a realization that the government need only resign if it loses a vote of confidence (Boothroyd
2001).
(2) . In the case of parliamentary democracies, the term “chief executive” is used in throughout this chapter to
denote the political heads of government rather than the ceremonial chiefs of state. Also, given the collective
character of executive leadership in parliamentary democracies (which includes the prime minister, the cabinet,
and administrative departments), “chief executive” is only used as a collective term for the heads of government
for reasons of style. For a similar treatment see Tsurutani and Gabbert (1992) and Helms (2005).
(3) . The only exception is Thailand; where the king can refuse to assent to a bill and force the legislature to
reconsider it (Fish and Kroening 2009, 662).
(4) . These countries include Benin, Brazil, Colombia, Malawi, Nicaragua, Paraguay, Peru, Venezuela, and Vietnam
(Fish and Kroenig 2009).
(5) . The composition of the sample and detailed information regarding the sources from which the data were
obtained are provided in Appendix A.
(6) . For a formal presentation of this argument, see Chapter 3 in Saiegh (2011).
(7) . As he notes, if a committee and a legislature’s floor want to move policy in opposite directions, the committee
will refuse to open the gates. But, “...if they did stupidly open the gates, then any proposal they made to improve
their lot would be voted down...” (Shepsle 2010, 389).
(8) . Cameron (2000) relies on incomplete information to explain the existence of bargaining failures across the
branches of government in the United States. Diermeier and Vlaicu (2011) model the legislative process as a
multiperiod bargaining game under uncertainty to rationalize the fact that legislative success rates of chief
executives are lower in presidential than in parliamentary democracies. They argue that bills proposed to the
legislature are more likely to be accepted when legislators expect that failing to do so would lead to government’s
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collapse. However, unlike Cameron (2000) and Diermeier and Vlaicu (2011) who do not identify the source of the
uncertainty about legislators’ preferences, I explicitly assert that incomplete information originates in the existence
of cross-pressured legislators.
(9) . For example in Groseclose and Snyder’s (1996) model, legislators are primarily concerned with the position-
taking aspect of their voting decisions, not with policy outcomes. This seems to be a particularly unrealistic
assumption. As Barry cleverly points out, “a committee made up entirely of people who had no interest in pursuing
some particular outcome but were fascinated by the process as such would be as frustrating as a brothel all of
whose customers were voyeurs” (1980, 184).
(10) . Even in those countries where party switching is frequent, legislators publicly announce their decisions to
defect/join a party, and they often do not make these decisions in between terms (Desposato 2005).
(11) . Sieberer (2011) examines the institutional powers of 15 Western European parliaments. He uses some of the
measures of legislative and control resources reported in Doring (1995), as well as more up-to-date indicators for
the electoral powers of parliaments.
(12) . In terms of the content of legislation, a key question is whether bills that are enacted by the legislature reflect
a chief executive’s preferences; or rather, as a result of successive amendments, those bills become
substantively different from what was originally proposed. With the exception of a recent study by Martin and
Vanberg (2011), little cross-country evidence on this respect exists. Some country strudies, however, can help to
shed light on this matter. For example, in the case of the United States, Barrett (2005) examines the content of 233
significant bills to measure presidential success between 1977 and 1996. He finds that in approximately 69 percent
of the bills that become law, presidents receive most of what they want. Therefore, he concludes that most
presidential successes can be characterized as presidential victories in terms of the content of legislation (Barret
2005, 149). Likewise, a number of scholars have pointed out that in the United Kingdom, majorities at Westminster
are often whipped into line to vote for unamended government bills (Griffith 1974; Burton and Drewry 1981; Cowley
and Stuart 2011; Thompson 2013).
(13) . The main empirical problem that led scholars in the United States to criticize this indicator pertains to the
ambiguity in identifying actual legislative proposals by the president. This is often referred to as the “denominator”
problem (Binder 1999). Put simply, since there are several ways to define how many times the president went to
bat, one may end up calculating several different presidential box scores. Note that this criticism is only germane
to the United States because the president’s legislative program has no constitutional or statutory basis.
(14) . See Appendix A for more information about the composition of the sample, and the sources from which the
data were obtained.
(15) . The box score measure is calculated as the percentage of executive-initiated bills that are approved by the
legislature over a period of time.
(16) . I follow Przeworski et al. (2000) to classify countries’ constitutional structures. Presidentialism is understood
here as a form of government in which (1) the president is both the head of state and the chief executive and is
elected by voters (or an electoral college chosen by them for that sole purpose); (2) the terms of office for the
president and the assembly are fixed, and are not contingent on mutual confidence. By contrast, parliamentarism is
defined as a form of government in which: (1) there is a head of state and a head of government. While the former
plays merely a protocolary role, the latter is the country’s chief executive and is elected by, and responsible to,
the legislature; (2) the terms of office for the executive and the assembly are not fixed, and are contingent on
mutual confidence. Other forms of government cannot be classified as parliamentary or presidential based on
these criteria. These are countries where the president is elected for a fixed term, but the government serves at
the discretion of the parliament. These constitutional structures are often referred to as “premier-presidential,”
“semi-presidential,” or “mixed” (Przeworski et al. 2000).
(17) . Due to data limitations, the composition of the sample used to estimate the model is slightly different than the
one in Appendix A. The variable Electoral Rules takes the value of 1 if plurality governs the majority/all of the seats
in the lower house of the national legislature, 0 if proportional representation is used, and 0.5 if it is a mixed system.
Source: Keefer (2005). The variable Average District Magnitude is calculated as the total number of seats
Page 26 of 28
LawMaking
allocated in the lowest tier divided by the total number of districts in that tier. Source: Golder (2005). The variable
Seats from a National District indicates the proportion of legislators that are elected via a national tier to the lower
house of the national legislature. Source: Wallack et. al. (2003). The variable Bicameral System takes the value of
1 if the national legislature is bicameral; 0 otherwise. Source: Wallack et al. (2003).
(18) . The first column reports the results of a model in which standard errors are robustly estimated and the
disturbance terms for each country are allowed to be correlated, while the second column presents the results of a
model with regional dummies.
(19) . The following countries in the sample were coded as Westminster-style systems: Canada, Bangladesh,
Ireland, Malta, United Kingdom, and New Zealand.
(20) . See Appendix A for more information about the composition of the sample.
(21) . Unfortunately, a complete list of MPs who received secret service pensions during the whole era of personal
parties cannot be compiled. It is also impossible to match the recipients of these pensions with how they voted in
particular divisions with pinpoint accuracy. Also, very few divisions took place during Rockingham’s first
administration.
(22) . Whenever a division (or roll call vote) was taken, a list of MPs who voted “aye” or “nay” was generated.
These lists are a great source of information except for two caveats. First, divisions were not always taken for the
votes on bills, even very important bills. A division was taken only if there was a challenge to the conclusion of the
Chair as to a voice vote. Second, the British Parliament did not start keeping an official record of MPs’ votes until
1836. Therefore, before that date, all records were unofficial lists, usually published in newspaper accounts or in
random letters and manuscripts.
(23) . Four MPs who voted against Newcastle’s candidates, despite being government’s pensioners (Thomas Fane,
Soame Jeyns, William A’court-Ashe, and George Mackay) were hardly among the neediest of legislators (Namier
and Brooke 1964).
(24) . These divisions are included in the databases compiled by Donald E. Ginter (1995) and by Julian Hoppit
(1996).
(25) . The models used to generate these results are presented in Appendix B.
(26) . According to the conventional wisdom, under parliamentarism, the authority of the executive to offer
legislative proposals as matters of confidence explains why parties are more unified parties in parliamentary than
in presidential systems (Huber 1996; Diermeier and Feddersen 1998; Carey 2007). In its barest form, as Kam notes
(2009), the argument is that the confidence convention suppresses dissent because government backbenchers do
not want to bring down their government and deprive themselves of the privileges of power. Yet, as he also points
out, the confidence convention is a heavy-handed instrument, ill-suited for securing members’ loyalty on an on-
going basis (and of no use whatsoever to leaders of opposition parties). For another critical assessment of the view
that the confidence provision elicits party discipline, see Chapter 5 in Cheibub (2007).
Sebastian M. Saiegh
Sebastian M. Saiegh is Associate Professor of Political Science, University of California, San Diego.
Page 27 of 28
Legislatures and Public Finance

Joachim Wehner
Institutions
2014
The struggle for parliamentary control over taxes and public spending played a central role in the development of
modern democracy. Although the power of the purse is now recognized as a fundamental function of
representative assemblies, systematic comparative scholarship on this area of legislative studies is recent and not
extensive. This chapter examines the role of legislatures in the budgetary process from a comparative
perspective. It first discusses the evolution of the literature in the field, followed by a summary of core findings in
relation to the variation in legislative financial scrutiny and the impacts of legislatures on public finances and other
outcomes. Finally, it highlights a number of significant unanswered or underexplored questions and offers
suggestions for future research.
Keywords: power of the purse, legislatures, public spending, politics, budgetary process, taxation, public finance, constitutional authority,
legislators, fiscal policy
24.1 Introduction
THE struggle for parliamentary control over taxes and public spending plays a central role in the emergence of
modern legislatures and, ultimately, democracy. Fundamental legal documents such as Magna Carta (1215), the
Constitution of the United States (1787), and France’s Declaration of the Rights of Man and of the Citizen (1789), all
sought to ensure that governments could not unilaterally impose taxes. Modern, democratic constitutions are
incomplete without a requirement for the regular approval of financial measures by a popularly elected legislative
body.
Given that the power of the purse is a fundamental function of representative assemblies, it is perhaps surprising
that the systematic comparative study of legislative financial scrutiny is relatively recent. Until the 1990s, the study
of legislatures in public finance outside the United States was overwhelmingly case-based and without an explicitly
comparative framework (Oppenheimer 1983). Since then, there has been renewed interest in this role, partly due to
urgent questions of institutional design that arose in a number of countries after the collapse of the Soviet Union
and political shifts towards more democratic polities in other regions (Stapenhurst and Pelizzo 2002). International
organizations and donor agencies, too, became concerned with strengthening legislative scrutiny and oversight of
public finances in developing countries, in an effort to improve “governance” (United States Agency for
International Development 2000). Increasing scholarly interest also reflects the development of the comparative
study of legislative bodies more broadly.
This chapter provides a review of the comparative literature on legislatures in public finance. The first section
contains a brief survey of the evolution of the literature in this area of research. Section two discusses several
research frontiers in greater detail. The third section highlights a number of significant unanswered or (p. 515)
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underexplored questions, including suggestions for future research. Section four concludes.
It is useful to clarify the particular emphasis of this chapter. First, the focus here is on comparative work on
national legislatures and public finance. There is a large literature on the United States Congress, as well as a
political economy literature on fiscal institutions, including legislative powers, structures, and procedures. These
sets of literature are referred to only to highlight some of the origins of the comparative research agenda, but they
are not the main interest here. Second, in thinking about the financial role of legislatures, it is useful to distinguish
ex ante and ex post scrutiny. The former refers to the approval of the annual budget that should precede its
implementation; the latter refers to oversight based on annual accounts and audit reports, which is a function
exercised after the end of the relevant fiscal year. Much of the comparative literature discussed here relates to ex
ante scrutiny, but there is a smaller body of work that looks at ex post control, which is considered as well.
24.2 From Case Studies to Comparative Analysis
For legislative scholars, a proper assessment of the design of the budget process is important for understanding
the balance of power between different actors in a political system, as well as associated political dynamics and
outcomes including public policy. For much of the previous century, scholarly work on legislatures and public
finance had a descriptive emphasis on procedural aspects, and most of the work was on legislatures in the United
States (Oppenheimer 1983). Important contributions include, for example, Richard Fenno’s (1966) work on
appropriation politics in Congress and Aaron Wildavsky’s (1964) groundbreaking analysis of the politics of the
budgetary process, which falls outside the legislative studies tradition but delivers an essential account of
congressional decision-making over financial resources.
The country-specific literature on financial scrutiny by legislative bodies outside the United States is sizeable in
some instances, such as the British House of Commons (e.g. Chubb 1952; Einzig 1959; Reid 1966), the German
Bundestag (e.g. Hirsch 1967; Sturm 1988; Eickenboom 1989), or the French Parliament (e.g. Stourm 1917; Chinaud
1993; Amselek 1998). This literature provides rich accounts of the emergence, evolution, and decline of the
budgetary role of parliaments, or describes practices prevalent at a certain point in time, but largely without
comparative ambition.
Comparative scholarship on the role of legislatures in public finance took some time to develop a systematic
framework. An early example—ahead of its time in many ways—is the perhaps first-ever cross-national survey of
budgetary procedures, conducted by the Cobden Club, a pro-free trade gentlemen’s club in London (Probyn
1877). The club developed a questionnaire about the legislative procedure for the budget, which it sent (p. 516)
to respondents in several countries. The questions reflect a concern that the design of the parliamentary process
may affect budgetary outcomes, which is nowadays a central topic for research. The survey dealt with procedural
features such as the format of the budget, and how it was reviewed in parliament, including the role of committees.
It further inquired whether parliamentary scrutiny “had the effect of keeping down the charges recommended by
the Government or of limiting abuses in administration” (Probyn 1877, p. 5). The Cobden Club received responses
from a total of 11 countries, which reveal a diverse set of opinions on the state of parliamentary control of public
finances. Unfortunately, this comparative survey project remained the only example of its kind for many more
years.
A century after the pioneering work of the Cobden Club, comparative analysis in this area had made little, if any,
substantive progress. For instance, a collection of case studies by Coombes (1976) provides detailed historical
information on several countries, but it lacks a rigorous theoretical basis that would make the studies comparable
and enable an overarching perspective. Survey work by the Inter-Parliamentary Union (1986) covered the financial
functions of parliaments among a large number of other aspects, establishing an enormously helpful and
comprehensive data source, but again without developing this material on the basis of a comparative analytic
framework.
During the 1990s, cross-national studies by political economy scholars started to highlight the role of budget
institutions as determinants of fiscal outcomes, such as deficits and debt (von Hagen and Harden 1995; Alesina et
al. 1999). This work emphasizes the “common pool resource problem” in budgeting, which arises when decision-
makers fail to internalize the full cost of their actions (von Hagen and Harden 1995). Legislative actors can be
particularly prone to internalize the benefits of spending targeted at their particular constituencies—think, for
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instance, of classic pork-barrel projects such as bridges, roads, and other infrastructure—which are financed from
a common pool of revenues, so that costs are distributed across a larger number of taxpayers (Weingast et al.
1981).
One implication from this political economy literature is that budget systems where legislative authority is limited are
less conducive to a pro-spending bias and hence more likely to be associated with smaller government and
prudent fiscal policy. Among the variables discussed in this work are institutional features that determine the extent
of executive agenda-setting power in budgeting, notably the degree to which legislative actors may amend the
spending and tax proposals of the executive (von Hagen and Harden 1995), as well as the fragmentation of the
committee process for budgetary decisions in the legislature (Crain and Muris 1995). These ideas have played an
important role in the comparative study of the role of legislatures in public finance.
As the comparative literature on legislatures became more systematic over the past two decades (Olson and
Mezey 1991; Döring 1995), a body of work emerged that attempts to study the role of legislatures in budgetary
decisions within an explicitly comparative framework. The volume by Haggard and McCubbins (2001) expands
work on distributive politics and legislative institutions that was developed in the United States context to the
comparative study of legislative politics elsewhere. The book outlines two (p. 517) crucial institutional dimensions
that affect the nature of public policy, including budgetary choices, namely the design of the electoral system and
the extent of executive policy authority. It argues that the combination of the “separation of purpose” (a centrifugal
electoral system that engenders demand for pork) and the “separation of powers” (constitutionally limited
presidential control over policy permitting the supply of pork) reduces decisiveness, and increases the provision of
fiscal pork and rents.
This work highlights the interaction between the legislative–executive balance of power and the incentives created
by electoral systems. Hallerberg and Marier (2004) expand this idea. Drawing on the literature on the common pool
resource problem in budgeting, they use a subset of variables from a broader index of budget institutions
developed by Alesina et al. (1999), which capture the authority of legislative bodies to amend the budget proposal
of the executive as well as reversionary budget provisions. They find that these institutional features have a
systematic effect on deficits, conditional on the extent to which the electoral system promotes a “personal vote”
(Carey and Shugart 1995). Their results suggest that countries with electoral systems that promote constituency-
centred legislative service are associated with higher deficits, unless legislative authority in budgetary matters is
limited—for instance by prohibiting legislators to adopt amendments that would augment expenditure. This also
implies that reforms of legislative budget procedures are potentially more important for fiscal choices in countries
where legislators have strong constituency linkages that weaken party discipline. The third part of this chapter will
return to this aspect.
Apart from some elements in the comparative literature on executive–legislative relations (Haggard and McCubbins
2001) and on the political economy of fiscal institutions (Hallerberg and Marier 2004), there have been few
attempts to systematically capture and measure cross-national differences in the budgetary role of legislatures.
Wehner (2006; 2010a) reviews several institutional preconditions for legislative control of public finance, focusing
on two dimensions. One is the formal authority of a legislature in budgetary matters. This includes a legislature’s
powers to amend the executive budget proposal, the reversionary budget that is implemented should approval be
delayed beyond the start of the fiscal year, as well as the degree of executive flexibility to alter the approved
budget during implementation without having to seek legislative approval. A second set of variables captures the
organizational capacity of a legislature. This relates to the amount of time available for parliamentary budget
discussions prior to the start of the fiscal year, the degree to which parliamentary scrutiny involves specialized
legislative committees, as well as parliament’s access to independent budget research capacity in the form of a
parliamentary budget office. These variables are combined into an index of legislative budget institutions using
data from an international survey for a total of up to 36 countries.
The index of legislative budget institutions reveals substantial variation in the level of financial scrutiny of
government by the legislature among contemporary liberal democracies. The United States Congress emerges as a
clear outlier, with an index score that is more than three times as great as those for the bottom nine cases,
predominantly Westminster-type systems. Congress has unfettered constitutional authority in fiscal (p. 518)
matters, and delayed approval of appropriation bills can lead to government shutdown. Moreover, Congress
approves very detailed budgets and tightly controls any adjustments to approved spending during the fiscal year.
Page 3 of 10
The presidential budget request is presented to Congress eight months prior to the start of the fiscal year, earlier
than in any other established democracy. Moreover, Congress has a plethora of specialized committees to dissect
budgetary issues, and members have access to the largest and best-resourced legislative budget unit in the world,
the Congressional Budget Office.
The contrast with the British Parliament could not be greater. It has severely curtailed amendment powers, which
have long fallen into disuse. Governments routinely implement spending plans prior to final parliamentary approval
on the basis of a so-called “vote on account.” Appropriations are so highly aggregated that departments have
nearly unlimited flexibility in how they spend money as long as they do not breach their total allocations. The British
Parliament receives the estimates around the start of the fiscal year and only approves appropriations after its
commencement. It lacks a specialized appropriations committee as well as a dedicated legislative budget analysis
unit. In between the extremes of Westminster and the United States Congress, continental European parliaments
make up much of the middle mass of the ranking. In some cases, formal constitutional authority is extensive, but
organizational capacity tends to be much lower. This distribution suggests that, despite a common constitutional
recognition of the parliamentary “power of the purse,” in practice very few legislatures have the institutional
prerequisites to truly assert control over budgets.
Most of the existing work on legislatures in public finances focuses on the approval stage of the budgetary
process, but ex post oversight has also attracted some comparative attention. Most developed in this regard is
research on Public Accounts Committees in Commonwealth countries (McGee 2002; Pelizzo et al. 2006). These
committees specialize in the scrutiny of audit reports on the government’s annual accounts and, in some
countries, performance audits carried out by the auditor general. The latter differ from financial audits in that they
comprise investigations into the economy, efficiency, and effectiveness of public expenditures. This work still has a
strong descriptive emphasis, sometimes mixed with normative connotations. Research on Public Accounts
Committees establishes some broad patterns in the practices of these committees, such as the tendency for them
to be chaired by a member of an opposition party (Wehner 2003). However, what is lacking from this literature, so
far, is a similarly detailed analysis of parliamentary practices pertaining to the review of accounts and audit reports
as is now available for the budget approval process.
Nonetheless, the existing work on Public Accounts Committees suggests several patterns that deserve further
exploration. One observation from the available research is that ex post scrutiny is perhaps most developed in the
Westminster system, whereas elsewhere specialized audit committees are less common and audit findings tend to
receive less legislative attention. Moreover, where external audit bodies have judicial status—such as the cour des
comptes in France—they also tend to have weaker interaction with the legislature. In contrast, the Comptroller and
Auditor General in the UK is an officer of the House of Commons, and hearings in the Public Accounts Committee
(p. 519) are essential for publicizing audit findings and applying pressure on the government to address any
underlying problems and shortcomings. With advances in the comparative study of supreme audit institutions
(Santiso 2009), a more systematic cross-national analysis of legislative audit must be a logical next step.
24.3 Key Findings So Far
This section discusses several of the central findings in the existing comparative literature, grouped loosely into
two broad clusters. The first relates to what is known about the variation in legislative financial scrutiny. The
second looks at what has been learned so far about the impacts of legislatures on public finances.
Most fundamentally, existing work highlights variation in constitutional authority and budgetary procedures. An
essential variable that displays tremendous cross-national variation is the constitutional authority of legislatures to
amend the budget proposal tabled by the executive. Some assemblies have unfettered authority to decide
spending and taxation—for instance the United States Congress, the German Bundestag, or the Swiss Parliament—
whereas others are highly constrained in the types of changes they may make to executive proposals. The British
Parliament, for example, may only decrease items proposed by the executive, but it may not introduce new ones,
nor can it vary any proposed items upwards. There is broad consensus that this variable matters for the
executive–legislative balance of power in budgetary matters (Alesina et al. 1999; Haggard and McCubbins 2001;
Wehner 2006; Hallerberg et al. 2009). Clearly, the rules by which legislators decide annual budgets, and any
constraints that they must adhere to, have implications for the extent of influence they can potentially exert.
Page 4 of 10
Perhaps surprisingly for some, there is little evidence that the budgetary authority of legislatures differs
systematically across parliamentary and presidential systems of government. It is true that the United States
Congress is, by far, the most active and powerful legislature in public finance, and the opposite holds for
Westminster-type parliamentary systems. However, these are extreme cases among presidential and
parliamentary systems, respectively. With regard to presidential systems, there is substantial variation in legislative
authority over budgets (Haggard and McCubbins 2001). Some countries in this group, such as Chile, have a highly
constrained legislature with limited constitutional powers to amend budgets. Within parliamentary systems, the
British Parliament is among the least active of all legislatures in the developed world with regard to financial
scrutiny, and has long ceased to amend “money bills”—appropriation bills that authorize spending and finance bills
that change tax law—unless changes were initiated by the government. However, a number of other parliaments
have substantially more formal authority over budgets, and routinely use this authority to amend budget proposals
(Wehner 2006; 2010a). Lienert (2005), apart from confirming the outlier status of Westminster democracies, finds
little covariation of legislative budget authority with the separation of powers.
(p. 520) However, constitutional authority is only one determinant of the budgetary role of a legislature. Other
variables shape the incentives for legislators to use their authority. Notably, the electoral system (Haggard and
McCubbins 2001; Hallerberg and Marier 2004) affects constituency linkages and impacts on the ability of party
leaders to demand and enforce discipline in legislative voting behaviour. Moreover, partisan majorities across the
executive and legislature matter. In countries with dominant parties, even powerful constitutional structures may
not give rise to extensive legislative scrutiny (Morgenstern 2002). Conversely, under conditions of minority
government or divided government, scrutiny of the executive is likely to be more intense, and the potential for
legislative effects on budgets can be greater (Wehner 2010b; Hankla 2013).
We also know a fair amount about how legislative authority in budgetary matters affects fiscal policy outcomes,
mostly from the political economy literature on fiscal institutions. A number of papers establish that legislatures with
extensive budgetary authority can be a threat to fiscal discipline. Von Hagen and Harden (1995) find an
association between budget institutions and deficits and debt in 12 EU countries during the 1980s. Alesina et al.
(1999) apply a similar approach to 20 Latin American and Caribbean countries. They find an association between
budget institutions and primary deficits in the 1980s and early 1990s (see also Stein et al. 1998). Fabrizio and Mody
(2006) obtain similar results for a small sample of ten Central and Eastern European countries during the 1990s and
2000s, drawing on work by Yläoutinen (2004). Using a large panel of industrialized and developing countries
between the 1970s and 1990s, Wehner (2010b) finds that limits on legislative amendment authority dampen the
effect of partisan fragmentation on deficits.
The findings summarized in the preceding paragraph have formed the basis for reforms seeking to strengthen
fiscal discipline. In some countries where the constitutional authority of the legislature is unfettered, reforms have
established more “top-down” procedures that involve making a decision on aggregate spending prior to detailed
choices about the allocation of available funds. One example is Sweden, which overhauled its budgetary
procedures in the mid-1990s and closely followed the recommendations in this literature to centralize decision-
making in order to contain the common pool resource problem. Prior to the reforms, different committees of the
Swedish Parliament, the Riksdag, dealt with different parts of the budget, with very little overall coordination.
Approved budgets routinely increased expenditure over the amount proposed by the government. The reforms
centralized deliberations over aggregates in the finance committee, and instituted a new procedure whereby the
Riksdag votes on total spending first and only later on detailed allocations. This change has made it much harder
for members to amend government budget proposals (Wehner 2010a).
In contrast, hardly anything systematic is known from comparative work about the relationship between legislative
financial scrutiny and other outcomes, such as government accountability or corruption, which are posited in the
applied literature as central benefits of a stronger role for legislatures (US Agency for International Development
2000; Stapenhurst and Pelizzo 2002; UK Department for International Development 2006, 27). Elsewhere, Steven
Fish (2006, 5) has gone as far as to claim: “the presence (p. 521) of a powerful legislature is an unmixed blessing
for democratization.” Such thinking has inspired “legislative strengthening” programs by donor agencies that focus
on, for instance, improving the functioning of finance committees, or creating parliamentary budget offices.
However, many practitioners in international financial institutions tend to have a more skeptical and less benign
view of legislative involvement in resource decisions. The potential role of legislative scrutiny of public finances in
delivering development outcomes such as reduced corruption, more efficient government, and democratic
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consolidation has yet to be explored much more systematically. Without such research, it is impossible to judge
whether the benefits of increased legislative activism may outweigh possible risks.
24.4 Questions For Future Research
There remains substantial scope to shape and implement a comparative research agenda on the role of
legislatures in budgetary decisions and oversight. The conclusion reached by Oppenheimer (1983) that knowledge
about legislatures outside the United States and how they affect budgets is rather sparse may no longer apply to
the same extent. Since then, legislative scholars have accumulated more diverse case studies (e.g. Stapenhurst et
al. 2008). However, the expansion of comparative coverage is far from satisfactory. A wider geographical focus
would, in time, lead to a more nuanced appreciation of patterns and trends in legislative budgeting. In some of the
understudied regions, the theme of a “decline” in financial scrutiny may not necessarily be the most dominant. At
the same time, a wide array of questions and aspects deserve further treatment in an explicitly comparative
framework, which are highlighted below.
The first challenge is to further demolish the cliché that legislative budgeting takes one of two basic forms,
represented by the British House of Commons for parliamentary systems, and the United States Congress for
presidential systems. This simplistic view of the world posits that governments always get what they want in
parliamentary systems, whereas the separation of powers makes for more a more competitive relationship between
branches. This cliché remains widespread, despite the best efforts of some comparative scholars to increase
awareness of the variety of parliamentary practices (e.g. Esaiasson and Heidar 2000). The challenge applies more
broadly to the comparative study of legislatures, but it certainly also applies to the narrower segment of the
literature that examines the budgetary role of parliaments. A careful look beyond such crude macro-constitutional
distinctions as the form of government will be essential for advancing understanding of legislative budgetary
behaviour.
The contrast between the United States Congress and the British Parliament is, however, useful for illustrating
another neglected aspect that awaits further inquiry: the question whether there is a trade-off in financial scrutiny
between ex post and ex ante control, and if so, why. The focus of the United States Congress is almost entirely on
budget formulation. Most of the year is spent in an attempt to reconcile the competing (p. 522) views of its
members, who still often fail to agree on fiscal plans in time. Ex post scrutiny is far less developed and receives
less attention. In contrast, the British Parliament routinely approves executive budget proposals with only
superficial scrutiny and without any changes. However, it has a well-established infrastructure for ex post scrutiny
that dates back to the Gladstonian reforms in the 1860s. The prestigious Public Accounts Committee scrutinizes
reports on departmental spending prepared by the supreme audit institution, the National Audit Office, which
supports the work of the committee. The relationship between ex ante and ex post legislative scrutiny, including
whether there is, in fact, a systematic trade-off across national legislatures, awaits comparative analysis.
Another area for further development relates to understanding the effects of legislative involvement in financial
decisions. This area of research is heavily influenced by the “fiscal institutionalist” research project based on the
common pool resource problem. This approach has had a major impact on understanding the association between
procedural arrangements—such as committee structures and amendment authority—on budget outcomes. Work in
this tradition is an essential reference for comparative researchers, but at the same time there is much scope to
broaden the focus of this line of inquiry. In particular, much of this literature has had a rather narrow focus on
aggregate fiscal outcomes: deficits, debt, total expenditure, etc. Whether and how legislative involvement affects
budget composition or particular programs, on the other hand, deserves far more attention (e.g. Keefer and
Khemani 2009). Also, as noted above, the more applied literature on “governance” and “legislative strengthening”
posits various beneficial effects of parliamentary scrutiny that should be far more carefully examined empirically,
also because they form the basis for policy prescriptions and technical assistance to developing countries. There
remains scope to diversify the dependent variable.
A further limitation of much of the research so far is that it tends to be limited to exploring direct effects of certain
institutional features rather than more subtle interactions. There are some examples in the literature that suggest
that legislative institutions mediate the effect of other variables such as centrifugal tendencies in the electoral
system (Hallerberg and Marier 2004) or partisan fragmentation (Wehner 2010b; Hankla 2013). This shift from direct
Page 6 of 10
effects to the investigation of more subtle interactions promises to make further important contributions to
understanding of the determinants of fiscal performance and, possibly, other budgetary impacts.
Finally, the comparative study of legislative budgeting has tended to have a rather short-term perspective or cross-
sectional approach. In practice, the influence of legislative bodies, and the executive–legislative balance of power
can shift over time. For instance, in his widely used guide to the federal budget process in the United States, Schick
(2000) identifies periods of congressional dominance (1789–1921) and presidential dominance (1921–1974),
followed by a more contested period (1974–2000). While some historical accounts suggest a pattern of decline
(e.g. Stourm 1917; Einzig 1959), others point to a possible resurgence in legislative activism in a number of
countries (Schick 2002). Too much of this discussion draws on anecdotal evidence. Comparative legislative
scholars could also do more to document and examine budgetary decisions (p. 523) and changing patterns of
legislative–executive relations over much longer periods of time (e.g. Wehner 2013). Patterns that appear striking
in a ten-year period may look far less remarkable when considered in a much longer historical context.
24.5 Conclusion
Over the past two decades, the comparative study of legislatures in public finance has become more systematic.
Most of this research focuses on the budget approval function of legislatures, and less on ex post scrutiny. The
comparative literature documents substantial differences in legislative budget authority and procedures. Electoral
systems and party political majorities appear to play an important role in explaining when formal powers translate
into legislative activism. Political economy scholars have shown that powerful legislatures are associated with less
disciplined fiscal policy outcomes. Other possible impacts of legislative financial scrutiny, for instance on
accountability and democracy, have been asserted but not yet rigorously examined.
The comparative study of legislative financial scrutiny would benefit from an expansion of geographical coverage
beyond the set of advanced democracies. Further work should avoid being misguided by the cliché that the
difference between presidential and parliamentary systems automatically translates into fundamentally different
roles for legislative bodies in budgetary decisions. Instead, more nuanced questions are likely to advance
comparative research in this area. Is there a systematic trade-off in ex ante and ex post financial scrutiny by
legislatures, and why? What can we say about the impacts of legislative involvement in financial decisions other
than on aggregate fiscal policy, for instance on budget composition or particular programs, or other aspects of
governance including corruption and accountability? Under what conditions do institutional differences in
budgetary authority matter most? And how can we document and assess legislative impacts on budgets over
extended periods of time?
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Joachim Wehner
Joachim Wehner is Senior Lecturer (Associate Professor) in Public Policy at the London School of Economics and Political Science.
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Legislatures, Lobbying, and Interest Groups

Anne Skorkjær Binderkrantz
Institutions
2014
In modern democracies, societal interests frequent the legislative hallways to pressure and exert political influence
on legislators. Lobbying represents an intense interaction between organized interests and legislators in
parliaments. In the last decades, there has been a remarkable shift in attention with parliament assuming a more
central role for interest groups across Europe. This chapter examines the relations between interest groups and
legislators and the nature and effects of such relations. It begins with a description of the development in scholarly
attention toward lobbying in legislatures, followed by a discussion of recent advances in the understanding of
relations between groups and legislators. It concludes by highlighting a number of areas where further progress
may be made.
Keywords: legislators, lobbying, parliaments, interest groups, political influence, legislatures
25.1 Introduction
LEGISLATORS have continually been subject to pressure from societal interests haunting the legislative hallways in
search of political influence (Beer 1956, 4; Duverger 1972, 110; Rozell and Wilcox 1999, 3). In present-day
parliaments, a wide range of interest groups seek access to members of parliament (MPs), utilize institutional
channels of parliamentary access, and launch lobbying campaigns to impress their views on legislators. While the
groups and causes represented by organized interests are diverse, they are united by a common goal to affect the
legislative process and ultimately to leave their fingerprints on the legislation adopted. This chapter discusses the
relations between legislators and interest groups and the literature that seeks to advance our understanding of the
nature and effects of such relations.
Pressure-group activity vis-à-vis legislatures have been described as both detrimental and beneficial to
democracy. On the one hand, interest groups have been praised as central to bringing citizens’ views and
demands to the attention of legislators (Dahl 1961; Truman 1951). On the other, observers have warned that
advocates of private interests may distort the political process to the detriment of the public good (Madison 1787;
Olson 1982). These concerns are echoed in present-day public debate about, for example, financial contributions
to election campaigns and compulsory registration of lobbyists (Holman and Luneburg 2012). Studies of the
relations between interest groups and legislators can therefore provide an important piece to the puzzle of
understanding the functioning of democratic societies.
The evidence of group interest in the composition and activities of parliaments dates back to at least the eighteenth
century. In many countries, organized interests were even active in the establishment of parliaments (Beer 1956,
4; Rozell and Wilcox 1999, 3). Early examples of organized groups include loosely formed groupings of citizens as
well (p. 527) as guilds representing tradesmen or merchants. More modern interest groups such as trade unions,
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farmers’ organizations, and trade associations were typically established in the latter part of the nineteenth century
(Beer 1956; Heaney 2010). In many countries—particularly in Western Europe—the major interest groups came to
reflect the same societal cleavages as political parties. Trade unions and Social Democratic parties, for example,
had common roots in the labour movement and close organizational ties linked unions and parties (Finer 1966, 50;
Duverger 1972; Saalfeld 1999; Howell 2001). In other countries, parties and groups developed more
independently, but even in the United States the development of political parties and interest groups has been
described as a process of co-evolution, and bonds exist between, for example, organized labour and the
Democratic Party (Heaney 2010, 569).
While lobbying of Congress has always been central for American interest groups, parliaments have traditionally
been rather neglected by European groups (Beer 1956). Instead, corporative institutional arrangements integrating
groups into public policy-making have been the main vehicle of group involvement in politics, and legislators are
often sidelined as civil servants and groups negotiate directly (Rokkan 1966; Schmitter 1974; Richardson and
Jordan 1979). When legislation reaches parliament, deals and compromises have already been struck and little is
changed in the following process. As stated by Grant in a discussion of British groups: “Although most large groups
retained a parliamentary officer or hired a firm of consultants to cover the legislature, real power was seen to lie
with the executive in Whitehall” (Grant 2001, 337). Interest groups’ use of the parliamentary channel was
described as a rather ineffectual weapon of groups excluded from insider status in policy-making or as an
emergency technique that groups might use to rescue causes still unwon (Jordan and Richardson 1987, 270).
The last decades have seen an adjustment of this picture. In tandem with a decline in corporative arrangements,
parliament has obtained greater status in the political work of interest groups (Crepaz 1994; Christiansen and
Rommetvedt 1999; Wessels 1999; Binderkrantz 2003; Schmitter 2008). Further, the European Union has emerged
as a new arena for pressure groups and—reflecting institutional reforms that have strengthened its role—the
European Parliament has assumed a central role for groups seeking influence at the European level (Kohler-Koch
1997; Wessels 1999). These developments have led scholars to pay increasing attention to relations between
groups and legislators (Beyers 2004; Binderkrantz 2005; Kriesi, Tresch, and Jochum 2007). More generally, interest
in the political activities of interest groups has also been on the rise and across the Atlantic the latest generation of
scholarship has converged on common themes (Lowery and Gray 2004; Beyers, Eising, and Maloney 2008;
Mahoney and Baumgartner 2008). In many ways, the time is thus ripe to evaluate the relationship between interest
groups and parliament—and the literature in the field. The chapter proceeds with description of the development in
scholarly attention toward legislative lobbying. Thereafter recent advances in the understanding of relations
between groups and legislators are discussed, and the last section points to a number of areas where further
progress may be made.
(p. 528) 25.2 The Ebbs and Flows of Pressure Group Research
Scholarly attention to interest-group lobbying of parliament has been highly skewed over time and across
countries. Over time, attention to the issue has waxed and waned reflecting general developments in the field of
interest-group studies. Across countries, throughout most of the twentieth century the literature in the United States
and Europe developed along different paths with little cross-fertilizing (Baumgartner and Leech 1998; Mahoney and
Baumgartner 2008). In the US, the political role of pressure groups became a prominent field of research in the
1950s and 1960s. Pluralist scholars such as Bentley, Truman, and Dahl (Bentley 1908; Truman 1951; Dahl 1961)
placed groups on centre stage and lobbying of Congress was seen as the most important aspect of their political
role. European scholars focused on other arenas of group activity. The pressure group perspective’s focus on
interest groups’ influence on the legislative arena seemed less relevant than, for example, the corporatist view of
groups as closely integrated in administrative decision-making (Beer 1956; Rokkan 1966; Schmitter 1974).
Among the pioneering studies of pressure activity in Congress is Schattschneider’s study of the tariff negotiations
in 1929–30 (Schattschneider 1974 [1935]). Schattschneider found ample evidence of close interaction between
legislators and business interests and—foreseeing his later conclusions about a biased pressure system
(Schattschneider 1975 [1969])—he concluded that the pressures exerted upon Congress are extremely
unbalanced (1974 [1935], 287):
The assumption is that a few can exert great influence on the process of government because they are
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organized and because they are alert and have access to information, know what they want, and have
power in the economic regime outside the formal organization of government, while the mass remains inert.
Another seminal contribution was Truman’s “The Governmental Process” (Truman 1951). While Truman was aware
of differences in group access and success, he was generally optimistic about the options for mobilization and
influence. Groups were expected to mobilize given sufficient threats to their interests, and countervailing forces
such as government institutions would protect the public interest. Generally, group theory relied on the pluralistic
assumption that the best political outcomes would arise as a result of group conflict. Legislators would therefore be
well served by the views put forward by competing organized groups (Baumgartner and Leech 1998, 48).
Later contributions questioned this benign view of interest groups and pointed to the imbalance of power among
interests and the barriers toward mobilizing and affecting politics (Schattschneider 1975 [1969]). A series of
developments coincided to push studies of the political activities of interest groups down the research agenda
(Baumgartner and Leech 1998). First, a large debate evolved around the difficulties of empirically (p. 529)
measuring group power and influence. In effect, subsequent research has largely shied away from studies of group
influence (Dür 2007; Mahoney 2007). Second, an influential study found that interest groups were perhaps, after
all, not so influential. Bauer, Pool, and Dexter (Bauer, Pool, and Dexter 2007 [1963]) thus argued that lobbyists
mainly targeted members of Congress who were already inclined to support their causes and labeled groups mere
“service bureaus” for legislators. Further, they maintained that:
...the lobbies were on the whole poorly financed, ill-managed, out of contact with Congress, and at best
only marginally effective in supporting tendencies and measures which already had behind them
considerable Congressional impetus from other sources.
(Bauer et al. 2007 [1963], 324)
Third, a major blow to the pressure-group tradition was delivered by Olson’s “The Logic of Collective Action”
(Olson 1965), in which he argued—given that the membership of a single person will not affect groups’ options to
obtain their goals—that rational actors, in fact, had no incentive to contribute to interest groups. This triggered
scholarly interest in group mobilization and the incentives used to attract group members (Baumgartner and Leech
1998). By the late 1960s, the pressure-group approach was in crisis and studies of the political activities of interest
groups became increasingly rare.
The field has seen a resurgence in the last couple of decades with a new wave of US scholarship with a narrower
focus on, for example, campaign contributions and lobbying tactics (Baumgartner and Leech 1998). The recent US
literature has even been labeled “neopluralist,” emphasizing the heritage from pluralist authors such as Dahl and
Truman (Lowery and Gray 2004). European scholarship has also experienced a remarkable shift with the study of
interest groups in general, and group relations to legislatures in particular, representing a growing field (Beyers et
al. 2008, 1103). After decades of evolving along different paths, recent literature shares more common ground
(Mahoney and Baumgartner 2008). This new generation of scholarship has moved beyond classic distinctions
between political systems as corporatist or pluralists, and advances have been made, for example, in mapping
groups’ lobbying strategies and theorizing group–legislator relations. The following section reviews these
advances.
25.3 Recent Frontiers in Studies of Group–Legislator Relations
Interest groups are ultimately relevant because they affect public policy. Their political role may be seen as an
“influence production process” (Lowery and Gray 2004), and studies have typically focused on different stages of
this process. Central for organizing the literature in the field is a distinction between strategies, access, and
influence. Strategies are the overall approaches groups adopt in seeking their political (p. 530) goals, and can be
observed empirically as combinations of specific activities or tactics (Berry 1977, 212). Access requires that
groups have successfully passed the threshold to a certain arena—for example, by being invited to a
parliamentary hearing (Hansen 1991). While access signifies political importance, influence is only obtained when
groups affect political decisions—including decisions about which issues should be on the political agenda (Dür
2007; Schattschneider 1975 [1969]). Even though recent studies have begun to tackle the issue of studying
influence, this may be seen as a primary challenge for future research. In contrast, considerable progress has
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been made in theorizing and mapping the lobbying tactics and strategies used by groups in search of
parliamentary influence and to some extent also the legislative access gained.
25.3.1 Legislative Tactics and Strategies
Rather than facing the seemingly insurmountable difficulties in studying influence, scholars have focused on
investigating group strategies. Lobbying activities are comparably easy to investigate and studies provide
important lessons about the patterns of contacts between interest groups and decision-makers. A series of US
surveys from the 1970s and onward have asked groups to report their tactics. Here, activities such as contacting
legislators and giving testimony at legislative hearings have repeatedly been among the most widespread
(Baumgartner and Leech 1998, 152). In Europe, recent studies have also demonstrated that legislative contacts
are used by most interest groups (Beyers 2004; Binderkrantz 2005; Eising 2007b; Kriesi et al. 2007). In a study of
groups in seven European countries, Kriesi and colleagues (Kriesi et al. 2007) find contacts to the parliamentary
arena to be as widespread as administrative contacts. These findings have led to a reevaluation of the role of
parliament in the political work of interest groups. Rather than being a mere fallback option for groups excluded
from more attractive political venues, parliamentary contacts are now seen as a crucial part of the action
repertoire.
This development is related to a decline in corporatist structures integrating groups into public decision-making as
well as to a rise in the power of parliaments (Binderkrantz 2003; Crepaz 1994; Norton 1999; Rommetvedt 2005;
Öberg et al. 2011). In the Scandinavian countries, legislatures in the 1960s and 1970s were described as arenas
for the relatively powerless. Rokkan (Rokkan 1966) concluded that “votes count but resources decide,” indicating
that group resources relevant for corporative interactions were more important than the allocation of seats in
parliamentary elections. A longitudinal study of contacts between groups and legislators and civil servants in
Denmark and Norway demonstrates, however, that representation in corporatist committees and contacts with civil
servants from about 1980 onward has gradually been supplemented by—and in some cases even substituted for—
lobbying of government and MPs (Rommetvedt et al. 2012, 10). The parliamentary strategy is most intensively used
by groups who are also well represented in institutional arrangements of (p. 531) policy-making. Accordingly, it
cannot be seen as a “weapon of the weak” (Binderkrantz 2005; Rommetvedt et al. 2012).
The rise of the European Union has also been decisive for the political work of European interest groups. Domestic
groups have incorporated lobbying of the EU in their action repertoire and a system of EU-level pressure groups
has developed. While the first wave of studies of interest groups in the EU was somewhat isolated from other fields,
the field has gradually been integrated with the general literature on groups (Woll 2006, 457). Today the EU is the
political system that attracts most attention among interest-group scholars in Europe—and this scholarship
assumes a central role in the emergence of a more unified research agenda across the Atlantic (Mahoney and
Baumgartner 2008). The main focus is on group lobbying of the European Commission, but gradually—and in
tandem with the extension of its power in the legislative process—the European Parliament has obtained a more
prominent position on the agenda of both groups and researchers (Kohler-Koch 1997; Beyers 2004, 225; Bouwen
2004b, 475; Rasmussen 2012).
An important lesson from these studies is that rather than assuming the dominance of any particular arena, their
prominence in the political work of groups must be considered an empirical question. And there is reason to focus
more on legislator-interest group relations as well as on the combination of these with other strategies. Insider
tactics where groups approach legislators directly may thus be combined with outsider tactics. Thereby groups
can impress on legislators that they are supported by large constituencies willing to engage in action. Kollman has
demonstrated that grassroots campaigns may serve both to alert legislators about existing public sentiments and to
raise the salience of issues (Kollman 1998). Similarly, EU studies have found that groups use legislative contacts as
part of a larger action repertoire including attempts to raise public awareness of issues and thereby gain the
attention of legislators (Eising 2007b).
Interest groups do not necessarily focus on the legislative body as such, but rather contact individual legislators or
specialized committees (Bouwen 2004b, 482). The specific legislative targets may vary according to the type of
groups; for example, domestic interest groups tend to lobby their national MEPs most frequently (Beyers and
Kerremans 2012, 283). Further, issue characteristics affect the choice of tactics and strategies (Beyers and
Kerremans 2012; Binderkrantz and Krøyer 2012). Among the factors of obvious importance is the salience of an
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issue to the general public as this, for example, affects the opportunities to pressure legislators through grassroot
campaigns (Kollman 1998). A recent study has also found that groups in pursuance of generalized interests in a
specific case are more active toward parliament than groups promoting more limited interests (Binderkrantz and
Krøyer 2012).
The sheer amount of lobbying activity varies tremendously across issues. Based on reports filed under the US
“Lobbying Disclosure Act,” Baumgartner and Leech found that the top 5 percent of issues accounted for more than
45 percent of all lobbying, whereas the bottom 50 percent of issues accounted for less than 3 percent
(Baumgartner and Leech 2001). An important lesson based on this pattern is that the choice of issues (p. 532) for
study may distort our findings. High-profile issues are often picked out for case study as this ensures a large
amount of material and high political relevance. However, findings from such studies may not be relevant for the
wider range of issues, where just a single or a few groups are seeking influence (Baumgartner and Leech 1998).
25.3.2 Accessing Legislators: A Matter of Political Exchange
Accessing political arenas is a particularly crucial step in gaining influence and while it is more complicated to
investigate than group lobbying it does not imply the same difficulties as studies of influence. Access signifies
political importance and eventually a higher likelihood of political influence (Eising 2007a, 387) and as argued by
Hansen: “the policy views of advocates with access receive consistent, serious consideration” (Hansen 1991, 11).
In comparison, groups that are not part of the policy process are less likely to defend their interests as captured in
the Washington, DC adage: “If you’re not at the table, you’re on the menu” (Schlozman, Verba, and Brady 2012,
309). While access does not necessarily imply influence it constitutes a necessary step toward achieving it
(Bouwen 2004a; Eising 2007a).
The concept of access has attracted considerable attention. Different research designs have been used as some
studies ask groups about their levels of access in surveys, while others rely on interview data or archival sources
(Beyers and Kerremans 2004; Bouwen 2004a; Eising 2007a). Just as in other areas of research, US scholars were
among the first to study access to parliaments. For example, Hansen has illustrated how large-scale fluctuations in
the ability of groups to supply relevant information to legislators result in changes in their patterns of access
(1991). EU scholars have also taken up the challenge of studying access and one finding is that political officials
are centrally placed when it comes to group access to the EU (Beyers and Kerremans 2004; Bouwen 2004b).
Outside the US, national studies of group access to parliament are scarce, but a few studies include access to
legislatures in broader mappings of group presence in political arenas (Binderkrantz et al. 2014; Halpin et al. 2012).
In explaining patterns of access, relations between interest groups and legislators are increasingly seen as a
resource exchange, with legislators being in possession of resources valued by groups and vice versa. Groups
and legislators are thus in a resource dependency relation and based on the relative value of possessed
resources, patterns of access may be explained (Bouwen 2004b, 476; Beyers and Kerremans 2007; Eising 2007b;
Heaney 2010). Most attention has been given to the resources that groups supply to legislators with a range of
different resources cited as important. An influential strand of US scholarship simply emphasizes financial
resources as the key to buying either votes or the time and attention of legislators (Austen-Smith and Wright 1994;
Hall and Wayman 1990). For example, groups make donations to election campaigns expecting to obtain access—
and hopefully also favourable policies—once the representative is installed in office. Donations may thus be made
to candidates with particularly (p. 533) good chances of election rather than to change the outcome of the
election (Rozell and Wilcox 1999).
Other contributions have addressed intangible resources such as the provision of expertise, political intelligence,
and propaganda. Hansen (1991) argues that policy advocates provide groups with electoral intelligence as well as
supportive propaganda, and Hall and Deardorff (2006) see lobbying as a legislative subsidy where specialized
lobbyists provide legislators with valuable information and labour. Two distinctions may help organize the various
resources that groups supply to legislators. First, whether the resource relates to information provided or to action
carried out by the group; and second, whether it relates to the development and implementation of legislation or to
the electoral fate of legislators. Groups may thus supply legislators with important expert knowledge necessary for
developing effective legislation and they may help in the enforcement of legislation as emphasized in the
corporative literature (Bouwen 2004a; Eising 2007b, 385; Öberg et al. 2011). They may also—and especially in the
US literature this is often seen as the only relevant resource—help legislators in their pursuance of re-election.
Page 5 of 13
Bouwen argues that MEPs are particularly concerned about obtaining information regarding domestic
encompassing interests. Because MEPs are nationally elected, this type of information is most likely to enhance
their chances of re-election (2004b, 480).
Groups also seek resources from legislators. A common assumption is simply that groups want political influence
(Bouwen 2004a; Hall and Deardorff 2006; Hansen 1991; Öberg et al. 2011) and this element of the resource
exchange has therefore received less attention. Groups may, however, have different goals when involving
themselves in parliamentary politics. While the most obvious is to influence policies adopted by parliament, groups
may also aim to place their issues on the parliamentary agenda. A more nuanced view therefore includes attempts
to affect agenda-setting alongside specific policy decisions (Bernhagen and Trani 2012: 50). Importantly,
parliament plays a crucial role both in decision-making and as a more open forum for agenda-setting (Adeweg and
Nijzink 1995). While a parliamentary majority is required to enact bills or amendments, in most parliaments
individual MPs have instruments available for agenda-setting—and thus resources making them attractive for
groups (Binderkrantz 2003). An adequate understanding of the resource exchange between legislators and groups
must therefore incorporate both sides of the equation.
25.3.3 Patterns of Legislator–Group Contacts
Interest groups come in many shades. Some represent specific constituencies such as workers, businesses, or
patients; others advocate more general causes such as environmental protection or human rights (Berry 1977). In
modern democracies almost all conceivable interests and causes have advocates in terms of organized groups.
The representation and chances of political success are, however, far from evenly distributed (p. 534) across
these groups (Schlozman 2012). Accounting for and mapping the patterns of group–legislator contacts is a crucial
challenge for interest-group studies. An advantage of the resource exchange model is the ability to theorize about
the kinds of patterns that characterize group–legislator relations.
Central to the discussion of the political role of groups is whether groups primarily seek to convince legislative
opponents of the need to change their views or rather limit their lobbyism to legislators who are sympathetic to the
cause. This may depend on, for example, the stage in the legislative process, but in general groups have been
found to focus most on sympathetic legislators (Hojnacki and Kimball 1998). These can act as legislative agents for
groups and typically value the information and legislative assistance that groups are able to supply (Hall and
Deardorff 2006). Such friendly patterns of contacts have been particularly stable in countries with considerable
overlap between the interests represented by political parties and interest groups (Allern and Bale 2012).
In Western democracies, these linkages have declined over a couple of decades. While political parties and some
interest groups could historically be seen as manifestations of the same social cleavages, socioeconomic changes
throughout the twentieth century have had a profound effect on party-group linkages (Allern and Bale 2012, 10;
Howell 2001, 32; Schmitt-Beck and Tenscher 2008, 151–2). Across Europe, ties between groups and parties have
generally declined as both have an interest in greater independence (Allern 2010, 5; Allern and Bale 2012, 67–8;
Howell 2001, 7; Thomas 2001). For example, organized labour and Social Democratic parties still share interests,
but too close ties to unions negatively affect the electoral success of Social Democrats. Present-day interest
groups therefore have an incentive to pursue contacts across the entire political spectrum. Rather than relying on
traditional patterns of contact, alliances may be struck on specific issues.
The prominence of parliamentary access has been found to vary across different groups. In an influential article,
Salisbury argued that the proportions of different types of pressure participants vary across political arenas
depending on how public and visible are the arenas (Salisbury 1984). Two recent studies have found similar
patterns with citizen groups being more prominently represented in the parliamentary arena than in government
consultations and public boards and committees (Halpin et al. 2012; Binderkrantz et al. 2014). These findings echo
earlier speculations that parliament is a particularly suitable arena for environmental groups and other cause
groups, not only because they are less well represented in other arenas, but also because they work with issues
where contacts to parliament could be instrumental in attracting media attention (Jordan and Richardson 1987, 252;
Norton 1999, 9). In tandem with the rise of parliament as a more important arena for lobbying, Rommetvedt has
argued that groups generally need to widen their appeals beyond the self-interest of specific societal groups. Thus,
actors who are capable of showing that their viewpoints promote the public good have better chances of success
(Rommetvedt 2005, 757).
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(p. 535) 25.4 An Agenda for Future Research
25.4.1 Placing Parliament at Centre Stage
Outside the US, there is a peculiar lack of literature with specific focus on interest group–legislator relations.
Parliament and parties are clearly back on the political scene after previous declarations of “post-parliamentary
democracy” (Richardson and Jordan 1979). Further, casual observations and more systematic analyses indicate
that legislative lobbying and contacts between groups and MPs have important political consequences. Still, few
studies have mapped this area and almost none have compared group–legislator relations across different
countries (for an exception see Rommetvedt et al. 2012). While some attention has been devoted to the European
Parliament, studies of patterns of group activity and influence vis-à-vis domestic legislatures are also rare. At best,
tactics and strategies aimed at parliament or measures of parliamentary access have been included in broader
surveys of group activity (Binderkrantz 2005; Kriesi et al. 2007). And, outside the US and Western Europe it is
difficult to find any recent studies of group–legislator relations.
A more explicit focus on the interaction between groups and legislators would be well suited to enhance our
knowledge of the policy process in modern democracies. Also, more sophisticated theorization and study of
differences in patterns of strategies, access, and influence over time and across countries would be helpful. Over
time, speculations primarily centre on the relative power of parliament as a determinant of group lobbying, while
more careful theorization could include the effects of a move from cleavage-centred to more media- and issue-
oriented politics (Binderkrantz 2003; Green-Pedersen 2007; Rommetvedt et al. 2012). Across countries, existing
studies typically refer to rather crude distinctions based on overall characterizations of countries as corporatist,
pluralist, and statist. Others argue that cross-national differences may also exist on a more subtle level in terms of
different lobbying styles. Lobbying in the US is, for example, more direct and aggressive than in the EU where
lobbyists take a more subtle and consensus-oriented approach (Woll, 2006: 461). Perhaps not surprisingly, the
empirical evidence is mixed and often contradicts expectations (Eising 2007b; Kriesi et al. 2007; Bernhagen and
Mitchell 2009; Beyers and Kerremans 2012).
Country-specific factors and institutional set-ups are likely to be important both for the role legislatures play in
overall group strategies, for the type of groups that approach legislatures and for their extent of influence
(Mahoney and Baumgartner 2008). The strength of parliament vis-à-vis the executive obviously affects the
emphasis groups give to lobbying parliament not only over time but also across countries (Rommetvedt et al.
2012). This is one of the main reasons that Congress has always been central for US interest groups and scholars.
Parliamentary strength also varies across different parliamentary functions as some legislatures are particularly
important with regard to agenda-setting, while others are more powerful in affecting the fate and shape of (p. 536)
legislation (Mattson and Strøm 1995). This may affect not only the general emphasis on parliament among interest
groups, but also the type of groups that find the parliamentary arena attractive. While some groups are mainly
interested in affecting legislation and regulations, others are more focused on general agenda-setting (Binderkrantz
et al. 2014). As illustrated by this example a closer integration of interest-group studies with the literature on
legislatures will stimulate future scholarship.
25.4.2 Moving Closer to Pinpointing Influence
Perhaps the most influential movement in current interest-group scholarship is the attempt to tackle empirically the
age-old issue of interest-group influence. This is also an area where considerable progress may be made by
devoting more attention to conceptual as well as methodological issues. Leech (2010, 534) has described the
search for a definitive statement about the power of lobbyists as the Holy Grail of interest group studies: “All seek
it, but are forever being led astray.” Recent research has adopted two main roads in search of the grail of
influence. First, and as discussed above, scholars have focused on interim measures of group success such as
accessing political arenas or placing an issue on the political agenda. Second, studies have linked group positions
to policy outcomes (Baumgartner et al. 2009; Mahoney 2009). What is particularly important in these studies is that
they move beyond single case studies and thus arrive at more generalizable conclusions.
Baumgartner and colleagues (2009) have conducted a groundbreaking study, in which they analysed 98 cases
and related the positions of groups involved to the outcome. An important lesson from this study is that in many
cases defenders of the status quo won, as no political changes were enacted. Therefore, choosing cases based
Page 7 of 13
on, for example, new legislation does not accurately capture all issues that groups are working to affect. Another
important finding is that resources are not instrumental in determining outcomes. Mahoney (2009) adopted a similar
approach in a comparison of lobbying success in the United States and the European Union and found clear
differences between the two political systems. McKay (2011, 13) has re-analysed data from Heinz et al.’s (1993)
study of US lobbyists by relating data from the original interviews with a measure of whether the policy outcome
favoured the lobbyist. Her analysis demonstrates that organizational wealth has little effect on policy success, but
how the money is spent can affect the ability of groups to get what they want
While considerable progress has been made, clearly there are still obstacles to be dealt with. In particular—and as
acknowledged in these studies by using the term “lobbying success” rather than influence—linking group goals to
policy outcomes does not demonstrate that the outcome would have been different in the absence of any group
action. Future research should therefore focus more directly on establishing the causal link between interest-group
activities and success with affecting politics (Dür 2007). This may be combined with attention to the many different
goals that groups have in approaching legislatures (Pedersen 2013). Groups may not always be interested in
policy (p. 537) outcomes, but rather seek to place issues on the agenda or to communicate to members that they
are active advocates of their causes (Leech 2010; Lowery 2007). Understanding the political effects of interest
groups also necessitates a focus on the relations between groups and parties. In many legislatures, political parties
rather than individual MPs are thus the most important constituent units (Saalfeld 1999, 44–46).
25.4.3 Linkages Between Groups and Legislators
Recent research shares common ground with the classic pressure-group perspective in viewing groups as
external actors seeking influence through lobbying legislators. In this “influence production process” groups
mobilize for action and adopt a repertoire of tactics seeking to obtain political influence (Lowery and Gray 2004).
While this perspective is clearly instrumental in capturing much of what goes on in group–legislator relations, a
more organizationally inspired approach may shed further light on the complex linkages between interest groups,
political parties, and individual legislators.
First, interest groups and parties represent different channels for advancing the views and interests of societal
groups and are thus in a relationship of simultaneous competition and cooperation (Heaney 2010). The interests
represented by the two organizational forms often overlap. Historically, membership of, for example, trade unions
typically coincided with membership of Social Democratic parties and although such patterns have been
dissolving, membership overlap still exists (Howell 2001). For example, a study of US convention delegates has
documented a wide network of group relations among them (Heaney, Masket, Miller, and Strolovitch 2011). Similar
networks obviously exist for legislators, many of whom are members of interest groups. Second, interest groups
may be directly involved in internal party politics, and interest groups have been found to affect which candidates
political parties nominate for office (Saalfeld 1999, 46–9). In effect, MPs may see themselves as representatives of
groups or at least view groups as important parts of their constituency.
Third, relations between interest groups, legislators, and parties clearly extend beyond interaction with regard to
specific political issues (Rasmussen and Lindeboom 2013). Interest groups are called upon for input to party
programs and position papers, and groups and legislators engage in common strategies directed at the media, for
example. Elections are particularly decisive events in democracies. Here groups can seek influence on who is
elected to parliament (Allern and Saglie 2008). This may be restricted to financial campaign contributions, but in
many instances groups are more directly involved in supporting parties with volunteer labour, for example. While
such engagement was in previous decades a natural activity for many major interest groups, it has come under
pressure as both parties and groups risk alienating supporters if they are seen to be too involved. Instead, some
groups have resorted to “below-the-radar campaigns” (Russel et al. 2008), but the extent is largely unknown. Also,
we know little about how electioneering affects the relationships between groups and legislators once the election
is over.
(p. 538) In conclusion, the time is ripe for renewed scholarly attention to the interactions between groups and
legislators. The field has developed largely in response to developments in the political role of groups. Scholarship
in the US and Europe may be rather different, but the last decade has seen a remarkable shift in attention toward
similar issues and also, to some extent, a more common theoretical grounding. While our insight into the general
political role and influence of groups has advanced, there is still much ground to cover to understand the relations
Page 8 of 13
between interest groups and parliament.
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Anne Skorkjær Binderkrantz

Anne Skorkjær Binderkrantz is Professor of Political Science at Aarhus University.
Page 13 of 13
Legislatures and Foreign Policy

Tapio Raunio
Institutions
2014
This chapter examines the many different ways that parliaments influence foreign policy. Citing the US Congress as
an example, it challenges the claim about weak parliaments and explains why legislatures nowadays are more
involved in foreign affairs than ever before. It then considers how European parliaments have responded to the
challenge brought about by regional integration. In particular, it looks at the increasing external constraints faced
by the European Union and the concerns about the “deparliamentarization” of European governance. It also
discusses how Congress and other legislatures can influence foreign affairs and international bargaining by
highlighting two major policy questions: war powers and international political economy. The article concludes by
suggesting avenues for future research.
Keywords: parliaments, foreign policy, US Congress, legislatures, foreign affairs, deparliamentarization, European Union, international bargaining,
war powers, political economy
26.1 Introduction
IT is customary to argue that foreign policy is very much dominated by the executive, with parliaments wielding
marginal or at best limited influence. According to this accepted wisdom, parliamentary democracy functions less
well in foreign policy than in domestic policy. Decision-making in foreign policy is characterized by limited
openness and secrecy is often presented as integral to the protection of the national interest. As the efficient
conduct of foreign policy, especially regarding use of force, also requires flexibility and fast reactive capacity,
parliamentary involvement may cause unnecessary delays that obstruct the achievement of important foreign-
policy goals. International issues are also significantly less relevant for voters, and this further reduces the
incentives for parliamentary engagement. Foreign policy is hence determined by the political and bureaucratic elite
and does not engage the legislators and much less the general public. Foreign policy also often requires national
unity and demands that the major political parties at least try to build consensus on these issues. These notions
apply particularly to decisions with military implications: “as security policy is taken to require particularly rapid
decision-making and, at times, a high degree of secrecy, it is regarded as the exclusive domain of the executive
and thus lying outside the sphere of parliamentary control.” (Peters et al. 2010, 3)
This line of thinking is nothing new, and can be traced back to political philosophers such as Locke (1960) or de
Tocqueville (1990). But what accounts for this low level of parliamentary influence? There are essentially two
interconnected explanations: either legislatures voluntarily acquiesce to such government-driven policy-making or
they simply fail to control the government in the field of external relations. According to the first perspective,
parliaments delegate policy-making to the executive branch which represents the country in international
negotiations. The effective formulation and defense (p. 544) of national interest requires that the executive is
given sufficient flexibility and room for manoeuvre, with parliamentary participation thus limited to setting ex ante
Page 1 of 19
constraints to government action. Ex post control is in turn politically difficult, as rejecting international unilateral
agreements reached by governments can be exceedingly costly, potentially damaging the reputation of the
country and its success in future negotiations. Delegation is also attractive for parliamentarians as foreign relations
are not that important for re-election. There are thus more costs than benefits for legislators in subjecting the
government to tight scrutiny. The second perspective, on the other hand, argues that the structural two-level
games logic of international bargaining shields governments from parliamentary control. The executive branch
uses international institutions to insulate themselves from parliaments and other domestic actors, and to push
through or legitimize even unpopular internal reforms. And beyond such possible strategic considerations, global
or regional governance is by its very nature inter-governmental, thus empowering governments at the expense of
legislatures. But importantly, the two-level game scenario also emphasizes that governments are often constrained
by domestic actors such as legislatures that in the end can unilaterally veto the agreements, and that the
executive can use this legislative constraint as a bargaining advantage (Putnam 1988; Evans et al. 1993;
Moravcsik 1994; Wolf 1999; Pahre 2006)
This chapter provides a critical re-evaluation of suchargument, providing evidence that parliaments are definitely
not—and have hardly ever been—marginalized in foreign policy. Quite the opposite, legislatures have multiple
ways to influence external relations, with particularly European parliaments becoming more assertive vis-à-vis their
governments. Focusing mainly on the US Congress, the next section revisits the claim about weak parliaments, and
explains why legislatures are more involved in foreign affairs than ever before. Building on that Congressional
literature, the third section analyses how European parliaments have coped with the challenge caused by regional
integration. While parliaments throughout the world are subject to increasing external constraints through political
and particularly economic globalization, it is inside the European Union (EU) that such constraints are most strongly
felt, with the gradual but consistent empowerment of the EU triggering concerns about the “deparliamentarization”
of European governance. The final section concludes by suggesting avenues for future research.
26.2 The Myth of Weak Parliaments
The accepted wisdom about parliaments not really mattering in foreign affairs probably explains in part why
scholars have paid relatively little attention to this interesting subfield of legislative studies. In Europe it has been
commonly understood or almost taken for granted that the logic of parliamentarism further marginalizes
legislatures, with foreign policy viewed as an issue area where parliaments exercise most delegation to the
executive. However, recent work on parliamentary scrutiny of EU affairs has (p. 545) increasingly challenged
such notions of executive drift, and as argued in the last section of this chapter, there is a need to investigate
whether domestic legislatures also manage to influence government activities on other foreign policy questions.
The situation is very different in the United States, where the constitutional system with its checks and balances
has stimulated a wealth of research on the relationship between the president and the Congress in foreign policy.
This research basically consists of two strands of literature. On the one hand, there is an abundance of
publications on the rivalry between Congress and the president, driven to a large extent by the argument about
“two presidencies,” initially proposed by Wildavsky (1966), with the president allegedly enjoying considerably
more discretion in foreign affairs than in domestic matters.1 Much of this research has focused on various
Congressional activities, mainly roll-call voting, to analyse partisan coalitions and the positions of individual
legislators in a variety of foreign policy issues. On the other hand, primarily international relations scholars, or more
precisely those specializing in international political economy, have extrapolated linkages between domestic
politics and international negotiations, thus also focusing on the role of parliaments in influencing the outcomes of
such global or regional bargaining rounds in trade and security policies.
According to this body of research, Congress seldom questioned executive leadership in foreign policy from the
end of the Second World War until the 1960s. But by all accounts, the role of Congress underwent a dramatic
change during the Vietnam War in the 1960s and 1970s. From then on, the interventions of Congress have become
more detailed and substantive. Previous discretion to the president was replaced by a more assertive Congress,
willing to question and reject executive decisions in foreign economic and security policies. Partisan consensus, or
so-called bipartisanship, gave way to ideological disputes between Democrats and Republicans, and also an
increasing number of legislators became active in foreign policy questions. In the 1970s the Senate cut off all funds
for US military operations in Cambodia, and Congress succeeded in cutting off aid to South Vietnam. With the 1973
Page 2 of 19
War Powers Resolution over a presidential veto, Congress asserted its intention to check any future presidential
decisions concerning use of force (see Section 26.2.1). Congress also made significant cuts to the defense
budget. In the 1980s Congress took so many decisions contradicting the Reagan administration that arguably US
policy toward Central America was effectively made by the legislature, not the president. During the 1990s, Clinton
had to read just his policies towards Haiti, Bosnia, and Somalia in order to avoid more extensive interference from
Congress.
Indeed, the original drafters of the US constitution had deliberately given Congress substantial powers in foreign
relations, concerning both the declaration of war and trade (Schlesinger 1989). As foreign policy is based less on
legislation than domestic policy, the toolkit of Congress with regard to foreign policy contains a broad array of
instruments. In addition to voting on budgetary items and ratifying international agreements, members of Congress
can set ex ante limits to presidential action, change the rules of delegation in the direction of less executive
discretion, or use public posturing and grandstanding to influence the nation’s foreign policy. For example,
Congress (p. 546) has introduced stricter reporting requirements or procedures that force the president to
consult Congress prior to decision-making or during international economic negotiations and military conflicts.
Perhaps not very surprisingly, Congressional influence is on average stronger under divided government.2
Let us examine more closely the way Congress and other legislatures can influence foreign affairs and
international bargaining by turning to two major policy questions—war powers and international political economy.
26.2.1 War Powers
Decisions about use of force abroad, for short war powers, are central to understanding the development of
parliaments. The authorization of conscription for armies, raising funds for military expenditure, and subsidies to
foreign powers were at the heart of early modern parliamentarianism ever since the English nobility reached a
constitutional settlement in the Glorious Revolution of 1688. Foreign policy was also regularly debated in the British
parliament, with MPs questioning the executive about international issues and demanding explanations for
proposed or undertaken courses of action (Black 2004). Beyond such historical legacies, parliamentary
participation rights regarding war can also be defended from a more normative point of view. As few decisions
potentially have a more severe impact on the lives of citizens than decisions regarding military missions, it can be
argued that no meaningful notion of democracy could possibly exempt security policy from parliamentary control.
Here the question is not necessarily about the actual influence of the parliament—what matters perhaps more is
that the legislature provides a forum for debate where the security policy decisions are justified and explained
(Lord 2011).
However, there is no denying the challenges that legislatures face in wielding influence over security policy,
particularly decisions relating to military operations (Born and Hänggi 2004). Effective control must primarily be
exerted ex ante, with parliaments themselves also recognizing that the executive needs a certain level of
manoeuvre for the successful conduct of military missions. As summarized by Peters and Wagner (2011, 178):
Proponents and critics of parliamentary control do not dispute that parliamentary involvement slows down
decision-making over military missions and increases public ex ante scrutiny to the effect that, if
conflicting, the interests of a reluctant public are more likely to trump security considerations. The main
disagreement concerns the desirability of this effect with critics having more confidence in the executive’s
capacity to respond adequately to international pressures and requirements and proponents being more
alarmed about possibilities of misjudgement and even abuse of executive freedom.
Indeed, in the US the discretion accorded to the president in security policy was extended during and after the
Second World War, in part because Congress itself saw (p. 547) that its interventions had worked against an
effective security policy in the inter-war period.3 In 1950 President Truman simply informed Congress of his
decision to enter the Korean War. Congress was also marginalized during the Cuban Missile Crisis of 1962 and in
sending troops to Vietnam. But during the Vietnam War the resurgence of Congress culminated in the War Powers
Resolution. Passed in 1973 against a presidential veto, the resolution was intended to curb and constrain
president’s right to use force abroad. It would make sure that the executive consulted Congress and also got its
approval during military operations. According to the resolution the president can send armed forces into action
abroad only by authorization of Congress or in the case of a national emergency. The president is required to
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notify Congress within 48 thours of committing armed forces to military action; the resolution also forbids armed
forces from remaining for more than 60 days, with a further 30-day withdrawal period, without authorization for the
use of military force or a declaration of war by Congress. No president has acknowledged the constitutionality of
the resolution, and several presidents have disregarded it. President Reagan did so in 1981 when sending the
military to El Salvador; likewise President Clinton in 1999 during the bombing of Kosovo and President Obama in
2011 when he did not seek Congressional approval for the attack on Libya, arguing that the resolution did not
apply to that action.
The War Powers Resolution is also a good example of the limitations of parliamentary involvement. Many voices
inside Congress have argued that the resolution is too ambitious and goes too far—some issues are simply just
better left to the executive, and the president needs a certain level of discretion for the efficient conduct of military
operations. Beyond the specificities of the resolution, Congressional involvement can also be hampered by
procedural complexity, especially as military decisions often require fast reactions to suddenly changing
circumstances. But Congress and other parliaments can, if necessary, use special procedures that facilitate
confidentiality and faster processing of issues (Howell and Pevehouse 2007; Stevenson 2007).
Comparing the war powers of 49 legislatures between 1989 and 2004, Peters and Wagner (2011; 2014) show that
parliamentary veto power over military deployments is relatively widespread, albeit still restricted to a minority of
countries in their study. According to Peters and Wagner there is considerable variation between countries,
concerning whether they allow the legislature to veto troop deployments and regarding the kinds of operations to
which parliamentary control applies and the procedures through which this control is exercised. A parliamentary
veto right over troop deployments is associated less with general aspects of the political system (e.g. the
distinction between presidential and parliamentary systems) and more with the specific culture and past
experiences of a country, together with the level of threat it faces. Parliamentary veto is found almost exclusively
in countries without connections to the British constitutional tradition. Second, past experiences of lost wars with
heavy casualties appear to contribute to the institutionalization of parliamentary veto rights over warfare. The best
examples are Japan or Germany, where the experiences of the Second World War produced strong concerns
about misuse of executive freedom and extensive parliamentary involvement in military issues. Furthermore, the
external security environment plays a (p. 548) role, with higher levels of threat associated with lesser
parliamentary powers over troop deployments.
Joint military missions, coordinated primarily by North Atlantic Treaty Organization (NATO), the United Nations, and
the EU, or collective defense clauses create further problems for parliamentary involvement (Born and Hänggi.
2004; Peters and Wagner 2011; 2014). In the context of accession to NATO and the EU, many Central and Eastern
European states relaxed their parliamentary restrictions and abolished their parliamentary provisos for NATO and
EU operations:
Especially NATO membership apparently amplified the trade-off between creating legitimacy through
procedures of ex ante parliamentary control and gaining efficiency through lean, executive-centred
decision-making. From a NATO perspective, having some member state governments tied to domestic
parliamentary veto power must seem highly unattractive. Arriving at unanimous decisions in the North
Atlantic Council is difficult already, especially after NATO enlargement. The prospect of having domestic
parliaments veto a deployment even after a decision had been arrived at in the North Atlantic Council
therefore created some unease on the NATO level. NATO’s efforts to limit national parliaments’ interference
in decision-making focused on the states in the accession process and to which conditionality therefore
applied.
(Peters and Wagner 2011, 186)
It was precisely this collective action aspect which made it so surprising when the Turkish Grand National Assembly
refused to ratify the government’s decision in March 2003 to permit the United States to use Turkey as an air base
for its operations in Iraq (Kesgin and Kaarbo 2010).
A number of “democratic peace” school studies have focused on the role of the legislature as a potential
constraint in conflict situations—that is, whether there is a “parliamentary peace” effect at work, with parliamentary
engagement reducing the likelihood of the use of force. These analyses have produced mixed findings. According
to Elman (2000, 98), who compared different types of regimes, single-party governments with strong majorities are
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not constrained by parliament in conflicts:
Despite the fact that the executive is chosen by the legislature and is dependent on its confidence, there
are no institutional veto points to thwart the...[executive]. The executive can count on legislative approval
for its foreign policy positions largely because voting against the government implies handing it over to the
opposition.
Auerswald (1999) also argued that single-party majority governments are more likely than coalition cabinets to use
force. Leblang and Chan (2003) in turn suggested that countries with proportional representation electoral systems
are less likely to be involved in war. Reiter and Tillman (2002) showed that countries with stronger parliamentary
powers in treaty ratification are less likely to initiate military conflicts. Studies that go beyond comparisons of
regime and coalition types enrich the picture through incorporating the level or degree of parliamentary
involvement into the equation. (p. 549) Dieterich et al. (2009; 2010) examined the parliamentary war powers of
EU member states in relation to countries’ degree of participation in the Iraq War that started in 2003, finding that
countries that were involved militarily had “basic” or “deficient” parliamentary war powers, while countries with
“comprehensive” war powers made no contribution beyond logistical support. Also analysing the degrees of
participation in the Iraq War among 30-countries, Mello (2012, 447) stresses that parliamentary veto rights alone
are not a sufficient constraint, emphasizing instead the interaction between constitutional rules and party politics:
“under conditions of broad executive majorities or partisan convergence mandatory parliamentary approval is
unlikely to amount to a legislative veto point.”
To conclude, it is certainly true that both the legislative and the executive branches of the government have good
reasons to avoid or limit parliamentary involvement in security policy. Electoral considerations can favour
executive discretion. While legislators may vote against trade agreements that have negative distributional
consequences for their constituencies (see Section 26.2.2), attacking the executive on military issues is more risky
business and can even result in deputies losing their seats. Parliamentarians may also believe that public criticism
of the government might compromise or jeopardize national security. Hence blame avoidance can seem like a
persuasive tactic, at least during the military operations.
The executive, on the other hand, may not always prefer maximal discretion. Governments can ask for ex ante
parliamentary approval either because of its positive impact on military morale or in order to avoid domestic
opposition in the course of the conflict. As argued by Lindsay (1993, 613):
Presidents are especially likely to anticipate the mood in Congress on foreign policy, because public
defeats threaten to weaken their credibility on the world scene. As Secretary of State James Baker
explained President Bush’s reluctance to request congressional authorization for Operation Desert Storm:
‘The President has not wanted to ask for such a resolution unless the leadership of the Congress could
assure him that such a resolution would be forthcoming, because your hand would be weakened if it were
not forthcoming.’
But obviously parliamentary ex ante acceptance of use of force abroad does not automatically produce favourable
domestic conditions for warfare. In the UK, the Iraq War that began in 2003 divided public opinion despite cross-
party support in the House of Commons for the government’s action.4
26.2.2 Political Economy
Parliamentary involvement in international, regional, or global trade at least partly follows a different logic,
concerning both the rules of parliamentary engagement and the nature of domestic party-political competition.
Overall, foreign trade has much more direct economic distributional consequences, producing winners and losers
inside (p. 550) individual countries. As a result, legislative bargaining and voting about trade is driven
considerably more by constituency interests.
Analyses of Congressional voting clearly confirm the explanatory power of political economy theories. Overall
these results are in line with the Stolper-Samuelson theorem’s predictions about the economic implications of such
policies: constituencies that stand to gain from trade and aid are more supportive of international economic
engagement. Legislative support in Congress and other select parliaments for foreign economic aid, trade, and
funds for international financial institutions such as the International Monetary Fund (IMF) is more likely when a
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legislator comes from a district that is well endowed with a relatively high skilled constituency. Left-leaning
legislators are more likely to favour foreign aid and funding of international financial institutions (e.g. Bailey 2001;
Hiscox 2002a, 2002b; Broz 2005, 2008, 2011; Broz and Hawes 2006; Milner and Tingley 2011, 2012).
Constitutionally, legislatures including Congress, have enjoyed stronger rights in international political economy
than in security policy, especially through their right to approve and reject international treaties and agreements.
Consistent with insights from veto-player literature and the logic of two-level games referred to in the introductory
section of this chapter, international cooperation among governments is constrained by domestic politics, such as
interest groups, splits within governing parties, or parliament. Hence granting parliaments veto powers makes
international bargaining more difficult—and can certainly be expected to work against major reforms to the rules of
global or regional cooperation. Status quo bias thus increases when the role of the legislature and other domestic
veto-players is more institutionalized. However, the cabinet can naturally also use such domestic constraints as a
bargaining chip, for example, by making clear what kinds of decisions are acceptable to the legislature which must
ratify the agreements. This latter feature is known as the “Schelling Conjecture” (Schelling 1960), according to
which an executive whose hands are tied by a domestic ratification constraint such as a parliamentary veto can
negotiate more favourable outcomes than an unconstrained executive (Putnam 1988; Evans et al. 1993; Milner
1997; Pahre 2006; Mansfield and Milner 2012).
However, ex ante legislative engagement can also increase the credibility of the negotiators and have a positive
impact on the eventual implementation of the pacts:
As long as legislatures have the capacity to impede implementation of international agreements, closing
them out of the initial stages of international cooperation and attempting to prevent their preferences from
influencing the course of negotiations has the potential to cause severe commitment dilemmas. Insulated
executives are not, in the final analysis, strong executives, because they find it difficult to implement
international agreements. In contrast, bringing legislators into the cooperation process in a formalized,
regular manner allows states to bargain more effectively and to assure others that agreements signed at
the international table will in fact be put in place at the domestic level.
(Martin 2000, 198)
(p. 551) Focusing on Congressional support for economic sanctions, executive agreements, and food aid, and
the role of national parliaments in the EU, Martin (2000) showed in her important work that tighter legislative
constraints on the executive result in improved implementation records and can improve the bargaining position
and credibility of the executive. Martin also illustrated how Congress utilizes a variety of tools to influence
American foreign economic relations, and how Congressional influence or assertiveness is greater under divided
government.5
But despite the more obvious constituency linkages and stronger constitutional rights, trade also shows how
parliaments need to strike a balance between executive discretion and active control. For example, the Trade Act
of 1974 made the United States Trade Representative more directly accountable to Congress, and that institution is
considered to be highly sensitive to Congressional opinions. That same Act also established the practice of having
legislators from both chambers of Congress directly present in trade talks alongside members of the executive
branch. In 1988 the Congress in turn approved the Omnibus Trade and Competitiveness Act which extended the
negotiating authority of the president, and this enabled the executive to more effectively negotiate major deals
such as the North American Free Trade Association (NAFTA) and the Uruguay round of General Agreement on
Tariffs and Trade (GATT).
26.2.3 Toward Stronger Parliamentary Engagement?
There are also good reasons to expect that parliamentary influence, and the general interest shown by legislators
toward non-domestic matters, will increase in the future. Already in the late 1970s Manning (1977) paid attention to
the rise of issues falling somewhere between pure foreign and domestic policy—or what he referred to as
“intermestic” issues. Clearly the world has become much more interdependent over the past few decades,
particularly since the end of the Cold War. How to manage global and regional trade, energy and environmental
policies, and immigration are now regularly on the political agendas of democratic countries throughout the world,
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and such policies also have more explicit distributional consequences for constituencies than “traditional” foreign
policy issues. International commitments are probably more expensive than before, and when considering the
financial uncertainty and budget deficits that characterize most democratic countries, legislatures have stronger
economic incentives to curb executive discretion in foreign policy.
Moreover, recent studies from the United States and Europe also show that foreign policy matters in terms of
elections and vote choice. There is thus an “electoral connection” at work in foreign affairs—citizens’ preferences
about foreign policy have shaped the policies pursued by political leaders in the United States, and there is also
evidence that foreign affairs questions have impacted on the voting behaviour of the electorate (Aldrich et al.
2006) And even in the post-9/11 world, there appears to be more readiness to debate policy alternatives and to
question the policies of governments in international affairs. Indeed, many recent studies of US foreign policy have
noted that Congressional (p. 552) assertiveness in foreign policy increased after the Cold War, with more varied
foreign policy issues on the legislative agenda—but it is less clear how this has affected either the level of
bipartisanship or relations between Congress and the president (Wittkopf and McCormick 1998; Kupchan and
Trubowitz 2007; Chaudoin et al. 2010). Individual members of Congress have also become more active and vocal
in foreign affairs, using a variety of parliamentary instruments to shape US foreign policy, particularly when they
disagree with the president about foreign affairs issues (Carter and Scott 2004).
However, such increasing levels of parliamentary engagement can, at least in certain countries, be counteracted
by the fight against terrorism—and more broadly by what is termed in international relations literature
“securitization” which focuses on how policy questions are transformed by actors in security matters. After all, as
the research reviewed in this section indicates, the executive is normally allowed more discretion in security and
military policy than in foreign economic policy, with such delegation and overall parliamentary support particularly
pronounced during military conflicts (Howell and Rogowski 2013). There is certainly evidence of the salience of
“homeland security” issues in Congress (Middlemass and Grose 2007). Interestingly, Milner and Tingley (2012)
show how presidents can benefit from framing foreign policy issues as security or military matters. The president
may thus imply that the issue at hand transcends party-political boundaries and affects the entire country. For
example, instruments such as military aid and deployments and bilateral aid allow the president greater freedom
from Congressional constraints than foreign economic policy issues. Hence the president can be tempted to use
military or security instruments since other types of foreign policy questions are subject to greater legislative
constraints. Milner and Tingley show that in their large sample of foreign affairs votes, the influence of the president
is greater on votes with an explicit national security dimension (for example, the president’s influence is more
pronounced in votes on military aid compared with votes on development aid). Presidential influence is also
stronger in those areas of the federal budget that deal with defense and weaker when it comes to foreign policy
areas with less immediate national security connections. However, comparing the impact of the “war on terror” on
the legislative–executive relationship in eight countries, the volume edited by Owens and Pelizzo (2009) suggests
that parliaments are not necessarily weakened during such crisis, with only three cases—the United States, Great
Britain and Russia—providing evidence of executive empowerment.
To conclude, while the research reviewed in this section may paint a rather positive picture about parliamentary
influence on foreign policy, it is nonetheless important to recognize certain real-world constraints. Essentially none
of the studies claim that legislators in the US or elsewhere would enjoy the same level of information about foreign
affairs than members of the executive branch. Hence there is a persistent problem of informational asymmetry, and
just as in domestic policy, many of the procedural innovations or reforms introduced by parliaments have been
designed to address such asymmetries. The executive also has considerably more resources to invest in foreign
affairs, and in the end it is always the government that represents the country in international negotiations. The
logic of international bargaining thus sees to it that the parliament (p. 553) must really seek to influence
government ex ante, but also that the executive itself has an incentive to seek parliamentary approval for its
positions, particularly when the legislature has the power to reject the outcome of global or regional agreements.
These cautionary notions also apply to the role of national parliaments in the EU, a topic we shall address in the
next section.
26.3 National Legislatures and the European Union
When examining parliamentary responses to European integration, it is interesting to observe the similarities
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between the domestic legislatures of EU member states and the US Congress. This applies both to the considerable
challenges the parliaments face in attempting to influence policies, and to the constitutional rights and procedural
innovations that facilitate such influence. In light of these similarities it is noticeable and indeed frustrating how little
of the research reviewed in this section has been informed by insights from Congressional studies.
European countries have joined the EU in order to benefit from regional integration. But while member states can
certainly benefit from EU membership economically and politically, Europe also acts as a significant constraint on
national democracy. However, there is no scholarly consensus about the extent to which the EU actually impacts
on the work of domestic legislatures. It is nonetheless generally agreed that European integration and the
consistent empowerment of the EU have presented a major challenge to national parliaments. According to the so-
called “deparliamentarization” thesis, the development of European integration has led to the erosion of
parliamentary control over the executive branch. The argument about deparliamentarization is based on
constitutional rules and on the political dynamics of the EU policy process (Raunio and Hix 2000).
The EU member states have transferred policy-making powers to the European level in a broad and significant
range of questions, and as a result, parliaments have directly lost influence. With the partial exception of Treaty
amendments and other issues decided by unanimity, in EU affairs the influence of national legislatures is mainly
limited to scrutinizing the Commission’s initiatives and to influencing the government that represents the country at
the European level. The increased use of qualified majority voting in the Council (which means that individual
governments can find themselves in the losing minority), and the often complicated bargaining in the Council and
the European Council in turn, make it difficult for national parliaments to force governments to make detailed ex
ante commitments before taking decisions at the European level. But the main point is that national governments
represent their countries in EU negotiations and hence this results in informational asymmetries between the
executive branch and the legislature. Considering the dominance of this deparliamentarization (p. 554) thesis in
scholarly work and political debate, it is not surprising that national parliaments are often labeled as the main
“losers” or “victims” of European integration (Goetz and Meyer-Sahling 2008; Raunio 2009).
However, constitutionally, parliaments enjoy strong participation rights in EU governance. National constitutions
typically give domestic legislatures certain rights (such as to receive information from the government on EU
affairs) and set them specific responsibilities (such as transposing EU laws or approving Treaty amendments), with
the constitutions often containing rules about how EU matters are processed by parliaments. Beyond such rules
parliaments are free to decide how and whether to become involved in EU politics. EU Treaties also give national
parliaments certain rights (such as to receive EU documents), and allocate them certain specific duties that mainly
deal with the division of competencies between the EU and its member states (Cygan 2013). The Lisbon Treaty
introduced the “early-warning mechanism,” with the national legislatures assigned the right to monitor whether
initiatives for EU laws comply with the principle of subsidiarity. There is broad scholarly consensus that the early-
warning mechanism is unlikely to have much significance. It was mainly introduced in response to legitimacy
concerns, and it is likely that its impact will remain modest (e.g., Rittberger 2005, 189–92; Kiiver 2012).
The role of national legislatures in the EU first received serious political and academic attention in the mid-1990s in
connection with debates on how to cure the EU’s democratic deficit (Norton 1995; Raunio 1999). Academic interest
in the topic drew further inspiration from the first comparative projects that showed domestic legislatures to be
largely ineffective or uninterested in controlling their governments in EU matters (Laursen and Pappas 1995; Norton
1995; Smith 1996). Since then the role of national parliaments has featured quite prominently on the research
agenda of parliamentary and EU scholars, with several comparative research projects completed since the turn of
the millennium. Scholars have been particularly interested in comparing the effectiveness of alternative scrutiny
systems and in explaining the adoption of specific scrutiny models.6 There is also a small but growing body of
research on inter-parliamentary cooperation among national legislatures (and the European Parliament). (Goetz
and Meyer-Sahling 2008; Raunio 2009, 2011)
Thanks to this lively academic debate, we are now in a much better position to evaluate the ways in which national
legislatures are affected by and get involved in European integration. While national parliaments have certainly
been late adapters to integration, there is no doubt that they exercise tighter scrutiny of their governments over EU
matters than before. This is not surprising. After all, European integration has taken major steps forward since the
late 1980s, with the competence of the EU extending to basically all policy sectors. Domestic legislatures have
quite logically responded to this empowerment of the EU, mainly through upgrading the powers and resources of
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the European Affairs Committees (EAC) and involving specialized committees more regularly in EU affairs. Inter-
parliamentary networking in the Conference of Parliamentary Committees for Union Affairs of Parliaments of the
European Union (COSAC)7 and other forums has facilitated the sharing of “best practice,” with the individual
parliaments assessing (p. 555) the strengths and weaknesses of the scrutiny arrangements in other legislatures.
This learning of best practice applies particularly to those countries that joined the EU in 2004 and 2007. Indeed,
early evidence from these newer member states indicates that their parliaments have on average implemented
more comprehensive scrutiny mechanisms than the parliaments of the older EU countries (Szalay 2005; O’Brennan
and Raunio 2007; Karlas 2012; Winzen 2012, 2013).
Considering this exchange of ideas among the parliaments, it is not surprising that the same literature also points
toward gradual institutional convergence among the 27 parliaments. All national parliaments have an EAC, the main
function of which is to coordinate parliamentary scrutiny of the government in EU matters. But importantly, the
status of EACs appears to vary significantly between the member states. For example, while in the three Nordic EU
countries the EAC is a fairly prestigious committee, the opposite is largely the case in the Mediterranean countries.
Further research on EACs could explore the attractiveness of these European committees, for example, through
surveys among MPs or by analysing the committee careers of legislators. There is more diversity concerning the
involvement of specialized committees. The delegation of authority from the EAC to specialized committees has
been necessitated by the huge workload of the EACs, but is also motivated by the need to utilize the policy
expertise of the MPs. However, while in some legislatures (such as the Finnish Eduskunta, the German Bundestag,
the Estonian Riigikogu, and the Slovenian National Assembly)the role of the specialized committees has become
institutionalized, in around half of the parliaments they only become rather sporadically involved in EU matters.
When we examine the role of plenary, the research points again in the direction of substantial convergence.
Existing evidence, though very scarce, suggests that the role of the plenary tends to be rather limited in European
affairs. Indeed, the main difference between domestic and EU politics seems to concern the role of the plenary.
Domestic laws and other nationally salient issues are normally debated in the full chamber while it seems that
normal EU matters such as the Commission’s legislative initiatives are only seldom on the agenda of the plenary.
Most parliaments do, however, have debates about “high politics” EU issues such as Treaty reforms, multiannual
financial frameworks, European Council meetings, or the euro crisis and the associated bail-out measures (de
Wilde 2011; Wendler 2013; Maatsch 2014). This limited role of the plenary is probably explained by a combination
of institutional choices and the interests of political parties. The establishment of EACs reduces the use of plenary,
as the former coordinate parliamentary work in EU matters and are normally authorized to speak on behalf of the
whole parliament in these issues. While MPs may defend committee deliberations behind closed doors with the
need to further national interests and to allow confidential exchange of views between the national government
and the parliament, this mechanism clearly also serves the interests of the mainstream parties. Governing parties in
particular may want to monitor the government behind closed doors without public criticism that might damage the
reputation of the cabinet (Auel 2007).
Considering that most of the main opposition parties in the EU member states are on average no more coherent
over EU issues than governing parties or have similar (p. 556) preferences on integration, they are also unlikely
to demand more plenary debates about Europe. Besides, were the opposition to attack the government, the prime
minister might blame the opposition for undermining the success of the government in defending the “national
interest” in EU negotiations (Benz 2004, 881; Auel and Benz 2005, 379). Hence, probably the only parties that
would like to have debates about Europe are those that are more in tune with their electorate over Europe and
internally cohesive about integration. These parties are normally either populist parties or parties located at the
extremes of the left–right dimension that can, for example, use such debates to criticize the government for not
defending the national interests well enough in EU negotiations. Hence a plausible hypothesis for future research is
that plenary debates on Europe are more likely in countries with more Eurosceptical party systems or with more
polarized or differentiated party preferences about integration. In such member states, parties should have more to
win by having public debates about Europe, either because they can thus challenge the governing parties or they
can use the debates to send signals to their electorates (Auel and Raunio 2014)
In terms of institutional adaptation, domestic change has often been incremental and path-dependent, with the
implemented reforms in the older EU countries reflecting the domestic parliamentary cultures and “ways of doing
things.” Moreover, it appears that despite the gradual institutional convergence, the priorities or even basic goals
of the scrutiny systems differ between the legislatures. For example, the volume edited by Maurer and Wessels
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(2001) makes the distinction between parliaments that engage in more document-based, supportive, or consensual
processing of EU matters, while other legislatures emphasize the mandating of Brussels-bound cabinet members.
Considering these differences in the basic orientation of the scrutiny process, future research should be more
critical about how to measure the strength of scrutiny. The ability of the EAC to mandate ministers on behalf of the
whole parliament through setting the bargaining range or even issuing explicit voting instructions has so far been
used as the primary indicator of powerful scrutiny (access to information, the powers of the EAC, and the
involvement of specialized committees have been the other main indicators). This results from the influential
Danish system, where the EAC is famous for its ability to constrain ministers through issuing voting instructions.
However, this emphasis on mandating is not entirely unproblematic, and future studies should analyse the multiple
strategies—e.g., use of control instruments, reporting requirements, direct contacts with the European level—that
legislators and political parties employ to influence European affairs.
These measurement concerns are directly related to the validity of the “rankings” of the national scrutiny models.
The literature on explaining cross-national variation in the level of scrutiny of EU matters has produced somewhat
mixed findings, but it suggests that the variation is primarily explained by three factors: parliamentary strength
independent of integration, presence of Euroscepticism in the party system, and later accession to the Union
correlate with government subjected to tighter scrutiny in EU affairs (Pahre 1997; Bergman 1997, 2000; Raunio
2005; Saalfeld 2005; Karlas 2012; Winzen 2013). There is also a demand for research on actual behaviour within
the different (p. 557) institutional and party-political contexts. Only through in-depth empirical analyses can we
answer whether parliaments really influence government behaviour—and indeed, which EU matters receive
attention from MPs and why. There is evidence that, at least in some member states, the level of parliamentary
scrutiny is explained by the importance of co-decision legislation or the incentives of government and opposition
parties (De Ruiter 2013; Finke and Dannwolf 2013). Another potential way forward would be to compare
parliamentary scrutiny in two modes of EU governance, with the sample containing both supranational laws and
matters falling in the domain of various forms of inter-governmental coordination. Examples of the latter mode could
be coordination of national policies in the framework of EU security policy (Peters et al. 2008; Peters et al. 2010) or
the Open Method of Coordination (Duina and Raunio 2007).8
Despite this proliferation of research, we lack empirical studies about the extent to which national parliaments
have, in fact, been Europeanized—that is, how much and in what ways EU has impacted or constrains national
parliaments. The existing literature has almost exclusively focused on law production. The inspiration for this
research has been the often-repeated “80 percent” claim made in the late 1980s by the Commission President
Jacques Delors about the share of legislation that would flow from Brussels. Research has shown this share to be
much lower, even when including domestic laws that are in some way “inspired” by the EU—however, the impact
of the EU has increased over the years (Brouard et al. 2012). In the only study to adopt a more comprehensive
approach, Raunio and Wiberg (2010) examined the Europeanization of the Finnish Eduskunta with five indicators:
share of EU-related national laws, the use of control instruments (confidence votes and parliamentary questions) in
EU matters, and the share of committee, plenary, and party group meeting time spent on European matters. Raunio
and Wiberg showed how the impact of Europe varied inside the legislature, with parliamentary committees most
burdened by EU affairs. This finding probably resulted from the constitutional obligation in Finland of the committees
to report on EU matters. The extent to which EU matters are centralized to the EACs may thus be a key variable in
explaining how Europe impacts on domestic legislatures. In parliaments where EU matters are mainly isolated to the
EAC, the other committees should deal much more infrequently with EU questions.
But perhaps a more interesting point concerns the methodological challenges involved in distinguishing between
EU affairs and domestic issues. While certain questions—such as Treaty amendments, enlargements, or EU budget
—can be rather uncontestedly categorized as European matters, more typical are cases where EU and domestic
spheres have become increasingly intertwined. This applies particularly to policy-related questions (e.g.
agriculture, economy, environment, etc.), regardless of whether the matter is of European or national origin. Not
only does an increasing share of matters formally decided at the national level have a European dimension, but
also debates on EU laws or European-level processes can be dominated by domestic issues. This interesting
finding is also in line with multilevel governance theorizing according to which integrative Europe is characterized
by growing inter-connectedness of national and EU agendas. Here it is easy to draw a parallel with the
Congressional (p. 558) studies that paid attention to the rise of “intermestic” issues that fall somewhere between
the categories of domestic and foreign policies (Raunio and Wiberg 2010; Auel and Raunio 2014).
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The need for further research on Europeanization brings us to our final and highly important point: can parliaments
still be considered “losers” or “victims” of European integration? As has been discussed in this section, national
parliaments clearly subject their governments to tighter scrutiny in EU matters than before. Legislatures have
fought back and have in many ways become better at controlling governments in EU politics—and given the
increasing political weight of the EU, there is no reason to expect this trend not to continue. Domestic scrutiny can
also benefit the overall effectiveness of EU governance. Bergman (2000) and Martin (2000, 164–89) showed that
effective ex ante parliamentary involvement is correlated with better implementation rates of EU directives. This
point is important, for all too often active scrutiny by individual parliaments has been viewed as something evil
(particularly by those who favour deeper integration), slowing down or even blocking EU decision-making through
reducing the bargaining range of national governments (Sprungk 2013).
But as is the case with the Congress, there is no doubt that despite this increased assertiveness national
parliaments are structurally disadvantaged vis-à-vis their governments in EU governance. Future research should
approach this equation more from the perspective of individual legislators or political parties. That is, what are the
payoffs and costs—either in terms of re-election, policy influence, or career advancement—for legislators in
becoming involved in EU affairs? If the incentive structure works against active engagement in EU issues, then
studies reporting limited scrutiny of EU affairs or low levels of interest in European issues shown by MPs should not
necessarily be understood as parliamentary weakness (Møller Sousa 2008, 441). Interestingly, recent evidence
points in the direction of the EU becoming increasingly politicized and salient in domestic politics, with Europe as an
issue also affecting the performance of parties in national parliamentary elections (de Vries and Tillman 2011;
Hooghe and Marks 2012). Whether this translates into more effective parliamentary engagement in EU issues
remains to be seen, but at least Europe features more prominently in domestic politics than before.
26.4 Future Research Agenda
The literature reviewed in this chapter shows how the US Congress and European parliaments have several
avenues to influence foreign policy—from setting ex ante limits to governments to holding the ultimate veto power
in treaty ratification. By all accounts, the level of executive drift in foreign policy has decreased over the decades,
perhaps in part through the higher interdependence of domestic and foreign policy agendas. As foreign affairs
have clearer and more varied domestic distributional consequences, legislators probably have more incentives to
engage in foreign affairs.
(p. 559) However, that same body of research also offers consistent reminders of the difficulties legislators face
in trying to keep up with the executive that enjoys a vast informational advantage and represents the country
abroad. A further difficulty is posed by the multilevel governance nature of global or regional politics. According to
this framework, the modern global political architecture offers actors such as national parliaments multiple access
points to influence politics. But the main lesson of the multilevel governance school is a more negative one,
indicating that legislatures tend to be excluded from inter-governmental policy coordination and negotiations that
dominate decision-making in multilevel systems of government. Several scholars have argued—often without any
real empirical evidence—that multilevel governance involves the sharing of policy competencies by actors at
different levels, muddled lines of accountability, and the marginalization of representative bodies (e.g. Bache and
Flinders 2004; Benz and Papadopoulos 2006; Benz et al. 2007; Curtin et al. 2010; Bellamy 2011). Legislatures
have responded through the creation of transnational or regional parliamentary assemblies and more regular inter-
parliamentary cooperation, with European parliaments especially engaged in a variety of parliamentary networking
arrangements. It appears that the main function of this activity lies in exchange of information, but more research is
needed to establish the actual importance of the various forms of inter-parliamentary cooperation (Slaughter 2004,
104–30; Marschall 2005; Kraft-Kasack 2008; Šabič 2008; Crum and Fossum 2013).
Future research should also pay more attention to the interests of individual legislators to engage in foreign policy
issues. As noted above, members of the Congress have become more active in foreign affairs, using a variety of
parliamentary instruments to influence US foreign policy (Carter and Scott 2004). While it is customarily argued that
the incentive structure works against parliamentary activity in foreign policy, the developments examined in this
chapter—e.g. increasing globalization, consistent empowerment of the EU, and the blurring of lines between
domestic and foreign policy—certainly suggest that legislators should have good reasons to focus more on foreign
or EU affairs. For example, one could examine whether and what types of parliamentarians are more likely to ask
Page 11 of 19
questions, table or sponsor legislative motions, or hold speeches related to foreign policy questions (Burgin 1991;
Patten 2005; Martin 2013).
Finally, perhaps the most important lesson to be drawn from this chapter is the lack of comparative research. While
the US system with its constitutional checks and balances is quite different from most democracies, insights from
the voluminous literature on Congress should be utilized to conduct empirical comparative enquiries into the work
carried out on foreign affairs by legislatures in other parts of the world. For example, the Congressional research
on trade policy coalitions could be replicated in other countries. American scholars have also paid a great deal of
attention to the various ways in which Congress shapes US foreign relations, and it is worrying that no similar
research tradition exists in Europe. And as research in the US and Europe has been preoccupied with the
legislature–executive relationship, there is a need to investigate whether foreign policy also matters in terms of MPs
linking with the citizens, for example through constituency work and parliamentary debates. As the world has
become (p. 560) more interdependent, are parliamentary agendas also more influenced by such foreign or
“intermestic” issues—and if so, to what extent are there behaviour, coalitional, or procedural differences between
such issue categories?
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Notes:
(1) . Wildavsky’s original argument was based on empirical evidence from Congressional roll-call votes. Utilizing
Congressional Quarterly Almanac presidential box scores, he found that Congress supported presidential
proposals concerning foreign policy and national security more than presidential proposals concerning domestic
policy. Since then it has generally been assumed that the president receives more support from Congress in
foreign policy.
(2) . The literature on Congress and foreign policy is extensive. See, for example, Robinson (1967); Wilcox (1971);
Franck and Weisband (1979); Pastor (1980); Spanier and Nogee (1981); Mann (1990); McCormick and Wittkopf
(1990); Meernik (1993); Lindsay (1993; 1994a; 1994b); Hinckley (1994); Wittkopf and McCormick (1998); Henehan
(2000); Hersman (2000); Kelley (2005); and Howell and Pevehouse (2007).
(3) . In fact, in August 1941 President Roosevelt had barely managed to persuade Congress to extend the draft (by
a vote of 203 to 202). Overall, Roosevelt was, in the initial stages of the Second World War, repeatedly frustrated
by isolationist tendencies in Congress, which only disappeared after Japan had attacked Pearl Harbor. Indeed, a
standard argument in US foreign policy literature is that the president tends to be more internationalist, preferring
more extensive foreign engagement while legislators, representing geographically small constituencies, are more
parochial in their outlook.
(4) . After the controversial decision to send British forces to Iraq, the Labour government had indicated its
willingness to introduce a form of parliamentary veto over future troop deployments. Such reform, however, has so
far not taken place even though it had been included in the government’s proposals for wider constitutional reform
in 2008 (Peters and Wagner 2014).
(5) . Martin (2000, 201) also makes the interesting proposal for future research that the executive may try to evade
or manage to avoid legislative constrains in one-off situations, whereas parliamentary engagement will be more
institutionalized in stable and repeated forms of international cooperation. Certainly the stronger role of legislatures
in controlling international trade and the EU than in security policy (where no two conflicts are exactly alike)
suggests the real-life existence of such a behavioural pattern.
(6) . This literature has predominantly focused on institutional adaptation by national legislatures, with a specific
focus on European Affairs Committees. See Martin (2000); Maurer and Wessels (2001); Auel and Benz (2005);
Szalay (2005); Gates (2006); Kiiver (2006); Holzhacker and Albæk (2007); O´Brennan and Raunio (2007); Tans et
al. (2007); Barrett (2008).
(7) . The biannual COSAC meetings bring together delegations from the EACs of the national parliaments and the
European Parliament. COSAC decides normally by consensus but its non-binding decisions (called “contributions”)
can be passed with three-quarters of votes cast (which must constitute at last half of all votes). COSAC also has a
secretariat in Brussels.
(8) . The EU and its member countries have in the new millennium increasingly relied on various forms of inter-
governmental policy coordination, or “soft law” instruments as opposed to binding supranational legislation, for
achieving their policy objectives. In fact, given the inter-governmental or informal nature of such policy
coordination, there appears to be procedural ambiguity in several countries about how to process such matters in
the parliament. Research also suggests that so far such European level coordination processes have largely
escaped national parliamentary scrutiny.
Page 18 of 19
Tapio Raunio
Tapio Raunio Professor of Political Science, School of Management, University of Tampere, Tampere, Finland.
Page 19 of 19
Common Agency? Legislatures and Bureaucracies

Mathew D. McCubbins
Print Publication Date: Jun 2014 Subject: Political Science, Comparative Politics, Parties and
Bureaucracy
2014
In all democracies, whether presidential or parliamentary, the chain of political delegation is a complex process
involving a multitude of principals, many of which are frequently replaced. This presents common-agency problems
for bureaucrats and politicians—that is, they must be answerable to many different principals. The fractured and
temporally unstable nature of democratic leadership makes political oversight of bureaucracy a particularly
problematic link in the process by which the government is controlled by citizens. Legislatures can mitigate the
agency problems associated with delegation using one of four approaches: contract design, screening/selection,
monitoring/reporting requirements, and institutional checks. Thischapter examines the common-agency problem
and the legislative control of the bureaucracy. It begins with a review of the positive and normative literature on
delegation and oversight. More specifically, it considers the normative debate on who should control the
bureaucracy, as well as the positive debate on who actually controls the bureaucracy. It concludes by addressing
research frontiers in the study of oversight.
Keywords: political delegation, principals, common agency, political oversight, bureaucracy, legislatures, contract design, screening/selection,
monitoring/reporting requirements, institutional checks
27.1 Introduction
SINCE the rise of societal complexity, rulers have struggled to control their agents. According to the earliest history
of ancient Egypt, Pharoah Othoês was assassinated by his own bodyguard in 2333 BC (Kanawati 2002). The Roman
kingdom ended in 509 BC when Lucius Junius Brutus, commander of the king’s guard, overthrew the king and
established the Roman republic. The Roman republic began to collapse in 49 BC when Julius Caesar, whom the
Roman Senate had appointed proconsul of Gaul, violated Senate orders to disarm and marched on Rome. Though
contemporary research on the subject tends to focus on questions of policy slippage (or “bureaucratic drift”),
political control of the bureaucracy has long been a question of life or death.
To consider a milder, more modern example in the exercise of its power over interstate commerce, the United
States Congress may outlaw the transportation across state lines of food contaminated with pathogens, as it did in
the Food and Drug Act of 1906. While they may pass such a law, members of Congress would be hard-pressed to
enforce it personally. In fact, Congress may not even have the resources to identify which pathogens should be
banned. In order to ensure that food sold in the United States is safe, Congress must delegate authority to agents in
the bureaucracy. Like all forms of delegation, granting authority to implement policy involves some risk of agency
loss; that is, an agency tasked with implementing law may implement it in ways that diverge from the intentions or
preferences of the legislative coalition that created that agency.1
As a second example, consider the signatory states of the Schengen Agreement in Europe. The Schengen states—
Page 1 of 17
which now include most of Western Europe—agreed to eliminate border checks between each other while
concentrating resources on control (p. 568) of borders with non-Schengen states. This radical form of delegation
involves sharing control of who can and cannot enter one’s country (and with what cargo) with every other
Schengen state, and delegates some authority to an international bureaucratic agency called Frontex,2 which
coordinates customs standards and helps patrol borders (European Parliament 2006).
When a single employer delegates work to a single employee, information asymmetries and divergent preferences
cause agency loss. When a legislative coalition delegates authority to a bureaucratic agency, there are two
additional complications: the multiplicity and temporal instability of the principal. In presidential systems, the
multiple political principals arises from the separation of powers. In parliamentary systems with proportional
representation, multiple principals arise from coalition politics. Even governments with the clearest delegation
chains—for example, Westminster systems with first-past-the-post voting—often have diverse legislative coalitions,
as have governing parties in Britain from 2010 to the writing of this chapter. Temporal instability of political
principals, of course, is by definition a characteristic of all democratic governments (Przeworski 1996). Political
scientists have of late produced a range of models addressing the multiplicity of legislative principals—
incorporating congressional committees, bicameralism, and the presidential veto. (These models are referred to as
common agency models.) Less frequently addressed is the related problem of the temporal instability of political
principals.
There are four key methods for a legislature to mitigate the agency problems associated with delegation (see
Kiewiet and McCubbins 1991, Ch. 2). The first two, contract design and screening/selection, are carried out before
delegation occurs, and the last two, monitoring/reporting requirements and institutional checks, are carried out
afterward.3 Table 27.1 shows these four methods along with examples from the formal institutional powers of the US
Congress. For more than a century, political scientists have debated whether and to what extent these tools can
and should allow Congress or any (p. 569) other legislature to govern the implementation of law. This article will
provide an overview of these debates.
27.1.1 Comparative Work on Oversight
Most of the scholarship on the legislative control of bureaucracy has been shaped in the literature on American
politics (Pollack 2002), but some work has extended the literature to shed light on EastAsian and European politics
(e.g. Thies 2001; Baum 2007a; 2007b; Pollack 2002). This section includes just a few outstanding examples.
Aberbach, Putnam, and Rockman (1981) present data from a survey of political and bureaucratic elites in Britain,
France, Germany, Italy, the Netherlands, Sweden, and the United States. While they do not focus on oversight, they
have several observations of importance to those who do. For example, in their sample of respondents, while
American agency heads are slightly more liberal than their political principals, their European counterparts were
slightly more conservative than their own political principals. They also contend that “Congress plays a more
powerful and independent role in formulating policy and overseeing its implementation than do its sister legislatures
in Europe,” and “congressional oversight is substantially more detailed and effective than in Europe.” (This claim,
to the best of my knowledge, has yet to be rigorously proved.)
Moe and Caldwell (1994) offer a theoretical perspective on how parliamentary and presidential institutions
(represented by those of Britain and the US, respectively) might influence political control of the bureaucracy. They
argue that prime ministers exert much more effective control over their bureaucratic agents than do presidents.4
Ramseyer and Rosenbluth (1997) made a very controversial contribution to the study of Japanese politics, by
extending the work of Weingast and Moran (1983) to argue that the famously independent Japanese bureaucracy
was actually beholden to the longtime ruling Liberal Democratic Party.
Huber and Shipan (2002) measured the verbosity of enabling legislation (with controls for language variations) as a
proxy for the thoroughness with which politicians attempt to control outcomes ex ante. Building on their work,
Salmond (2011) argues that the parliamentary institution of Question Time in Westminster-system parliaments
affects the delegation and oversight of bureaucracy, where “open, spontaneous question times” reduce discretion
by increasing reputation risks to ministers.
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Table 27.1 Methods for mitigating agency loss
Method Formal Institutional Levers for Implementing this

Method
Contract design (to prevent moral hazard) structure the bureaucracy establish procedures determine
budgets
Screening and selection (to prevent adverse presidential appointments and senatorial confirmation
selection)
Monitoring and reporting requirements hearings, fire alarms budget reviews, policy reviews
Institutional checks direct disapproval of agency rules impeachment of any

civil officer
27.2 The Normative Debate: Who Should Control the Bureaucracy?
Before asking whether politicians have the capacity to control bureaucracy, we should ask whether they have the
right to. This is especially true for comparativists, since the (p. 570) answer to the empirical question (“can they”)
may vary from government to government, whereas the normative question (“should they”) is grounded in basic
democratic theory. Broadly speaking, today most political scientists agree that in a democracy, elected
representatives have the right to control the bureaucracy, because democracy is built on a chain of delegation:
politicians are agents of the people, tasked with deciding law; bureaucrats are the agents of elected
representatives, tasked with executing that law.
Political scientists have not always agreed on the normative question of who should control the bureaucracy, and
even today there is a wide variety of perspectives on the degree to which that authority should be exercised.
Wilson (1887) argued that “administrative questions are not political questions” and should be “removed from the
hurry and strife of politics.” Wilson and the Progressives felt that cabinet officials were “not necessarily political
officers at all,” and even that “the Constitution looks upon the President himself in the same way” (Wilson 2006).
Progressives throughout the twentieth century continued to favour bureaucratic autonomy (Weber 1946; Landis
1938) while “democrats” (lower-case d) argued for legislative sovereignty (e.g. Shapiro 1964; Noll 1971; Woll
1977).5 This disagreement strikes at the heart of two competing views of democratic governance. As Shapiro
(1964, 45) puts it, “somewhere in the examination of every agency of American government, we may wish to ask
to what extent the structure and function of this agency accords with whatever theory of democracy we have.”
While Wilson (1887) felt administration should be “sensitive to public opinion,” he believed the public should be
“docile and acquiescent in learning what things it has not a right to think and speak about imperatively” and avoid
meddling, since in “oversight of the daily details...of government, public criticism is of course a clumsy nuisance, a
rustic handling delicate machinery.”6 Woll (1977) viewed this as a form of elitism, fearing instead that “the
development of a bureaucracy that is not elected and that exercises broad political functions has apparently
resulted in the breakdown of a primary constitutional check on arbitrary governmental power” (p. 29).
There are six schools of thought about who should govern the bureaucracy: the Progressives, the Pluralist School,
the Neodemocrats, the Public Choice School, the Civic Republicans, and the Neoprogressives. The following is a
brief overview of these perspectives.
On the side of bureaucratic autonomy, Progressives envisioned an apolitical technocracy. Landis (1938) argues
that “the administrative process is, in essence, our generation’s answer to the inadequacy of the judicial and the
legislative processes.” Progressives believed Congress should be engaged only in the highest level of policy-
making, and then delegate broad authority to the bureaucracy, and expect bureaucrats to make unbiased choices
on behalf of the public weal. Along these lines, Weber (1946) writes that “bureaucratization offers above all the
Page 3 of 17
optimum possibility for carrying through the principle of specializing administrative functions according to purely
objective considerations.”
The Pluralist School largely replaced the Progressives in the 1950s (e.g. Truman 1951), building on the work of
Bentley (1908). The Pluralists recognized that the bureaucracy was political, but viewed it as capable of forging
compromise between competing (p. 571) factions. In this view, the bureaucracy joined Congress as an
appropriate forum for the kind of factional competition Madison foresaw in Federalist 10. While the Progressives
denied that administration was part of politics, Pluralists acknowledged that administration was political, but
considered bureaucrats (and courts) competent to make political decisions.
Favouring legislative sovereignty, the Neodemocrats view Congressional control of the bureaucracy as essential to
democratic accountability (Shapiro 1964; Noll 1971; Woll 1977; Melnick 1983). Neodemocrats prefer democratic
(mainly legislative) control of the bureaucracy, and have focused on explicating the mechanisms for such control
—the structure and process of legislative delegation (Wilmerding 1943; Fiorina 1977; Cohen 1979; Wilson 1980;
Fisher 1981; Breyer 1982; McCubbins and Schwartz 1984; Weingast 1984; McCubbins 1985; McCubbins and Page
1987; Moe 1987; Noll 1987; McCubbins, Noll, and Weingast 1987, 1989; Kiewiet and McCubbins 1991; Bawn 1995;
Epstein and O’Halloran 1996).7
The Public Choice School shares the preference for democratic control of the bureaucracy, but focuses on the
argument that special interests, not public interests, have captured the benefits of government intervention.
Perhaps the most succinct expression of the Public Choice perspective (especially as a critique of Pluralism) comes
from Schattschneider (1960), who wrote that “the flaw in the pluralist heaven is that the heavenly chorus sings with
a strong upper-class accent.” Public Choice models often focus on how bureaucrats are influenced by special
interests to allocate rents (Buchanan and Tullock 1962; Kolko 1965; MacAvoy 1965; McConnell 1966; Lowi 1969;
Stigler 1971; Peltzman 1976). Mashaw (1997) characterizes this view “somewhat hyperbolically, as a world of
greed and chaos, of private self-interest and public incoherence....It is a vision that makes all public action deeply
suspect.” Since special-interest-dominated regulation threatens economic efficiency, Public Choice scholars wish
for Congress to reduce the administrative footprint and “undelegate” its legislative authority (Lowi 1969).
The final two approaches extend the Progressive School. Civic Republicans like Sunstein (1990) and Seidenfeld
(1992) believe the bureaucracy can lead the public in policy-making deliberation, both to resolve factional conflict
and to instill the virtue of civic republicanism in the citizenry. Scholars have promoted this sort of guided
deliberation in the form of negotiated rulemaking (Susskind and McMahon 1985) and deliberative polling (Fishkin
1991; Ackerman and Fishkin 2005). Seidenfeld writes:
Given the current ethic that approves of the private pursuit of self-interest as a means of making social
policy, reliance on a more politically isolated administrative state may be necessary to implement
something approaching the civic republican ideal.
The New Progressivists (chief among whom is Mashaw [1985; 1994; 1997]) reject the pessimism of Public Choice
and argue that the bureaucracy is actually competent and responsive to the public will (e.g. Mashaw 1997, 206).
New Progressivists believe that political meddling in the bureaucracy hinders the ability of bureaucrats to pursue
public-interest policy (Mashaw 1994).
(p. 572) 27.3 The Positive Debate: Who Does Control the Bureaucracy?
27.3.1 A Short Survey
In American politics, the early literature on delegation to the bureaucracy simply asked whether Congress could
control the bureaucracy, and the answer was usually no. Wilson (1885) considered it “quite evident that the means
which Congress has of controlling the departments and of exercising the searching oversight at which it aims are
limited and defective.” Lowi (1969) and Niskanen (1971; 1975) were perhaps the leading twentieth-century
proponents of the “abdication hypothesis” that Congress had yielded up control over the apparatus of government
to administrative agencies, which were in turn influenced by the sort of factions Madison (1787) sought to
constrain. Proponents of the abdication hypothesis pointed to the infrequency with which Congress could be
observed to directly override agency decision-making (Pearson 1975; Seidman 1975; Hess 1976; Fiorina 1977).
Page 4 of 17
Scholars in the public administration school agreed with the fundamental assumption that agencies had
considerable discretion, but were more sanguine about the ability of bureaucracies to implement policy without
political meddling from Congress or presidential appointees (e.g. Wilson 1974; Heclo 1977). Congressional
abdication is still a popular perspective today among scholars and politicians (e.g. Webb 2013).
The traditional view of an impotent legislature was challenged by what came to be called (mistakenly) the
“Congressional Dominance” school of oversight, perhaps best represented by Weingast and Moran (1983; and
Calvert, Moran, and Weingast 1987), who argue that the lack of evidence for Congressional override of the
bureaucracy is consistent with a world in which bureaucrats do exactly as Congress desires for fear of retribution.8
Weingast and Moran (1983) argue that changes in the behaviour of the Federal Trade Commission can be
attributed to the changing preferences of the Senate’s FTC oversight subcommittee. And despite the observational
equivalence of dominance and abdication in equilibrium, some evidence emerged that Congressional leadership
can control the bureaucracy (via appointment of committee chairs) in 1994, when incoming House Speaker Newt
Gingrich “bypassed more senior Republicans in the selection of chairs for the Appropriations, Energy, and
Commerce, and Judiciary Committees” (Cox and McCubbins 2007).
In the 1970s and 1980s, many students of American politics perceived an “imperial presidency.” Advocates of this
perspective argue that Congress lacks the ability to set its own legislative agenda, leaving a vacuum into which the
unified presidency enters (Fiorina 1974; Edwards 1980; Sundquist 1981). Moe (1985) argues for the (far from
absolute) power of the president over administrative agencies via the imposition of an extra, politicized layer atop
these agencies. (His argument builds on the work of Truman [1951] and Neustadt [1960].) Moe (1987) argues in
particular against Weingast and Moran on (p. 573) theoretical and empirical grounds, and (1987a) proposes an
alternate model in which the bureaucracy has multiple principals (Congress and the president) and illustrates his
argument with an account of the origin and development of the National Labor Review Board. Moe and Howell
(1999) show that the president can use executive orders to exert control over the bureaucracy. The claimed rise
of the imperial presidency places the president rather than Congress in the role of political principal.9
27.3.2 Asking More Nuanced Questions
The theories described in the preceding paragraphs all tend to be addressed to the question “who controls the
bureaucracy?” The modern literature on political control of the bureaucracy tends to draw on agency theory to
answer the question “how and when do different principals control the bureaucracy, and to what extent?” This
begins with McCubbins and Schwartz’s (1984) attempt to address how Congress might control the bureaucracy.
They argue that there are two forms of oversight, labeled metaphorically “police patrols” and “fire alarms.” Police
patrols are centralized, active, direct investigations into the behaviour of agencies. Fire alarms are systems of
rules, procedures, and informal practices that allow others to alert Congress to abuses of bureaucratic discretion.
Their analysis is built on three assumptions: technological (the police-patrol and fire-alarm methods are both
available to Congress), motivational (Congressmen and women seek to maximize credit for benefits to supporters
and avoid blame), and institutional (executive agencies act as agents of Congress, according to the Constitution).
They conclude that Congress will neglect police-patrol oversight, and instead use administrative rules and
procedures to enable fire-alarm oversight.
Aberbach (1990) argues that Congress does indeed engage in a great deal of police-patrol oversight (though he
provides an expanded taxonomy of types that fit within that category). Whereas many authors assume that
Congress wants to control the bureaucracy (and argue that they are strategic in the selection of methods),
Aberbach gives special attention to the strategic choice of whether or not to attempt to control the bureaucracy.
He argues that the 1970s brought expanding Congressional staffs, shrinking discretionary budgets, growing scope
and complexity of government, and increasing political competition with the president; and these changes and
others led to higher payoffs for oversight activities, which spurred Congress to spend more time on hearings and
the like.
McNollgast10 (1987) develop this argument further, defining the executive agency’s principal more precisely and
considering its motive. They explain that the principal who delegates administrative authority is the legislative
coalition (including the president) that passed the agency’s enabling legislation. They also point out the motive for
this delegation: “Much of administrative law...is written for the purpose of helping elected politicians retain control
of policy-making.” Like models of war that treat whole nations as unitary actors, previous theories of delegation to
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the bureaucracy treated Congress as if it were an individual. But Congress is not a single actor—not a single
individual in the present, and not a single coalition over time.
(p. 574) McCubbins, Noll, and Weingast (1987) write that the members of a legislative coalition attempt to act in
concert to implement ex ante controls on their agent’s behaviour by determining administrative structure and
process.11 The members of this coalition know that each coalition member has an incentive to opportunistically
influence agency behaviour toward his own preferred outcome after the creation of the agency, and they also
know that future attempts to correct and govern a noncompliant agency will “not, in general, reproduce the policy
outcome that was sought by the winning coalition” (McCubbins, Noll, and Weingast 1989). Thus they will attempt in
so far as possible to constrain bureaucratic agencies in advance to behave in ways that match the coalition’s
preferences.
Ex ante controls on the bureaucracy do have their limitations. Arnold (1987) argues that because Congress only
gets one shot to write enabling legislation (and infrequent opportunities for major reform), ex ante controls are not
as effective as ongoing efforts to oversee the bureaucracy. Spence (1997a; 1997b) argues that legislators may
lack the foresight to implement effective controls. Potoski (1999) finds mixed evidence for the effectiveness of ex
ante controls, arguing that politicians are not able to “stack the deck” in favour of preferred interest groups.
Evidence in support of ex ante controls, on the other hand, can be found in Gerber et al.’s (2005) comparative
study of American states. They found that bureaucratic agency heads were more likely to characterize as “high”
the “degree of influence the legislature has on decisions your agency makes” in states that exerted stronger ex
ante controls over bureaucratic decision-making.
Once a coalition of elected officials delegates to bureaucrats, they essentially create a new player whose
unconstrained incentives may diverge from those of the coalition. For this reason, they seek to include institutional
constraints that induce more favourable preferences. As an analogy, if a business owner wants his business to
thrive through the sale of widgets, but he does not have time to both produce and sell widgets, he may hire agents
and delegate sales to them. Since those agents don’t innately care about the sale of widgets, the owner pays them
a commission to induce them to care. This kind of comparison between the process of delegation to the
bureaucracy and the process of delegation in firms is the basis of a revolution in political science: the importation
of tools from the field of industrial organization, particularly agency theory and institutional economics.12
Since the infusion of agency theory into the study of oversight, advocates of presidential control of the
bureaucracy have also shifted from asking does “the president control the bureaucracy” to asking “how and when
does the president control the bureaucracy.” Here are some of their conclusions:
• Carpenter (2001) presents conditions for administrative independence, but without a very well specified
general-equilibrium theory of political control, it is still difficult to distinguish empirically between administrative
independence and political control (as noted by Weingast and Moran 1983).13
• Skowronek (1982) provides a sort of general-equilibrium theory, explaining the expansion of the American
state in the twentieth century as a result of the demand for and supply of regulation among interest groups,
Congress, the president, courts, and the states (see further, Orren and Skowronek 2004).
(p. 575) • Epstein and O’Halloran (1996) show that Congress delegates more power to executive agencies
under unified government, and more power to independent agencies and commissions under unified
government.14
• Wilson (1989) argues that agencies have more discretion from the president when outputs or outcomes are
non-observable.
27.3.3 Spatial Models for Multiple Principals at a Given Moment
The separation of powers in American government produces multiple policy-making principals during any given
term of Congress. In addition, turnover among representatives, senators, and presidents from term to term—and
even changing pressures and preferences within a term—mean that the principal of yesterday does not exist
today. Since the principal that delegates to a bureau is the legislative coalition that creates it, this principal only
exists from the moment the president decides to sign the final form of the agency’s enabling legislation to the
moment that he does sign it—this being the only period in which all members of the legislative coalition desire for
Page 6 of 17
that legislation to determine outcomes. Once the legislation becomes status quo, the individuals who cooperated to
pass the legislation now wish to push policy closer to their own ideal points. As Laver and Shepsle (1990, 873) put
it, “forming a government is not the end of politics but the beginning.”
Bureaucracies are designed (so far as possible) to act in the interests of the coalition that formed or reformed
them. But once a bureaucratic agency actually exists, it serves a multiplicity of agents. To model this complex
principal-agent relationship, political scientists often use spatial models to represent preferences. Wood (1988)
shows that when Congress and the president both hold ideal points on the same side of an agency’s current
policy, they can force that agency to move that policy in the direction they prefer. When Congress and the
president hold ideal points on opposite sides of the agency’s current policy, that agency has much greater
discretion to choose policy (see further,Kiewiet and McCubbins 1988). He illustrates this point with monthly data on
the EPA’s monitoring and abatement actions.
Shipan (2004) offers a more formal spatial model of three actors on a one-dimensional policy continuum, which he
labeled C, F, and A (committee, floor, and agency). In this model, A proposes an action, a; C chooses either to take
no action or to introduce a bill, labeled b; if C introduces b, F chooses either to reject the bill (yielding outcome a),
pass the bill as written (outcome b), or pass an amended bill (outcome b*). There is one more element in the game,
C(F), or the indifference point for the committee with respect to F. There are three different “regimes,” or
arrangements of the three points on the continuum, as listed below. Fig. 27.1, taken from Shipan’s article, illustrates
these three regimes.

Fig. 27.1 Regulatory regime (by agency location)
1. Committee-Floor Regime: A < C(F) < C < F

2. Gatekeeping Regime: A ∈ [C(F), F]
3. Floor Regime: C < F < A
(p. 576) Under a Committee-Floor Regime, the agency picks C(F) and the committee, satisfied with this policy,
chooses not to act. Under a Gatekeeping Regime, the agency picks its own ideal point C and the committee doesn’t
act. Under a Floor Regime, the agency picks F and again, the committee doesn’t act. In an extension, Shipan treats
the president as an actor who gets to choose the vicinity of the agency’s preference before the game starts, but
doesn’t get to use a veto once the game begins.15 He also adds a second legislature to the model, but ultimately
collapses the regimes into the same three spatial arrangements, to make the analysis tractable.
27.4 Frontiers in the Study of Oversight
27.4.1 Understanding Agents
Political scientists have developed strong models for explaining the preferences and predicting the behaviour of
elected officials. By contrast, there is a surprising paucity of empirically justified theory about the preferences and
behaviour of bureaucrats. The normative debate over policy delegation hinges crucially on the preferences of the
agents enacting policy. If bureaucrats seek to maximize social welfare, perhaps the Progressives and their
intellectual heirs are correct in thinking that politicians shouldn’t meddle in the bureaucracy. If, on the other hand,
bureaucrats seek to maximize their budgets or provide favours to industry in exchange for personal enrichment,
then the Neodemocrats may be right in advocating legislative control of the bureaucracy.
The positive debate over who controls the bureaucracy hinges on the preferences of bureaucrats as well.
Consider Fig. 27.2, a diagram (presented in Shepsle [1992]) that illustrates McNollgast’s concept of bureaucratic
drift. In this diagram, a legislative coalition of majorities in the House (H) and Senate (S) along with the president (P)
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pass a law. The political principal is this coalition of actors, each of which we can place in a two-dimensional policy
space. (We could choose any positive number of dimensions, but two yields the clearest picture.) H, S, and P
compromise to pass a law designed to bring about outcome X somewhere near the centre of HSP, but once that law
is passed, the bureaucratic agency can implement any policy X′ within HSP. This bureaucratic drift cannot be
undone by elected officials, because no matter where X′ is within HSP, (p. 577) every alternative point (including
the original outcome, X) is less preferred than X′ for at least one of the three coalition members.16 Fig. 27.2 only
makes sense, however, if B’s preferences can be defined along the same dimensions as those of H, S, and P. If B’s
only preference is for something universally opposed by the coalition members—say, to maximize agency salaries
—the coalition members should be able to prevent drift (through mechanism design).
Of course, this description assumes that when an agency pulls policy from X to X′, the “drift” is instigated by
bureaucrats—that is, the policy changes because of the political preferences of the bureaucrats. This is a common
assumption (see, for example, Romer and Rosenthal 1978; 1979), but one plausible alternative is that the
misbehaving agent is not the bureau but some other part of the “subgovernment” such as the congressional
committee or subcommittee empowered to oversee the bureau.

Fig. 27.2 Diagram of McNollgast’s bureaucratic drift
As in their discussion of The Logic of Delegation, Kiewiet and McCubbins (1991) argue that the agency loss arising
from the delegation of policy-making from the majority party and its leadership in the House or Senate to its
Committee Chairs, or from a governing coalition to its ministers (Thies, 2001), is the most challenging. The
difference is important because the methods for mitigating agency loss differ between these two scenarios. If an
agency misbehaves, Congress can rein it in using the Appropriations Committee (who must approve any policy
change that costs money). An agency seeking to change policy also may have to talk to a budget committee,
which is even more tightly controlled by majority party leadership than is the Appropriations Committee. But if the
Appropriations chair is deviating from the preferences of the majority party leadership, the chain of delegation and
accountability is essentially broken. Perhaps this explains why Newt Gingrich chose a more ideologically faithful
junior representative as chair over the ranking Republican when he took control of the House in 1995.
(p. 578) Regardless of whether errant agencies are generally seeking their own policy objectives or following the
whims of the ministers or congressional committees empowered to govern them, it is clear that bureaucrats’
preferences play a crucial role in most models of legislative oversight (e.g. Dessein 2002; Bendor and Meirowitz
2004; Bertelli and Feldmann 2007; Prendergast 2007; Gailmard 2009). Given the central role of bureaucrats’
preferences, the lack of empirically justified theory about those preferences is surprising. Niskanen (1971)
originally assumed that bureaucrats sought to maximize agency budgets, and later (1975) popularized Migué and
Bélanger’s (1974) view that bureaucrats sought to maximize discretionary budgets. McNollgast (1987) argue that
“in the absence of effective oversight,” bureaucrats are motivated by “personal preferences, derived from some
combination of private political values, personal career objectives, and, all else equal, an aversion to effort.” In a
review of formal models of bureaucracy, Gailmard and Patty (2012) observe that most contemporary models
assume bureaucrats “maximize policy preferences of the same nature as most other political actors.” This
perspective is of course quite contrary to the Progressives’ view that “the field of administration is a field of
business...removed from the hurry and strife of politics” (Wilson 1887).
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Why should a bureaucrat seek private gain through the maximization of discretionary budgets (as in Niskanen’s
model) when he could attain it by more direct means? For example, the US Department of the Interior found that
members of its Mineral Management Service “frequently consumed alcohol at industry functions, had used cocaine
and marijuana, and had sexual relations with oil and gas company representatives” (US Department of the Interior,
2008), in addition to receiving “ski and golf trips, tickets to sporting events, a jaunt to a party in New Orleans,” and
other gifts (Denver Post 2008). On the opposite extreme, Carpenter (2001) argues that the FDA highly values its
reputation for scientific thoroughness and objectivity—if not for the intrinsic satisfaction of a job well done, then at
least as a source of public support, a bargaining chip for greater autonomy from politicians, and a resource in
recruiting outstanding employees. In light of these different perspectives, it may be time to stop viewing
bureaucratic preferences as monolithic. It may also be time for a Fenno (1978)-style soak-and-poke approach to
understanding bureaucrats and their preferences.
McNollgast (and chapter nine of Wilson 1989) argue that bureaucrats may choose to follow instructions in the
interest of career advancement within the government, and this is especially likely since 1982, when Anne
Gorsuch was found to be in contempt of Congress and forced out of her position as EPA administrator. Spiller
(1990), however, points out that bureaucrats may face more lucrative career opportunities in their regulated
industries, and multiple scholars have argued that the career trajectory of bureaucrats influences their policy
choices (Gormley 1979; Grace and Phillips 2008). The “revolving door of politics” (in which regulators move to
industry and vice versa) is common not only in the United States (US General Accounting Office 1986) but
throughout Western Europe (Thatcher 2002) and in Japan (Horiuchi and Shimizu 2001), where the phenomenon is
called amakudari, or “descent from heaven.”
(p. 579) 27.4.2 Temporal Instability of Principals
As noted earlier, turnover in politics is by definition a universal characteristic of democratic governance. Also
discussed above, the principal that generates a bureaucratic agent is an ephemeral legislative coalition
(McNollgast 1987). Unfortunately, the oversight literature often overlooks the temporal instability of political
principals. Notable exceptions include Horn and Shepsle’s (1989) response to McNollgast (1987; 1989), Macey’s
addition to Horn and Shepsle, and the line of research that grew out of Macey’s work (Levine 1992; Shepsle 1992;
Epstein and O’Halloran 1994; Shapiro 1994; 2007; Hamilton and Schroeder 1994; Wood and Bohte 2004; Thomson
et al. 2006). In this work, the temporal instability of principals is referred to as coalition drift. Shepsle (1989) argues
that coalition drift makes ex-ante controls on the bureaucracy more appealing than ex-post oversight to Congress
because (1) such controls do more to preserve their preferences after the political principals are replaced (2) by
doing more to preserve their chosen policy, ex-ante controls heighten the value of any favours that the enacting
legislative coalition provides to interest groups. More recently, Stephenson (2006) and Alesina and Tabellini (2008)
have investigated the effects of temporal instability of agents.
27.5 Conclusion
I conclude by briefly discussing how delegation works over time, why it is likely to produce inaction among political
principals, and whether we can view this as a good or bad thing. In this simple model of delegation over time, at
each moment in time (each period t) the current Congress (Ct) gets to decide law. As soon as Congress acts, that
moment ends and Congress finds itself in a new moment. The law, however, remains until it is taken off the books.
(As a practical matter, this typically means that the law remains forever.) So in period 1, C1 creates Law A. In period
2, C2 creates Law B. In period 3, if Laws A and B come into conflict, C3 must decide whether and how to respond. If
C3 doesn’t respond, interest groups will bring a case to court, and the court will render a judgment that alters one
or both of the laws. After the court rules, C3 may choose to reform one or both of the laws. But for C3 to
successfully reform any law, the reformed law must be preferred by the relevant committees and the floors of both
houses, as well as by the president.
In this little model, Congress has many reasons not to act when two laws come into conflict. First, changing the law
is difficult, and the court may render a judgment that C3 approves of, so Congress may simply decide to wait and
see what the court does. Second, Congress may not know the level of public support or interest-group support for
the alternative outcomes. Observing interest-group investment in a court case and public response to its outcome
provides Congress with free information about the likely payoffs of the alternative policy solutions. Finally,
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Congress may know that its own veto players have preferences that diverge enough to make reform impossible.
(p. 580) It is clear that the American founders established in Article 1, Section 7 of the Constitution a consensus
procedure. One of the leading arguments among Madison’s contributions to the Federalist Papers—especially
Federalist 51—is that this makes lawmaking very difficult. It is clear from this simple model of lawmaking that when
two agencies believe their directives bring them into conflict, or when two factions conflict over the ruling of a
single agency, Congress is quite likely not to act.
Neodemocrats such as McNollgast note that the consensus decision-making described in Article 1, Section 7 of the
Constitution is mirrored in the procedures of executive agencies, with the result of decreasing the activity of
agencies—or to put it more plainly, not much gets done. Of course, the value of bureaucratic activity to society
depends on the actions being taken, so Neoprogressives such as Mashaw lament the stifling gridlock caused by
the consensus decision-making rules Congress forces upon executive agencies, while students of the Public
Choice school rejoice in the obstacles Congress places in the way of bureaucrats’ natural inclination to impose
market distortions.
What are the conditions under which things do get done? In America, Progressives controlled the House, Senate,
and presidency from 1933 to 1969 (and arguably into the 1970s), and therefore also controlled the Courts, and
there was a great flurry of change, from the New Deal to the Civil Rights Act. Since then, a period of divided
government—and especially, of late, a divided Congress—has slowed the rate of policy change considerably.
Whether this is for good or ill depends in large part on one’s perspective on the normative debate over the
appropriate role of the bureaucracy.
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Notes:
(1) . Of course, not all delegation arises out of necessity—after all, Congress is comprised of politicians. One
alternative motivation for delegation is that Congress may wish to implement a policy but avoid blame for that policy
(Fiorina 1982; Epstein and O’Halloran 2000).
(2) . The legal title of this agency is in fact the European Agency for the Management of Operational Cooperation at
the External Borders of the Member States, or EAMOCEBMS for short.
(3) . Note that only these last two constitute “oversight.” The literature discussed in this article is often erroneously
referred to as “legislative oversight of the bureaucracy.” Oversight is only one form of legislative control (or
perhaps more appropriately, influence) over the bureaucracy.
(4) . One of Moe and Caldwell’s arguments is that “prime ministers do not need such an enormous, politicized
institution [as the American executive branch] to see their will implemented by the bureaucracy.” They do not
mention that, since its creation in 1968, the title of Minister for the Civil Service has been held by the Prime Minister
(Daintith and Page 1999).
(5) . This perspective is presaged in legal scholarship by the work of Holmes (1881; 1897), Cardozo (1922), and
Pound (1931). These three argued that law is a form of policy and that judges had an obligation to implement policy
in tune with the law established by the people and their representatives. Holmes wrote that “if my fellow citizens
want to go to Hell I will help them. It’s my job” (Howe 1953).
(6) . This view of executive agencies has been extended in the way many legal scholars see the Supreme Court as
a counter-majoritarian institution.
(7) . Of course, some scholars argue that administrative procedures often fail to induce bureaucracies to follow
Congressional preferences (e.g. Balla 1998).
(8) . Ramseyer and Rosenbluth (1997) made a similar argument for Japanese politics, arguing that policy decisions
made in the Japanese bureaucracy promoted the electoral interests of the ruling Liberal Democratic Party. This was
a highly controversial argument in Japan, where the popular wisdom had long been that the bureaucrats enjoyed
extraordinary independence.
(9) . Both McCubbins, et al. (1987; 1989) and Kiewiet and McCubbins (1991) use the word “Congress” as a
shorthand for the legislative powers of the federal government as defined in Article 1, Section 7, which includes the
House, Senate, and president.
(10) . McNollgast is the nom de plume of coauthors Mathew McCubbins, Roger Noll, and Barry Weingast. The first
two papers published by this trio (1987; 1989) were attributed to McCubbins, Noll, and Weingast; subsequent works
are attributed to McNollgast.
(11) . In a system with separation of powers, this coalition is comprised of deciding factions (almost always the
majority party) within each institution; in a parliamentary system, this coalition is comprised of parties in the
government.
(12) . For a few leading works in industrial organization, see Alchian and Demsetz 1972; North and Thomas 1976;
Tirole 1988; Milgrom and Roberts 1992; Ostrom 1990; Arrow 1970; North 1981, 1990; Williamson 1975; Knight
1992; Greif 2006; Olson 1965; Schelling 1965.
Page 16 of 17
(13) . Huber and Shipan (2002) offer an innovative comparative attempt to measure the construct of political
control of the bureaucracy, by measuring a proxy for the thoroughness of enabling legislation.
(14) . Epstein and O’Halloran (1999) modeled the transaction costs involved in delegating. McCubbins and Page
(1987) came to the same conclusion by means of a sequential game of proposal and veto.
(15) . Bizarrely, Shipan justifies the lack of veto power by observing that the president never vetoed legislation on
the FDA during the time period covered in his correlational study. Given that his entire model is based on the idea
that actors act strategically in light of predictable responses from their opponents, Shipan should never expect to
observe a veto. He should nonetheless expect that the president having this power significantly alters the game.
(16) . Shepsle notes that B is likely to be on the SP side of the triangle, since the president appoints agency heads
with Senate approval. This implies that the House has the most to lose from bureaucratic drift.
Mathew D. McCubbins
Mathew D. McCubbins is the Provost Professor of Business, Law and Political Economy at the University of Southern California.
Page 17 of 17
Political Behaviour in the European Parliament

Simon Hix and Bjørn Høyland
Print Publication Date: Jun 2014 Subject: Political Science, Comparative Politics, European Union
2014
This chapterexamines political behavior and legislative politics in the European Parliament. It begins with a review
of research findings on the political behavior of Members of the European Parliament (MEPs), focusing on the last
decade or so. It considers the process of recruitment and election of the members of parliament and how this
process affects them and their political preferences. It then looks at the formation of political parties and
committees in the European Parliament—the so-called “equilibrium institutions”—and how they shape MEP behavior
and policy outcomes in the European Parliament—the so-called “institutional equilibria.”
Keywords: political behavior, legislative politics, European Parliament, recruitment, election, members of parliament, political parties, committees,
equilibrium institutions, institutional equilibria
28.1 Introduction
RESEARCH on political behaviour in the European Parliament has grown in volume and sophistication over the past two
decades. In fact, there have probably been more papers and books published on legislative politics in the
European Parliament in the last decade than on any other legislative chamber other than the US Congress. Part of
the growth in academic interest can be explained by academic interest in the growing significance of the European
Union (EU), and the growing powers of the European Parliament within the EU. The availability of data on the
European Parliament, both on the web directly from the parliament and integrated datasets disseminated by
scholars of the European Parliament, has also enabled new researchers to build on existing research and test new
ideas. The other main reason for the growth in this area of legislative politics has been the ease of transporting
theories and methods from the study of the US Congress to the European Parliament. The institutional context of the
US Congress and the European Parliament is surprisingly similar. For example, the separation of powers in the EU
means that Members of the European Parliament (MEPs) are more similar to members of Congress than they are to
many national parliamentarians in Europe, in that they are not beholden to their party leaders nor are they subject
to the threat of parliamentary dissolution if a government loses a vote of confidence. The European Parliament also
has a similar committee system to the US Congress. And, as a result of these two factors, MEPs spend most of their
time scrutinizing and amending legislation or the EU budget, rather than holding a government to account.
Much of the research on political behaviour in the European Parliament has focused primarily on importing theories
from elsewhere in political science to help explain behaviour and institutions inside the EU’s only elected legislative
chamber. Nevertheless, there is a growing body of scholars of behaviour in the European (p. 592) Parliament that
tries to export knowledge—to use evidence from the European Parliament to contribute to our general
understanding of legislative behaviour and institutions in democratic political systems. From this perspective, the
European Parliament is a fascinating laboratory. For example, the weak “electoral connection” between voters and
MEPs means that individual behaviour and the formation of political parties and coalitions in the European
Parliament are driven by policy goals and/or career concerns inside the European Parliament. Similarly, MEPs are
Page 1 of 14
elected under a variety of different electoral institutions and rules, which provides an almost unique test of how
electoral rules shape legislative behaviour within a single legislative institution. Consequently, this raises interesting
questions about whether electoral incentives should be seen as the primary determinant of legislative behaviour
and organization in democratic systems. And, as scholars start to understand the role and power of rapporteurs in
the European Parliament (MEPs who are responsible for writing a legislative report on a bill and for guiding the bill
through the stages of adoption), several propositions are being put forward which could be tested in other
parliaments where this legislative role exists.
This chapter reviews the development and the contributions of research on political behaviour in the European
Parliament, focusing in particular on the last decade or so. We first look at research on the process of recruitment
and election of the MEPs, and how this process shapes who the MEPs are and their political preferences. We then
look at research on behaviour inside the European Parliament, focusing on how researchers understand the
formation of parties and committees in the European Parliament—what Shepsle (1986) would call “equilibrium
institutions”. We then turn to what we know about how these parties and committees shape MEP behaviour and
policy outcomes in the European Parliament—what Shepsle (1986) would call “institutional equilibria.” In each
section we discuss what we think we have found out as scholars and also what we think we do not yet know, and
hence what the next generation of scholars might try to discover.
28.2 Election, Recruitment, and Preferences of MEPs
A clear connection between citizens’ voting choices in elections and the behaviour of parties or politicians in the
European Parliament is weak. That is, the vote-shares received by parties in European Parliament elections has
more to do with the position of national parties in national political systems at the time of the elections (their
governing status, the timing of the European Parliament election in the national electoral cycle, and the
performance of the national government) than the performance of the political groups in the European Parliament
(Hix and Marsh 2007; 2011). This is mainly due to the incentives for national parties to use European Parliament
elections in their (p. 593) battle for domestic political office. However, the lack of an electoral connection in
European Parliament elections is also in part due to the failure of European-level parties to present competing
policy agendas for the EU or rival candidates for the office of the Commission President (Hix 2008).
Nevertheless, at the level of individual candidates, there is some evidence that the electoral rules used in a
particular country influence how candidates campaign for the European Parliament, what types of politicians are
elected in a country, and how MEPs behave inside the European Parliament once elected. All EU member states
use some form of proportional representation (PR) electoral system to elect their MEPs. But about half of the
member states use a preferential electoral system, either “open” list proportional respresentation (OLPR) or single
transferable vote (STV), which enables voters to choose between candidates from the same political party as well
as between political parties. The other half of the member states use a “closed” list proportional representation
(CLPR) system, where voters can only choose between pre-ordered lists of candidates from each of the political
parties standing in a constituency.
There is some evidence that this difference influences how candidates and MEPs behave. For example, Farrell and
Scully (2007) find that MEPs elected under preferential electoral systems, for example, from Finland or Ireland, tend
to spend more time campaigning directly to voters and representing the interests of their constituents in the
parliament than MEPs elected under CLPR systems, for example, from most of the UK or Germany. Similarly, Hix and
Hagemann (2009) find that voters are more likely to be contacted by candidates and better informed about the
elections in countries with preferential electoral systems. Then, once elected, Hix (2004) finds that MEPs elected in
preferential electoral systems tend to be more independent of their national parties and, as a result, more
responsive to pressure to follow voting instructions from their European political groups.
In the first cross-country study of what types of politicians gain a seat in the European Parliament, Scarrow (1997)
identified three different types of MEPs: those who see the European Parliament as a stepping stone and training
ground for a national political career; those who see the European Parliament as a reward for good service and a
step down towards retirement after a national political career; and those who hope to secure a long-term career in
the European Parliament. Interestingly, Scarrow’s study has not been updated, despite the fact that it is easier to
collect career background data today, e.g. via the internet, than when she conducted the study almost 30 years
Page 2 of 14
ago. In one of the few pieces of recent research on how candidates’ career backgrounds shape the process of
European Parliament elections, Hobolt and Høyland (2011) find that parties who choose candidates with significant
national political experience to lead their election campaigns tend to receive more votes in European Parliament
elections than parties whose list of candidates is headed by an inexperienced national politician or an incumbent
MEP
Then, once elected, it was widely assumed that MEPs would be socialized by their experience in the European
Parliament by becoming more pro-European than similar (p. 594) national politicians (e.g. Kerr 1973). However,
Scully and Farrell (2003) and Scully (2005) have shown that this assumption is largely false. Scully (2005) finds
evidence that politicians who find European integration more salient than the average party member may self-
select into a career in Brussels. Also, using evidence from a survey of MEPs in 2000, Scully and Farrell (2003) find
that length of service in the European Parliament had little effect on MEPs’ views about EU reform or the powers of
the European Parliament. They also found that MEPs’ underlying ideological preferences were more powerful
determinants of their views on EU institutional reforms than their national affiliations. Specifically, the more left-wing
an MEP, the more supportive he or she tends to be of increasing the powers of the EU institutions and EU policies
more generally, regardless of which member state he or she is from (compare Scully et al. 2012).
The underlying ideological policy preferences of MEPs also feed through into their political behaviour inside the
parliament. The first dimension that is extracted when scaling roll-call votes in the European Parliament correlates
highly with MEPs’ exogenous left-right ideological preferences regardless of the scaling method used (e.g.
NOMINATE, an item-response model or correspondence analysis) (Kreppel and Tsebelis 1999; Thomassen et al.
2002; Hix et al. 2006; Han 2007; Hix and Noury 2009). Moreover, voting in roll-call votes in the European
Parliament is overwhelmingly one-dimensional, like most other democratic parliaments. A second dimension can be
extracted from the data. However, this second dimension only explains between 2 and 5 percent of the variance in
a particular session of the European Parliament and it is difficult to give a clear interpretation of the substantive
meaning of this second dimension, as in only some periods of the parliament does this second dimension correlate
with MEP and national party positions toward European integration. Interestingly, though, the positions taken by
MEPs in parliamentary speeches are not explained by underlying left-right policy preferences (Proksch and Slapin
2009).
MEPs are not completely free agents, of course. In practice, MEPs have two main principals (e.g. Hix 2002; Kreppel
2002). First, MEPs need to please their national political parties, who play a dominant role in the process of
selecting candidates for European Parliament elections and also in deciding which political group an MEP will
belong to, and what other positions an MEP can pursue inside the European Parliament. Second, MEPs’ behaviour
inside the parliament is shaped by the European political group to which they belong, since the political groups
control committee assignments, speaking time, agenda time, the allocation of rapporteurs, and most other
procedural and financial resources inside the European Parliament. MEPs rarely receive competing instructions
about how to vote in a roll-call vote from these two principals. But, when they do, MEPs tend to go with their national
parties rather than their European political groups (Hix 2002).
The attention that national party leaderships pay to politics in the European Parliament varies across parties and
has varied over time (Raunio 2000). There is also evidence that the influence of national parties varies within a
single legislative term, where national parties monitor their MEPs more closely in the pre-election period of (p. 595)
a national cycle (Lindstädt et al. 2011). And there is evidence that newly elected MEPs take some time to learn how
to balance the demands of their national party and their European political group (Lindstädt et al. 2012).
In sum, what we have found out about who the MEPs are and what they think can be summarized as follows. There
are three types of MEPs: early careerists who see the European Parliament as a stepping-stone to national politics;
seasoned politicians for whom the European Parliament represents a step down from national politics; and Brussels
careerists who see the European Parliament as their main arena for their careers. Because there is high turnover of
MEPs between parliamentary terms and because many MEPs leave the European Parliament to pursue a career
elsewhere within each term, the pool of Brussels careerists is small. Also, MEPs’ political preferences tend to be
aligned with their national parties, and underlying left-right preferences of MEPs and national parties are strong
predictors of how MEPs vote. There is little evidence of any socialization of MEPs into becoming more pro-European
by staying in Brussels. Finally, the electoral connection between MEPs and their voters is weak, if it existsat all.
However, the specific electoral rules used (whether an MEP is elected under a preferential electoral system or a
Page 3 of 14
closed list PR system) and how candidates are selected can shape how beholden MEPs are to their national party
leaderships.
Yet, there is a lot we still do not know about these issues. Research on the European Parliament has yet to uncover
the implications of the difference in career types. To what extent does career type influence the behaviour of
MEPs? One may expect that young careerists who seek a career at the national arena are more prepared to break
away from the position of their European political group if the position risks being a liability in the national political
discourse. In contrast, MEPs who primarily seek a European career might place more weight on building long-term
relations and trust with other actors inside the European Parliament. We may also expect that those who see the
European Parliament as the final stage of their political career may shirk in their legislative effort, as demonstrated
in studies of final-term effects in national parliaments. Research on the European Parliament has not yet provided a
persuasive account of any such relationship.
Next, little is known about the quality of MEPs, however measured. While the European Parliament has improved its
political power vis-à-vis the other EU institutions, we do not know of any studies that find (or refute) the idea that
the development of the institutional power of the European Parliament has led to an improvement in the overall
quality of MEPs.
Finally, there is scant research on the link between the behaviour of MEPs inside the European Parliament and their
career progression. Does it matter what an MEP does in Brussels for his or her political career back home, or even
inside the European Parliament? While there exist examples of MEPs whose careers have been cut short as a result
of defection from the national party-line on key votes, and MEPs whose post-parliament career can clearly be
traced back to their work in the European Parliament committees (for example, finding a position with a powerful
interest group in Brussels), systematic evidence of these patterns is lacking.
(p. 596) 28.3 Equilibrium Institutions: Formation of Political Groups and Committees
The two main aggregating institutions that shape political behaviour in the European Parliament are the “political
groups,” which are transnational parliamentary party organizations, and the committees. An interesting feature of
the European Parliament is that both of these institutions have been created endogenously by the MEPs. Hence, an
obvious question from the point of view of comparative legislative studies is how can the design and reform of
these two legislative institutions be explained. We first discuss the political groups before turning to the committees.
28.3.1 Formation of Political Groups
Unlike other international assemblies and some national parliaments, members of the European Parliament sit in
transnational political groups rather than as national delegations. This has been the practice since the first meeting
of the European Assembly in 1952 (Haas 1958). The membership of these political groups has evolved over time.
The most stable groups are those whose membership mirrors that of the traditional European “party families.” For
example, the main centre-left group, currently called the Alliance of Socialists and Democrats (S&D) brings
together the Social Democratic or Labour parties from each member state, has had a more stable membership than
the main centre-right group, the European People’s Party (EPP). In the EPP the tension between Christian
Democratic parties and Conservative parties has led to repeated mergers and splits over time. For example, having
joined the group in 1992, the British Conservative Party left the EPP after the 2009 elections to establish a smaller
group to the right of the EPP, together with several Eurosceptic conservative parties from the new Central and
Eastern European member states. Various other splits and mergers of political groups and switches of national
delegations between the political groups have occurred since 1979.
Despite these splits and mergers, the correlation between membership of a particular ideological “party families”
and membership of European Parliament political groups suggests that the purpose of these political organizations
in the European Parliament is policy-oriented. Their aim is to promote the common policy goals of the national
member parties and MEPs within each of the groups (see Hix and Lord 1997; Niedermayer 1983; Pridham and
Pridham 1981; Van Oudenhove 1965). Indeed, the ideological nature of the political groups is explicitly recognized
in the European Parliament’s own rules of procedure, where Rule 30 states that “Members may form themselves
into groups according to their political affinities.” The European Court of Justice has backed the (p. 597)
parliament’s rejection of groups that do not have an identifiable “political affinity” (such as “technical” or “mixed”
1
Page 4 of 14
groups formed purely to secure resources from parliament’s budget).1
McElroy and Benoit (2010; 2012) have undertaken the most thorough analysis of the policy congruence between
national party positions and membership of the European political groups, using data from expert judgements of
where national parties and the European political groups are located on a range of policy dimensions. On average,
the policy positions of national parties is a strong predictor of their political group membership. For example,
knowing the policy positions of national parties and the political groups led McElroy and Benoit (2010, 392) to
correctly predict the political group membership of 117 of the 148 national parties in the 2004–9 parliament.
McElroy and Benoit found some clear anomalies, however, which cannot be explained by the policy positions of
national parties alone. For example, the two main parties from Ireland—Fianna Fáil and Fine Gael—are probably in
the “wrong” political groups given their underlying policy positions. Fianna Fail, the more conservative of the two,
now sits in the liberal group whereas Fine Gael is a member of the EPP. The reason for this is that when Ireland
joined the then European Communities in 1973, Fine Gael became a member of the EPP before Fianna Fail, and then
successfully blocked the other party from joining the group. Other factors in addition to policy positions therefore
explain membership of the various groups. In particular, because the two largest groups in the parliament—S&D
and EPP—control most leadership positions in the parliament and also secure the chairs of the most important
committees, there are strong incentives for parties to belong to these two groups (Bardi 1996).
In short, what we know about the formation of the political groups in the European Parliament is that these
organizations primarily exist to promote the policy goals of national political parties and individual MEPs. Unlike
parties in most other democratic legislatures, the political groups in the European Parliament do not help MEPs get
re-elected. Instead, the groups enable MEPs to organize with like-minded politicians to influence the policy agenda
of and policy outcomes from the European Parliament. The political groups establish a division of labour between
the MEPs, between leaders and followers, and between different policy specialists in the committees. In return for
taking on these roles, MEPs are willing to follow the voting instructions of the groups in the knowledge that
collectively each group can be more influential than any single MEP acting alone. National parties and MEPs whose
policy positions are not completely congruent with the median positions of the political group to which they belong
are usually willing to face the costs of sometimes following group instructions against their own policy preferences
in the knowledge that other MEPs and national parties in their group will do the same on issues on which they are
closer to the group position. From this perspective, the political groups in the European Parliament are rather like
the parliamentary factions that formed in many national parliaments in Europe and North America in the nineteenth
century, prior to mass democratic elections—organized to promote their members’ policy positions in the legislative
process rather than to fight election campaigns (see Hix et al. 2007).
(p. 598) Yet, there is still a great dealwe do not know about why political groups exist. For example, why do
national parties and individual MEPs switch political groups? Are these switches primarily policy-driven or are they
driven by office incentives internal to the parliament, such as better committee positions? We also know very little
about the allocation of positions inside the political groups. For example, what explains who becomes the president
of a political group or who becomes the group “coordinator”on a particular committee? Are some national parties
systematically more influential inside the groups than others, controlling for their size? Does the seniority of an MEP
make a difference? And are more loyal MEPs in roll-call votes more likely to be rewarded with promotion inside the
group than less loyal MEPs?
28.3.2 Formation of Committees
Following Bowler and Farrell (1995), research on committees in the European Parliament has generally sought to
apply the three classic theories of committees in the US Congress (Shepsle and Weingast 1994, see also Martin,
this volume). The distribution theory—which highlights the electoral connection and constituency interests and
predicts that committees will be composed of high demanders and preference outliers (Shepsle and Weingast
1981)—has been dismissed as largely irrelevant in the European Parliament, as there are few constituency-specific
goods to allocate. The rules of the European Parliament, whereby the political makeup of each committee must be
broadly the same as the plenary as a whole, ensures that on average each committee member has similar
preferences to the Parliament as a whole, although there may be some within-group variation between committee
members and the plenary. Also, the fact that committee reports can be easily amended on the floor of the plenary,
where any political group can propose an amendment, prevents any committee from capturing the policy agenda
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in their policy area.
Nevertheless, there is some evidence that the background of MEPs in particular interest groups influences the
committee the MEPs join, which fits an assumption of the distributive theory of a close connection between
committee members and interest groups in the policy jurisdiction of a committee (Yordanova 2009). For example,
members of the Environment Committee, which is the most powerful legislative committee in the European
Parliament, generally have closer links to environmental interest groups than the average member of the European
Parliament (McElroy 2006). And rapporteurships on the Environment Committee tend to be allocated to MEPs from
member states with higher environmental standards (Kaeding 2004).
Alternatively, the informational perspectivehas found more support (Yordanova 2009). This perspective
emphasizes the role of committees in improving the quality of legislation through specialization in order to promote
the development of expertise in a legislative chamber, and predicts that committees should be representative of
the plenary as a whole (Gilligan and Krehbiel 1987; Krehbiel 1991). Once allocated to a committee, an MEP tends to
stay on the committee and build up his or her expertise in a particular policy area. Also, MEPs do not have large
personal offices—unlike members (p. 599) of the US Congress—and so are reliant on the administrative support
staff of the committees to help them prepare legislative reports and amendments, which again points to a particular
role of technical expertise in committee work in the European Parliament, rather than partisan interests or capture
by interest groups.
Finally, the partisan perspective has found support (Bowler and Farrell 1995; McElroy 2006; Whitaker 2001;
2005)on the basis of comparing differences in voting behaviour across members from different committees with the
rest of the European Parliament.This perspective emphasizes how party leaderships delegate autonomy in one
policy area to a backbencher in return for loyalty on all other policy areas and predicts that committees will reflect
the strength of the different parties (Cox and McCubbins 1993).However, to the extent that political groups are able
to shape the voting behaviour of individual members, ideal point estimates extracted from roll-call voting behaviour
may be a problematic measure of individual-level preferences in committees in the European Parliament.
Nonetheless, the political groups have gradually increased their influence inside committees via the use of “group
coordinators” in each committee and the appointment of “shadow rapporteurs” by the main political groups. And,
the process of appointing committee chairs and vice-chairs is highly partisan, where assignments are granted to
each political group in proportion to their size in the chamber and the order generated by the d’Hondt divisor
method.
Inside the committees, the right to appoint rapporteurs to draft legislative reports is proportional to the number of
MEPs from each political group who are full members of a committee. Within each political group, proportionality
between national delegations is the norm. However, Mamadouh and Raunio (2003) find some discrepancy across
national delegations and political groups in the third and fourth parliamentary terms. As the European Parliament
operates an auction system for allocating reports, and some reports may be considered more important than
others, this discrepancy may simply reflect that political groups and national delegations within them may differ in
their trade-off between the number of reports and the saliency of the report. Indeed, Høyland (2006) demonstrates
that within each political group, representation in the Council matters with regard tohow parties trade saliency
versus frequency of reports. Parties in government in the EU member states tend to write more legislative reports
than parties not represented in the council. Focusing on individual characteristics of the pool of rapporteurs,
Yoshinaka, McElroy, and Bowler (2010) demonstrate that the pool of rapporteurs represents a small subset of all
MEPs, whose characteristics suggest that they are both loyal to the political group and possess relevant
experience in the policy area from their pre-parliament career. Finally, Marshall (2010) finds that interest groups
target MEPs selectively based on their expertise and ability to carry amendmentproposals into legislation.
In short, since the landmark study of Bowler and Farrell (1995), our knowledge of the committee system in the
European Parliament has grown exponentially. While several of their findings still stand, there is mounting evidence
against their claim of no “seniority effect.” Seniority is clearly not as important in the European Parliament as in the
US Congress. Yet, we still see that most committee chairs are allocated to incumbent MEPs, and these MEPs pick up
alarger proportion of the legislative reports. Also, although (p. 600) committees are representative of the plenary
as a whole in terms of political group membership and the voting behaviour of MEPs, there is some element of self-
selection into committees on the basis of background and interests, which means that committee members have
closer links to interest groups in the policy area of their committee than would be the case if committee membership
Page 6 of 14
were allocated randomly. We also know that reports are allocated to MEPs who participate and are loyal to the
political groups in roll-call votes (but see Kreppel 2002). This means that rapporteurs are representative of the
parliament as a whole in terms of revealed preferences as expressed in roll-call votes.
In terms of what we do not know, although there is some evidence of a seniority effect in the allocation of
committee chairs and reports, the precise operation of such a system, if it really exists, has not been convincingly
established. Is the distinction simply between those who serve more than one term and newcomers, or is there a
hierarchy behind the system? It is easy to present examples of individuals with long-term careers who seem to be
influential in a particular field. Also, while there is a growing literature on allocation to committees and
responsibilities within committees, there has been no systematic research on the committee system itself. For
example, why has the system developed in the way that it has, with the particular committee jurisdictions and large
differences in the sizes of the committees, both in terms of members and in workloads? For example, there is not a
perfect relationship between committee size and the number of reports written or the legislative activity of a
committee. Similarly, our knowledge of how committee chairs are allocated barely moves beyond the
proportionality principle between political groups and national delegations within them. Finally, although it is well
known that committee coordinators have established themselves as important actors within committees, we do not
yet know how they are appointed or to what extent they influence what happens inside the committees.
28.4 Institutional Equilibria: Impact of Parties and Committees on MEP Behaviour
Once created, legislative institutions such as parties and committees shape behaviour, sometimes in ways that
were intended by the designers of the institutions (the legislators themselves) and at other times in ways that were
not intended. So, how have the political groups and committees shaped political behaviour, in the European
Parliament?
28.4.1 Impact of the Political Groups
Research on voting behaviour in the European Parliament suggests that one of the main impacts of the political
groups has been to increase the voting cohesion of the (p. 601) members of the political groups in roll-call votes
in the chamber (Hix et al. 2005; 2007). Exogenous measures of MEP or national party preferences—for example
from surveys of MEPs, the coding of national party manifestos, or expert judgments of national party positions—
reveal a considerable overlap in the left-right positions of the members of the political groups in the European
Parliament (see Hix 2002; McElroy and Benoit 2010). For example, the British Labour Party and most British Labour
MEPs who sit in the centre-left S&D group, are located to the right of the Belgian Christian Democratic parties and
MEPs who sit in the centre-right EPP group. However, in their roll-call voting behaviour, British Labour MEPs almost
always vote with their S&D colleagues while Belgian Christian Democrats almost always vote with their EPP
colleagues.
The main explanation for this sort of behaviour is that MEPs are engaged in a repeated game, where an MEP
carefully calculates whether voting against his or her group in a vote is likely to pay off in the near future (see Hix
et al. 2009). In the division of labour inside the group, MEPs become policy specialists (for example in the area on
which they specialize in their committee). Through this specialization, MEPs are given the opportunity to influence
the position their group takes on policy issues in their area. MEPs are then likely to follow the line of their group on
each issue, on the assumption that this would be the position of the MEP on the issue if he or she had the time and
expertise to figure out what thatpreference would be. As a result, if an MEP votes against the group line in a highly
salient vote, this undermines the credibility of the MEP when he or shehas the chance to set the group position on
his/her special issues. The political groups also have some sanctions to punish MEPs who do not follow group
instructions. For example, there is evidence that MEPs who follow group instructions are more likely to become
rapporteurs than MEPs who are more disloyal (Yoshinaka et al. 2010).
As political groups have become more institutionalized in terms of their internal division of labour and in terms of
their organizational structure within committees and the plenary, their voting cohesion has increased over time. In
fact, the main political groups in the European Parliament are now more cohesive in roll-call votes than the
Democrats and Republicans in the US House of Representatives, although they remain less cohesive than
parliamentary parties in national parliaments in Europe (where governing parties have strong control over their
Page 7 of 14
parliamentary parties). Bigger groups also tend to be more cohesive than smaller groups, and as groups have
grown in size their cohesion has increased (Hix et al. 2005). Bigger groups have an incentive to strengthen their
internal division of labour and are also more able to influence the policy agenda inside committees and on the
plenary floor, which aids their cohesion. Bailer et al. (2009) show that the ability of party group leaders to maintain
voting unity varies.
Furthermore, the cohesion of the political groups has grown in parallel with growing contestation between the two
biggest groups. When forming legislative coalitions, leaders of the two biggest political groups need to tradeoff the
incentive to present a united front in order to maximize the parliament’s impact vis-à-vis the other EU institutions,
against the need take a clear stand on an issue (Kreppel 2000). However, Kreppel and Hix (2003) find that a
“grand coalition” between the two main groups was not more likely to form on legislative votes where the
institutional rules required an (p. 602) oversized majority, although it was more likely to form on final votes that
send a strong signal to the EU Council and Commission. Having said that, coalition formation in the European
Parliament tends to be stable within a policy area, but vary across areas. For example, in the 2004–9 and so far in
the 2009–14 terms, a centre-right coalition (between the EPP, the Liberals, and the groups to the right of the EPP)
tends to win on market liberalization issues, whereas a centre-left coalition (between the S&D, the Liberals, and the
groups to the left of the S&D) tends to win on civil liberties and environmental issues.2
Nevertheless, there is growing skepticism regarding the claims of political group cohesion in the European
Parliament, since there may be a selection bias in roll-call votes. Roll-call votes only constitute about one-third of
all votes in the European Parliament. Also, roll-call votes are requested by political groups. There are several
reasons why a group might request a roll-call vote on an issue, for example to signal the position of the group to
outside interest groups or the other EU institutions, or to show which way each group voted on an issue, or to
enforce group cohesion (Carrubba et al. 2008, Carrubba et al. 2006). These strategic incentives suggest that
groups are likely to be more cohesive in roll-call votes than in non-roll-call votes (see Hug 2010). What is more,
Carrubba et al. (2006) show that roll-call votes are disproportionally requested on environmental issues (by the
Green group) and on non-legislative issues. Hix, Noury, and Roland (2007) and Høyland (2010) show that the
political groups are more cohesive on non-legislative issues, where the European Parliament has full control of its
own agenda, than on legislative issues, where the European Parliament is forced to take positions on issues that
are proposed by the European Commission or the EU Council. Hix, Noury, and Roland (2007) find that a group is
more cohesive when it requeststhe roll call than when other groups request the roll call. Against these findings, the
number of roll-call votes has increased over time, roll calls are requested on most highly salient votes (when MEPs
are likely to face many competing pressures).Since any political group can request a roll-call vote, it is difficult for
any one group to restrict roll-call votes to issues on which they can enforce cohesion. So the jury is still out on this
issue.
In short, we know that the political groups in the European Parliament are surprisingly cohesive with regard toroll-
call votes, and that this cohesion seems to have gone up over time. We also know that the groups have become
more cohesive despite growing internal ideological heterogeneity, and that some MEPs often vote against their own
ideological positions in order to support the positions of the groups. Hence, this suggests that “parties matter”
inside the European Parliament. Put another way, policy outcomes in the European Parliament would be different in
the absence of the political groups.
Nevertheless, the theoretical micro-foundations of the political groups in the European Parliament are
underdeveloped. For example, we do not yet have a robust model, supported by data, of the conditions under
which a political group is united or when voting unity breaks down. In addition, we do not yet know how far the
selection effect in roll-call votes undermines the key results about the extent and growth of party cohesion in the
European Parliament. And it is not clear why particular issue-specific coalitions between the political groups form
and seem to be stable.
(p. 603) 28.4.2 Impact of the Committees
Research on the structural aspects of committee organization has developed further than research on the impact
of the committee organization of the European Parliament. Do the committees enhance the quality of the legislative
input ofthe European Parliament? Do they enhance the bargaining position of the European Parliament? Because it
is notorious difficult to measure influence of a legislator or a legislative institution, research has made less progress
Page 8 of 14
in answering these questions.
Nonetheless, in terms of the influence ofrapporteurs, Costello and Thomson (2010) find that early agreement under
the co-decision procedure enables the rapporteur to bias the European Parliament opinion in favour of the position
of his or her member state, but find no effect of such bias in favour of the position of the MEP’s political group. This
finding is surprising given the dominant role of the political groups in the allocation of reports, although it is in line
with some skeptical assessment of the lack of transparency in first reading agreements (e.g. Shackleton and
Raunio 2003).
In contrast, Rasmussen and Toshkov (2011) find that the European Parliament allocates disproportionally more time
to first reading co-decision legislation than to legislation passed under other procedures. Furthermore, rapporteurs
with revealed policy-preferences close to the European Parliament median (as measured by scaling roll-call votes),
are more likely to conclude first reading agreements (Rasmussen 2011). However, Ringe (2005; 2010)
demonstrates that the rapporteurcan use strategic framing of the contentious issues on a piece of legislation to
shape the position of the European Parliament. And Benedetto (2005) illustrates how a rapporteur can act as a
legislative entrepreneur, balancing the need to find winning coalitions within the European Parliament while
conducting bicameral negotiations with the council.
These findings suggest that the literature has reached a consensus that the committee system is important for
legislative outputs, functioning as the “legislative backbone” of the European Parliament (Neuhold 2001). However,
there is no substantive agreement over exactly how and, to what extent, the actors within the committees are able
to influence EU legislation. Given the open amendment rule on the floor of the plenary of the European Parliament
and the high degree of proportionality in the allocation of committee membership and committee roles, it is not clear
that specialization in committees actually results in legislation that is substantively different from the position of the
median floor member of the European Parliament.
There are several other aspects of the impact of the committee system in the European Parliament which have not
yet been investigated. For example, to what extent does decision-making in committees matter for policy
outcomes? Does the allocation of a legislative report to one committee rather than another shape the position of
the European Parliament on the legislation? While there exists suggestive evidence of this on the basis of
interviews with insiders, there is no systematic analysis of this issue. Furthermore, does the involvement of the
European Parliament enhance the quality of EU legislation, or is it a gateway for interest groups to unduly influence
EU legislation in favour of specialized interests and away from the interests of the general public?
(p. 604) Hagemann and Høyland (2010) show that disagreement in the council makes it less likely that the
European Parliament will be able to form a sufficiently broad coalition to meet the “absolute majority” requirement
for amending co-decision legislation in second reading. However, there is little systematic research on how and to
what extent inter-institutional dynamics shape political behaviour in the European Parliament. While the rapporteur
may be able to shape the position of the parliament, and successfully promote the position of the European
Parliament in inter-institutional bargains (König et al. 2007), we lack a proper understanding of how, to what extent,
and under whatconditions, the rapporteuris able to promote some interests at the expense of others. Also, while we
know a lot about which coalitions tend to form across procedures and policy areas, we are not aware of any
research that identifies log-rolling across or within legislative bills (or the lack of it), either within the European
Parliament or between the EU institutions, or how this may affect the policy outcomes of the EU.
28.5 Conclusions
The last decade or so has seen extensive application of theories and methods originally developed for studying
political behaviour in the US Congress to political behavior in the European Parliament. Hix (2001) and Noury
(2002) were the first to apply NOMINATE to the study of roll-call votes in the European Parliament, which was
followed by an ambitious research program to collect and analyse all recorded votes since the first direct elections
to the European Parliament in 1979. By and large, this research program has shown that the European Parliament is
a “normal parliament” in terms of party cohesion and coalition formation (Hix et al. 2007). By making publically
available the complete set of recorded votes and individual MEPs’ “NOMINATE scores”, European Parliament
scholars have been able to test imported research designs that require some revealed individual-level measure of
ideological location in the European Parliament policy space (e.g. Hausemer 2006; McElroy 2006; Yordanova
Page 9 of 14
2009).
As a result, we now know that committees in the European Parliament, while representative in terms of the diversity
in nationalities and ideologies, are run by groups of loyal and active MEPs. Yet, the balance of power between the
political groups and the committees is still not fully resolved. This may, at least in part, be due to a lack of a
similarly comprehensive dataset on activities in the committees and MEPs’ background. However, perhaps equally
important, are the lack of ambitious research designs that enable careful evaluation of theoretically derived
behavioural implications.
To sum up, research on politics in the European Parliament has, by extensive import of sophisticated methods and
general theories of legislative behaviour, substantively enhanced our understanding of politics in the European
Parliament. Being the most transparent of the EU legislative institutions, research on behaviour in the European
Parliament has also enhanced our knowledge of EU politics in general. However, to a limited extent we have only
been able to use the variation within the institution—in (p. 605) terms of procedural rules, electoral systems, and
political career paths—to enhance our knowledge of legislative politics in general. Future generations of European
Parliament researchers should strive to make their core findings more relevant for legislative scholars outside the
realm of EU politics.
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Effects on Party Group Cohesion in the European Parliament. Journal of Legislative Studies, 15: 355–78.
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Notes:
(1) . See Judgement 2004/C 59/03 of the European Court of Justice. The italics in the quote are added for emphasis.
(2) . Data from <www.VoteWatch.eu>.
Simon Hix
Simon Hix is Professor of European and Comparative Politics and Head of the Department of Government at the London School of
Economics and Political Science.
Bjørn Høyland
Bjørn Høyland is Professor of Political Science at the University of Oslo.
Page 13 of 14
Sub-National Legislatures
William M. Downs
Institutions
2014
The term “sub-national legislature” encompasses a multitude of elected bodies located outside national capitals.
Scholars of political science have increasingly focused on the study of sub-national legislatures in order to
understand governance and political behavior across a range of democratic systems. This chapter looks at sub-
national legislatures, with emphasis on the intermediate regional level. It provides an overview of research on sub-
national legislatures to assess where the field is today and to identify pressing issues for future investigation. It
charts the development of research on sub-national legislatures by disaggregating the field into three core areas:
recruitment and elections, legislative behavior, and institutional design. It also considers recent research frontiers
in the study of sub-national legislatures.
Keywords: sub-national legislatures, governance, political behavior, recruitment, elections, legislative behavior, institutional design
29.1 Introduction: Legislative Politics in the Periphery
THE study of sub-national legislatures constitutes an increasingly important focal point for political science research.
While most scholarship has traditionally restricted attention to national assemblies, a now-vibrant body of work
explores classic as well as cutting-edge questions against the evidence offered by representative bodies at sub-
central levels. These “second-order” institutions are intrinsically crucial to understanding governance and political
behaviour across a range of democratic system types; they are, moreover, instrumentally valuable as a still largely
untapped universe of empirical cases with which to develop and test theory. Many of the issues that have long
dominated legislative studies (e.g., executive–legislative relations, electoral responsiveness of legislators, internal
organization and procedures, members’ voting behaviour) likewise characterize investigations into regional,
provincial, cantonal, and other local-level authorities. Additional topics emerge in the literature, including the
international relations of sub-national legislatures, post-election government formation, use of territorial assemblies
as laboratories for policy innovation, and the vicissitudes of public perceptions. Notable at first inspection for its
apparent eclecticism, published work on sub-national legislatures does provide evidence of increasing theoretical
rigor and more frequent cross-national comparisons.
Growth in research on sub-national assemblies is partly a function of decentralist trends in Western democracies.
Just as modern nation-states have confronted the centripetal pull of globalization and transnationalism from above,
so too have they faced centrifugal pressures from below. A range of motivations—democratization, administrative
efficiency, pacification of regional nationalism, offloading of unpopular (p. 610) burdens—prompted states in
recent decades to restructure their internal distributions of power and responsibility. Central state authorities have,
in some cases, devolved powers to new institutions of territorial governance. Elsewhere, they have resuscitated
old structures and enlivened them with new responsibilities. States resisting such trends still maintain networks of
local representative democracy. Loughlin characterizes these developments as posing:
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...new problems for the theory and exercise of democracy. Previously democracy had been understood
primarily as liberal representative democracy whose legitimacy lay at the national level. Today, both the
theory and practice have to be modified by the introduction of notions of regional and local democracy,
now seen as essential elements of democracy itself. This raises a number of issues concerning the locus
of legitimacy, the nature of representation, relations among levels of government (hierarchical or
egalitarian), and forms of participation. (2001, 480–1)
Scholars devote considerable effort to explaining decisions, forms, and consequences of decentralization (Hankla
and Downs 2010; Treisman 2007; De Vries 2000; Downs 1999), and as described later, a sizeable portion of that
effort examines the roles played by elected territorial assemblies and their members.
“Sub-national legislature” is a broad encompassing term that can include a multitude of elected bodies located
outside national capitals. To be sure, there is extensive scholarship focusing on municipal and other local-level
councils (see Dahl 1961; Norton 1994; Lidström 1999; Egner and Heinelt 2008), which advances our
understanding of urban politics and comparative local government. City councils, however, are normally
distinguishable from meso-level legislatures in terms of scale, scope, and (sometimes) political allure. Therefore,
this chapter by necessity acknowledges published work on local elected assemblies; however, given that the
greatest growth area in sub-national legislative studies is at the intermediate regional level, more emphasis is
devoted to that portion of the subfield. At all levels, representative assemblies can be assessed according to
standard functional expectations (representation, deliberation, lawmaking, supervision) as well as those more
specifically related to their locations in systems of multilevel governance (protecting the autonomy of sub-national
authorities from central intrusion, countering executive dominance, congruence of party alignments with those at
national level). The purpose of this chapter is to provide an overview of research on sub-national legislatures,
characterizing where the field is today, and mapping pressing issues for future investigation.
29.2 Comparative Scope
One apparent reality of scholarship on sub-national legislatures is that multiple research traditions coexist,
sometimes complementing one another but too frequently developing in isolation. Indeed, mirroring trends in
legislative studies writ large, there is an (p. 611) “Atlantic divide” in the literature on sub-national assemblies.
Much as in the broader subdiscipline of legislative studies, work on the American case is “more likely to contain
deductive theory, make use of mathematical reasoning, or be large-N quantitative;” research on European cases
is also marked by quantitative data, but “the thick descriptive approach is still frequently employed with purely
theoretical works relatively rare” (Martin 2008, 558). The importance of states in federal systems, combined with an
enduring sense of American exceptionalism, has produced a long-standing research program on the 50 US state-
level legislatures. Among the most influential early works in this tradition is Malcolm Jewell’s Representation in State
Legislatures (1982), which pioneered systematic, multistate interview methods to capture legislators’ role
perceptions. Subsequent research on American state legislatures is, first, characterized by attempts to document
the extent to which phenomena observed in the US Congress are also found in the states (see Jones 1986; Francis
1989; Prince and Overby 2005) and, second, by efforts to chart state legislatures’ evolving role in the country’s
particular federal style (see Chaffey 1970; Rosenthal 1996; Squire 2006). Despite significant advances in
knowledge about state legislatures, the literature still “lacks the strong theoretical orientation found in the
congressional literature” (Clucas 2003, 388). The problem, according to Clucas:
...is not simply a lack of theory, for most studies published today are framed in some theoretical
perspective. Rather, the problem is the lack of a broader vision in trying to explain state legislative politics.
Much state legislative politics research focuses on narrow, discrete questions. With some important
exceptions, there has been little effort to develop and apply rigorous and integrative theories of legislative
behaviour to explain state legislative politics and place these narrow questions in a broader context.
(2003, 388)
While not yet realizing the full potential of integrative theory building, the American literature is at least routinely
comparative in scope and method. Squire and Hamm (2005) specifically contend that the problems inherent in
comparing legislatures across countries can be ameliorated by comparing legislatures within the United States, and
such advantage is regularly exploited. Where US state legislatures are placed in cross-national context, the most
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frequent comparison is with Canada’s provincial parliaments (Moncrief and Thompson 1990; Moncrief 1994;
Bolleyer 2010).
On the other side of the Atlantic divide are European scholars who confront much greater variation in legislative
forms, roles, and performance at sub-national levels. There federalism likewise increases the salience of sub-
national legislatures, and studies of regional or cantonal parliaments in Germany, Austria, Belgium, and Switzerland
are predominant in the literature. Federalism “is argued to offer opportunities for subnational legislatures to
distinguish themselves from the central legislature” (Massicotte 2003, 19), yet the extent to which this is apparent
varies considerably across countries. Reforms of traditionally unitary states during the 1970s and 1980s
empowered regional assemblies in France, Spain, Portugal, and Italy, expanding the pool of meaningful sub-
national legislatures available for study. Italy’s regional councils figure prominently (p. 612) in Putnam’s influential
Making Democracy Work (1994), highlighting the impact of social capital on institutional success. Schmidt’s
Democratizing France (1990) was among the first works to examine the historical and political context of regional
as well as local councils in a traditional unitary state system. Sub-national legislative research has only grown
modestly among French scholars, for whom comparatively “low interest in the life of national and local assemblies”
can be explained in part as a function of “the weakness of parliamentary intervention in France, which results from
the increasing importance of the executive branch, at the expenses of assemblies, in the formulation of public
policy” (Nay 2003, 95). As evaluated by Costa, “French specialists are not, for the most part, applying the
methods, concepts and frames of mainstream legislative studies: they prefer to do things on their own and are
often critical toward the international Anglo-Saxon literature” (2010, 71).
Among traditional unitary states where sub-national assemblies have captured the sustained attention of legislative
scholars, the United Kingdom stands out. Greater research interest is likely due to the fact that in the UK, unlike in
France, the devolution of political responsibilities to territorial assemblies coincides with historical identities (rather
than administrative divisions). The election of representative assemblies in Scotland (since 1999), Wales (since
1999), and Northern Ireland (since 1998, but with subsequent suspensions) has given voice and at least symbolic
authority to the UK’s non-English constituent nations. Despite the absence of extensive formal powers (most of
which are retained by the House of Commons and the prime minister’s government in London), “regional
parliaments have enjoyed their successes in attempting to exert a modicum of influence over how their ministers
conduct themselves” (Raunio and Wright 2006, 294). Exerting a “modicum of influence,” however, does not
always satisfy nationalist sentiments and a good portion of the literature on devolved legislatures in unitary states
addresses the politics of frustrated expectations (Bradbury and Mitchell 2002; Catt and Murphy 2002; Arter 2004).
Scotland’s planned referendum on independence in September 2014 provides renewed energy and urgency to this
line of research.
Post-communist countries also provide important contexts in which to study sub-national legislative institutions.
Russia’s federal character elevates the apparent importance of regional legislatures there. Although “No one would
claim that Russian regions and republics have evolved into models of democratic governance,” regional legislative
assemblies imperfectly “constitute the first real sovereignty vested in locales over the past millennium of Russian
civilisation” (Moses 2003, 1053). They “provide some hope for the rise of minimally responsive, increasingly
professionalized” democratic institutions that can “confront an encroaching federal government” (Moraski 2006,
135). In Russia the “relatively low degree of party penetration of regional political institutions, such as the regional
legislatures” (Ishiyama 2002, 165) translates into significant variation and volatility across territorial institutions.
Elsewhere, the transition to democracy has encouraged examination of party discipline in the five new Landtage in
eastern Germany (Davidson-Schmich 2003), of opportunities for the Czech Communist Party to sustain its political
relevance (LaPlant et al. 2004), and of (p. 613) institutional reforms in Poland necessary as preconditions for
accession to the European Union (O’Dwyer 2006).
Membership in a supranational organization such as the European Union embeds sub-national legislatures in
intricate systems of multilevel governance. By examining the responses of sub-national legislatures to policy-
making in such systems:
we can gain new perspectives on multilevel democracy beyond the common skeptical perceptions
emphasizing deficits. We can discover institutional learning and adaptation, which are driven by tensions
between inter- and intragovernmental arenas.
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(Benz 2010–11, 111)
Relevant work on sub-national legislatures in the era of Europeanization focuses primarily on a range of functions:
scrutiny and oversight, balancing executive power, autonomous action, checking the decisions of national
parliament, and external representation. Central to studies of legislative scrutiny is the role played by EU Affairs
committees, while accountability checks on regional executives in EU policy fields are shown to manifest through
such controlling mechanisms as oral and written questions, debates, hearings, and confidence votes. In the EU’s
increasingly complex networks of multilevel governance, the sub-national legislature’s ability to adopt unilateral
policy positions that may contradict those of the central government is seen as a measure of autonomy, while its
voicing of regional interests in EU issues serves as an important and potentially binding check on national
government. Even more directly, the sub-national legislature’s ability to exercise control over the region’s
representation in Brussels can profoundly extend its image projection and information-gathering abilities. Each of
these information, accountability, and control functions—if exercised—provides lower-order assemblies with some
measure of system relevance (Downs 2003).
A much smaller but still rich literature exists on sub-national legislatures outside the North American and European
arenas. Federalism, again, draws research interest to a range of cases including Australia (Halligan, Williams,
Hawker 1988) Brazil (Samuels 2003), India (Jain 1972), Mexico (Beer 2001; 2003) Nigeria (Suberu 1993), and
Venezuela (Aragort 2008). Beyond countries with formally federal structures, there is also effort to understand
territorial assemblies’ roles in such issues and settings as political accountability in South Africa (Rapoo 2004;
Lodge 2005), corruption in Malawi (Tambulasi 2009), and legislators’ party-switching in Japan (Milazzo and
Scheiner 2011). Dominant among these works are issues of democratization, development, and political capacity.
For countries that once struggled with centralized authoritarianism, political decentralization brings government
“closer to the people,” increases citizen access to public authority, and presumably heightens political efficacy.
Such works are considerably less likely than studies of North American or European cases to demonstrate cross-
national, comparative methodologies and instead tend to be descriptive examinations of individual contexts.
Notable exceptions include Eaton’s Politics Beyond the Capital (2004), which compares the politics of designing
sub-national institutions across Argentina, Brazil, Chile, and Uruguay. Although significantly different from their
counterparts in (p. 614) fully fledged democracies, territorial assemblies in less open states still garner scholarly
attention for their functional roles. Illustrative here is work on provincial and local assemblies in China (Xia 1997;
Cho 2006; Chunli 2008).
29.3 Evolution of the Field
We can chart the development of research on sub-national legislatures by disaggregating the field into three core
areas: recruitment and elections; legislative behaviour; and institutional design. In each of these areas there is
evidence of the dual origins—e.g. intrinsic and instrumental—of interest in legislative politics outside national
capitals. What may be loosely deemed a “local government tradition” places analytical weight on assemblies for
their intrinsic political importance. Local- and mesolevel representative institutions are initially relevant for what
they tell us about democratic process and quality in national peripheries. The implicit assumption is that politics at
sub-national levels genuinely matters and produces certain “normative merits” (Van Assche and Dierickx 2007,
26) by fostering political participation, legislative responsiveness, and citizen education. A parallel “comparative
legislatures tradition” has evolved by finding instrumental value in sub-national representative institutions for
leveraging new tests of hypotheses originally developed at the national parliamentary level. In this tradition,
research on the sub-national arena is driven less by the substantive import of legislative politics at that level than it
is by realization that comparison across territorial assemblies “makes possible a level of sophistication, theory
building, and hypothesis testing that is not possible when we limit our attention” only to national legislatures
(Ramsden 2002, 177). The confluence of these two traditions has produced some significant advances in our
understanding of legislative politics beyond national capitals; moreover, it highlights glaring gaps where future work
may find profit.
29.3.1 Elections to Sub-National Legislatures
Just as it is for national legislatures, the centrality of elections to the study of sub-national legislatures is clear and
enduring. Of the American case, Clucas determined that the “aspect of state legislative politics that has received
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the most scholarly attention since 1990 has been elections” (2003, 389). So, too, is it that candidate recruitment,
campaigns, electoral system rules, and outcomes constitute important themes for comparative research. Together,
such themes direct attention to the variable value of legislative membership at sub-national levels.
Of recruitment to sub-national legislatures, the extant literature focuses on the same three essential questions that
have long animated studies of national assemblies: “1. Who is recruited? 2. How and why are individuals recruited?
3. What circumstances affect variations in 1 and 2?” (Kornberg, Clarke, and Watson 1975, 253). While variations
(p. 615) clearly exist at national level, their incidence increases substantially across sub-national institutions. The
allure of standing for election is shaped in part by the institution’s political and policy influence (both actual and
perceived), by the prospects that securing a seat can translate into further career development, by anticipated
financial gain, and by pursuit of ideological and/or psychological rewards. In much of the literature on state
legislatures in the United States, the key dimension is institutional professionalization; with increased
compensation, larger staffs, and longer sessions, the attractiveness of being a legislator increases. Such increases
should, in turn, yield cohorts of capable legislators “who are more likely to want a political career and, thus, more
likely to be motivated by the re-election goal” (Clucas 2007, 2). Beyond the American case, attention to institutional
professionalization is complemented by interest in how politicians use territorial assemblies as springboards for
national legislative ambitions. In complex, multilevel polities the importance of having sub-national elected
experience as a precursor to securing a position on the party’s national list may be great (Borchert and Stolz
2011; Montero 2007). Linkages between national and sub-national legislative politics—as well as the career
trajectories of politicians—are impacted in systems that allow the simultaneous accumulation of multiple elected
mandates. France, for example, has for most of its Fifth Republic allowed the cumul des mandats practice,
whereby national parliamentarians would routinely also sit as members of councils at local and/or regional levels.
Dual mandates are typically prohibited in federal systems.
Work on recruitment and office-seeking at sub-national levels increasingly focuses on the access that particular
groups have to seats in representative bodies. Here the success of women and minorities is at issue, with sub-
national legislatures providing opportunities to observe the impact of electoral rules on representation (especially
in systems that employ different rules at national and sub-national levels). Mesolevel assemblies “offer seats that
are often less competitive, require less costly campaigns, and are less likely to require relocation away from
familial demands, all conditions which have traditionally inhibited women’s involvement” in legislative politics
(Vengroff, Nyiri, and Fugiero 2003, 163). Those inhibiting factors aside, there are then expectations that
proportional representation systems increase women’s representation in sub-national legislatures to greater
degrees than majoritarian or mixed systems, and it may also be conditioned by a country’s level of economic
development. Dominated by research on the American state legislatures, studies of recruitment and representation
of minorities seek evidence of the effects of district type and magnitude (Haynie 2001; Lublin and Voss 2000;
Bullock and Gaddie 1993). Redistricting to improve the representation of racial minorities (especially African-
Americans in the United States) is a growing focal point for studies at the sub-national level and potentially
connects theoretically inspired research to the practice of political reform.
Comparative analysis of recruitment and election of sub-national legislators is most highly developed in the area of
voting behaviour and in the depiction of substate elections as “second-order” phenomena. Introduced first by Reif
and Schmitt (1980) in an effort to explain why incumbent parties in national governments (i.e. the first-order arena)
suffered heavy losses in European Parliament elections, propositions about (p. 616) second-order elections
anticipate reduced stakes leading to lower turnout, greater voter experimentation with smaller or new parties (on
whom votes would be “wasted” in national elections), and heightened rejection of those parties that govern in the
first-order arena. Including in their definition of second-order elections “by-elections, municipal elections, various
sorts of regional elections, those to a second chamber and the like” (1980, 8), Reif and Schmitt suggest that
distinctive sub-national issues get eclipsed by national ones as voters render their judgments on the first-order
arena. Jeffery and Hough qualify this apparent dynamic by comparing the UK, Germany, Spain, and Canada, with
evidence suggesting that “this ‘second orderness’ is reduced when more powers are decentralized to the sub-
state level...and if sub-state identities and parties are stronger” (2009, 219). Elsewhere, the “conception of
regional elections as second-order national elections is clearly dismissed by the data” in Switzerland (Selb 2006,
70). The extent to which local factors intervene to mediate the anticipated effects of second-order elections is the
crucial frontier now in need of research attention. If elections to sub-national legislatures are predominantly
plebiscites on the performance of national governments, then we should expect party strategy in the periphery to
Page 5 of 14
look demonstrably different than if more localized issues and actions drive voting outcomes (Pallarés and Keating
2003; Jeffery and Hough 2003).
29.3.2 Legislative Behaviour
While studies of recruitment and elections are facilitated by the relative ease of data collection on those topics
(even from afar), much more challenging—and therefore much less visible in the literature—is work on the actual
actions and behaviour of legislators once elected to sub-national assemblies. Research on behaviour often
demands direct observation, survey research, and interviewing, all of which makes for rich and original data;
however, the fieldwork necessary to produce such data can limit comparative scope. One notable exception to
such methodological demands is the study of voting behaviour within sub-national legislatures, which can be more
readily accomplished at a distance. Despite research challenges, key contributions do indeed exist, and our
understanding of behaviour outside national settings is progressing in a suitably cumulative fashion. That being
said, the Atlantic divide is especially apparent in this dimension of sub-national legislative studies, and genuinely
comparative work remains scarce.
As work on legislative behaviour in sub-national settings has evolved, focus has sharpened around two clustered
issues: (1) legislators’ roles, perceptions, and constituency behaviour, and (2) their voting behaviour and fidelity to
party discipline. Invoking the classic Burkean distinction between delegates and trustees, Halligan et al. (1988) use
responses to mailed questionnaires administered to Australian state and Canadian provincial legislators to find that
“delegate-servant” role orientations (where constituents’ opinions take precedence over the member’s personal
judgment) are a rarity. For those sub-national legislators with a delegate orientation, however, time spent on
constituency service is found to be considerably greater. Of course, the characteristics of (p. 617) individual
legislators may influence their role perceptions, and those perceptions may be mediated by the intervening effects
of electoral rules. For example, where legislatures employ mixed electoral systems (e.g. some members elected
directly as a constituency representative with others elected proportionally by party list), there is reason to expect
list members will take up less case work than constituency representatives (Carman and Shephard 2007). Such
distinctions do not apply to the American case, where studies of state legislators abound (see Thomas and Welch
1991; Jewell and Whicker 1994; Clucas 2007). In contrast to party-driven parliamentary systems, “In most
American legislatures, the individual legislator is something of an electoral free agent, building influence and re-
election success on constituency service, committee work, and his/her own fundraising ability” (Moncrief and
Thompson 1990, 15). Where sub-national institutions are newer and weaker, legislators’ role perceptions and
constituency activities are overwhelmingly shaped by how they adapt to democratization processes and political
contestation (Beer 2001; Rapoo 2004).
Beyond studies of role perceptions and constituency service, there is a growing body of work on legislators’ actual
voting behaviour. Students of legislative politics outside the United States “look with envy to Capitol Hill” where
every year “the US House of Representatives produces some hundred roll-call votes (RCVs) offering the
opportunity to test theories of parliamentary behaviour with sound individual data at a very high level of
methodological sophistication” (Stecker 2010, 438). As a consequence of an absence of a similar abundance of
data from national parliaments outside the United States, some scholars have turned to sub-national assemblies for
evidence of recorded votes and other forms of legislative behaviour that may provide insights about party unity
and policy-making. Illustrative is work on federal Germany, where 16 state parliaments with traditions of strong
party discipline face increasing public pressure to have their deputies vote their own views rather than follow the
strict party line. As Davidson-Schmich finds in her analysis of the five new eastern Landtage, even in “a setting
where sociological factors—including anti-party norms, low ideological cohesion, and both weak party organisation
and identification—all suggest that party groups will not be cohesive when votes are taken, the opposite occurs”
(2003, 100). The emergence of strong legislative parties after German unification is proffered as evidence that
legislators respond rationally and strategically to incentives embedded in democratic institutions, regardless of
prior socialization. Such a premise, clearly, calls out for additional testing against the evidence offered by sub-
national legislatures in other transitioning systems.
29.3.3 Institutional Design
A third strand of the literature on sub-national legislatures addresses the diverse mosaic of forms and functions
Page 6 of 14
found at this level of representative democracy. Scholars working in this area try to advance understanding about
the consequences of legislature size, number of chambers, term lengths, committee organization, and a range of
other (p. 618) structural attributes. Institution-centred analyses prioritize these attributes as explanatory variables
in studies on such topics as government expenditure, political party interactions and strategies, and legislature–
executive power relations. Not only are formal structures deemed important, but so too are informal institutional
rules and norms.
At the most fundamental level, there is effort to isolate the impact of legislature size on behaviour and outcomes.
Size speaks in part to choices about the tradeoff between representativeness and efficiency, and it may also
influence legislative output. Building upon earlier work by Weingast et al. (1981) and Stigler (1976), Fiorino and
Ricciuti (2007) propose a link between legislature size and government expenditure whereby “the relation between
government spending and legislative size is essentially an empirical question whose answer depends upon the
relative strength of the different costs of generating collective decisions” (118–19). Examining Italy’s regions from
1980 to 2000—where statutes enabled increases in legislative membership—Fiorino and Ricciutia find significant
increases in spending per capita where institutional size grew. The operative logic is that the costs to interest
groups lobbying legislators decline as the number of members increases (presumably then resulting in more
purchasing of legislative influence) while the incidence of log-rolling likewise proliferates. If results from study of
Italy’s regional legislatures can be generalized in any way, then they should provide a cautionary tale to
institutional designers and reformers in times of fiscal austerity who might otherwise be inclined to expand
membership.
Institutionalist approaches also focus on the internal workings of sub-national legislatures, in particular the roles of
committees in legislative organization. Reflecting the importance of legislative committees in the US Congress,
observers of the American case have used state legislatures to test hypotheses about the intent and capacity to
use committees for purposes of distributing power among interests and parties or, alternatively, of providing the full
legislature with necessary policy information. The empirical marker here is whether committees are
unrepresentative of the parent legislature (suggesting disproportionate assignments of high-demand members to
meet individual re-election motives) or more closely matching the full body’s distribution of preferences (thereby
providing the chamber with better information on the potential impact of legislation). Prince and Overby (2005), for
example, investigate committee composition in the upper chambers of American state legislatures, advancing
results that “provide robust support for the proposition that the information model of legislative organization is
generalizable beyond the United States House of Representatives” (2005, 81). That claim, while appearing at least
to hold true for sub-national legislatures in the United States, has yet to be validated through comparative, cross-
national analysis. Indeed, empirical studies on committees in sub-national legislatures are in their infancy, although
some important exceptions do exist (e.g. Arter 2004; Cairney 2006).
Structural influences on the balance between legislative and executive power constitute a third primary research
focus for institutions-centred analysis. Whether the executive is elected directly by voters, appointed by central
government, or indirectly selected by legislators will at a basic level help shape executive responsibility to the
legislature. (p. 619) However, even in sub-national legislatures that follow the parliamentary model of responsible
government, constitutions mapping institutional arrangements in territorial assemblies often “organize the fusion of
power between the executive and the parliament in different ways” (Reutter 2006, 288). Variation in executive–
legislature relations will impact everything from agenda-setting, budgeting, and the ability to veto proposed
legislation. Much of the literature documents apparent trends toward executive dominance mirroring those evident
in some national parliamentary contexts, a reality that is increasingly depicted as evidence of a kind of democratic
deficit: “meaningful representation is compromised when legislators remain subordinate and answer to the
executive rather than the electorate” (Beer 2001, 425). Herein lies the important ongoing debate about an
efficiency-legitimacy dilemma, where greater legislative power (necessary to maintain democratic legitimacy) is
likely to reduce institutional efficiency. That more systematically comparative research has not yet been devoted
to this topic “is striking since sub-national parliaments face this efficiency-legitimacy dilemma to an even greater
extent than national parliaments since the risk of centralization of competences is much more pronounced”
(Bolleyer 2010, 412).
29.4 Recent Research Frontiers in the Study of Sub-National Legislatures
Page 7 of 14
Our survey of the field’s evolution has only sampled selectively from what is an expansive body of literature, and it
is not exhaustive of the puzzles and themes that attract scholarly investigation. From the breadth of work now
being devoted to sub-national legislatures, it is, however, possible to identify a handful of emerging issues that
constitute new and promising frontiers for research. These include government formation and coalitional dynamics,
the international activities of sub-national institutions, and the use of media technology and e-democracy in
substate assemblies. In each of these thematic areas nascent foundations of understanding exist; more
importantly, the unrealized potential for new discovery elevates them as primary targets for future investigation.
29.4.1 New Arena for Coalition Studies
For national legislatures, research on post-election government formation and coalition-building lies at the
intersection of legislative studies and cabinet governance. To the extent that coalition bargaining and behaviour
are increasingly seen as aspects of a dynamic democratic lifecycle, it clearly makes sense for legislative scholars
to investigate them at all levels of the polity. Moreover, the evidence provided by coalition behaviour in sub-
national legislatures can remedy the data limitations so apparent in (p. 620) national-level coalition studies. Citing
work by Downs (1998) and Bäck (2003), Lupia and Strøm observe that “studies of subnational coalitions have
shown a surprising incidence of partnerships that fly in the face of those that exist at the national level and that
seem to defy explanations in terms of common policy preferences” (2008, 56). Theories designed to explain
coalitional behaviour of parties elected to national legislatures often make motivational assumptions that fail to
explain why, for example, separate sub-national branches of the same political party choose different coalition
strategies despite confronting similar alternatives. Once deemed “an almost entirely unworked field in political
science” (Mellors 1989, 8), coalition politics in sub-national parliaments now draws attention from scholars wanting
to better understand the efforts of central parties to coordinate policy-making in the periphery (Laffin 2007), the
opportunities for niche and extremist parties to negotiate their way into power (Downs 2012), and the bargaining
behaviour of legislative parties in mixed-motive situations (Ştefuriuc 2009). To build upon these emerging
advances in understanding, future research will have to continue to attract the attention not only of mainstream
coalition theorists but also students of comparative legislatures. The still largely untapped reservoir of empirical
evidence offered by party behaviour in sub-national legislatures can be used to further refine notions of party
strategy in multilevel settings and to help better understand the impact of cooperation in territorial assemblies on
partisan relations at the centre. In demonstrating the (in)compatability of parties, their (in)capacity to govern, and
the electoral (un)popularity of alternative power-sharing combinations, coalitions in sub-national legislatures may
be valuable sources of feedback to party strategists in the capital.
29.4.2 Entrepreneurial and International Activities of Sub-National Legislatures
A second emerging research frontier in the study of sub-national legislatures is found in their outward-oriented
entrepreneurial and international activities. Such activities are often defensive reactions against perceived or
threatened marginalization. If contemporary national legislatures struggle increasingly against executive
dominance or usurpation by supranational authorities, then the vulnerabilities of sub-national assemblies to a host
of similar threats are even greater. Where their formal powers are circumscribed and assemblies become primarily
reactive institutions, relevance is imperiled. Emerging research seeks to better understand how—and with what
success—territorial parliaments respond to such pressures. One observed remedy is what Bolleyer calls “inter-
parliamentary activism,” namely the “collective activities of parliaments that attempt to counterbalance executive-
dominated” (2010, 415) inter-governmental relations. Through cooperation and strategic exchanges within and
across national boundaries, sub-national legislatures can harness and exploit political will to organize
independently of their executives. The extent and success of inter-parliamentary activism at sub-national levels
varies considerably, as (p. 621) illustrated by US state legislatures routinely pursuing interests separately from
their executives, Swiss cantonal parliaments doing the same but less forcefully than their American counterparts,
and Canadian provincial assemblies shying away from similar practices. In their single-country study of US state
legislatures, Conlan, Dudley, and Clark examine the international dimension of inter-parliamentary activism and find
substantially increasing independent involvement in such key areas as economic development, law enforcement,
education, and emergency preparedness: “legislatures as a whole have joined with the rest of state government to
become increasingly active participants in the global arena of the twenty-first century” (2004, 185). As provincial
and regional legislatures turn aggressively outward to meet the challenges of multilevel policy-making, the
necessity for researchers to explain variation in impact and system relevance grows. To meet this necessity,
Page 8 of 14
future comparative work must continue shifting away from viewing substate activism as exclusively the domain of
executives.
29.4.3 Sub-National Legislatures Online
Use of the internet, new media technology, and e-democracy in sub-national legislatures constitutes another area
of emerging research interest seemingly poised for future expansion. The impact of new media on regional and
local elections, lawmaking, and public relations is an increasingly salient issue for legislative scholars. To date (and
replicating a pattern found elsewhere), the overwhelming majority of studies on this topic use state legislatures in
the US as focal points. Illustrative is Herrnson et al. who argue that “little is known about candidates’ Internet use”
(2007, 31) and seek to remedy that deficiency by isolating the impacts of age and education on state legislative
candidates’ characteristics. Shifting attention from candidates to sitting representatives, Cooper (2004) surveyed
state legislators in Iowa, Georgia, and California to document the evolving reliance on online sources for policy
information. Fagan and Fagan evaluate the accessibility of American state legislative websites, which they deem to
be “clearly a ‘hot’ issue for states” (2004, 81); Ferber, Foltz, and Pugliese (2008) contend that the variable quality
of such sites is directly attributable to the demographic and political characteristics of states themselves. Still, a
decade after McNeal et al. observed that “little published research has been conducted on the determinants of
state policy innovation in e-government” (2003, 53), there is a paucity of work on technology and new media as
sources of administrative efficiencies and as mechanisms for enhanced democratic participation. There is great
potential for data collection and hypothesis testing outside the American case, as exemplified by Braga and Nicolas
who investigate Brazilian state legislatures and cast critical light on the “insufficient transparency” (2008, 107)
apparent in their on-line homepages. Additional comparative work in this area may provide important clues about
the professionalization of sub-national legislative bodies, the viability of digital democracy, and the impact of new
information delivery modes on citizen participation.
(p. 622) 29.5 Pressing Issues for the Future
All the evidence from this inspection of legislative studies in the sub-national arena suggests that increased
attention is being devoted to what, in some cases, had long been considered to be nominal institutions. The
willingness of legislative scholars in recent decades to venture beyond national parliamentary institutions,
combined with the ambition of some sub-national government experts to connect their work with broader issues of
legislative process, produces a drive for data and some groundbreaking research. There is, as a result, greater
knowledge and understanding today of a broad range of substantive issues and theoretical concerns. While
political scientists have registered significant gains for this subfield of legislative studies, the area of study remains
vastly underdeveloped. Framed more positively, this means there are critical topics where the potential for
theoretically meaningful and spatially generalizable research is especially great.
It is a methodological irony of sorts that what draws researchers to compare across sub-national legislatures within
a single country (e.g. the ability to control for a range of potentially intervening contextual influences) also appears
to confound attempts at cross-national comparison. Culture, rules of the game, and issue salience are among the
factors more effectively controlled by intra-system comparisons than by inter-system ones. Yet, it is clearly
incumbent upon the next wave of research to engage in the kind of careful comparative analysis that can facilitate
testing of existing hypotheses and help generate new ones. Doing so should aid in answering actor-, institution-,
and system-level questions associated with contemporary decentralist trends. Have transfers of responsibility,
resources, and status to sub-national legislatures altered the caliber and capacity of legislators drawn to office? If
so, have gains in actor capacity generated greater public expectations and more vigorous accountability
mechanisms? Where regional legislatures are being empowered, what are the implications for local councils—are
they witnessing the siphoning away of their own power, status, and legitimacy in favour of a “new centre” (i.e.
regional institutions)? Finally, in thinking about the system-level import of legislative politics in the periphery, do
information, strategy, and experience trickle up? In other words, where are sub-national legislatures best
characterized as second-order institutions serving, at best, as reactive barometers of political support for national
governments, and where, instead, are they active agents informing and influencing politics and strategy at national
level? Advancing answers to these questions will increase understanding of one of representative democracy’s
most overshadowed institutional layers.
Page 9 of 14
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People’s Congresses in China. Journal of Legislative Studies, 3: 10–38.
William M. Downs
William M. Downs is Professor of Political Science and Associate Dean for Social and Behavioral Sciences at Georgia State
University.
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The Study of Legislatures in Latin America

Brian F. Crisp and Constanza F. Schibber
Institutions
2014
This chapter focuses on legislatures and legislative politics in Latin America. It reviews the literature on
representative assemblies (during the current democratic era), including member activities inside or outside the
institution, members’ relationship to other political institutions, and their effect on public policy. It also considers the
so-called electoral connection—the relationship between legislators and their constituency—as well as cameral
politics, or politics as it is conducted in the chamber itself, including roll-call voting and the work of legislative
committees. Finally, it examines the relations between the legislative and executive branches, with emphasis on
the ability of presidents to initiate and prioritize legislation and presidential decree authority.
Keywords: legislatures, legislative politics, Latin America, representative assemblies, legislators, constituency, roll-call voting, legislative
committees, presidents, legislation
30.1 Introduction
THE number of refereed articles and books published on legislative politics in Latin America in the last 30 years has
increased annually and is increasing at an accelerating rate. The work on legislative politics in Latin America has
taken advantage of theories about legislative or parliamentary politics originally developed to study other parts of
the world, but, more importantly, scholars working in the region have stretched those theories or made entirely
original theoretical contributions of their own—as well as amassing impressive amounts of systematic, empirical
research.
We concentrate on research on representative assemblies (during the current democratic era), including the
activities of their members inside or outside the institution, their relationship to other political institutions, and their
effect on public policy.1 We limited ourselves to articles published in English and books written in English, Spanish,
or Portuguese (published by early 2012). We identified 31 books and 151 journal articles focused on the study of
legislative politics in Latin America.
We classified articles into three broad substantive categories and within those categories by the outcome of
interest. Exactly 30 articles focused on what we have dubbed the electoral connection: the relationship between
legislators and their constituency. Another 53 articles were published on what we are calling cameral politics:
politics as it is conducted in the chamber itself, including on the floor and in committees. Finally, 60 articles focused
on legislative–executive relations: how two branches characterized by distinct electoral origins and not dependent
on one another for survival interact in the process of making policy. We identified far more literature than we could
possibly summarize here.2
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(p. 629) 30.2 The Electoral Connection
Mayhew (1974) put an emphasis on an accountability relationship with electorates when trying to understand
legislative politics, emphasizing re-election incentives. Fenno (1978) too put the emphasis on elected
representatives’ relationships with their constituencies—perceived of in multiple ways. They deduced from this
connection several implications for representatives’ behaviours: when in Congress—hill style and when in their
districts—home style. Their thinking, implicitly or explicitly, has served as a foundation for many scholars studying
legislatures in Latin America. Cross-national and time-serial variation in candidate-selection procedures and
electoral rules mean that the institutions establishing the electoral connection give us the opportunity to deduce
implications that would not have made sense under any single set of institutions.
An interesting twist that comes through in all the literature on home style in Latin America is that multimember
districts complicate the relationship, making the “geographic constituency” identified by Fenno the territory of more
than one sitting member. Crisp and Desposato (2004) used a unique set of travel records to study how legislators
interact with current and prospective constituents in multimember districts, in this case Colombia’s nationwide
Senate district. They found that legislators are sure to return to their existing bailiwicks and that in the search for
future supporters, they avoid areas already dominated by others. Taylor (1992) studied constituency service in an
unlikely environment, Costa Rica’s multimember districts where legislators cannot run for re-election. She finds that
members regularly hold meetings (giras) with citizens in their districts, using them as an opportunity to learn what is
on the minds of constituents as well as to keep them informed of the MP’s work on their behalf in San José. She
concluded that members do not shirk constituency service because they understand its importance for their
parties’ future prospects, and the fact that the party controls access to their next political post, wherever that might
be given the lack of immediate re-election, makes the need to cultivate the party’s reputation compelling.
Several works examine the bills sponsored by legislators in an effort to determine whether their subject matter or
geographic focus is a function of the sponsors’ constituencies. For example, Taylor-Robinson and Diaz (1999)
developed a classification scheme to identify the level of aggregation at which a legislative proposal was aimed:
national, regional, sectoral, local, and individual. They used it to show that Honduran legislators, contrary to the
received wisdom regarding the importance of local strongmen, were primarily interested in national-level politics.
This would seem to jibe well with the use of closed-list proportional representation and the emphasis it places on
the shared reputations of parties (as opposed to the reputations of individual legislators). Crisp, Escobar-Lemmon,
Jones, Jones, and Taylor-Robinson (2004) also adopted the Taylor-Robinson and Diaz classification in a six-
country (Argentina, Chile, Colombia, Costa Rica, Honduras, and Venezuela) study of whether personal versus
party vote-seeking incentives explain legislators’ priorities. They found that personal vote-seeking incentives led to
the initiation of targeted bills (p. 630) and that the number of co-sponsors with whom an initiator will share credit
declined with personal vote-seeking incentives.
A rich body of literature on the substantive representation of women also made use of bill sponsorship as an
indicator of legislators’ efforts to respond to their constituents. As one example, Schwindt-Bayer (2010) examined
bill initiation in Argentina, Colombia, and Costa Rica as an indicator of substantive representation of women’s
interests, confirming the gender difference on women’s issues in many cases. She also found evidence of
marginalization of female members who were as likely as male members to identify economic issues as a priority
but less likely to initiate bills on the matter.
30.2.1 Ambition and Careers
Fundamental to the electoral connection logic is the assumption that elected representatives are strategically
trying to extend their careers. Legislators display static ambition if their goal is re-election to the same seat and
dynamic ambition when they use their actions in their current office to pursue another office. Where the
constituencies for two offices are identical, sorting between the two might prove impossible, but where they differ,
scholars have made efforts to distinguish between the two. The existence of no immediate re-election clauses and
the value placed on gubernatorial and mayoral positions, especially in decentralized systems, makes Latin America
a rich place to pursue questions of ambition and career-building.
Samuels (2000) explained that the relatively high—typically greater than 50 percent—turnover rate in Brazil was in
large part a function of dynamic ambition. He was able to show that MPs who had been the strongest candidates
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when seeking election to congress disproportionately sought election to executive branch positions at the
department and municipal level, often times before their legislative term expired. As a result, incumbents who did
seek re-election (displaying static ambition) were the relatively weak ones—thereby increasing turnover even
more.
Central to whom legislators feel beholden for the continuation of their careers are candidate-selection procedures.
Pathways to Power: Political Recruitment and Candidate Selection in Latin America, edited by Siavelis and
Morgenstern (2008), is by far the most extensive treatment of this under-studied topic. The editors defined the
recruitment and selection processes using institutional features of electoral systems in interaction with several
variables at the level of party structure. They then deduced the types of candidates these combinations of features
should tend to favour, defining them as party loyalists, constituent servants, entrepreneurs, or group delegates.
After this, they offered hypotheses about how each of these types of candidates would behave once in office.Their
framework was then put into use by a group of scholars who provided careful case studies of several countries.
The volume makes clear that the institutions governing recruitment and selection have an impact on the type of
legislators chosen—party loyalists, constituent servants, entrepreneurs, or group delegates—and that the types of
legislators chosen affect campaign behaviours, interparty relations (coalitions), discipline of legislative parties, and
other aspects of politics.
(p. 631) 30.2.2 Constituent–Representative Relations
Broadly conceived, constituency–representative linkages underpin much of the literature on legislative politics.
Here, we limited ourselves to instances when scholars explicitly perceived of legislators acting first and foremost
with some conception of a constituency in mind. With significant success, scholars have been able to show how
the incentives embodied in electoral rules can be leveraged to understand who legislators are likely to view as
constituents and the types of activities in which they will engage to serve those constituents.
In our opinion, an area that has received too little scholarly attention is home style. We must take on the challenge
of developing systematic indicators that “travel” across cases. Travel records are systematic, probably travel well
(no pun intended), and can be easy to get, but we need additional, richer ways of examining representatives
interacting with their constituents. For example, one possibility might be to ask legislators and their staff for
calendars with (public) meetings on them. Another possibility might be to transcribe speeches given in the district
or op-ed articles published in local papers for text analysis of various sorts. Whatever the measure, we think that
this is an area where solid theorizing and rich empirical work are needed.
Another area that has only recently received its appropriate level of attention is candidate-selection procedures.
They are no less important than electoral laws in terms of providing incentive structures for legislators wishing to
extend their careers, but the challenge of collecting and coding them, especially historically, means they are not
accounted for as frequently as electoral laws. The irony is that the characteristics that make them a challenge to
collect—they vary over time, across parties, and even within parties across districts—are important sources of
leverage for addressing questions of who legislators see as their constituents.
30.3 Cameral Politics
A large portion of the literature on legislative politics in Latin America is devoted to how chambers themselves are
structured and what exactly it is that—as individuals, as co-partisans, and as coalition members—they do while in
those chambers. Most of that literature uses roll-call vote results to measure the concepts of greatest interest, but,
as we will detail here, some works have focused on other activities.
30.3.1 Legislative Committees
Bills introduced into a chamber, either by legislators or directly by the executive, are usually assigned to one or
more legislative committees, with some variation in who has the right to make this determination. Jones, Saiegh,
Spiller, and Tommasi (2002) studied the designation of committee chairs in Argentina, where provincial governors
and (p. 632) party bosses play a key role in the career prospects of national legislators. Given the low re-election
rate of individual legislators and the strong link between the career of these legislators and their local party, the
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authors argued that some legislators were more likely to secure a committee chairmanship, enjoying the extra
resources tied to the positions. More specifically, they found that legislators aligned with the governor from their
province, those who had served as committee chair previously, and those with seniority were more likely to be
appointed as committee chairman.
Beyond the composition of committees, the nature of committee work found across Latin American cases is
considerably different than what has been observed in the US Congress. In the US, because committees members
have incentives to specialize and gain information, members have property rights over their posts and committees
are endowed with strong gatekeeping powers, but Alemán (2006) showed that in many Latin America chambers
committees do not have gatekeeping powers—simple majoritarian procedures can force a vote to schedule a bill
for plenary consideration. Calvo and Sagarzazu (2011), focusing on the case of Argentina’s lower chamber where
committees do have strong gatekeeping powers, argued that committee chairs’ gatekeeping strategies varied with
changes in the partisan makeup of the chamber. If a party controlled the majority of seats on the plenary floor, the
chair used gatekeeping authority to hold back legislation not preferred by the floor median. By contrast, in a
plurality led-congress, committee chairs became more permissive, discharging more bills, and thereby delegating
further gatekeeping power to other chamber authorities in charge of scheduling bills for consideration by the floor.
30.3.2 Voting on the Floor
A very sizable portion of the literature devoted to cameral politics focuses on whether individual legislators vote
with the majority of their party. Morgenstern (2004) analysed the relationship between party cohesion and party
unity using surveys of legislators to measure the ideological cohesiveness of parties and roll-call votes to measure
party unity. He found that cohesive parties or groups tend to have higher voting unity and that parties with internal
conflicts are less able to come together when voting, apparently regardless of the carrots and sticks held by
leaders. Likewise, Zucco (2009) found that legislators who were ideologically closer to the president—measured
through surveys—were more likely to vote in accordance with the speaker of the chamber, who is also the
president’s whip—measured as the absolute distance between the legislator’s ideal point and the Speaker in the
first dimension of the WNOMINATE ideal point analysis.
An important vein of literature has analysed whether presidents, governors, and/or bloc leaders within the
legislature influence individual legislators’ voting behaviour. Two contrasting theories—the cartel thesis and the
competing principals approach—have been applied to understand voting behaviour in the Latin American
chambers. The first theory emphasizes the role of the chamber rules and the distribution of agenda powers among
legislators. The second highlights the interaction between electoral rules (p. 633) and political parties as sources
of influence across legislators’ competing principals—president, governors, or party bosses, and constituency.
Amorim Neto, Cox, and McCubbins (2005) extended the cartel thesis to the Brazilian lower chamber, where partisan
fragmentation and presidents with strong agenda powers could potentially allow the assembly to function as a
parliamentary agenda cartel. They showed that agenda cartels are formed only when presidents assemble majority
coalitions by distributing positions in the cabinet to key party politicians. As a result, the president combined his
own agenda authority with those of the party leaders of the legislative majority, allowing the majority government to
control the placement of bills on the agenda and decreasing the likelihood of being rolled on the floor.
Jones and Hwang (2005) proposed a modified version of the original cartel thesis to explain why, even though
provincial party leaders have strong influence over the career of the legislators in Argentina, no provincial effects
are observed in roll-call vote behaviour. The considerable authority and control over the parliamentary agenda by
the majority party leadership—through the assignment of party members as chairs of the most politically important
committees, a working majority on the important committees, and control over the referral of bills to committees—
allowed it to keep the bills that divided the party off the floor (negative agenda control) and to include on the
agenda legislation that gathered the support of the party (positive agenda control). Thus, in a sense, governors
influence what makes it onto the agenda, not how legislators actually vote on what does make the agenda. These
powers and resulting advantages did not extend to the minority.3
Alemán (2006) surveyed all the chamber rules in Latin America and highlighted the variation in how they distribute
the positive and negative agenda authority among party leaders. Analysing roll-rates in the lower chambers of
Argentina, Chile, and Mexico, he found that in the first two chambers majority leaders use their agenda power to
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avoid scheduling legislation that would divide their parties on the floor. In the case of Mexico, in contrast, the three
main parties did not have unilateral gatekeeping powers, and at least two of them had to agree to include
legislation on the agenda, preventing a cartel from emerging.
The competing principals approach focuses on whether institutional characteristics, primarily exogenous to
cameral rules, shape legislators behaviour. In particular, those adopting the approach focus on the extent to which
legislators are influenced by principals whose demands may be in conflict with one another. For example, it has
been hypothesized that intra-party competition strengthens the influence of the constituency over the legislator;
that control of the nomination process by governors or local party bosses increases their ability to pressure
legislators; and that the agenda-setting powers of presidents and their control over vital resources enhance their
prospects of influencing how legislators vote.
Carey (2007) provided a cross-national test of the competing principals approach by studying the effect of
institutional factors—intra-party competition, federalism, the existence of a confidence vote, and presidentialism—
on party unity. Operating under the assumption that all legislators are influenced by their bloc leaders in the
chamber, he (p. 634) cogently made the case for why we might expect other actors to still prove influential in the
right settings. For example, he argued that in presidential systems the chief executive was a potential competing
principal, and, empirically, he found that governing parties in presidential systems were less unified than their
counterparts under parliamentarism. He also found that intra-party competition, which strengthens the influence of
the constituency relative to party leaders, had a negative effect on unity.
As we mentioned earlier, governors often play a central role in legislators’ ability to achieve their career goals,
positioning themselves in some cases as legislators’ principals. We also noted that governors’ influence can be
difficult to detect precisely because their preferences are anticipated. Rosas and Langston (2011) followed a
unique strategy to uncover the effect of gubernatorial pressure on legislators’ voting behaviour in Mexico’s lower
chamber. They estimated legislator ideal points using roll-call votes, and calculated “state-party delegation
dispersion scores that were modeled as a function of gubernatorial time horizons” (p. 490). Taking advantage of
the different lengths of the terms served by governors and legislators (neither of whom can be re-elected), they
showed that as the governor’s time left in office increased, so did the effect they had on the voting behaviour of
legislators belonging to their party and from their state.
Electoral systems that foster legislators’ incentives to cultivate a personal vote are often hypothesized to increase
conflict within legislative parties. However, Desposato (2006), comparing the Brazilian lower chamber to the upper
chamber—where the electoral system for each creates different incentives to cultivate a personal vote—found no
difference in the degree of party unity across chambers. Perhaps surprisingly, despite legislators’ strong incentives
to cultivate a personal vote in Brazil, there has been a reasonably high level of party unity because party leaders
within the legislature are successful in imposing discipline on their rank-and-file members (Figueiredo and Limongi
1999). Finding that institutions are not determinant is informative in its own right, and it also points to the need to
account for additional variables—such as candidate selection procedures, cameral rules regarding agenda
control, the distribution of seats across parties, presidents’ legislative powers, etc.—when trying to tease out the
effect of electoral rules in cross-national research designs (where electoral rules show the most variation).
The agenda cartel and competing principal approaches are not in conflict. In order to keep the focus on actors
outside the chamber, Carey (2007) reasoned that: “almost all legislators are subordinate to party leaders within the
assembly, and the extent to which party groups are unified or cohesive depends on whether principals, with
competing demands, also control resources to pressure legislators.” However, there is marked variation among
chambers regarding both the distribution of agenda powers to party leaders (Alemán 2006) and the success of
party leaders in taking advantage of those powers under different partisan configurations (Amorim Neto, Cox, and
McCubbins 2003; Calvo and Sagarzazu 2011). As a result, future cross-national work on party unity should be able
to conceive of different combinations of cameral organization embedded within national configurations that set up
more-or-less competing principals.
(p. 635) 30.3.3 Beyond Roll-Call Votes
Dependence on roll calls is not without its pitfalls. Most fundamentally, they simply are not available everywhere. In
addition, floor votes occur after whatever agenda control possessed by party leaders (and executives) has
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already been exercised. Therefore, we are seeing legislators’ expression of preferences on a set of issues that
has been strategically chosen for them. Where party leaders have tight control over the legislative agenda, what
roll-call votes tell us about the underlying concept of party unity is not clear. Parties might appear quite cohesive
when, in fact, they are strategically being prevented from openly voting on an issue that might divide them. Beyond
these more or less widely acknowledged difficulties, issues that do not get as much attention are lurking.
Crisp and Driscoll (2012) argued that where cameral procedures do not mandate the use of roll-call procedures on
all votes, which is the case in many chambers across the region, estimates based on the sample of votes on which
legislators themselves decide to invoke a roll call may be biased. The decisions of whether to invoke a roll call and
then whether to vote aye or nay once put on the record are strategic actions. With data from Argentina and Mexico
they showed that certain types of proposals—those with their origins in the executive and those that are preceded
by lengthy debate—are most likely to provoke a roll when the standard operating procedure would have been a
voice vote. They also showed that, in Argentina, when legislators chose to invoke a roll call on proposals by the
executive and proposals regarding the agenda, party discipline increased. On the other hand, where legislators
chose to invoke a roll call on an item that was preceded by a lengthy debate, perhaps prolonged by legislators’
needs to justify their vote choice to competing principals, party discipline was lower than average.
Rosas and Shomer (2008) pointed out that tools for capturing ideal points from votes assume that non-responses—
absences, abstentions, etc.—can be ignored, when we know that these are often strategic acts indicating
something about the non-respondent’s preferences (or conflicted preferences) on the issue. They developed
extensions to an item-response theory model to accommodate non-ignorable abstentions. With data from
Argentina, they showed that missing values on roll calls may be a function of competing principals, where
provincial/gubernatorial pressure informs when a legislator will not vote—information that should not be ignored
when measuring the legislator’s ideal point.
Spurred by issues surrounding roll-call votes (mostly their unavailability), several scholars have sought ways to
locate individual politicians and parties with indicators other than roll-call vote results. Co-sponsorship of bills has
been employed in many national settings, but especially the US, as an indicator of shared preferences among
legislators. Alemán, Calvo, Jones, and Kaplan (2009) compared preferences as revealed by roll-call decisions and
co-sponsorship decisions in Argentina (and the United States). They found that co-sponsorship served as a good
substitute for roll-call results, offering a very similar depiction of the policy space. That said, Desposato, Kearney,
and Crisp (2011) offer some cautions regarding the use of co-sponsorship, suggesting that a strong theory
regarding the data generating process has not been developed and that possible (p. 636) theories entail very
different assumptions about what the decision to co-sponsor or the failure to do so actually means.
Wiesehomeier and Benoit (2009) obtained independent estimates of positions and saliencies for presidents and
parties on multiple policy dimensions in 18 Latin American countries from original, expert survey data. They found
that a single left-right dimension captures the policy space across most issues. They also determined that
presidents tended to position themselves independently of their parties more in bicameral and proportional
representation systems, when they differ in the importance they assign to a given policy dimension, and when
elections with legislatures are nonconcurrent. Clearly, one cannot expect experts to provide “ideal points” for
every member of congress, but as Wiesehomeier and Benoit (2009) showed, they can help scholars get at
secondary quantities of interests such asthe location of parties and notable individuals within them, as well as
some sense of the dimensionality of the policy space.
The Parliamentary Elites of Latin America project at the University of Salamanca has assembled an extremely rich
array of data and produced a plethora of highly informative studies. One of their most valuable data contributions is
a series of surveys of members of parliaments across the region after virtually every legislative election. Saiegh
(2009) used MPs’ responses to questions asking them to place themselves and other political actors on a ten-point,
left-to-right scale to estimate the location of parties, chief executives, and legislators from nine countries in a
common ideological space. He noted that this indicator bypasses any bias that may result from agenda control by
elites (though it does impose a predetermined scale on respondents). The depiction of the policy space that his
analysis revealed jibes well with both scholarly and journalistic descriptions of each country. He concluded that
elite surveys can, for some purposes, substitute for roll-call results and may have some advantages over other
indicators.
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Each of these alternate measures comes with its own set of pros and cons. However, they have proved fruitful for
defining the dimensionality of national policy spaces, for locating parties within those spaces, for examining the
unity of partisan blocs, and for characterizing executive–legislative relations. Despite any drawbacks, we would
suggest that thinking about how these indicators are related to one another and whether they can be used to
triangulate quantities of theoretical interest is a productive way forward.
30.3.4 Analysing Cameral Politics
Our review of politics as conducted in the chamber itself revealed a number of areas where very interesting works
exist, but they may point the way to additional work that is needed. First of all, we know more about the committee
assignment process than we do about how committee work alters the content of legislation or what legislation the
floor actually sees. Analyses of roll-call vote results have told us a great deal about party unity, about the
dimensionality of the policy space, and about the location of parties within it. We have given less consideration to
the choice of voting procedures themselves (when legislators have an option to vote via roll call or via “voice”),
and how that (p. 637) choice might be a strategic choice regarding position-taking, signaling, or disciplining. The
study of bill co-sponsorship may serve as a nice complement to roll-call vote results, but we need to spend more
time theorizing carefully about the likely determinants of co-sponsorship. Teasing out distinctions between the
observable implications of an agenda cartel approach and a competing principals approach would help push both
forward. We could also use systematic, cross-national measures of both the agenda powers of chamber leaders
and of where and when principals actually have conflicting preferences. Finally, we know little about cameral
procedures themselves. They are clearly endogenous, and it would be interesting to know what is required to
change them, how often change happens, and in response to what.
30.4 Legislative–Executive Relations
A distinct body of literature devoted to the study of legislative politics in Latin America focuses on how legislators
and executives interact, usually with the goal of explaining some ultimate policy outcome. Policy outcomes have
been conceived of in terms of simple movement—or the lack thereof called either stability or gridlock, depending
on one’s perspective; in terms of how successful presidents are at implementing their agendas; and in terms of
direction—usually on a left-right or state-market continuum. Related works focus on the interim steps of coalition
formation, maintenance, and breakdown.
While discussing the themes of gridlock, policy outcomes, the fate of the president’s agenda, and legislative
coalitions individually helps us to organize the substantive focus of many individual works, it seems appropriate to
start this section by pointing readers to three excellent edited volumes that manage to cover all the topics
mentioned here jointly—Mainwaring and Shugart’s (1997) Presidentialism and Democracy in Latin America,
Morgenstern and Nacif’s (2002) Legislative Politics in Latin America, and Alcántara Sáez and García Montero’s
(2011) Algo Más que Presidentes. El Papel del Poder Legislativo en América Latina (Something More than
Presidents: The Role of the Legislative Branch in Latin America). Mainwaring and Shugart (1997) approach
legislative–executive relations from the perspective of the president, emphasizing the interplay of their
constitutionally allocated powers, both proactive and reactive, and their partisan powers, or the size and unity of
partisan blocs in the legislature (especially the president’s party). The edited volume includes contributions on
Argentina, Bolivia, Brazil, Chile, Colombia, Costa Rica, Mexico, and Venezuela. While the findings are rich and
varied, some of the big takeaways from the volume are that presidents find ways to succeed despite variations in
constitutional and partisan powers and that prolonged policy gridlock is uncommon even in the context of partisan
fragmentation of the legislature.
Morgenstern and Nacif (2002) approach legislative–executive relations somewhat more squarely from the
perspective of the legislature. They focus on the use of the tools available to presidents for pushing their policy
agendas, the level of unity displayed by partisan blocs in the legislature, and how these tools and the incentives of
legislators (p. 638) interact in the policy-making process. On each one of these three substantive topics, the
volume includes a contribution on Argentina, Brazil, Chile, and Mexico. Again, the conclusions of the individual
contributions are rich and varied, but general conclusions drawn by the volume include that legislatures are largely
reactive (to presidents’ proactive efforts), that there is great variance in that reactive role, and that the variance is
primarily a function of institutional design.
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Alcántara Sáez and García Montero (2011), on the other hand, make the case that Latin American legislatures
have not played a marginal role in the policy-making process, but instead have strengthened representative
democracy in the region. Some of the chapters focus on different aspects of executive–legislative relations—the
success of the president’s legislative agenda or the formation of legislative coalitions, for example—others study
how the electoral incentives of legislators and the size and unity of partisan blocs affect policy outcomes. The
volume makes a significant contribution by combining cross-national pieces on these subjects, with country-
specific work on Argentina, Brazil, Colombia, Costa Rica, Ecuador, Mexico, and Uruguay.
The conclusions drawn in these three volumes are echoed in many of the works discussed later.
30.4.1 Gridlock
Separate origins and fixed terms of office could potentially generate a legislature and executive with irreconcilable
differences, amounting to policy gridlock. Colomer and Negretto (2005) took Krehbiel’s (1998) formalization of the
US system in the form of the pivotal politics models as their jumping off point, but they pointed out the need to
expand it (or relax some of its assumptions) to allow for variations in institutional designs across the presidential
regimes of Latin America. Most notably, they modeled the impact of multiparty legislatures and the possibility that
levels of discipline displayed by partisan blocs in the legislature may vary. They reasoned that both multiparty
systems and relatively low levels of discipline would reduce the set of outcomes to be found in a region of the
policy space characterized by gridlock. They do not provide any empirical tests of the observable implications of
their theory-building exercise, but they do conclude by suggesting routes future empirical work might take.
Cheibub (2002) sought to determine not only whether legislatures where the presidents’ co-partisans were a
minority of members lead to gridlock but also whether minority government and gridlock were associated with
democratic breakdown. His dataset spanned 50 years and extended beyond Latin America to include all
presidential systems, though the greatest concentration of cases is in the region. He concluded that the electoral
rules in presidential systems were, in fact, more prone to generate minority governments, but minority governments
were no more prone to gridlock than others. What is more, minority governments and gridlock were not associated
with the survival of democracy in presidential systems.
(p. 639) 30.4.2 Policy Outcome
A related thread in the literature refocuses the attention from the freedom to change the status quo—or the inability
to do so—to trying to explain particular policy outcomes: the size of budget deficits; the proportion of spending on
social programs; or the extent to which the economy is governed by markets or the state, for example.
Johnson and Crisp (2003) used the Interamerican Development Bank’s Structural Policy Index as a measure of
where economic policy falls on a state-centric versus market-oriented continuum to test the extent to which voters
can send electoral mandates. More specifically, they examined how the ability of legislators to implement their
ideological preferences, as captured by the reputations of their parties, is a function of their potential for collective
action. Based on data from 46 congressional terms across 11 countries, they found legislatures characterized by
fewer parties and, particularly, those legislatures where partisan blocs were likely to be disciplined, to be much
better at pursuing the policy preference of the average member.
When trying to explain budget outcomes in Chile—notably the tendency to run surpluses—Baldez and Carey
(1998) identified constitutional provisions that limit the choices of legislators. Legislators cannot revise revenue
figures, and they can only decrease the president’s proposed spending choices. If congress fails to pass a budget,
the president’s proposed budget is the reversion point. They presented a spatial model illustrating how such
provisions tend to constrain spending and privilege the president’s priorities. They also provided empirical data in
support of their claims regarding fiscal policy outcomes in Chile, and they contrasted Chilean institutions with
others in the region, connecting other institutional designs to tendencies toward deficit spending.
30.4.3 The President’s Agenda
Not far from this literature is a significant vein of research that conceives of policy outcomes more explicitly in
terms of presidents’ success at implementing their agendas. Much of the causal reasoning in this thread resembles
Page 8 of 15
the works discussed above but more emphasis is given to agenda-setting powers here, particularly institutional and
partisan features that make it possible for presidents to constrain—even sometimes dominate—the legislature’s
agenda. Within this agenda-setting literature, particular attention is given to the roles of presidents’ ability to initiate
and prioritize legislation and presidential decree authority, with most nuanced works indicating that they are not
blunt instruments to be wielded by executives whenever or wherever they choose.
Calvo (2007) combined non-institutional characteristics, such as presidential popularity, and institutional features,
including the advantage a president might obtain as a result of the ability to introduce a bill into the more
favourable chamber, when accounting for how bills initiated by Argentine presidents fared. He modeled bill
approval rates at individual and aggregate levels, making the case that factors particular to individual bills, such as
substantive subject matter, and factors that characterize an entire term, (p. 640) such as the partisan
composition of the chambers, are likely to affect passage rates. He concluded that despite the existence of a
strong legislative cartel, bill approval rates were not merely a function of party discipline, the spatial distribution of
ideal points, and the location of the proposal relative to the status quo. Instead, the legislative cartel appeared
responsive to changing public opinion when these other factors were constant.
When only individual cases are examined, institutional characteristics, such asthe strength of the president’s veto,
for example, were held constant and often remained implicit in theoretical terms. Saiegh’s work (2011) in this area
was comparative in both theoretical and empirical terms—covering not only all of Latin America but other cases as
well. His main argument, presented in both informal and formal theoretical terms, was that uncertainty about
legislators’ preferences, not level of partisan support, determined the chief executive’s ability to get things
adopted. He developed what he calls a chief executive’s box score (passage rate) to capture “how much a
government governs.” He found several determinants of executive success—autocratic better than democratic,
parliamentary better than presidential, and where legislators have party vote-seeking incentives better than
personal vote-seeking incentives. The scope of the empirical data on which these findings were based is really
impressive. He also provided a series of simulations to show the negative impact of uncertainty about legislators’
preferences on the rate at which a chief executive’s proposals get adopted.
There is a related set of works that takes up the usage of presidential decrees. While perhaps belonging in the
handbook of executive studies, these works deserve some mention because almost all of them consider the extent
to which presidents use decree authority as a function of their relationship with the legislature. An edited volume by
Carey and Shugart (1998) was one of the first to address the topic. They started with the important distinction
between delegated decree authority and constitutionally allocated decree authority. In addition to an overarching
theoretical motivation and a comparative concluding chapter on where constitutions were most likely to provide
each type of decree authority provided by the editors, other authors provided studies of Argentina, Russia, Peru,
Venezuela, Italy, Brazil, France, and the United States. More recently, Pereira, Power, and Rennó (2005; 2008)
revisited several aspects of decree usage in Brazil, and Negretto (2004) provided a straightforward formalization of
the dynamics followed by case studies of decree usage in Argentina and Brazil. Though not in total agreement with
one another about just what drove decree usage, an overarching theme in all these works was that constitutionally
allocated authority to issue decrees with the force of law did not render the legislature irrelevant. Each of the works
identified a list of constraints faced by presidents, many of them having something to do with the prospect of
provoking unwanted action by the legislature. In a sense, they made the case that, given legislative prerogatives,
constitutionallyallocated decree authority may not be as distinct from delegated decree authority as a simple
glance might suggest.
In what we think is a unique contribution, Reich (2002) used the fact that all presidential decrees issued in Brazil
must ultimately be approved to dig more deeply into how legislators affected presidents’ ability to implement their
agendas. He reasoned that granting decree authority is a rational move to delegate legislative authority, taking (p.
641) advantage of the executive’s expertise in drafting legislation, and avoiding arduous and unrewarding
committee work. Legislators then post hoc would be able to reduce any agency loss by amending selected
amendments. Empirically, he then showed that proposals to amend decrees were more numerous on items likely to
garner media attention—currency conversion, minimum wage, and privatization—and on items that might affect
legislators’ sources of patronage—closure of federal agencies, housing programs, and transfers to state and local
governments. Not surprisingly, as the number of amendments proposed went up, the likelihood that the decree
would be approved without amendment went down. Rather than stopping at a distinction between success and
rejection, putting all approvals into a single box score, Reich differentiates among presidential successes.
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One final note, the Calvo (2007) piece discussed earlier, found a very significant replacement effect between
executive decrees and bill initiatives. His work uncovered a negative relationship between decrees and approved
presidential proposals in Argentina’s Congress, indicating that at best there were limited strategic gains from a
purported decree menace from the president. Combine this with the nuanced studies of decree usage summarized
here, and the existing literature makes it clear that the availability of executive decree power does not minimize the
importance of legislative politics.
30.4.4 Legislative Coalitions4
Given that electoral rules in Latin America tend to lead to multiparty systems, none of the policy-making discussed
thus far could take place without the formation of legislative coalitions. A handful of pieces have taken up the issue
of coalition politics in the presidential systems of Latin America (and beyond). Most of them make the point that the
study of coalitions was once the preserve of those interested in parliamentary systems. Given the need for mutual
confidence, it was assumed that coalition politics was far more frequent and far more critical for explaining policy
outcomes in parliamentary systems. Conversely, it was assumed that the fixed terms that characterize presidential
regimes made coalition formation less necessary. As a group, these works have shown that, as with many other
dynamics, the variation within presidential regimes means the parliamentary–presidential dichotomy is probably
falsely drawn, or at least often overstated.
Cheibub, Przeworski, and Saiegh (2004) most comprehensively made the case that when it comes to coalition
politics the presidential–parliamentary divide was blurry at best. Their dataset spanned democratic regimes from
1946 to 1999 and while it included most, if not all, Latin American examples, it goes far beyond that, making the
explicit presidential–parliamentary comparison possible. They found that sustained government coalitions exist in
more than half of the cases in which the president’s party alone did not constitute a majority, that minority
governments were no less successful in legislative terms than majority coalitions (which holds in both presidential
and (p. 642) parliamentary cases), and that the coalition status of the government had no impact on the survival
of democracy in either type of regime.
Amorim Neto’s (2006) book on presidentialism and governability in the Americas took a very thorough look at
coalition formation and its consequences with data spanning more than 30 years from 18 countries. He
distinguished between presidents who wished to pursue their agendas through approval by the legislature and
those who had unilateral powers that provided another option. He reasoned that the former would build coalitions
with parties portfolios, proportional to their sizes in the chamber, (until they accumulated more than majority
support). He found that, as the literature covered earlier on decree authority might suggest, that simply having
decree authority did not make a president any less likely to build a majority coalition. However, when he raised the
bar to “effective majority”—consistently able to vote as a majority bloc—he did find that powerful presidents did not
as consistently establish coalitions. He then addressed the consequences of coalition formation, examining cabinet
durability, ministerial stability, and fiscal policy. To some extent, the features of cabinet coalitions explained earlier
in the book help us understand these consequences, with the proportionality of cabinet portfolios and seats on the
floor being the most consistently significant covariate.
Martinez-Gallardo (2012) also pulled together an impressive quantity of data—121 cabinets from a dozen Latin
American countries over a span of nearly two decades. She found that presidential popularity helped keep parties
in the governing coalition. On the other hand, where presidents had decree authority that allowed them to change
the policy status quo unilaterally, coalition partners were more likely to leave the coalition, perhaps feeling that the
executive felt less need to compromise with them. Not surprisingly, departure was also more likely where the
coalition had a surplus such that a party’s departure did not jeopardize the government’s majority status.
In sum, coalition dynamics are not entirely dissimilar in presidential and parliamentary regimes. More importantly,
an area of study that seems particularly promising is the comparative work that develops our theorizing about how
coalition politics should vary across presidential regimes—given their differences both in terms of constitutionally
allocated powers and in terms of party systems.
30.4.5 Interbranch Relations
Length constraints prevented us from detailed comment on many of the works that contribute to our understanding
Page 10 of 15
of the impact of legislative politics on interbranch relations. However, even the selected sample reviewed here
makes it clear that differences across party systems, often with their origins in electoral rules, and variation in the
constitutional allocation of powers mean that the presidential democracies in Latin America provide a rich array of
opportunities to gain leverage over many questions central to the study of legislative politics. The effective number
of parties (and the size of the president’s party), the vote-seeking incentives of legislators, and the constitutionally
or (p. 643) procedurally allocated tools at each branch’s disposal all help to determine the strategies that
legislators adopt when facing the president, and vice versa.
30.5 Conclusion
As we have shown here, there is a rich and varied literature on the study of legislative politics in Latin America. The
field is welldeveloped in terms of theory and methods. Still, throughout this essay we have tried to identify what we
think are interesting research questions where more work is needed. We want to conclude by making one
additional suggestion about future directions for the field. In cataloging works for review, we were surprised by the
balance among single-country studies and the balance between them and multicountry studies.
Of the 151 refereed journal articles, 92 (or 62 percent of them) dealt with a single country. A full 43 percent of
single-country studies (or 40 articles) focus on one case—Brazil.5 Argentina (15 articles), Chile (12 articles), and
Mexico (6 articles) also get a good deal of attention, with no other national case being the focus of more than three
articles, and many cases receiving no attention at all. We identified 40 articles that were multicountry studies, and
another 14 articles were primarily theory-building exercises.
In other words, relatively speaking, we are not taking advantage of the breadth of cross-national variation that
could help us gain leverage on several questions. This is particularly surprising given the dominance of an
institutional approach to the study of legislative politics in Latin America as many important institutions only rarely
vary within a country. To be sure, instances of institutional reform within a country provide nice research design
opportunities to observe legislator behaviour before and after while naturally holding so many other features
constant. On occasions, scholars have taken advantage of institutional differences across chambers to gain
leverage over a research question, but upper chambers are relatively understudied. There is also much to be
gained from looking at how non-institutional factors that do vary over time—such as the partisan balance of seats,
for example—influence behaviour, including the use of institutional powers such as decree authority and the veto
power.
That said, cross-national variation remains relatively untapped. For example, many of the empirical pieces
reviewed here have been influenced by theoretical articles, such as Carey and Shugart’s (1995) thinking about
personal versus party vote-seeking incentives, where the factors that are expected to drive the behaviour of
legislators only take their full range of values when we look cross-nationally. Surprisingly, these theoretical tools on
which we have based many assumptions about legislators’ actions have not been tested extensively in a
comparative fashion. Carey’s (2007; 2009) cross-national study of the effect of electoral rules on party unity is one
notable exception here.
Not surprisingly, book manuscripts, with their longer length, more typically feature cross-national work. Of the 31
books we identified, 22 (72 percent) are multicountry studies. However, nine of those are edited volumes, and the
individual chapters in (p. 644) these tend to be single-country studies. Still, based on the exceptions, it is clear
that cross-national work does not require book-length treatment. It is our sense that a fruitful trend would be greater
focus on multicountry studies.
References
Alcántara Sáez, M. and García Montero, M. (eds.), 2011. Algo más que Presidentes. El Papel del Poder Legislativo
en América Latina. Zaragoza: Fundación Manuel Giménez Abad de Estudios Parlamentarios y del Estado
Autonómico.
Alemán, E., 2006. Policy Gatekeepers in Latin American Legislatures. Latin American Politics and Society, 48: 125–
55.
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Alemán, E., Calvo, E., Jones, M.P., and Kaplan, N., 2009. Comparing Cosponsorship and Roll-Call Ideal Points.
Ames, B., 2002. Party Discipline in the Chamber of Deputies. In S. Morgenstern and B. Nacif (eds.) Legislative
Politics in Latin America, pp. 185–221. New York: Cambridge University Press.
Amorim Neto, O., 2006. Presidencialismo e governabilidades nas Américas. Rio de Janeiro: Konrad Adenauer
Stiftung/FGV Editora. (p. 645)
Amorim Neto, O., Cox, G.W., and McCubbins, M.D., 2003. Agenda Power in Brazil’s Camara dos Deputados, 1989-
98. World Politics, 55: 550–78.
Baldez, L. and Carey, J. M., 1999. Presidential Agenda Control and Spending Policy: Lessons from General
Pinochet’s Constitution. American Journal of Political Science, 43: 29–55.
Calvo, E., 2007. The Responsive Legislature: Public Opinion and Law Making in a Highly Disciplined Legislature.
British Journal of Political Science, 37: 263–80.
Calvo, E. and Sagarzazu, I., 2011. Legislator Success in Committee: Gatekeeping Authority and the Loss of Majority
Control. American Political Science Review, 55: 1–15.
Carey, J.M., 2007. Competing Principals, Political Institutions, and Party Unity in Legislative Voting. American Journal
Carey, J.M., 2009. Legislative Voting and Accountability. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press.
Carey, J.M. and Shugart, M.S. (eds.), 1995. Incentives to Cultivate a Personal Vote: A Rank Ordering of Electoral
Carey, J.M. and Shugart, M.S., 1998. Executive Decree Authority. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press.
Cheibub, J.A., 2002. Minority Governments, Deadlock Situations, and the Survival of Presidential Democracies.
Cheibub, J.A., Przeworski, A., and Saiegh, S.M., 2004. Government Coalitions and Legislative Success Under
Presidentialism and Parliamentarism. British Journal of Political Science, 34: 565–87.
Colomer, J.M. and Negretto, G.L., 2005. Can Presidentialism Work Like Parliamentarism? Government and
Cox, G.W. and McCubbins, M.D., 2005. Setting the Agenda: Responsible Party Government in the US House of
Crisp, B.F. and Desposato, S.W., 2004. Constituency Building in Multimember Districts: Collusion or Conflict? Journal
Crisp, B.F. and Driscoll, A., 2012. The Strategic Use of Legislative Voting Procedures. Legislative Studies Quarterly,
37: 67–97.
Crisp, B.F., Escobar-Lemmon, M.C., Jones, B.S., Jones, M.P., and Taylor-Robinson, M.M., 2004. Vote-Seeking
Desposato, S.W., 2006. The Impact of Electoral Rules on Legislative Parties: Lessons from the Brazilian Senate and
Chamber of Deputies. Journal of Politics, 68: 1018–30.
Desposato, S.W., Kearney, M.C., and Crisp, B.F., 2011. Using Cosponsorship to Estimate Ideal Points. Legislative
Fenno, R.F., 1978. Home Style: House Members in their Districts. Boston: Little, Brown.
Figueiredo, A.C. and Limongi, F., 1999. Executivo e Legislativo na nova ordem constitucional. Rio de Janeiro:
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Fundação Getulio Vargas Rio de Janeiro.
Johnson, G.B. and Crisp, B.F., 2003. Mandates, Powers, and Policies. American Journal of Political Science, 47:
128–42.
Jones, M.P. and Hwang, W., 2005. Party Government in Presidential Democracies: Extending Cartel Theory Beyond
the US Congress. American Journal of Political Science, 49: 267–82.
Jones, M.P., Saiegh, S., Spiller, P.T., and Tommasi, M., 2002. Amateur Legislators-Professional Politicians: The
Consequences of Party-Centered Electoral Rules in a Federal System. American Journal of Political Science, 46:
656–69.
Krehbiel, K., 1998. Pivotal Politics: A Theory of US Lawmaking. Chicago: University of Chicago Press. (p. 646)
Mainwaring, S. and Shugart, M.S. (eds.), 1997. Presidentialism and Democracy in Latin America. New York:
Martínez-Gallardo, C., 2012. Out of the Cabinet: What Drives Defections From the Government in Presidential
Systems? Comparative Political Studies, 45: 62–90.
Mayhew, D., 1974. The Electoral Connection. New Haven: Yale University Press.
Morgenstern, S., 2004. Patterns of Legislative Politics: Roll-call Voting in Latin America and the United States.
Morgenstern, S. and Nacif, B. (eds.), 2002. Legislative Politics in Latin America. New York: Cambridge University
Press.
Negretto, G.L., 2004. Government Capacities and Policy Making by Decree in Latin America—The Cases of Brazil
and Argentina. Comparative Political Studies, 37: 531–62.
Pereira, C., Power, T.J., and Rennó, L.R, 2005. Under What Conditions Do Presidents Resort to Decree Power?
Theory and Evidence from the Brazilian Case. Journal of Politics, 67: 178–200.
Pereira, C., Power, T.J., and Rennó, L.R., 2008. Agenda Power, Executive Decree Authority, and the Mixed Results
of Reform in the Brazilian Congress. Legislative Studies Quarterly, 33: 5–33.
Reich, G., 2002. Executive Decree Authority in Brazil: How Reactive Legislators Influence Policy. Legislative
Rosas, G. and Langston, J., 2011. Gubernatorial Effects on the Voting Behavior of National Legislators. Journal of
Politics, 73: 477–93.
Rosas, G. and Shomer, Y., 2008. Models of Nonresponse in Legislative Politics. Legislative Studies Quarterly, 33:
573–601.
Saiegh, S.M. 2009. Recovering a Basic Space from Elite Surveys: Evidence from Latin America. Legislative Studies
Saiegh, S.M., 2011. Ruling by Statute: How Uncertainty and Vote Buying Shape Lawmaking. Cambridge:
Samuels, D., 2000. Ambition and Competition: Explaining Legislative Turnover in Brazil. Legislative Studies
Schwindt-Bayer, L.A., 2010. Political Power and Women’s Representation in Latin America. Oxford: Oxford
University Press.
Siavelis, P.M. and Morgenstern, S. (eds.), 2008. Pathways to Power: Political Recruitment and Candidate Selection
in Latin America. University Park: Penn State University Press.
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Taylor, M.M., 1992. Formal Versus Informal Incentive Structures and Legislator Behavior. Evidence from Costa Rica.
Taylor-Robinson, M.M. and Diaz, C., 1999. Who Gets Legislation Passed in a Marginal Legislature and is the Label
Marginal Legislature Still Appropriate? Comparative Political Studies, 32: 589–625.
Universidad de Salamanca. Parliamentary Elites of Latin America, PELA (2012). Available from the Observatorio de
Élites Parlamentarias de América Latina website: <http://americo.usal.es/oir/elites/>.
Wiesehomeier, N. and Benoit, K., 2009. Presidents, Parties, and Policy Competition. Journal of Politics, 71: 1435–47.
Zucco, C., 2009. Ideology or What? Legislative Behavior in Multiparty Presidential Settings. Journal of Politics, 71:
1076–92.
Notes:
(1) . This means, for example, that we did not include research that uses electoral outcomes, such as the effective
number of legislative parties or the proportion of women elected to the legislature, as the concept of primary
interest. As a first cut, we put the following search script into the Social Sciences Citation Index and into Google
Scholar: “(Argentina OR Bolivia OR Brazil OR Chile OR Colombia OR “Costa Rica” OR “Dominican Republic” OR
Ecuador OR “El Salvador” OR Guatemala OR Honduras OR Mexico OR Nicaragua OR Panama OR Paraguay OR
Peru OR Uruguay OR Venezuela OR “Latin America”) AND (parliament* OR legislat* OR congress* OR chamber OR
house OR senate OR assembly) AND “political science”.”In addition, we searched likely journals individually by
substituting their titles for the term “political science” in the script. Finally, we used the reference lists of several
books to help identify additional works, especially other books.
(2) . An additional eight articles were left in a “residual” category. The entire bibliography is available on the
Replication page of Crisp’s website (<crisp.wustl.edu>).
(3) . It is worth pointing out that what the authors define as the majority party is, at times, a party that holds the
plurality and not the majority of the seats.
(4) . There is a related group of works that focus on the role of legislative politics in the fate of individual presidents
and the survival of democratic regimes more generally, but due to space constraints, we will not review it here. See
our replication bibliography for a list of these papers.
(5) . There is a vibrant cottage industry of Brazilianists engaged in a dialogue with one another about how best to
depict the country’s legislature, including especially executive–legislative relations. The debate over how chaotic
the policy-making process is in Brazil has spurred one response after another. See Ames’ (2002) contribution to
Morgenstern and Nacif (2002) for a review of the literature that marks the origins of this debate. See Pereira, Power,
and Rennó (2008) for an update on how that debate has evolved.
Brian F. Crisp
Brian F. Crisp is Professor of Political Science at Washington University in St. Louis.
Constanza F. Schibber
Constanza F. Schibber is a Doctoral Candidate in the Department of Political Science, Washington University in St. Louis.
Page 14 of 15
Legislatures in Central and Eastern Europe

Josephine T. Andrews
Institutions
2014
Scholars have explored the role of legislatures in the democratization process in the post-communist countries of Central and Eastern Europe (CEE).
There is evidence that legislative strength is correlated with democracy; the stronger the legislature the stronger the democracy. This chapterexamines
the characteristics of a strong legislature and the significance of legislative strength to successful democratization. After discussing the collapse of
communism in CEE and how it has influenced the design of constitutions, it considers three factors that contribute to the strength and functioning of
legislatures: the constitutional powers attributed to the legislature versus the executive; the partisan structure of the legislative membership and its
implications for policy-making and government stability; and the internal organizational features—the institutional capacity—of legislatures. It then
considers the design and functioning of legislatures in the post-communist countries of CEE. It compares the constitutional structure of government
systems and describes the causes and consequences of multipartism and legislative fragmentation. It also analyzes executive legislative relations and
concludes by assessing internal organizational features such as committees, party system, and deputy experience, and their impact on legislative
strength and effectiveness.
Keywords: legislatures, democratization, post-communist countries, Central and Eastern Europe, democracy, communism, constitutions, multipartism, executive legislative relations, party system
31.1 Introduction
THE role of legislatures in the democratization process has motivated much of the scholarship on the post-communist countries of Central and Eastern
Europe. Using an index of legislative strength developed with Kroenig, Fish shows that the stronger the legislature, the stronger the democracy (Fish
2006). Although there are few other systematic studies linking legislative strength and democracy (Barkan 2008), much of the work investigating
legislatures in the post-communist democracies of Central and Eastern Europe is driven by this question—what are the characteristics of a strong
legislature and how significant is legislative strength to successful democratization? This chapter is organized around this central concern.
The now substantial literature on legislatures in the post-communist countries emphasizes three factors that contribute to the strength and functioning
of legislatures: (1) the constitutional powers attributed to the legislature versus the executive; (2) the partisan structure of the legislative membership
and its implications for policy-making and government stability; and (3) the internal organizational features—the institutional capacity—of legislatures.
Scholarship on legislative strength in these new democracies takes as its starting point the now classic literatures on executive–legislative relations
(Shugart and Carey 1992; Lijphart 1999), electoral rules, party systems and government duration (Strøm 1985; Cox 1997; Tsebelis 2002), and internal
legislative organization (Olson 1980; Shepsle and Weingast 1987; Shaw 1990).
In this chapter, I discuss the design and functioning of legislatures in those post-communist countries of Central and Eastern Europe (CEE) in which the
legislature is a decisive arena for lawmaking. This set of cases includes six former republics of the Soviet Union: Lithuania, Latvia, Estonia, Russia,
Ukraine, and Moldova; six former satellites: Poland, Czech Republic, Slovakia, Hungary, Bulgaria, and Romania; and four (p. 648) former republics of
Yugoslavia: Slovenia, Croatia, Macedonia, and Serbia; and one additional Balkan country, Albania.1
As outlined, the literature on parliaments in CEE identifies three key explanatory variables that contribute to legislative strength and impact, and within
this chapter the review of the literature on legislatures in CEE is organized around these three important lines of research. First, there is a comparison of
the constitutional structure of government systems, which discusses both the historical circumstances that led to the adoption of specific constitutional
arrangements across the region as well as the implications of these governmental systems. Next the causes and consequences of multipartism and
legislative fragmentation are examined. Finally, there is a comparison between internal organizational features such as committees, parliamentary party
groups, and deputy experience, and their impact on legislative effectiveness. Throughout, I consider the impact of these three key features of
democratic legislatures on democratization across the region.
31.2 The Collapse of Communism and Primacy of Constitutional Design
The study of legislatures in Central and Eastern Europe began at the moment of transition (Kaldor and Vejvoda 1999; McFaul 2001; Stokes 2012).2 It
was in this context that political institutions were redesigned. Although in some countries constitutional rules were put in place prior to the first
competitive election, in most countries constitutions were drafted by parliament or by a specially elected general assembly. Furthermore, in most of the
countries, parliaments were empowered to amend the constitution, and most have done so. As architects of the new constitutional order, parliaments
emerged as the focal point of politics, at least in the early years of transition (Agh 1995; Kopecky 2004).
Scholars turned their attention to this extraordinary historical moment, which offered a chance to study institutions in the making (Przeworski 1991).
With the collapse of communism, the old regimes were liquidated, leaving behind a tabula rasa on which the new elites could draft new institutional
structures (Elster et al. 1998, 25). As Lijphart wrote:
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Among the most important—and, arguably, the most important—of all constitutional choices that have to be made in democracies is the
choice...of relationship between the executive and the legislature, in particular presidential vs. parliamentary government. (1992, 207)
Much of the work on constitutional choice in CEE focused on institutions as the outcomes of rational behaviour. Geddes, in her influential 1996 paper,
argued that those who design institutions do so in the attempt to increase their chances of political (p. 649) survival in the new competitive political
environment (1996, 18). Where political parties were many and none dominant, such as in Hungary, a pure parliamentary system was chosen,
whereas, when one party was dominant and led by a popular nationally known figure, a presidential or semi-presidential system was chosen, such as
occurred in Poland, Romania, and many others (Geddes 1996). Similar arguments have been made to explain the adoption of proportional electoral
systems across the region (Lijphart 1992; Remington and Smith 1996; McFaul 1999; Shvetsova 2003; Benoit and Hayden 2004; Benoit and Scheimann
2001).
However, institutional choices were not always the result of strategic calculation; for example, the proposal to add an upper chamber to the Polish
parliament was made by the leader of the former communist bloc to appease an important participant (Osiatynski 1996), and Vaclav Havel pushed
features that were not in the best interest of his Civic Forum party, for the sake of holding the Czechoslovakian federation together (Calda 1996).
Further, it is unclear that elites acted from a clear understanding of their self-interest. During the round-table negotiations in Hungary, although the
leader of Hungary’s former communist party was in favour of adding a directly elected presidency, which he assuredly would not have won, the leader
of the much more popular Hungarian Democratic Forum, Joseph Antall, opposed this decision (Sajó 1996). In the case of electoral rules, actors who
argued for particular rules were often eliminated in the next round of competition by the very rules they chose (Kaminski 2002; Andrews and Jackman
2005). Strategic behaviour played an important but not determinative role in the choice of governmental and electoral systems.
Scholars have also emphasized the impact of Western European institutional design, especially constitutions of highly influential players in the
European Union (EU), notably Germany and France, on political elites charged with drafting new constitutions (Elster 1991; Olson and Norton 1996). As
constitutional scholar Elster tells us: “[O]nly a subset of the conceivable constitutional packages [was] on the agenda in Eastern Europe (1991, 469).”
Malova and Haughton observe:
At the heart of much of the initial institutional change in the region was a desire to build modern democratic states...following the West European
templates. Throughout the course of the 1990s, however, a more influential mechanism emerged stimulating institutional convergence in
Central and Eastern Europe: the European Union. (2002, 101)
It should come as no surprise, therefore, that the prevailing institutional model throughout CEE involves parliamentary democracy with or without an
elected head of state, and proportional representation. In addition, for those countries with constitutional experience, the inter-war constitution was
often used as a template over which bargaining began (Whitefield 1993; Elster et al. 1998). Thus, the initial design of executive–legislative relations and
electoral rules in the CEE democracies was a combination of strategic behaviour by party elites carried out in a context of past constitutional
experience and effective pressure by Western Europe to adopt institutions compatible with EU norms.
(p. 650) The fact that constitutional arrangements were not only the result of bargaining among political elites but also affected by exogenous factors
such as past experience and EU norms should reduce concern that the outcomes of constitutional design are merely a continuation of conditions that
contributed to the creation of particular rules in the first place. It is also relevant that although a basic constitutional framework was almost immediately
put in place in every country, and the pace of institutional change has slowed, negotiations over constitutional design were ongoing in most countries
throughout the 1990s and in some countries have continued through to the present day. Only in the Baltics and Eastern European satellites (excepting
Poland and Hungary) were new constitutions adopted immediately.3 Until its very recent adoption by the Hungarian parliament on 18 April 2011,
Hungary’s constitution was a much amended version of the 1949 Soviet-era constitution.4 In the former Soviet republics constitutional change was
implemented in a piecemeal fashion.5 In the former Yugoslavia, three countries—Slovenia, Croatia, and Macedonia—managed to adopt new
constitutions immediately after the collapse of communism, with the remaining countries only recently resolving issues of national boundaries.6
In those countries that delayed adoption of a new constitution, rules governing the relative power of executive and legislature as well as electoral rules
were subject to change, but even in countries where constitutions were adopted early, amendments could and did occur. Rules governing elections
were changed multiple times in several countries, and rules governing the election of the head of state changed significantly in Moldova, Slovakia, and
very recently in the Czech Republic.7 Thus, institutional rules continue to be subject to change (Roberts 2009).
Proceeding from the early emphasis on the choice of institutions, subsequent work relevant to the legislatures in CEE has focused on the implications of
those rules for legislative strength and democratic transition.
31.3 Executive–Legislative Relations: Assessing the Strength of Parliament
Within the literature on legislatures in CEE, there are numerous inconsistencies in the classification of governmental systems, especially regarding those
countries in which there is both a directly elected head of state (president) and head of government (prime minister). Russia’s system is referred to as
being presidential by some authors (Colton 1995; Fish 2000) but semi-presidential by others (Haspel et al. 2006). Moldova is sometimes described as
presidential, yet this characterization leads us to overlook the interesting difference in trajectory of Moldova, whose parliament has both reduced the
powers of the president as well as changed the mode of presidential election from direct to indirect. This is in contrast with the two other post-Soviet
cases in our study, Ukraine (p. 651) and Russia, where the president remains directly elected and powerful. And Romania’s president is often
considered to be more powerful than Poland’s, although a careful analysis of the powers of each of these two presidents does not support this
conclusion (see Table 31.1).
(p. 652) Table 31.1 Constitutional powers of legislatures in Central and Eastern Europe
Country 1. Right 2. Right to 3. 4. PRES 5. 6. Right 7. 8. Mode 9. Mode 10. 11.

of amend Strength power Bicameral to Election of PM of gov’t Right to Censure
legislative budget legis veto to or dismiss PRES selection selection dismiss
initiative (override) decree unicameral assembly gov’t
Poland Assembly, Significantly Extra- None Bicameral, 2/3 vote of Direct PRES PM PM alone Constructive
gov’t, PRES restricted ordinary delay only lower appoints; appoints, dismisses vote of no
chamber, assembly assembly confidence
PRES upon confirms confirms
Page 2 of 15
PRES upon confirms confirms

failure to
install gov’t
(3rd ) or
pass
budget
Czech Assembly, Unrestricted Absolute None Bicameral, PRES upon Indirect PRES PM PRES and Unrestricted
Republic gov’t delay only failure to thru appoints; appoints, PM jointly right to
install gov’t 2012;direct assembly assembly dismiss censure
or failed after confirms confirms
vote of
confidence
Slovakia Assembly, Unrestricted Absolute None Unicameral PRES upon Indirect PRES PM Assembly Unrestricted
gov’t failure to thru 1998; appoints; appoints, dismisses right to
install gov’t direct after assembly assembly censure
or failed confirms confirms
vote of
confidence
Hungary Assembly, Unrestricted Simple Restricted Unicameral Assembly, Indirect PRES PM PRES and Constructive
gov’t, PRES PRES with appoints; appoints PM jointly vote of no
approval of assembly cabinet dismiss confidence
PM upon confirms
failure to
elect PM
and 4th
failed vote
of
confidence
Bulgaria Assembly, Unrestricted Absolute None Unicameral PRES upon Direct Assembly PM Assembly Unrestricted
gov’t failure to nominates appoints, dismisses right to
install gov’t assembly censure
confirms
(p. 653) Assembly, Minimally Simple Restricted Bicameral, PRES with Direct Assembly PRES Assembly Unrestricted
Romania gov’t, PRES restricted veto player approval of nominates appoints; dismisses right to
assembly assembly censure
and parties confirms
upon
inability to
install gov’t
Estonia Assembly, Significantly Simple None Unicameral PRES upon Indirect PRES PM PRES and Unrestricted
gov’t restricted third failure appoints; appoints PM jointly right to
to install assembly cabinet dismiss censure,
gov’t or confirms may trigger
failure to dissolution
pass
budget or
after vote
of no
confidence
Latvia Assembly, Minimally Simple None Unicameral PRES may Indirect PRES PM Assembly Unrestricted
gov’t, PRES restricted propose, appoints appoints dismisses right to
but PM cabinet censure
referendum
of voters
decides
Lithuania Assembly, Minimally Absolute None Unicameral 3/5 of Direct PRES PRES PRES and Unrestricted
gov’t, PRES restricted assembly, appoints; appoints; PM jointly right to
PM upon assembly assembly dismiss censure,
failed vote confirms confirms may trigger
of (no) dissolution
confidence
may
appeal to
PRES, PRES
Page 3 of 15
PRES, PRES
upon
failure to
install gov’t
Russia Assembly, Unrestricted Extra- Normative Bicameral, PRES upon Direct PRES PRES PRES PRES may
gov’t, PRES ordinary veto player third failure appoints; appoints alone ignore
to elect PM assembly dismisses censure
or second confirms
vote of no
confidence
in gov’t
(p. 654) Assembly, Unrestricted Extra- Restricted Unicameral Executive Direct PRES PRES PRES Unrestricted
Ukraine gov’t, PRES ordinary cannot appoints; appoints alone right to
dissolve assembly dismisses censure
confirms
Moldova Assembly, Significantly Simple Restricted Unicameral PRES upon Direct thru Assembly PM PRES and Unrestricted
gov’t, PRES restricted second 1996; nominates appoints, PM jointly right to
failure to indirect assembly dismiss censure
form gov’t after confirms
or upon 3-
month
legislative
impasse or
failure to
elect PRES
Slovenia Assembly, Unrestricted No veto None Bicameral, PRES upon Direct Assembly PM Assembly Constructive
gov’t delay only repeated nominates appoints, dismisses vote of no
failure to assembly confidence
form gov’t confirms
or upon
failure to
elect new
gov’t after
successful
vote of no
confidence
Macedonia Assembly, Unrestricted Absolute Restricted Unicameral Majority Direct Assembly PM Assembly Unrestricted
gov’t assembly nominates appoints, dismisses right to
assembly censure
confirms
(p. 655) Assembly, Minimally No veto Restricted Unicameral Majority Direct Assembly PM Assembly Unrestricted
Croatia gov’t restricted assembly, nominates appoints, dismisses right to
PRES upon assembly censure,
proposal of confirms may trigger
PM after dissolution
vote of no
confidence
or if
assembly
fails to
approve
budget
Serbia Assembly, Unrestricted Absolute None Unicameral PRES upon Direct Assembly PM Assembly Unrestricted
gov’t proposal of nominates appoints, dismisses right to
gov’t or assembly censure
failure to confirms
install gov’t
or failure to
elect new
gov’t after
vote of no
confidence
Albania Assembly, Minimally Absolute Restricted Unicameral PRES upon Indirect Assembly PM PRES and Unrestricted
gov’t restricted failure to nominates appoints, PM jointly right to
Page 4 of 15
elect new assembly dismiss censure

PRES or confirms
failure to
elect PM
Inconsistencies in classification of system as well as in the assessment of presidential powers are important in that they lead to inaccurate comparative
assessments of the role of the legislature across the region. If, as McGann argues, constitutional features are more determinative of legislative strength
and influence than has been appreciated (2006), then in order to compare legislatures we must agree on the constitutional structure of all of the CEE
countries.
According to Lijphart (1999), a pure parliamentary system is one in which there is no directly elected head of state, and the primary executive, the
head of government and cabinet, is responsible to the legislature. A pure presidential system is one in which the primary executive, the head of state, is
directly elected for a constitutionally prescribed term and is not responsible to the legislature. In a presidential system, the head of state selects the
members of the cabinet, although the legislature generally must approve them. Mixed systems, first identified by Duverger (1980), but systematically
defined by Shugart and Carey (1992), are systems in which there is both an elected head of state and a head of government. It is important to note that
according to Shugart and Carey, a system that includes a head of state elected by parliament as well as a head of government is not a mixed system; it
is parliamentary. The relative power of head of state versus head of government determines the type of mixed system, and some authors argue that the
constitutional powers of the head of state are definitive (Roper 2002). If the head of government appoints the cabinet and the normative powers of the
head of state are minimal, Shugart and Carey term the system “premier-presidential.” However, if the head of state appoints the head of government
and cabinet, which in turn are responsible to the legislature, and the normative powers of the head of state are considerable, Shugart and Carey term
the system “president-parliamentary” (1992, 19–24).
According to these criteria, it is a straightforward matter to classify each of the 17 countries included in this study.The 17 countries are classified
thusly:
• Parliamentary systems include Albania, Czech Republic (through 2012), Estonia, Hungary, Latvia, and Moldova (since 2000).
• Premier-presidential systems include Bulgaria, Croatia, Lithuania, Macedonia, Poland, Romania, Serbia, Slovakia (since 1999), and Slovenia.
• President-parliamentary systems include Russia and Ukraine.
Authors often refer to Ukraine’s system as increasingly presidential (Christensen et al. 2005), yet the relative power of Ukraine’s president (as measured
by Shugart and Carey’s index of presidential power) and parliament (as measured by Fish and Kroenig’s parliamentary powers index) is comparable to
that of France.8 On the other hand, as shown in Table 31.1, the Ukrainian president does have unfettered power to dismiss ministers, (p. 656) and the
veto override requirement is formidable. Thus, I place it in the same category as Russia. No pure presidential systems were adopted in CEE.
In 11 of the 17 cases, the head of state is currently popularly elected (that number will climb to 12 in 2013 when the Czech president is directly elected
for the first time). And, in every case, whether the head of state is weak or powerful, the government is confirmed by parliament and may be censured
by parliament, although in seven cases there are important restrictions on parliament’s right to censure. In every state except Estonia, Ukraine,
Macedonia, and Croatia, if a newly elected legislature is unable to confirm a prime minister or install a new government, the head of state may dissolve
the lower chamber and call for new elections. In addition, in Estonia, Lithuania, Croatia, and Russia, a vote of no confidence may trigger dissolution of
parliament by the head of government and/or head of state. Although the right of the head of state to dissolve parliament under these circumstances is
common, the ability of the Russian president to dissolve the lower chamber if it fails to elect the prime minister or censures the government twice over a
period of three months has received a great deal of attention, providing support for the view that Russia has a presidential or even “superpresidential”
system.
Disagreement over the proper classification of executive–legislative relations in Russia illustrates a general confusion in the literature over the role of
institutional powers versus partisan structure of the legislature in determining the relative strength of parliaments versus prime ministers and presidents.
This problem is exacerbated in discussion of CEE democracies due to the prevalence of mixed presidential-parliamentary systems. The primary reason
that the Russian president is able to dominate the government and legislature is due not to the institutional rules governing cabinet formation and
censure but to the very strong normative powers of decree ascribed to the head of state in the Russian constitution, and the use Presidents Yeltsin and
Putin have made of those decree powers (Carey and Shugart 1998; Haspel et al. 2006). In particular, President Putin, using his powers of decree, has
restricted freedom of the press and electoral competition and so engineered a dominant party system, which in turn has made the issue of
parliamentary approval of the prime minister a moot point (Hale et al. 2004; Crowther 2011). By contrast, during Yeltsin’s second term, the parliamentary
majority consisting of the Communists and Nationalists successfully rejected one of Yeltsin’s proposed candidates for head of government (Remington
2010). The Russian example underscores the problems, also highlighted by Shugart and Carey, of the president-parliamentary system. In such a
system, the president enjoys the powers of both head of government and head of state, and if the constitutional powers of the head of state allow the
president to legislate without parliament, the result is problematic indeed (Carey and Shugart 1998).
Key dimensions of the constitutional basis of legislative power are highly related to dimensions of executive power, as first introduced by Shugart and
Carey (1992). I have created an institutional scale of legislative power, which is presented in Table 31.1. The items included in the table are inspired by
the constitutional features first articulated by Shugart and Carey to capture the powers of presidents (1992, 148–66; see also Metcalf (p. 657) 2000).
All information summarized in Table 31.1 is based on detailed study and coding of constitutions and amendments for each of the 17 countries included
in the table.9 The index is organized around three key dimensions of legislative power:
1. Degree of control over policy-making (Items 1–5)

a. Is legislature a veto player
b. Strength of legislative veto
2. Degree of control over composition of legislature (Item 6)

a. Who selects members of legislature
b. Who dismisses legislature
3. Degree of control over composition of executive (Items 7–11)

a. Who selects members of executive
Page 5 of 15
b. Who removes members of executive.
To capture the legislature’s power over policy-making, I consider: (1) who, other than the legislature, has the right to initiate legislation; (2) the degree
of control that the legislature has over the state budget; (3) the majority required to override a presidential veto; (4) the scope of the president’s decree
power; and (5) whether the legislature is bicameral and if so whether the upper chamber is a veto player. Because all lower chambers considered in
this study are directly and nationally elected, I capture control over composition of legislature by coding criteria for dismissal of the legislature (6). To
capture control over composition of the executive, I code mode of election of president (7); selection of prime minister and government (8 and 9); and
right to dismiss and censure the government (10 and 11). While it is beyond the scope of this study to summarize and compare all aspects of
institutional power presented in Table 31.1, I draw the reader’s attention to several important points related to the three dimensions of legislative power
summarized above.
31.3.1 Degree of Legislative Control Over Policy-Making
Based on the information presented, we see that in every country case, the government as well as parliament can initiate legislation. Thus, in each of
these countries the government shares agenda control with the legislature itself. The most important piece of legislation passed each year is the state
budget. In every country included in this study, the government and never the president is responsible for preparing the draft budget. The primary role
of parliament is to review and amend the budget, at which point the government must respond to parliament’s suggested amendments (Gleich 2003). In
nine of the cases, there are no constitutional restrictions on the legislature’s ability to amend. The legislature may raise or lower spending as well as
change spending priorities. Further, the legislature may alter the budget throughout the fiscal year. In five cases, the legislature may amend the budget,
but it cannot increase spending without finding the funds to cover the increase; in short, there is a constitutionally balanced budget (p. 658)
requirement, and the limit on budgetary spending is set by the government. In these five cases, restrictions on amending exist but are minimal. In only
three cases—Poland, Estonia, and Moldova—are there more severe restrictions on how the legislature may amend. In such cases, the legislature may
neither raise nor lower spending, and it cannot alter the budget during the year without government approval. Thus, in most of the legislatures in CEE,
there are either no restrictions or only minimal restrictions on the legislature’s ability to amend the budget as prepared by the government.
We must also consider whether or not the legislature is required for policy-making (always a veto player). In fact, there is only one country—Russia—in
which the head of state can issue normative decrees. In nine cases, the head of state has no decree power whatsoever, and in the remaining seven
the president’s decrees are restricted to very specific circumstances outlined in the constitution. Thus, in all but one case, the legislature is essential to
the lawmaking process. As already noted, 11 (soon to be 12) of the countries have directly elected presidents, yet the legislature’s policy-making is
only minimally restricted by the president’s veto, requiring either an absolute majority to override (seven cases), or simple majority override (five
cases), or no override whatsoever (two cases). Note that among the 11 directly elected presidents in the region, only three have a veto that requires a
supermajority to override. The fact that most of the legislatures are unicameral increases the policy-making power of the legislature, since bicameralism
introduces one more veto player into the policy-making process, thus making policy change more difficult (Tsebelis and Money 1997). Only five of the
countries have an upper chamber, and in only two of those (Romania and Russia) is the upper chamber required for lawmaking.10 In general, the
policy-making powers of CEE legislatures are great. The Russian president is clearly an outlier. The Russian president may interfere through his or her
power of normative decree, and the override requirement is prohibitive. Thus, the Russian president enjoys great control over policy-making; and
among these cases, the Russian Duma is the weakest in terms of policy-making.
31.3.2 Degree of Legislative Control Over Composition of Legislature
Every parliament in the CEE region is directly elected; therefore, this chapter is concerned only with the right of dismissal. In none of the CEE countries
does either the president or prime minister have the unrestricted right to dissolve the legislature, and in three countries neither executive can dissolve
the legislature under any circumstances (Latvia, Ukraine, and Macedonia). Thus, at least in this regard, no CEE prime minister is comparable to that of
Britain and no president is comparable to that of France. In general, CEE constitutions guard against parliamentary dissolution. In the majority of cases,
either the executive (president or prime minister) lacks the right to dissolve the legislature, or the head of state may dissolve only if the parliament has
failed after several attempts to install a government, either following an election or a successful vote of no confidence.11
(p. 659) 3.3 Degree of Legislative Control Over Composition of Executive
In the CEE democracies, parliaments exert a great deal of control over the government, which in turn controls most of the activity of the presidents
(excepting Russia and Ukraine, the actions of which do not need to be countersigned by a government minister), elected or not. In all but one case, the
parliament must confirm the prime minister even if nominated by the head of state, and in 12 cases the parliament must confirm the composition of
government as well. In eight of the 17 cases, only the legislature may remove members of government, and in ten of the cases, the legislature has the
unrestricted right to censure the government. Thus, overall, legislatures in CEE have great constitutional power to control the composition of
government. This is an extremely important component of legislatures’ power in CEE, since the legislature’s power to censure implies that governments
in these countries are quite restricted in what they can do if they deviate from policies approved by the legislative majority.
For purposes of comparing constitutionally derived legislative powers across all 17 countries, I have created a scale of legislative power based on each
of the 11 categories included in Table 31.1. I generalized the coding responses to three per category, with a 1 representing the most constitutional
restrictions on legislative power and 3 representing the least. In Table 31.2, I present the information in Table 31.1 in numeric form, summing the totals
for each country in item 12.
Page 6 of 15
(p. 660) Table 31.2 Index of constitutional powers of legislatures in CEE. Each of the 11 categories ranges from 1 (least constitutional restriction on legislative power) to 3 (most constitutional restriction on
legislative power)
Country Classification 1. Right 2. 3. 4. 5. 6. Right 7. 8. Mode 9. Mode 10. 11. 12. PPI
of system of Right Strength PRES Bicameral to Election of PM of gov’t Right Censure Total
legislative to legis veto power or dismiss PRES selection selection to Leg
initiative amend (override) to unicameral assembly dismiss Powers
budget decree gov’t
Poland Premier- 2 3 2 2 3 3 1 3 3 3 3 17 0.75

presidential
Czech Parliamentary 2 3 2 3 3 2 1 3 3 3 3 26 0.81

Republic
Slovakia Premier- 2 2 2 2 3 2 3 3 3 2 3 27 0.72

presidential
Hungary Parliamentary 2 3 2 3 3 1 1 3 3 3 3 23 0.75
Bulgaria Premier- 2 3 2 3 3 1 2 2 3 3 3 28 0.78

presidential
Romania Premier- 1 2 3 3 3 3 3 1 2 3 3 25 0.72

presidential
Estonia Parliamentary 2 3 2 3 2 1 3 2 3 2 3 24 0.75
Latvia Parliamentary 2 2 3 2 3 1 1 3 3 3 2 27 0.78
Lithuania Premier- 2 3 3 3 2 1 1 3 3 3 1 22 0.78

presidential
Russia President- 1 2 3 2 2 2 1 3 3 3 3 14 0.44

parliamentary
Ukraine President- 2 1 3 3 3 1 3 2 2 2 2 21 0.59

parliamentary
Moldova Parliamentary 1 1 3 2 3 1 2 3 3 2 3 24 0.75
Slovenia Premier- 1 3 3 2 3 1 3 2 2 2 1 25 0.75

presidential
Macedonia Premier- 1 2 2 3 3 1 1 2 3 2 2 28 0.81

presidential
Croatia Premier- 1 3 1 2 3 3 1 2 1 1 3 25 0.78

presidential
Serbia Premier- 1 1 1 3 2 1 1 2 3 1 1 27 0.69

presidential
Albania Parliamentary 1 3 1 1 1 1 1 2 1 1 1 27 0.75
Based on the information presented in Table 31.2, I draw one extremely important point: presence of a directly elected head of state in the context of a
government accountable to parliament has little or no impact on the power of the legislature except in the two cases of president-parliamentarism—
Russia and Ukraine (Bayliss 1996).
Further, if we compare the constitutional powers of legislatures in CEE, as outlined earlier, with those of legislatures in Western Europe, we see that
legislatures in CEE are institutionally strong. Based on similar coding of ten Western European democracies that have written constitutions that reflect
modern practices,12 I conclude that in Western Europe, legislatures are generally more restricted in their ability to amend or alter the budget, and are
less likely to be involved in the confirmation of both prime minister and government and also less likely to be the only body able to dismiss government
members. On average, the powers of legislatures in CEE are quite comparable to those in the much older democracies of Western Europe.
These conclusions dovetail almost exactly with those based on Fish and Kroenig’s parliamentary powers index (or PPI) (2009). Their index contains 32
items, 27 of which (items 1 through 25, 27, and 30) are constitutionally determined, and 23 of which reference the powers of the legislature vis-à-vis the
executive. According to their index, the average PPI for the 17 countries included in this chapter is .73, and the average PPI for the 15 countries that
were members of the European Union prior to the beginning of Eastern enlargement (EU15) is exactly the same! If Russia is excluded from the
Page 7 of 15
calculation for (p. 661) CEE, the average PPI increases to .76, suggesting that if anything legislatures in CEE are slightly stronger than legislatures in
Western Europe.
31.4. Legislative Strength and the Party System
Legislatures are not institutionally independent, especially in parliamentary systems. In CEE, all countries adopted either parliamentary or some form of
mixed presidential-parliamentary systems. Decision-making in such systems is profoundly affected by the partisan structure of the legislative
membership, since this influences the (p. 662) number of parties in government and the number of partisan veto players required for policy-making
(Tsebelis 2002). Hence, the relative strength of legislature and executive cannot be understood without reference to the party system.
One of the striking characteristics of politics in the post-communist CEE countries has been the high number of parties competing and winning seats in
party systems across the region (Rose and Munro 2003). This was especially marked in the early elections (Reich 2004). As a result, national
parliaments during most of the post-communist period have been fragmented, often highly so (Bielasiak 2002; Karasimeonov et al. 1999). Data on the
effective number of parties in parliament for all countries considered in this study is presented in Table 31.3. Given that in every country in the region,
proportional representation or a mixed electoral system involving a proportional tier of substantial size was adopted, multipartism was to be expected
(Cox 1997; Birch 2001; Moser and Scheiner 2012).13 In addition to the large number of parties competing, scholars have also noted the historically high
levels of electoral volatility throughout the region, the result of low party institutionalization (Toka 1995; Mair 1997; Sikk 2005; Tavits 2005; Lewis 2007;
Tavits 2008; Powell and Tucker 2009; see especially Bielasiak 2002, Table 2). While there is little disagreement on the reality of party fragmentation and
low party institutionalization in CEE (Kitschelt et al. 1999), scholars disagree as to its impact on legislative versus executive strength (Kreuzer and Pettai
2003; Sikk 2005).
Table 31.3 Summary information for countries in Central and Eastern Europe. Number of distinct prime ministers (some have served more than once),
average effective number of parties in parliament (starting with first elected parliament and ending with present parliament), Polity IV 2010, and FIW
2010
Country Number of prime ministers Average ENPP Polity 2010 Freedom House FIW Score 2010
Poland 12 3.67 10 1 (F)
Czech Republic 9 3.88 8 1 (F)
Slovakia 7 4.65 10 1 (F)
Hungary 8 2.94 10 1 (F)
Bulgaria 7 3.07 9 2 (F)
Romania 9 3.99 9 2 (F)
Estonia 8 4.91 9 1 (F)
Latvia 12 5.82 8 2 (F)
Lithuania 9 4.08 10 1 (F)
Russia 10 6.07 4 5.5 (NF)
Ukraine 12 6.83 6 3 (PF)
Moldova 7 2.67 8 3 (PF)
Slovenia 7 5.47 10 1 (F)
Macedonia 6 3.43 9 3 (PF)
Croatia 4 3.21 9 1.5 (F)
Serbia 3 8 2 (F)
Albania 10 2.85 9 3 (PF)
Some scholars note that high party fragmentation and low party institutionalization has led to instability of cabinets and executive weakness. Malova
and Haughton argue that fragmentation of parliament as well as weak party loyalty among members of parliament contribute to executive weakness by
“blurring the distinction between government and opposition” (2002, 112). Kopecky suggests that lack of party loyalty among members of parliament
has generally impeded passage of government-sponsored bills and so weakened the executive (2004). It is true that prime ministers and governments
change frequently in CEE (Blondel and Müller-Rommel 2001; Muller-Rommel et al. 2004; Roberts 2006). As shown in Table 31.3, no country that has
held elections for the full post-communist period (which includes a minimum of six elections) has had fewer than seven different prime ministers (some
of whom served more than once) and some have had as many as 12. The number of distinct governments is considerably larger. Somer-Topcu and
Williams report that among the CEE countries that joined the EU in the fourth enlargement, the average cabinet duration was about 50 days shorter than
Page 8 of 15
the average duration in Western Europe (2008, Table 1), and if one excludes Hungary, where cabinets endured longer even than cabinets in Western
Europe, the difference in cabinet duration would be about one hundred days. What is not clear is the impact that cabinet instability and frequent change
in prime minister has had on executive strength. Is cabinet instability in CEE a cause for concern?
Scholars on CEE have found that the causes of cabinet instability are generally similar to those in the older and very stable democracies of Western
Europe (Strøm 1985; Warwick 1994). Somer-Topcu and Williams report that cabinet duration is significantly affected by legislative fragmentation and the
majority versus minority status of the coalition (2008, Table 3).14 Turnover of governments is not so frequent as to fall (p. 663) outside the scope of
normal politics in Western European democracies (Blondel and Müller-Rommel 2001), even though the turnover and short tenures of prime ministers is
high. Most importantly, among the more democratically and economically successful CEE countries (at least as captured by standard measures of level
of democracy, such as the Polity IV autocracy-democracy scale, and GDP per capita, the standard measure of economic development) are those
countries with high to very high executive turnover (see Table 31.3). Indeed, Hellman found, “Postcommunist countries with a greater dispersion of
political power and a larger number of veto points in the policymaking process have stabilized faster and more effectively than countries in which
political power is more concentrated (1998, Figure 8).”
Other authors argue that governments may have become overly strong and now dominate parliaments in CEE, just as they appear to do in Western
Europe (Olson and Norton 2007). In particular, as several scholars have discussed, the need to implement complex economic and political programs
demanded by outside organizations, especially the IMF and the EU, have reduced the lawmaking role of parliaments, the members of which have been
constrained to pass legislation mandated by these exogenous organizations which work primarily through the governments (Kopecky 2004;
Mansfeldova 2011; Fink-Hafner 2011). This was especially true in the final phase of the accession process when parliaments devoted almost their entire
agendas to passage of EU law, a process that was dictated by the EU and implemented via the governments of the EU hopefuls.
The fact that governments of the ideological left and right oversaw the introduction and passage of EU law appears to support the conclusion that
parliament played little role in the process and party fragmentation had no effect on government strength. Yet, it is possible that the apparent docility of
parliaments and the parliamentary party groups was the result of consensus among parties and their leaders on the left and right regarding EU
accession (Pridham 2002). Popular support for joining the EU was extremely high in countries that were part of the fourth enlargement (Caplanova,
Orviska and Hudson 2004; Doyle and Fidrmuc 2006) and is currently quite high among the countries of the Balkans, which are next in line to join
(Bechev 2012). Governments, whether of the left or right, by quickly and efficiently orchestrating the passage of EU law, were fulfilling their
parliamentary as well as electoral mandates.
In parliamentary systems (or mixed systems of the premier-presidential variety), the executive is not institutionally distinct from parliament, therefore, it
is theoretically quite difficult to decide whether the parliament to whom the government is responsible is weaker or stronger than the government it
keeps in place; indeed, this may not be the appropriate question to ask. The meaningful impact of legislative fragmentation on legislative strength in CEE
may be on the relative power of president versus prime minister and parliament in both the premier-presidential and president-parliamentary systems.
According to Protysk, popular election of a president, whatever that executive’s constitutional powers (and in CEE generally those powers are weak),
“is a very powerful source of political legitimacy for presidents in semipresidential regimes (2005, 136).” Furthermore, prime ministers who rely on the
support of a majority coalition are in (p. 664) a stronger position vis-à-vis an elected president than prime ministers supported by minority coalitions.
The data tells us that minority coalitions are associated with more fragmented parliaments (Protsyk 2005, 153); therefore, party fragmentation is
associated with higher rates of conflict between presidents and prime ministers. As Protysk explains, “Parliamentary fragmentation invites presidential
claims on executive leadership by lowering the president’s political costs of attacking a prime minister and cabinet that lack solid support in Parliament
(153).” Thus, party fragmentation weakens the legislature vis-à-vis the president in CEE premier-presidential systems, and the impact is likely
strengthened the greater the constitutional powers of the president. In the two president-parliamentary systems (Russia and Ukraine), we would expect
to find that fragmented party systems increase the powers of the president vis-à-vis both prime minister and parliament (Mainwaring 1993; Norton and
Olson 2007).
31.5 The Institutionalization of CEE Legislatures
Work on the internal organization and functioning of legislatures in CEE was initially inspired by early work on the US Congress. Classic papers by
Shepsle (1979), Shepsle and Weingast (1987), and by Aldrich (1994) theorize that legislatures are internally organized by parties and by committees.
When parties are weak, as they are in the US Congress, committees are the internal institutional feature that enables coherent policy-making. Where
parties are strong, the role of committees is reduced. Scholars of Westminster parliamentary systems, where majority parties dominate government and
policy-making, have noted the weakness of committees in the policy-making process (Shaw 1990). However, in the multiparty context of continental
Western Europe, and especially in countries with a tradition of multiparty coalition government, scholars find that committees and parties each play
important roles in policy-making (Olson 1980; Shaw 1990).
The earliest work on the internal institutional features of legislatures emphasized the relative importance of committees versus parties. In separate
analyses of the Russian Supreme Soviet, the legislature that immediately preceded the current Russian Duma, Ostrow (2000) and Andrews (2002)
found that a lack of coherent parties as well as appropriately differentiated and empowered committees led to incoherent policy-making and ultimately
institutional collapse. As Smith and Remington (2001) describe, members of the succeeding Russian Duma remedied the shortcomings of the Soviet-era
legislature by institutionalizing the role of parties and committees. Newly elected deputies, the majority of whom were representatives of distinct political
parties, institutionalized the primary role of parties in determining the makeup and membership of committees. The organic evolution of a committee
system dominated by parties was replicated throughout CEE (Remington 1994; Olson and Crowther 2002).
(p. 665) According to Norton and Olson, scholars have found “an inter-relationship between these institutional features, with the most important
variable being that of party (2007).” In situations of single-party dominance, committees are weak and their business is dominated by the majority party.
However, in many of the countries in CEE, multiparty coalitions are the rule, and in these cases the inter-relationship between parties and committees is
more complex. Where parties are particularly weak, as in Ukraine, committees may emerge as the focal point of legislative activity; however, the quality
of policy-making is low (Whitmore 2006; Olson and Crowther 2002). Committees are most effective when parties are strong and exercise control over
their membership and agendas (Olson and Crowther 2002; Whitmore 2003). Membership on committees is determined by the parliamentary party
groups (Khmelko 2011); hence, changes in committee membership are common due to significant changes in composition of legislative membership
from election to election. In addition, although committees tend to reflect specific government ministries, there has been considerable adjustment in the
number and jurisdiction of committees in almost all countries during the time period (Zajc 2007; Nalewajko and Wesolowski 2007; Ilonszki 2007).
In the presence of high party fragmentation and volatility, which continues to exist in the majority of CEE cases, increased organizational experience of
Page 9 of 15
MPs can mitigate the impact of party system instability, thus scholars increasingly emphasize professionalization of MPs as an important aspect of
legislative institutionalization (Chiva 2007, 144). Khmelko’s discussion of parliamentary organization in seven CEE countries, including Russia, Ukraine,
and Moldova, highlights many ways in which members in all seven legislatures attempted to improve the internal organization and functioning of
parliamentary party groups and committees (2011). In their study of parliamentary elites in seven CEE parliaments including Russia, Ilonszki and Edinger
find that that in all cases, number of deputies with prior professional experience is increasing and turnover in parliamentary membership is decreasing
(2007, 155–6, Tables 4 and 5). Mansfeldova reports similar trends (2011, Table 1).
Clearly, the literature on legislative organization in CEE is rich and driven by a set of standard questions regarding the relative role of parties and
committees. What is less clear is the impact of institutionalization on the legislature’s role in policy-making; that is, its strength vis-à-vis the executive.
According to McGann, “constitutional features actually determine policy outcomes more closely than has been appreciated (2006, 443; see also
McGregor 1996).” In his detailed discussion of the weakness of the Ukrainian, Russian and Moldovan parliaments, Crowther attributes most of the
problems to the process of constitutional adoption, which was slow and piecemeal in these cases, and the constitutional powers of legislatures vis-à-vis
presidents (2011).
Details of the budgeting process across CEE provide an example of how variation in legislative organization and efficiency, while important, may have
little impact on legislative strength or democratic trajectory. If constitutionally derived powers of the legislature are of paramount importance in
determining parliament’s role on policy-making (McGann 2006), I expect to find that the process of budget preparation and passage will (p. 666) be
highly reflective of the constitutionally derived budgetary powers of the legislature (see Table 31.1) as well as the legislature’s power vis-à-vis the
executive.
In every CEE country considered in this study, the constitution states that the government is responsible for drafting the state budget; however, it is the
legislature’s responsibility to pass the budget. Russia and Ukraine, along with five countries now part of the EU, are among the ten countries in which
the legislature has no constitutional restrictions on its ability to amend the draft prepared by the government or to amend the budget once passed.
Based on country-specific reports published in the Organisation for Economic and Cooperative Development (OECD) Journal of Budgeting15 for the 11
CEE countries for which reports are available and on the general report on CEE budgeting by Gleich (2003), I find that constitutional restrictions on
amendment during and after final passage guide the process as well as determine legislative involvement. Further, the technical details of the
budgetary process are all determined by statute; that is, they are endogenous to parliament (Martin 2005) and so can be modified by parliament at any
time within the constitutionally specified framework.
In all the CEE countries, the key link between the government and legislature in the budgeting process is the parliamentary committee that works
directly with the Ministry of Finance.16 As one would expect, the OECD reports are mostly concerned with the workings of government; however, every
report highlights the basic constitutional provisions governing the budget process, as these create the framework within which parliaments and
governments operate (Gleich 2003). According to the OECD reports, two factors determine the quality of budgeting in CEE: (1) the administrative
sophistication of the Ministry of Finance and other governmental organs that participate in the preparation of the draft; and (2) the transparency of the
budgetary process in which parliamentary review and involvement is a key component. Although quality of budgeting varies across the CEE cases, the
role of parliament in the budgeting process is increasing in every CEE case as is the sophistication of budget preparation. The authors of the OECD
reports attribute the variation in quality of budgeting to a country’s integration into the sophisticated economy of the European Union or, in Russia’s
case, the global economy.
As seen through the lens of the budgeting process, legislative institutionalization is a product of constitutional design and economic development.
Furthermore, the legislature’s influence over the actual makeup of the budget is a product of its relationship with the executive. Kopecky describes how
the executive in all counties of CEE has “gained and consolidated its position around a set of powerful institutions, most notably the Council of Ministers
and the finance ministers (2004, 149).” However, in the parliamentary and premier-parliamentary systems, these powerful ministers are responsible to
parliament and may be removed by parliamentary majority; hence, they are the agents of parliament. In Russia and Ukraine, these ministers are
responsible to the president and may be removed by the president, and however internally institutionalized the parliamentary process of budget review
and approval, the Minister of Finance is an agent of the president (Kopecky 2004).
(p. 667) 31.6 Legislative Strength and Democratization
As one of the most extensive literatures on institutional design and functioning, work on legislatures in CEE has contributed significantly to the field of
comparative politics.
Following the collapse of communism, we witnessed the creation of 11 new dual executive systems, with variation in the constitutional powers attributed
to parliament, prime minister, and president. In addition, countries in CEE adopted a variety of proportional and multitier electoral systems. As a result,
CEE elites designed many new, complex forms of democracy and generated opportunities to study variation along three dimensions that have long
been important to comparative politics: executive–legislative relations especially in mixed presidential-parliamentary systems, multipartism and its
impact on the relative power of legislature and executive, and the relative role of parties and committees in the administrative organization of parliament
in complex governmental systems.
There is no doubt that variation in the constitutional powers of legislatures is associated with variation in the democratic trajectory of Central and
Eastern Europe. Those countries with the constitutionally strongest legislatures (as measured by either the index presented in Tables 31.1 and 31.2 or
by Fish and Kroenig’s PPI) have made the most progress toward democracy, while those with weaker legislatures are taking longer. Obviously, this
relationship is far too complex to be causal; it is an association affected by many factors including regional characteristics. The influence of European
norms of parliamentarism as well the benefits of EU mandated institutionalization have contributed to legislative strength in the post-communist (as
opposed to the post-Soviet cases). However, regionally determined variables do not tell the whole story.
There is much yet to be done to flesh out the implications for democracy of the complex institutional interactions that occur in dual executive systems.
We do not yet understand the role of president, prime ministers, and parliaments, each in policy-making across different policy areas and across
systems with varying levels of presidential strength. In addition, the implications of highly fragmented and seemingly unstable party systems that exist in
most of the CEE democracies, are not yet clear, as most of these countries have either only recently joined or are in the process of joining the EU. As
the process of EU accession recedes for those countries that entered in the last decade, we will either begin to see party system stabilization or we
must come to understand the new equilibrium of democracy without such stability.
Most of the work on dual executive systems in CEE has focused on those examples that have already joined the EU, and so are clearly fully democratic,
Page 10 of 15
or on Russia, which is an outlier. Future work should focus on those countries with intermediate levels of democracy, countries that have not yet joined
the EU, such as the former Yugoslavian republics, and Moldova. Each of the former republics of Yugoslavia has adopted premier-presidential systems.
Moldova, another country still in transition, changed (p. 668) from a president-parliamentary to a pure parliamentary system and so provides an
excellent case in which to compare democratic trajectory in light of change in executive–legislative relations.
Most important, work on legislatures in CEE should proceed as it has started, with a strong focus on the implications of institutional design for
democracy.
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Notes:
(1) . Although Belarus, Bosnia and Herzegovina, and Kosovo are geographically located in Central and Eastern Europe, I exclude them from my analysis
because they lack sufficient democratic experience and/or have not yet established clear sovereignty. After a single election, the post-communist
government in Belarus reverted to strong authoritarianism, and the legislature has never functioned as a representative, deliberative, or lawmaking
body. Neither Bosnia and Herzegovina nor Kosovo has yet emerged as a clearly sovereign entity.
(2) . Exceptions include: Ukraine, where mass support for democracy did not emerge until the Orange Revolution (Wilson 2005), Moldova, Albania, and
those republics of the former Yugoslavia that became mired in civil conflict.
(3) . Material in this note is based on Ludwikowski (1996). Poland’s parliament initially adopted only a constitutional framework, the so-called “Little
Constitution” of 1992; a new constitution was not adopted by parliament until April 1997. Parliaments in both Estonia and Latvia re-enacted constitutions
in force prior to the Soviet period. Estonia’s constitution was enacted by referendum in June 1992, and Latvia’s by parliament in July 1993. The
Constitution of Lithuania, on the other hand, was the result of negotiations within the national parliament and was ratified by referendum in October
1992. The constitutions of the Czech and Slovak Republics were adopted by their respective national legislatures at the time of the peaceful dissolution
of Czechoslovakia, on 1 January 1993 and 1 September 1992, respectively. Bulgaria’s constitution was adopted by a directly elected General Assembly
in July 1991. Romania’s constitution was approved by the directly elected Romanian parliament and ratified by referendum in December 1991. In each
of these cases, the details of the new constitutional order were the result of negotiations among the leaders of parliamentary party groups.
(4) . The rules governing the smooth functioning of Hungary’s democracy from the moment of its first competitive election were based on amendments
to the communist era constitution and were put in place by leaders of Hungary’s former communist party and leaders of several opposition parties that
had formed prior to the negotiations (Elster et al. 1998).
(5) . The Russian constitution was adopted in December 1993 (Smith and Sharlet 2008), Moldova’s in July 1994, although it was amended in 2000 to
reduce the powers of the president and change the mode of election from direct by the people to indirect by parliament (Brezianu and Spânu 2007).
The Ukrainian constitution was finally adopted in June 1996, heavily amended in 2004 to reduce the powers of the president, but these amendments
were overturned by Ukraine’s Constitutional Court in 2010 (Christensen et al. 2005).
(6) . Macedonia adopted its constitution in 1991 although it was amended extensively in 2001 (Aceuska 1996). The Slovenian parliament adopted its
current constitution in December 1991, and, although the Croatian parliament adopted a new constitution in December 1990, the country quickly
retreated from democratization under the dictatorship of President Tudman. Following his death, the Croatian parliament amended the constitution to
reduce the powers of the president and strengthen those of parliament, restarting Croatia’s transition to democracy (Roberts 2009). Among the
remaining republics of Yugoslavia, ethnic conflict and civil war delayed the establishment of national boundaries and the adoption of new constitutions
until 2006 in Serbia and Montenegro, and the process is ongoing in Bosnia and Herzegovina, and Kosovo. In 1991, the Albanian parliament drafted a
temporary basic law (Ludwikowski 1996). Like much of the former Yugoslavia, Albania experienced six years of institutional failure and ultimately civil
war. Finally, the parliament adopted a new constitution which was ratified by referendum in November 1998.
(7) . Typically, changes in electoral rules involved the electoral threshold or the type of method used to translate votes to seats in proportional systems,
although in some cases, countries changed from one system to another (Birch et al. 2002). Starting in 1999, the president of Slovakia has been directly
elected. The next president of the Czech Republic will be directly elected in 2013. In Moldova, the president was directly elected through the 1996
election, but starting in 2000 was elected by parliament.
(8) . Shugart and Carey give France’s president a 5; using their index, Ukraine receives an 8. Fish and Kroenig’s index for France is .56, for Ukraine it is
.59.
(9) . Unless otherwise noted, the coding presented in the table is based on English translations of original constitutional documents. Where amendments
relevant to powers outlined in the table occurred (such as mode of election of president), changes in legislative powers are noted in the table.
Constitutions for Bulgaria, the Czech and Slovak Republics, Estonia, Hungary, Lithuania, Romania, and Russia can be found in Ludwikowski (1996).
Constitutional documents referenced include:
The 1998 Albanian constitution <http://www.ipls.org/services/kusht/contents.html>.

The 1990 Croatian constitution <http://www.servat.unibe.ch/icl/hr00000_.html>.
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The Latvian constitution <http://www.wipo.int/wipolex/en/text.jsp?file_id=190855>.

The 1992 Lithuanian constitution <http://www3.lrs.lt/home/Konstitucija/Constitution.htm>.
The 1991 Macedonian constitution <http://www.servat.unibe.ch/icl/mk00000_.html>.
The 1994 Moldovan constitution <http://confinder.richmond.edu/admin/docs/moldova3.pdf>.
The 1997 Polish constitution <http://www.constitution.org/cons/poland/konse.htm>.
The 2006 Serbian constitution <http://legislationline.org/documents/action/popup/id/8851/preview>.
The 1991 Slovenian constitution <http://legislationline.org/documents/section/constitutions>.
The 1996 Ukrainian constitution <http://www.infoukes.com/history/constitution/index-en.html>.
(10) . Among the five countries with upper chambers, the Senates in Poland, the Czech Republic, and Romania are directly elected in national contests.
Only the Slovenian and Russian upper chambers are indirectly selected. Upper chambers in Poland, the Czech Republic, and Slovenia can only delay
passage of legislation, and have restricted input into the legislative agenda. However, the upper chambers in Romania and Russia are full participants in
much if not all of the legislative process. In Romania, the upper and lower chambers must each agree on the final legislative version (as in the United
States). In Russia, the upper and lower chambers each have specific control over particular agenda items, and the upper chamber’s veto must be
overridden by a two-thirds majority of the lower chamber. Thus, in Romania and Russia, the presence of a powerful upper chamber complicates the
ability of the legislature to act swiftly and so strengthens the executive at its own expense. This is aggravated in the case of Russia in that the upper
chamber is appointed; thus, its membership answers to a very different constituency than that of the lower elected chamber. Indeed, the presence of a
powerful, indirectly elected legislative veto player greatly compromises democracy in Russia.
(11) . In three cases, the head of state may also dissolve if the parliament fails to pass the budget in a timely fashion (Poland, Estonia, and Croatia). In
no case may the head of government dissolve the parliament on his or her own initiative—instead the prime must bring such a proposal to the head of
state and argue the case. Even in the case of the Russian legislature, the head of state may not dissolve the lower house unless it fails three times to
install a government.
(12) . Belgium, Finland, France, Germany, Greece, Ireland, Italy, Portugal, Spain, Sweden.
(13) . Moser and Scheiner argue that context conditions the impact of rules on the party system; thus, the general lack of party institutionalization in
CEE ought to augment the impact of PR.
(14) . Nikolenyi reminds us of the importance of the censure rule, in particular the constructive vote of no confidence (2004), in reducing instability. The
constructive vote of no confidence is present in Poland, Hungary, and Slovenia (see Table 31.1). Tzelgov reports that the ideological composition of
government, in particular whether the government includes communist successor parties, matters for survival as well (2011).
(15) . For the discussion of the role of CEE legislatures in the budget process, I rely on the following articles published in the OECD Journal of Budgeting.
Budgeting in Bulgaria by Ian Hawkesworth, Richard Emery, Joachim Wehner, and Kristin Saenger, 2009, Vol. 3; Budgeting in Croatia by Dirk-Jan Kraan,
Daniel Bergvall, Iris Müller, and Joachim Wehner, 2006, Vol. 5; Budgeting in Estonia by Dirk-Jan Kraan, Joachim Wehner, and Kirsten Richter, 2008, Vol.
8; Budgeting in Hungary by Dirk-Jan Kraan, Daniel Bergvall, Ian Hawkesworth, and Philipp Krause, 2007, Vol. 6; Budgeting in Latvia by Dirk-Jan Kraan,
Joachim Wehner, James Sheppard, Valentina Kostyleva, and Barbara Duzler, 2009, Vol. 3; Budgeting in Lithuania by Ian Hawkesworth, Richard Emery,
Joachim Wehner, and Jannick Saegert, 2010, Vol. 3; Budgeting in Moldova by Dirk-Jan Kraan, Valentina Kostyleva, Colin Forthun, Jutta Albrecht, and
Ragnar Olofsson, 2010, Vol. 3; Performance Budgeting in Poland: An OECD Review, 2011, Vol. 1; Budgeting in Romania by Michael Ruffner, Joachim
Wehner, and Matthias Witt, 2005, Vol. 4; Budgeting in Russia by Dirk-Jan Kraan, Daniel Bergvall, Ian Hawkesworth, Valentina Kostyleva, and Matthias
Witt, 2008, Vol. 8; Budgeting in Slovenia by Dirk-Jan Kraan and Joachim Wehner, 2005, Vol. 4.
(16) . This committee is called by different names in different cases. For example, in Russia it is the Committee on Budget and Taxes, in Bulgaria the
Budget and Finance Committee.
Josephine T. Andrews
Josephine T. Andrews is Associate Professor of Political Science, University of California, Davis.
Page 15 of 15
Authoritarian Legislatures
Paul Schuler and Edmund J. Malesky
Institutions
2014
This chapter examines legislatures in authoritarian regimes. It first reviews the history of how scholars of
authoritarianism have conceived institutions, along with the theoretical arguments specific to authoritarian
legislatures. It then discusses the empirical evidence on the circumstances under which the institutions are created
and their downstream effects. More specifically, it considers parliaments in regimes most similar to the authoritarian
regimes and the role of assemblies or elections in buttressing regime rule. It also analyzes the power of assemblies
with respect to policy-making, access to spoils, and access to information about the performance of dictators and
the state.
Keywords: legislatures, authoritarian regimes, authoritarianism, parliaments, assemblies, elections, policy-making, dictators
32.1 Introduction
WHILE parliamentary analysis is one of the core research programs for political scientists studying the politics of
democratic regimes, until recently the same could not be said for the work on authoritarian politics. While
institutions have never been completely dismissed by scholars of authoritarianism, it is fair to say that the seminal
texts analysing authoritarian rule prior to the end of the Cold War paid less attention to the lawmaking bodies of
authoritarian regimes than is common today (Fainsod 1953; Friedrich and Brzezinski 1961; Arendt 1966; Linz
1970; Jackson and Rosberg 1982).
Yet the surprising assertiveness of some newly minted parliaments such as Myanmar’s assembly,1 the increased
activity in other assemblies traditionally viewed as rubber stamps,2 and, most importantly, the rise of hybrid-
regimes whose hallmarks are relatively liberal elections and assemblies, has led to more systematic attention to
assemblies3 and the elections that seat them.4 More broadly, scholars have noted that in contrast to the totalitarian
or personalistic leaders of the past, authoritarian regimes rely less on repression (Linz 2000) and more on these
institutions to alternately co-opt, empower, or enervate the opposition and buttress their rule. Where the most
recent wave of scholarship differs strikingly from past work is that assemblies are seen as constraints willingly
constructed by dictators in order to maximize the benefits of continued rule or increase regime stability. This
perspective contrasts with more traditional views, which are still held by many, that see both assemblies and
elections as tools to assist dictators without actually holding them accountable or forcing them to make policy
concessions.
To those more familiar with analyses of democratic legislatures, research on authoritarian assemblies may seem
foreign. While studies of democratic assemblies focus on how parties and individual legislators behave subject to
microlevel institutional constraints or the principal–agent relationship between the executive and the legislature,
(p. 677) the work on authoritarian assemblies generally does not consider the impact of more fine-grained
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institutions such as election rules, investiture, or whether the system is presidential or parliamentary. Although on
paper, as much variation in these institutions exists as it does in the democratic world, most work has focused
instead on why dictators would create any kind of assembly and the impact of these assemblies on growth and
regime longevity. This leads to a very different type of analysis, but one that should nonetheless be of interest to
any scholars concerned with how institutions—democratic or authoritarian—acquire the ability to constrain in the
first place.
The verdict from this literature is that authoritarian regimes with assemblies have become more prevalent since the
Cold War, and that they have become so for a reason—they deliver higher rates of economic growth, investment,
and potentially prolong regime survival (Geddes 1999; Boix 2003; Gandhi 2008; Wright 2008). Furthermore, the
cross-national analyses exploring which authoritarian regimes set up assemblies or allow multiple parties suggest
that there are patterns to the types of regimes and conditions that are conducive to reliance on such institutions.
Using the most influential typology of authoritarian regimes (Geddes 1999), civilian dictatorships are far more likely
to set up assemblies than monarchies, military regimes, or personalistic regimes. Furthermore, regimes are more
likely to establish assemblies when they are less able to rely on natural resource rents.
Despite the advances made in this exciting new literature, several challenges remain. First, many of the
explanations for the existence of parliaments adopt a functionalist explanation whereby the logic explaining the
creation of the regime is conflated with the purpose they serve (Magaloni and Kricheli 2010; Pepinsky 2013).
Second, the definition of which specific institutions matter is not always clearly defined. In particular, the role of
regime parties is often conflated with the role served by the assembly and the elections (Art 2012). In many of the
analyses reviewed below, parties and assemblies are seen as interchangeable in their ability to provide credible
constraints on the regime or mobilize support for regime goals. Indeed, in several important studies, the two
institutions are aggregated into a single index of institutionalization. While these institutions are no doubt
interdependent, as they are in democracies, they may also serve distinct purposes. Particularly critical to analyses
of single-party regimes is how the party exerts influence through these institutions, and how itspower is
constrained by them. Moreover, in some regime types, parties have parallel legislatures (central committees) that
provide many of the same roles as the national parliament. The interaction between these bodies is underexplored.
Third, the theoretical models of assemblies focus on the creation of assemblies, yet the cross-national empirical
studies rarely consider changes to the assemblies within a regime. Given that adding or reducing the power of an
assembly is likely to be more destabilizing than continuing to operate under the same institution, a clear
understanding of the risks of changing institutions is important.
Finally, the theoretical models assume that assemblies serve certain constraining functions, yet we have few
systematic studies of how dictators encourage delegates to challenge the regime without fear of reprisals. Publicly
voicing dissent in an (p. 678) authoritarian regime is a risky enterprise that can lead to forced retirement,
imprisonment, or exile. Furthermore, as Wintrobe (1998) noted, no promise from the regime that they will not punish
the dissenter is likely to be credible. Under such “dismal” conditions (Svolik 2012), how then, does the regime
generate constraining activity?
In this chapter, we will briefly review the history of how institutions have been conceived by authoritarian scholars
before summarizing the theoretical arguments specific to authoritarian legislatures. We then survey the empirical
evidence on the circumstances under which the institutions are created and their impacts before concluding with
suggestions for future work.
32.2 Classic Work on Authoritarian Institutions
It is tempting to say contemporary authoritarian research takes nominally democratic institutions seriously where
classic work did not. For instance, scholars such as Jackson and Rosberg (1982) in their analysis of post-
independence African dictators suggest that the lack of constraining institutions was the defining feature of these
regimes. The seminal works on the totalitarian regimes of the Second World War and subsequent research on the
Communist bloc scarcely mentions assemblies, elections, or parties as important variables worthy of consideration
(Fainsod 1958; Friedrich and Brzezinski 1961; Arendt 1966; Linz 2000). If elections arose at all in the analysis, it
was simply to look at spoiled ballots as measures of protest votes against regimes. Friedrich and Brzezinski, in
particular, seem to epitomize the dismissive attitude toward institutions under communist rule: “The reader may
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wonder why we do not discuss the ‘structure of government,’ or perhaps the ‘constitution’ of these totalitarian
systems. The reason is that these structures are of very little importance...” (Friedrich and Brzezinski 1961, 18).
Yet there are two problems with this conceptualization. First, many classic works do not so much dismiss the
importance of assemblies as see them as performing non-constraining roles. Second, many of the authors that are
most dismissive of assemblies are considering them under conditions of totalitarian rule, a regime type that is rare
in today’s authoritarian landscape.
Fainsod’s (1953) classic text on politics in the Soviet Union provides an example of a common interpretationof Cold
War-era views of authoritarian assemblies. He dismissed the notion that the constitution or the parliament served to
constrain the party in any way. At the same time, he suggested that the assembly and the elections “play an
important propaganda role both at home and abroad” (p. 292) and “offer a dramatic occasion for a campaign of
agitation and propaganda on behalf of the Soviet system” (p. 323). This view largely accords with arguments still
made by scholars that parliaments are tools to generate legitimacy for the regime. Others suggest different non-
constraining roles for authoritarian parliaments. Sartori (1976) argues that elections under authoritarian (p. 679)
rule serve as a “safety valve” for social discontent against the regime. Huntington (1991), meanwhile, contends
that they are a desperate measure by dictators to acquire legitimacy that would ultimately be doomed to fail. What
ties these works together is not so much that they dismiss assemblies entirely, but rather, they see assemblies as
performing a more circumscribed, but nonetheless valuable function.
On the second point, the composition of the authoritarian world has changed. As others have noted, the number of
authoritarian regimes relying on parties (Magaloni and Kricheli 2010), elections (Hyde and Marinov 2012), or
legislatures (Wright 2008) has increased considerably since the Second World War. Furthermore, and importantly
for any assessment of classic work on authoritarianism, there has been a decline in the existence of the most
virulent form of authoritarianism—the totalitarian regime. As Linz and Stepan note: “By the 1980s, the number of
countries that were clearly totalitarian or were attempting to create such regimes had in fact been declining for
some time” (1996, 40–1).
This change is important for our understanding ofthe role of institutions, because the classic work on authoritarian
regimes most dismissive of the importance of elections and assemblies focused specifically on totalitarian regimes.
The definition of totalitarianism has been contested, but the basic features of these systems are their emphasis on
permanent mobilization of the population to achieve regime-defined ideological goals, the eradication of the
distinction between state and society, and the use of terror and repression to achieve its objectives. Arendt’s
(1966) work, which highlights how terror and social atomization lead to totalitarianism, and at the same time ignores
elections and assemblies, is emblematic of this analysis. Friedrich and Brzezinski (1961) and Linz (2000) also
spend little time focusing on such institutions.
However, this does not necessarily imply that such institutions might not be important in today’s authoritarian
systems. These authors see totalitarian regimes as distinct, and in some cases, unprecedented forms of
authoritarian rule. For example, Friedrich and Brzezinski argue that “...it is our contention in this volume that
totalitarianism is historically unique and sui generis” (1961, 5). Arendt (1966) is similarly direct in saying
“...totalitarianism differs essentially from other forms of political oppression known to us such as despotism, tyranny
and dictatorship” (1966, 460). Unlike other forms of authoritarianism, totalitarian regimes use state institutions in
unique ways to achieve utopian purposes through mass mobilization.
Indeed, scholars studying non-totalitarian systems during the Cold War period spend more time focusing on the
relationship between the dictator and opposition in the parliament. Lewis (1980), in analysing Paraguay under
Stroessner (in power from 1954 to 1989), devotes considerable attention to the formal powers of the president. He
also offers an alternative reason why Stroessner did not liquidate all members of the opposition and allowed them
seats in an assembly, suggesting that personal relationships among a narrow ruling class generate a norm of
honorable conduct that prevents the current ruling coalition from punishing too harshly members of the opposition:
“...because people know each other so well, there are informal pressures to limit repression” (1980, 177). Similarly,
the revision of Fainsod’s (1953) text on politics in the (p. 680) Soviet Union placed even greater emphasis on the
role and importance of activity within the Supreme Soviet. Fainsod and Hough (1978) highlight critical comments
within the Soviet Union’s highest legislative organ in the post-Stalin era as evidence for the evolving role of that
institution. They suggest that the purpose of the assembly was to provide information for the bureaucracy that
could be incorporated into future policy (1978, 370).
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Based on this brief review, it would be unfair to say that past work considering parliaments in regimes most akin to
the authoritarian regimes existing in today’s world completely ignore the role of assemblies or elections in
buttressing regime rule. However, at the same time, it would be fair to say that few made these institutions central
to their overall focus of politics in these regimes. Furthermore, as we discuss below, few saw such institutions as
constraints on their ability to enact policy and control the bureaucracy.
32.3 Why Assemblies?
One of the key powers of a dictator is the ability to alter fundamental institutions. This power extends to the
extreme measure of setting up or shutting down the parliament. Peru’s Alberto Fujimori shuttered parliament during
the auto golpe in 1992, justifying the decision on national television as necessary for the emergency
reconstruction of the country (Conaghan 2005). Burma’s military rulers did not seat an assembly from 1988 to
2011. By the late 2000s, they promised to hold multiparty elections for a newly constituted parliament,5 and they
made good on the promise by allowing democracy activist Aung Sang Suu Kyi’s party to compete for seats in 2011.
New theories, which we will discuss in this section, aim to address this question of why leaders would willingly
submit themselves to a constraining assembly and when they can get away without convening one. Before
examining these theories, we will review arguments that see assemblies as not fundamentally in opposition to the
dictator.
One line of argument is that democratic institutions bolster the legitimacy of the regime both internationally and
domestically (Rustow 1985; Alagappa 1995; Thayer 2010). Rustow, for example, argues that elections in Middle
East dictatorships were ruses to convince the US to support the regimes or to signal to other Arab countries that
they were popular: “Democracy remains rare in the Middle East; yet elections have played a considerable role as
devices of legitimacy, real, attempted, or pretended” (1985, 123–4). Levitsky and Way’s (2010) explanation of
patterns of democratization and authoritarian consolidation since the “Third Wave” echo this line of argument.
They contend that vulnerability to Western influence is a prime causal factor in determining the degree of
openness a country will have in its parliament and elections: “...leverage alone generates inconsistent and
superficial democratizing pressure...Where linkage is high, leverage is more likely to generate pressure for full
democratization” (2010, 50–1). For linkage and pressure to work, authoritarian leaders must think that holding
elections (p. 681) will legitimate their rule in the eyes of Western leaders, on whom they rely for resources,
military aid, or security.
If the legitimacy argument holds, the regimes in question are not necessarily required to set up the parliament as a
credible constraint on their rule in order to achieve their aims. Instead, the regime will only grant the parliament as
much power as necessary to legitimize itself before its intended audience, be that domestic or foreign. At the same
time, if legitimacy were the sole logic for the creation of an assembly, regimes would likely be forced to grant at
least some power to those institutions given that a completely toothless assembly would be unlikely to convince
foreign or domestic audiences that they are legitimate. In practice, many assemblies such as those in the
Communist bloc, were widely derided as rubber stamps by Western governments, which would suggest that these
regimes are wasting the considerable amounts of money and effort spent on maintaining those institutions (Malesky
and Schuler 2011).
A second set of arguments, the information arguments, like the legitimacy explanations, do not require that the
assembly serve as a credible check on the dictator. The information arguments are based on the premise that the
need for information is especially pronounced in authoritarian regimes due to the “dictator’s dilemma,” which
Wintrobe (1998) describes as the inability of the dictator to credibly commit to not punishing those who would
otherwise bring him news he does not want. Consequently, public opinion surveys or reliance on key spokespeople
from the citizenry are ineffective, as nobody will feel comfortable sharing their true opinions and will instead
engage in preference falsification where they simply parrot a set of opinions that the regimes want to hear (Kuran
1991). Scholars suggest that assemblies can resolve this problem by providing a policy space for delegates to
safely provide criticisms or describe the needs of their constituencies in ways that do not threaten the stability of
the regime (Gandhi 2008).
Information may not only be important in terms of generating information on the popularity or efficacy of policy. The
regime may also need information on its own popularity or the popularity of the opposition. A lack of credible
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information about the balance of power can be calamitous for authoritarian regimes and lead to “stunning”
outcomes, where dictators lose even rigged elections (Huntington 1991). For instance, the Poland’s Communist-era
government was unable to produce credible polling results that accurately showed their true level of popularity,
which led them not only to lose the parliamentary election in 1989, but also to design the electoral system in such a
way that they denied themselves any of the elected seats (Kaminsky 1999). Other pieces of information the regime
might value are the quality of their subordinates tasked with implementing regime policy (Geddes 2006) or the
feasibility of specific policies proposals (Truex 2011).
The quality of the information the regime is able to generate is likely to depend on the micro-institutions of the
assembly and the electoral system. In particular, Malesky and Schuler (2011) point out that the openness of the
elections will parameterize the amount of information an assembly can generate. Single-party elections can only
generate information on the level of support for key regime leaders or on the quality of party members. (p. 682)
However, because opposition parties are barred from running, assemblies will be useless in assessing the strength
of the opposition. Furthermore, if there is no competition for seats, like, for example, in the Cuban National
Assembly, then elections will not be able to provide any information on the relative popularity or quality of lower-
level officials.
Another set of arguments sees the parliament not as a tool to empower or placate opposition forces, but instead as
a tool to divide them. This explanation aligns with Slater’s (2003) overall conception of institutions as weapons of
the dictator to consolidate power rather than as instruments to accommodate and reassure opponents. Magaloni
(2007) argued that the Mexican PRI systematically manipulated the election laws to divide opposition parties. In this
way, they were better able to sustain their long-lasting domination of Mexican politics.
The cooptation and rent-distribution arguments discussed below also contain elements of this strategy. Lust-Okar
(2005), for example, suggests that the regime will distribute patronage through the assembly in order to split the
moderate opposition that can be bought off through rents from the more dangerous, radical elements. Similarly,
Gandhi and Przeworski (2006) stress that incorporating the opposition into the assembly will moderate their views
and make the opposition more willing to cooperate with the dictatorship. Indeed, country scholars have noted this
mechanism in play. The Vietnamese Communist Party, for instance, headed off a threat from a veterans group in
the mid-1990s by setting up a parallel veterans association under the auspices of the party, thus splitting the
moderate elements of the group from the more radical elements (Abuza 2001).
For each of the theories presented above, the underlying logic of the assembly is not to provide a credible
constraint in the regime. In contrast, the next set of theories discussed below sees assemblies as having real
power in terms of policy-making, access to spoils, and access to information about the performance of the dictator
and the state. Importantly, for these authors, dictators have an incentive to grant willingly the opposition or allies
within the ruling inner circle such power. There are two prominent variants of these arguments. The first is the
“cooptation” argument (Boix 2003; Gandhi and Przeworski 2006, 2007; Gandhi 2008; Wright 2008), the second is
the “power-sharing” theory (Gehlbach and Keefer 2011, 2012; Svolik 2012).
The goals of dictators as proposed by proponents of the cooptation theory are to stay in power and generate a
profit: “That dictators are concerned with remaining in power goes without saying. Yet maintaining power is a
means to an end. While in power, dictators may have substantive goals they seek to fulfill” (Gandhi 2008, 82). In
this, they concur with McGuire and Olson (1996) that dictators are “stationary bandits” who have some concern
for the productivity of society, as opposed to “roving bandits” who will seek only to pillage without ensuring
productivity. The key theoretical twist of cooptation theory is that dictators, in order to generate productivity, need
to induce cooperation from the opposition. To induce cooperation, the dictator must bait them with policy
concessions or resource rents, which she argues are best distributed or negotiated in an assembly.
This model generates some testable hypotheses in terms of which types of regimes are more likely to install
assemblies. First, where assets in society are mobile, dictators (p. 683) are likely to require assemblies, because
when a regime can rely on natural resources, they do not require cooperation from society. This means that they
are not required to make as many concessions to the opposition, and thus, do not require a parliament. This
argument is similar to the theory proposed in Boix’s (2003) sweeping theoretical model linking economic
redistribution and the propensity for democratization. In that work, he also argues that as capital generated by
society is increasingly mobile, dictators will be forced to cede power to elites in order to prevent these productive
Page 5 of 15
sectors of society from moving their capital outside the country.
Second, regimes that face a stronger opposition are more likely to set up parliaments because when the opposition
is stronger, more rents or policy must be ceded in order to win cooperation. This leads to an interesting difference
between the Boix (2003) and Gandhi (2008) models with important theoretical implications in terms of the likelihood
of setting up an assembly relative to the divergence in policy preferences between the dictatorship and society.
Boix argues that as income inequality drops, the dictator will become less fearful of the redistributive effects of
power-sharing and be more willing to cede power. In contrast, Gandhi (2008) argues that as policy preferences
between the dictator and elites widen, which would likely occur as income inequality increases, the dictator will be
forced to cede more in the way of policy and rents. The different prediction results from Boix’s assumption that
there is an overall cost to maintaining a non-democratic society. That is, dictators must incur costs in order to
maintain non-democratic regimes. For Gandhi, there is no such cost. All pressure for granting policy rents is merely
a function of the strength of the opposition and the need for cooperation.
In terms of achieving the goals of inducing cooperation from potential or existing opponents, how does the
assembly do this? Gandhi (2008) argues that assemblies help in three ways: they help the dictator identify the
relevant partners; they allow both the opposition and the dictator to reveal information; and finally, they do so in a
way that prevents popular mobilization. Similar to the power-sharing theory, these causal mechanisms linking
assemblies to the leader’s desired outcome do not flow from the formal model, but instead enter into the model as
an assumption.
The power-sharing argument starts from a different assumption about the nature of an authoritarian regime. The
puzzle for Svolik (2012) is how authoritarian regimes maintain power-sharing arrangements and avoid descending
into tyrannies. He distinguishes between two types of authoritarian outcomes—“established autocracies” and
“contested autocracies,”—with the former being related to the tyrannical outcome embodied by Stalin. In this
model, dictators may or may not attempt to seize additional power at the expense of the allies he relies on to
buttress his rule. The more he reneges on their authoritarian power-sharing arrangement, the more difficult it will be
for the elites to oppose him in future rounds. This leads to an unstable equilibrium where the only power the allies
have to prevent the dictator from becoming a Stalin or Saddam Hussein is the threat of organized, collective action
against the regime.
Under this arrangement, institutions reduce the likelihood that the elites will actually have to rebel against the
regime. Therefore, when elites are strong enough, they may (p. 684) press for institutions which will facilitate
power-sharing. Unlike cooptation theory, the assembly is not a forum for regime opponents, but instead an arena
for hashing out compromise with regime allies:
By contrast [with Gandhi and Przeworski], I argue that the primary function of these institutions in
authoritarian governance is to reduce commitment and monitoring problems in authoritarian power-
sharing, whether it is among those who already support the dictator or between the dictator and the newly
recruited supporters.
(Svolik 2012, 88, emphasis in original)
The assembly facilitates this through two mechanisms, which like Gandhi’s model, enter the model as assumptions.
He argues that assemblies facilitate repeated interactions that will enable elites to signal the credibility of their
collective threat to rebel. Similarly, the dictator can more credibly signal that he is not reneging on the power-
sharing arrangement.
Gehlbach and Keefer (2011; 2012) offer a twist on the power-sharing arrangement, where unlike Svolik, they
include the dictator’s desire for investment into the utility function. They argue that authoritarian assemblies are
meant to provide transparency within a circle of investors handpicked by the regime. Through their participation in
the assembly, they gain reassurance that their property rights will be protected and therefore they will be willing to
invest. The key for their model is the assumption that within the assembly, any expropriation of another elite within
the assembly is immediately common knowledge to all elites. However, elites outside the assembly are atomized in
the sense that they can only observe a dictator’s expropriation of their property, but not of others. The assembly
serves to increase the likelihood that elites can act collectively to oppose the dictator if he expropriates an unfair
share of the rents, which gives them some incentive to invest effort and resources in productive activity.
Page 6 of 15
Taking these theories together, while the logic underlying the power-sharing and cooptation models are different,
they are not necessarily mutually exclusive. Indeed, both seem consistent with the argument made by North and
Weingast (1989) that the English crown in the seventeenth century, desiring resources to fight a foreign war,
empowered the parliament as a way of credibly committing to repaying debts to the gentry. Their story is
consistent with cooptation and power-sharing. The king needed cooperation in terms of resources from the elites in
order to increase rents through foreign wars, so he co-opted them through an empowered parliament. However,
ensuring that the dictator abided by the terms of the loans from the elites required that these aristocrats be given a
formal seat where they could ensure that he would abide by the terms of the deal, and therefore the parliament had
to be armed with real powers to punish the crown. This is consistent with the power-sharing perspective.
The difference lies in the semantics of what constitutes an “opposition.” Power-sharing sees the assembly as a
forum for allies of the dictator, while cooptation sees it as a venue for encapsulating the opposition. Of course, this
delineation of any particular actor can change over time. Co-opted parliamentarians (such as the British landed
gentry) from earlier periods may rise to levels in government that would lead them to be defined as elites in a
power-sharing relationship. Moreover, in either case, the term “opposition” for (p. 685) members of an
authoritarian assembly may be a bit of an exaggeration. A true opposition party in a democratic context should
fulfill the classic definition of a party, which is a group whose sole purpose is attempting to control government
(Schattschneider 1942). If a group is willing to accept a seat in order to gain rents without challenging the dictator
for prime control of the government, as cooptation would suggest, then these parliamentarians look more similar to
the regime allies of the power-sharing story then they do to an opposition party in a democratic system.
Nevertheless, these two arguments do clearly differ from the earlier arguments in that for both, the assembly
places constraints on the actions of the dictator. For cooptation, the assembly members must have enough
leverage to extract concessions through the institution. This means the dictator must shift in some way from his
ideal policy point to accommodate their demands. For power-sharing, the elites must maintain some degree of
leverage through the parliament to ensure that the regime does not engage in excessive extraction, which requires
both the capacity of the parliament to acquire information and sanction regime elites.
However, we must note that the individual theories are not mutually exclusive. Parliaments may serve different
roles at different times. For example, in democratic systems, assemblies can serve as constraints on the executive,
systems for power-sharing, and venues for rent-sharing. Considering the US Congress brings this point into sharp
relief, as Congress has largely met its intended function of checking the untrammeled power of an “imperial
presidency.” Furthermore, the transparency of this body and its powers to demand testimony from the executive
branch has enabled the social forces represented in Congress to credibly share power with the president. Finally,
the permanence of pork-barrel politics and logrolling which are the stock and trade of policy-making, attest to the
rent-distribution function also served by Congress (Evans 1994)
Another possibility raised by Wright (2008) is that assemblies in different types of authoritarianisms serve different
functions. Wright (2008) uses the Geddes (1999) typology of authoritarian regimes to argue that single-party and
military regimes have different motivations for erecting and maintaining authoritarian assemblies from personalistic
regimes or monarchies. The former regime types are more interested in assemblies as a constraint on their power
in order to encourage growth, while the latter regime types will only use the assemblies as tools of rent distribution.
For this reason, assemblies in single-party regimes will be “binding,” or in terms of the discussion here, present a
constraint on the dictator. However, personalistic regimes or monarchies will simply use the assemblies as
conveyor belts for patronage, and therefore the assembly will be “non-binding” or not act as a constraint.
32.4 Empirics
What does the data tell us about support for the various theories? In practice, they are hard to test directly, hence
most studies have looked for observable implications and (p. 686) tested those. Before looking at these tests, we
will provide a brief overview of the institutional variation in the world of authoritarianism.
Not all authoritarian countries have assemblies. From 1946 to 2008, more than 80 percent of authoritarian country-
years had legislatures (Svolik 2012: 36). However, the proportion of regimes with assemblies varies considerably
by regime type. The predominant strategy for dividing the world of authoritarian regimes uses Geddes (1999)
typology of single-party, personalist, military, and monarchy (see Gandhi 2008; Wright 2008; Brownlee 2009).
Page 7 of 15
While we agree with Svolik’s (2012) critique of using this typology for analytical purposes, it is useful for providing
a cursory overview of the distribution of assemblies among the different regime types. At 98 percent of country-
years since the end of the Cold War, almost all single-party regimes have convened assemblies each year. The
percentage of country-years with assemblies over the same period for the other types of regimes were 82 percent
for personalistic regimes, 69 percent for monarchies, and 42 percent for military regimes (Wright 2008).
In addition to variations in whether or not a regime seats an assembly, regimes also vary in the number of parties
they allow. Regimes may ban all parties, ban all but one, or allow multiple parties. From 1946 to 2008, 17 percent of
country-years under authoritarian rule existed under conditions where all parties were banned, compared with 36
percent where only a single party was allowed, and 47 percent with multiple parties. Not surprisingly, the biggest
change to this distribution occurred after the collapse of the Communist bloc in the late 1980s and early 1990s,
when the percentage of single-party regimes fell precipitously from more than half of all autocracies to about 10
percent (Svolik 2012, 35)
Proponents of the cooptation theory of authoritarian assemblies have exploited these sources of variation to
support their theory. They aim to show that regimes with greater access to natural resource rents are more likely to
rely on institutions, which indicates that when regimes need more cooperation they will reach out to other groups
and incorporate them into the inner circle of the regime (Gandhi and Przeworski 2006, 2007; Gandhi 2008; Wright
2008).
In creating their dependent variable Gandhi (2008) and Gandhi and Przeworski (2006; 2007) incorporate both
assemblies and parties into a single variable with three possible outcomes. They code a country-year as 0 where
there is no legislature (even if parties are allowed to exist) or where members of the assembly are not allowed to be
members of a party. They code the country-year as 1 if only one party is allowed, and a 2 if multiple parties are
allowed in an assembly. Wright (2008), however, simply uses a binary depending variable as to whether there was
an assembly during that country-year.
The two studies generate different findings regarding the impact of natural resources on the likelihood of
institutionalization. Gandhi and Przeworski (2006; 2007) find that natural resources lead to a higher score on their
index and that single-party regimes are more likely to have multiple parties than military regimes, which are in turn
more likely to have parties than monarchies. Wright (2008) finds that natural resources leads to a (p. 687) higher
likelihood of single-party and military regimes having an assembly, but that it has a negative impact on the
likelihood that a monarchy or a personalistic regime will have one. Wright (2008) interprets his results as showing
that only single-party and military regimes follow Gandhi and Przeworski’s logic of autocrats willingly constraining
themselves to generate growth. Monarchies and personalistic regimes, on the other hand, follow the logic of those
who argue that assemblies are simply venues to dole out rents.
However, both sets of studies face empirical problems that prevent us from being certain about the findings. One of
the issues is collecting sufficient data on income inequality, which is critical not only to theories of authoritarian
institutions, but also more broadly to theories of democratic transition (Boix 2003; Acemoglu and Robinson 2005).
When authors include this variable, they are forced to drop more than half the country-years from the sample.
Wright’s (2008) findings are difficult to interpret due to the multiple interaction effects, particularly for single-party
regimes, which have almost no instances of regime-years without assemblies since the Cold War. Furthermore, the
results show that by far the biggest determinant of having an assembly is the regime’s time horizon, which is
calculated using the predicted values from a separate regression. Given the sheer number of interactions
combined with the limited variation in the dependent variable for some of the categories, the model risks being
overfit.
Secondly, there are severe concerns about endogeneity, particularly unobserved heterogeneity. Assemblies and
elections are not randomly assigned to authoritarian countries, particularly where leaders select them to further
their own political ends. If these goals happen to be associated with growth or regime longevity, there is strong
potential that institutions are merely epiphenomenal, representing a particular constellation of interests at a point in
time that happened to be associated with positive outcomes. If this is the case, it is the underlying interests, not the
institutions, that are associated with the positive outcomes (Pepinsky 2013).
Finally, the two sets of studies use different dependent variables, which make it hard to compare the results.
Wright’s empirics more directly test the determinants of having an assembly. Gandhi’s, however, examine an index
Page 8 of 15
score which is interesting if we think of parties and assemblies as having an additive effect on institutionalization.
However, this notion could be disputed. For instance, cooptation theory provides no explanation of why a single-
party regime should be more institutionalized than a legislature with no parties.
It is important to note that the empirical limitations were not unknown to the authors or represent a failure on their
part. It is largely a result of the perils of doing research on authoritarian regimes, where transparent data is scarce.
As Gandhi and Przeworski admit: “We are far from certain that our empirical implementation accurately captures
the theoretically relevant variables: the constraint of data availability is very tight” (2006, 20). Given the similarities
between the Wright and Gandhi and Przeworski findings using different datasets and different dependent variables,
there seems to be some evidence that resource endowment is linked in some way with an increased likelihood of
having an assembly. However, in the next section we will consider more deeply how well these findings, if
accurate, support the proposed theoretical models.
(p. 688) 32.5 Downstream Effects of Assemblies
Aside from assessing the conditions under which assemblies are created, other work has analysed the downstream
effects of the assemblies. The most often examined variables of interest are the impact of assemblies on regime
longevity (Gandhi and Przeworski 2007; Gandhi 2008; Svolik 2012), economic growth (Boix 2003; Wright 2008;
Gandhi 2008), and domestic investment (Wright 2008; Gehlbach and Keefer 2012), and protection of civil liberties.
(Boix 2003; Gandhi 2008). Not all results tell a consistent story. Gandhi (2008), using regression analysis of her
composite measure of parties and assemblies, does not find any effect of institutionalization on regime longevity.
Svolik (2012), on the other hand, finds that authoritarian regimes with assemblies are less likely to suffer coups or
popular uprisings. Part of the difficulty in comparing the models is the differences in the way leadership tenure is
measured. Gandhi uses the duration of the individual leader, while Svolik uses the end of the ruling coalition as the
failure.
In terms of growth, Wright (2008) finds that single-party regimes and military regimes exhibit growth when they
have assemblies, while personalistic regimes and monarchies with assemblies actually grow less when they have
assemblies. Gandhi (2008) also finds, even after addressing non-exogenous selection into the different levels of
institutionalization, that regimes with multiple parties grow faster than single-party regimes or those without
assemblies.6 Both authors articulate that the relationship between parliaments and economic growth is generated
by better protection of property rights. Boix (2003) shows evidence that dictators with assemblies are less corrupt
and have lower levels of stateexpropriation. However, this evidence is quite preliminary, as it is simply based on
cross-tabs and does not account for controls or robustness checks.
In separate analysis, Jensen et al. (2013) probe the causal pathway between institutions and economic growth.
Although they agree that the empirical correlation is robust, they argue that micrologic specified by previous
authors—that authoritarian legislatures improve property rights—is both theoretically unsatisfying and empirically
untested. Jensen et al. (2013) are particularly skeptical that authoritarian parliaments are able to restrain the
expropriation activities of state leaders, reverse activities they disagree with, or remove authoritarian leaders who
violate the implied power-sharing arrangement. They provide an alternative explanation for the robust correlation
with growth, arguing that authoritarian legislatures, by providing a forum for horse-trading between multiple private
actors, are far better at generating corporate governance legislation that protects investors from the avarice of
corporate insiders than they are at preventing expropriation by governments. Their statistical analysis reveals that
the strength of authoritarian legislatures is associated with corporate governance rules and not expropriation risk,
as measured by international political risk figures. Concerned about endogeneity, the authors instrument for
parliaments and opposition parties by using the institutions inherited from the previous regime or colonial power.
While this provides a partial (p. 689) identification, it cannot resolve why particular authoritarian countries chose
to maintain inherited institutions (Slater 2010).
In summing up, assemblies appear to be correlated with growth, but as of now, it has not been definitively
established that this relationship is causal (Pepinsky 2013). Furthermore, in terms of longevity, as of now there is no
compelling evidence that institutionalization has any clear impact on the tenure of an individual leader. There is,
however, some evidence that the level of institutionalization has some impact on the type of transition a regime
might face.
Page 9 of 15
32.6 Beyond the Large-N Approach
In terms of what the empirics mean for the arguments presented above, while some results are consistent with the
theories presented, it is not clear that the cross-national evidence necessarily disproves the competing
information, mobilization, or the institutions as weapons-of-the-dictator theory. Much of this is because the theories
above are not mutually exclusive. There is no reason why an assembly cannot both create a check on the dictator
and provide him with information about the location of the opposition. At the same time, elites may also use the
same assembly to prevent the dictator from amassing personal power. That is, the different actors may all at
different times use the same institution for any one of the purposes mentioned above.
This highlights a weakness of the literature to date. As Magaloni and Kricheli (2010) have critiqued, theories on the
purposes of these assemblies are largely based on functionalist arguments. The question is often posed: why
would a dictatorship submit to an assembly? The answer is then found by looking at the impact of the assemblies.
However, the functions that institutions serve are distinct from the reasons why they were created. Answering the
question of why a dictator would submit to an assembly requires a deeper focus on regimes that have actually
created assemblies or dissolved them. Existing large-N analyses, however, do not focus on change in institutions,
and instead treat each country-year as an independent observation.
To address this question, we should focus on those instances where a country or a dictator created an assembly
where one previously did not exist or where the dictator closed one down. Such an analysis is likely to bear
greater fruit in terms of assessing the logic of the creation from both the perspective of the dictator and the elites.
When viewed this way, there are some case studies that provide compelling evidence that adding a new assembly
or empowering an existing one is a risky enterprise that may pay off in the long run, but that also entails great
short-run uncertainty and instability.
Take, for instance, the Polish United Worker’s Party, Poland’s communist party that ruled until 1989. Itattempted to
liberalize the assembly to include representatives from Solidarity in the 1989 election, but wound up miscalculating
and losing 100 percent of the non-appointed seats, which was just enough to lose control of the legislature
(Kaminsky 1999). The Soviet Union under Gorbachev had a similarly difficult (p. 690) time liberalizing the
Supreme Soviet to include more independent voices. While these reforms occurred alongside other reforms that
also had an impact on the demise of the Soviet Union, scholars have suggested that the liberalization of the
legislature may have played an important role in galvanizing both conservatives who were threatened by the
changes and reform-minded elites who were not satisfied with the extent of the changes (Roeder 1993; Bunce
1999) Elsewhere, Schuler, Gueorguiev, and Cantu (2012) have shown that although multiparty elections are
stabilizing overall for authoritarianism, they nonetheless lead to short-term spikes in the chance of democratization.
A second area requiring further exploration is assessing what the assemblies actually do. The major cross-national
studies assume that the assemblies fulfill the roles of information provision (Svolik 2012), a forum for moderated
debate (Gandhi 2008), or constraints on the dictator in certain cases (Boix 2003; Wright 2008). However, as noted
above, these proposed mechanisms enter the models as assumptions and are not modeled in their own right,
meaning that the studies are silent on how the assemblies will serve these functions. In particular, what are the
incentives of the delegates to perform in the ways that they are supposed to?
This is especially problematic because assembly members, who oftentimes are not elites, are subject to the
dictator’s dilemma. That is, they may be afraid of revealing information, even in an assembly, if they fear they will
face retribution for acting contrary to the wishes of the dictator. Although it seems common sense, many models
ignore the risks that delegate face in performing their roles. Simply put, much as it is for dissidents in authoritarian
settings, speaking out against the regime in an authoritarian parliament is a riskier business than it is in democratic
settings. The fate of Peng Dehuai, a Communist Party general who toiled through the Long March, illustrates this
problem perfectly. He was punished harshly after publicly criticizing Mao Zedong in a Central Committee meeting
for sending the economy into turmoil during the disastrous Great Leap Forward. Peng eventually died in prison and
was only rehabilitated after Mao’s death. This would surely signal to other potential dissidents in the Central
Committee that providing information through vocal opposition could be detrimental to one’s health. Opposition to
military rule in Brazil in the 1960s also led the regime to shutter the assembly on multiple occasions and purge the
rebellious delegates from the assembly (Desposato 2001). For this reason, some political dynamics at play in
democratic systems might actually have opposite effects under authoritarianism. For instance, Malesky, Schuler,
Page 10 of 15
and Tran (2012) show that under certain conditions, increased transparency can actually reduce the willingness of
delegates to provide information to the dictator, as they fear that revealing discontent could be destabilizing.
To explore these issues, a handful of scholars have focused on specific countries to explore how delegates are
selected (Malesky and Schuler 2009, 2011; Hyde and Marinov 2012) and what they do in parliament once they are
elected (White 1980; Desposato 2001; Malesky and Schuler 2010; Truex 2012; Oliver and Gueorguiev 2012).
Malesky and Schuler (2010) show, for example, that in the context of a single-party system, where no formal
opposition is allowed, participation is associated with certain biographical characteristics, access to information,
and nomination background. In the Vietnamese (p. 691) National Assembly, full-time, more educated, and locally
nominated delegates are more likely to play an active role in the assembly.
Desposato looks at a different institutional setting of military-ruled Brazil and finds that opposition and repression
came in waves. He shows that delegates who were new to the assembly or who had weak electoral support were
more willing to rebel against the regime than more politically secure delegates. Furthermore, those from urban
areas were also more willing to rebel. Desposato’s explanation is that these delegates are more independent
because they were appealing to more educated voters who were likely to pay attention to their votes as opposed
to the rural delegates, who were more likely to appeal to pork-driven political operatives.
These studies point to interesting variables that might improve the precision of existing studies. For example, the
length of time the assembly is in session during a year, the number of full-time assembly members, the percentage
of seats reserved for the dictator’s party, the enforced level of turnover, the size of the office of the assembly, and
the degree of hierarchy within the assembly are all potential variables to consider. These variables are important
because they influence the willingness of delegates to actively represent themselves or constituents.
Finally, as Art (2012) suggested in his critique of this literature, future studies need to bring clarity to the types of
institutions under consideration. Currently, the theory and the empirical evaluations are muddled, particularly
between parties and assemblies. In the literature on democratic systems, the party systems and the institutions of
the state are interrelated, but also distinct. It is known that the electoral system, among other things, impacts the
party system, but also that the party system has an important impact on how the assembly functions. A voluminous
literature focuses on how important the party is for structuring agenda-setting, the passage of bills, monitoring, etc.
However, in the literature on authoritarianism, the different roles of the parties and the assemblies are not carefully
distinguished. Gandhi (2008), for example, notes that parties serve a different functions, but then in the empirical
analysis combines the two into a single measure. Svolik (2012), although he provides a different theory for the role
of parties and assemblies, also conflates the two institutions in his analysis of the impact of the assemblies.
Brownlee’s (2007) analysis is instructive here. In his case studies of Iran, the Philippines, Malaysia, and Egypt, he
shows, much like in democratic systems, authoritarian regimes with elections and assemblies without strong parties
are highly unstable. He follows Huntington (1968, 1970) in placing a strong party system front and centre as the
most important factor in determining stability. Whether this also leads to growth and protection of individual
liberties, however, is an open question.
Gandhi and Przeworski’s (2007) finding that single-party regimes were far more stable than non-institutionalized
and multiparty regimes should indicate that the interaction of parties and assemblies are just as critical to
authoritarian dynamics as they are in democratic systems. Some things to consider are the ability of the parties to
structure debate, mobilize participation, and set the agenda for the assembly. Even more interesting is how these
functions are performed in non-institutionalized parliaments. (p. 692) How does a monarch overcome the
dictator’s dilemma in a non-partisan assembly? Furthermore, if the monarch is able to mobilize participation, how
does he control it so that it does not spin out of hand?
32.7 Conclusion
The literature on authoritarian assemblies has achieved increased prominence in recent years. New theoretical
models of authoritarian regimes combined with cross-national empirical work has led to intriguing answers as to
why dictators would constrain themselves with assertive assemblies. This chapter suggests that this research has
made exciting and important advances. Nevertheless, to move forward more attention needs to be paid to how
parties and assemblies relate within authoritarian settings. In addition, scholars should focus on the incentives of
Page 11 of 15
delegates within these systems to provide answers on how dictators overcome the dictator’s dilemma.
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Notes:
(1) . See the Economist. “Myanmar’s Parliament: Power Grab.” 3 November 2012.
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(2) . For examples of increased power for erstwhile rubber stamps, see work on the Vietnamese National Assembly
(Koh 2006; Salomon 2007; Malesky and Schuler 2009) or the Chinese National People’s Congress (Tanner 1991).
(3) . See Boix and Svolik 2010; Gandhi and Przeworski 2006, 2007; Gandhi 2008; Wright 2008; Malesky and
Schuler 2010; Truex 2012; Svolik 2012.
(4) . See Blaydes 2006; Lust-Okar 2006; Magaloni 2006; Tucker 2007; Bunce and Wolchik 2010; Levitsky and Way
2010; Gandhi and Lust-Okar 2010; Hyde and Marinov 2012; Malesky and Schuler 2011.
(5) . See bbcnews.com. “New Burma Constitution Published.” 9 April 2008. <http://news.bbc.co.uk/2/hi/asia-
pacific/7338815.stm>. Last accessed 2 December 2012.
(6) . Pepinsky (2013) takes great issue with Gandhi’s instruments in her two-stage Heckman selection model,
arguing that the instruments for both the growth model and the selection of institutions violate the exclusion
criterion in that they are plausibly correlated with both growth and the strength of opposition. For instance, Gandhi
uses leadership changes and purges (in addition to inherited parties) to model the strength of opposition (the
selection equation). But political instability has been shown to be strongly associated with economic growth.
Consequently, Pepinsky argues that it is not clear that Gandhi has solved the selection problem and identified a
plausible causal pathway between institutions and growth.
Paul Schuler
Paul Schuler is a Doctoral Candidate in the Department of Political Science, University of California, San Diego.
Edmund J. Malesky
Edmund J. Malesky is Associate Professor of Political Science, Duke University.
Page 15 of 15
Reluctant Democrats and Their Legislatures

Gary W. Cox
Institutions
2014
Reluctant democrats who feel unable to reject demands for competitive elections resort to various tactics to
subvert the electoral process. How authoritarians succeed in preserving the appearance of legislative
accountability while avoiding its reality is a question that needs to be addressed. This chapterexamines how
reluctant democrats subvert legislatures by focusing on the EnglishParliament. It discusses the methods by which
would-be authoritarians can get around their legislature’s power over the purse: such methods depend on re-
engineering the budgetary reversion, the reversionary trigger, and the executive’s complementary powers. It
illustrates the logic of budgetary reversions by presenting case studies of four countries in the period 1920–1971
and more systematic data on 156 countries in 2005. It shows that over the course of the twentieth century,
reluctant democrats worldwide successfully rewrote the budgetary reversion and trigger to advantage the
executive. It also traces the emergence of various legislative powers now enshrined in constitutions around the
world to England, focusing on the power of the purse, the power of the vote of confidence, and the power to
regulate royal decrees.
Keywords: reluctant democrats, authoritarians, legislatures, English Parliament, power over the purse, budgetary reversion, reversionary trigger,
legislative powers, vote of confidence, royal decrees
33.1 Introduction
AN important recent literature examines reluctant democrats’ attempts to subvert the electoral process, when they
feel unable to reject demands for competitive elections altogether.1 Studies of the post-Cold War era, for example,
have explored various tactics employed by electoral authoritarians to evade the spirit while accepting the letter of
multiparty elections (Schedler 2002, 2006; Levitsky and Way 2005; Beaulieu and Hyde 2009). As Schedler puts it,
the menu of manipulation is long.
In this chapter, I consider reluctant democrats’ tactics in the legislative arena. Since the nineteenth century, rulers
have faced pressure—both domestic and international—to establish national legislatures and endow them with
powers characteristic of Western assemblies. Yet, many rulers have chosen to subvert their legislatures, rather
than accept them as they sometimes appear on paper: a powerful and independent check on executive authority.
The question, similar to that in the electoral literature, is how authoritarians succeed in preserving the appearance
of legislative accountability while avoiding its reality.2
To explore this question, this chapter begins by considering how the English Parliament first assured itself of the
“powers characteristic of western assemblies.”3 Armed with some observations about the historical sequence in
which such powers were achieved, and what the most important of them were, the chapter then considers the
options of reluctant democrats pressured to write such powers into their nations’ constitutions. It argues that the
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essential task facing would-be authoritarians is to get round their legislature’s power over the purse; and analyses
the methods by which such a goal can be accomplished.
The methods highlighted hinge on re-engineering the budgetary reversion, the reversionary trigger, and the
executive’s complementary powers. The budgetary reversion is the budget that comes into force, if certain events
occur. Thereversionary trigger refers to (p. 697) the event(s) sufficient to bring the reversion into force. For
example, in some constitutions the reversion is triggered if no new budget has been adopted by the beginning of
the new financial year. The executive’s complementary powers are those thatenable it to trigger the reversion,
should it wish. For example, if the triggering event is that no new budget has been adopted within 40 days after the
executive submits its proposal, and the executive can veto the budget, then its veto constitutes a complementary
power. These terms are illustrated along with the logic of budgetary reversions, via case studies of four countries
in the period between 1920 and 1971, and more systematic data on 156 countries in 2005.
Substantively, I claim that reluctant democrats around the globe succeeded, over the course of the twentieth
century, in rewriting the budgetary reversion and trigger to advantage the executive. Such re-engineering carried
with it important institutional and behavioural correlates: weaker confidence procedures, weaker control of
executive decrees, and more frequent use of extra-constitutional means to attain power.
33.2 The English Parliament
Various legislative powers now enshrined in constitutions around the world can be traced back to the aftermath of
England’s Glorious Revolution (1688).4 This section describes how these early powers emerged in England,
focusing on the power of the purse, the power of confidence, and the power to regulate executive decrees.
As will be seen, the English case suggests two points of general relevance in understanding the executive–
legislative balance of power. First, the power of the purse was logically and historically prior to the power to
remove ministers or control royal decrees. Second, establishing the power of the purse required: not just (1)
entrenching Parliament’s right to approve the revenues and expenditures contained in the state’s budget on an
annual basis; but also (2) ensuring a favourable budgetary reversion, so that the legislature’s bargaining position
would be strong in the annual negotiations over the budget; and (3) securing the legislature’s ability to control
virements, impoundments, and all manner of “post-budget” and “off-budget” expenditures.
33.2.1 The Power of the Purse5
The power of the purse developed in the following sequence. First, the Bill of Rights 1689 articulated a new
constitutional restraint on the executive—that “levying money...for longer time...than the same is or shall be
granted [by statute], is illegal” (italics added). As J. R. Jones (1994, 70) notes, such a prohibition had been
proposed in 1674, with the intent to make “it illegal to extend taxes arbitrarily beyond the time limits set by
Parliament,” thereby removing the “operationally easiest method” of evading parliamentary control.
Having secured Royal Assent to the Bill of Rights, parliamentarians began immediately to impose time limits on their
tax grants much more intensively than they had done before (p. 698) the Revolution. For example, at the
beginning of their reign, Parliament had granted the coregency of William III (r.1689–1702) and Mary II (r.1689–94)
the customs tax revenues for six months, then another six months, then one year, then four years, and then five
(Hill 1976, 38, 40, 42, 49, and 62; Hoppitt 1997, 25–6). A deadline thus always loomed at which the Crown would
lose over a fifth of its total revenues, unless another deal with Parliament could be done. This put the coregency of
William and Mary in a very different bargaining position than Charles II and James II, both of whom had received the
customs for life and neither of whom had been forced to recognize the validity of parliamentary time limits.
Second, as it imposed time limits on tax grants, Parliament began to stipulate the authorized uses of public funds in
much greater detail in appropriations bills (Cox 2012a); and to conduct ex post audits to verify the funds’ actual
use (North and Weingast 1989). The result was England’s first system of annual state budgets.6
Third, having established its constitutional right and practical ability to put the Crown on a steady diet of short-term
and automatically expiring tax revenues, Parliament next sought to prevent the Crown from borrowing money
without parliamentary consent (Cox 2012a). Parliament’s rationale was simple: “Loans from bankers, secured on
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taxes already voted or on the permanent revenue, could enable the Crown to evade the restrictions imposed by
appropriation...” (Jones 1994, 71). Yet, it was not until 1693–4 that a reluctant King William III agreed to the principle
of “national” rather than “royal” debt; and gave the Royal Assent to the bill chartering the Bank of England.
Elsewhere (Cox 2012a), I argue that the delayed onset of England’s famous financial revolution had nothing to do
with its administrative backwardness (as argued by Epstein 2000). Rather, the Crown recognized that its financial
independence from Parliament, already under assault by the new practice of time-limited tax grants, would crumble
were it unable to borrow on its own. The decision to charter the Bank of England was thus an eyes-open decision
to cross a financial Rubicon—taken when a major war with France posed an existential threat to the new king’s
holdings in the Netherlands.
By the mid-1690s, the English House of Commons wielded the three powers that constituted the “power of the
purse” as traditionally defined: the power to deny, amend, or approve new taxes; new sovereign debt; and the
state’s annual expenditures. Moreover, these powers were configured in post-Revolution England in a way that
strongly favoured the legislature: any legislative majority could, merely by withholding assent, force the executive
to reduce or wholly stop spending money.
In other words, the budgetary reversion was something like a “government shutdown.”7 Although they did not use
the language and logic of reversions, the Whig architects of the Revolution settlement and their later admirers
implicitly had this budgetary reversion in mind—which should be remembered when one reads such famous
passages as Madison’s (2009[1788], 298) in Federalist No. 58:
This power over the purse may, in fact, be regarded as the most complete and effectual weapon with
which any constitution can arm the immediate representatives of the people, for obtaining a redress of
every grievance, and for carrying into effect every just and salutary measure.
(p. 699) 33.2.2 The Vote of Confidence
Roughly a decade after Parliament established its power over the purse, the earliest successful version of the vote
of confidence emerged on the English scene. In this section I explain why financial power preceded the power of
removal.
After the Revolution, English ministers became specialists with one central purpose: to steer supply and
appropriation bills through Parliament. Non-financial legislation remained the domain of unofficial members—
opposition MPs, government backbenchers, and government ministers acting in their capacity as private members
—until the 1830s (Williams 1948; Rydz 1979; Cox 1987).
To control supply, ministers assembled the following procedural rights after the Revolution. First, they drafted the
supply bills introduced to the House of Commons.8 Second, after 1693 they controlled the committee stage in the
House, allowing them to protect their handiwork from unwanted amendments at that stage (Hayton 2002, 393, 425–
6). Third, after 1706 MPs could propose no amendments in the plenum except those that reduced the supplies
sought by the government (Cox 2011).
The system just sketched was efficient and the success rate of supply bills increased steadily as it was put in
place. Yet, without some workable method by which parliamentary majorities could punish ministers for using their
positions to pursue policies of which those majorities disapproved, the ministers’ new procedural rights would not
have served MPs’ collective interests. So, how did Parliament control ministers?9
Parliament had used impeachments to drive unpopular ministers from office since the Restoration of the monarchy.
But the standard of evidence for impeachment was a high bar to clear, and the punishment severe.After the
Revolution, Parliament began to withhold supplies to drive ministers from office. Yet, threatening to reduce supplies
in a state dedicated largely to waging war (Brewer 1990) was like a game of chicken if the supply reductions
harmed England’s chances in wars both sides wished to win. Although Parliament did its best to find reductions that
hurt the Crown more than the median MP, actually implementing these reductions still hurt both the Crown and
various factions within Parliament.
One can thus view “supply reductions” as a species of “inefficient conflict.” The standard theory of such conflicts
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(Fearon 1995) argues that both sides will seek to reach a negotiated settlement that avoids the costs of conflict but
otherwise reflects the expected outcome from conflict. From this perspective, censure votes were threats to cut
supplies and, once Parliament established a reputation for issuing such threats only when it was prepared to carry
them out, the Crown preferred to promptly dismiss censured ministers. Both sides gained from the new
constitutional norm because it avoided actual supply disruptions.
33.2.3 Controlling Royal Decrees
No legislature can truly control expenditure if the executive has the constitutional right to issue decrees that entail
collecting or expending state revenues. If, for example, the king of England could unilaterally command the navy to
attack France, budgetary (p. 700) consequences would inevitably follow, regardless of anything else the
constitution said about public finances.
English parliamentarians, well aware of their potential for abuse, first took a piecemeal approach to regulating
decrees. For example, the Bill of Rights 1689 and Mutiny Act 1689 prevented the monarch from raising or
maintaining a standing army without parliamentary approval.
Given the difficulty of anticipating all the uses to which a creative executive might put an otherwise unrestricted
decree power, the piecemeal approach was problematic. Whether recognizing this or not, Parliament quickly
established a more comprehensive solution: holding ministers politically accountable (via votes of censure) for all
Crown acts. Once ministerial responsibility was established, ministers could control the use of royal decrees by
refusing their counter-signatures; 10 and Parliament could control ministers via votes of censure.
33.2.4 Summary
In the generation after the Glorious Revolution, the English Parliament acquired a set of rights sufficient to secure
financial control. First, it established its right to deny new taxes, new loans, and new expenditures. Second, it
ensured that the budgetary reversion was a government shutdown, and that this reversion would loom on a regular
(annual) basis. Third, it leveraged its new power over the purse into two new powers—removal of ministers via
votes of censure and control of Crown acts via ministerial responsibility—that together allowed it to regulate
impoundments, virements, and expenditure-by-decree.
The English case suggests that a firm power over the purse helps make votes of confidence and ministerial
responsibility sustainable in equilibrium as constitutional norms. For, where the assembly lacks financial power, the
executive has much less incentive to respect its votes of censure, or to accept the constraints imposed by
ministerial advice. I will explore these conjectures with contemporary data in a later section.
Today, the traditional powers over taxes, loans, and expenditures are so widespread among the world’s
legislatures, that no one has bothered to systematically document their incidence.11 Yet, despite how common the
powers of the purse are, no one would claim that all legislatures possessing them on paper actually exercise the
“complete and effectual weapon” of which Madison wrote. So, what went wrong?
33.3 The Difficulty of Transplanting English Parliamentarism
Can English parliamentarism be transplanted? Here, we focus on relatively favourable political soils in which the
constitution stipulates multiparty elections, and endows the legislature with the traditional powers over new taxes,
loans, and expenditures. Can (p. 701) reluctant democrats prevent the flowering of the legislature’s power of the
purse, even in such relatively favourable conditions?
One option is to wholly uproot the transplant—e.g. by rewriting the constitution to ensure non-independent
legislatures12 or remove the powers of the purse. Here, we consider rulers for whom the cost of these radical
strategies is prohibitive. Such rulers can choose either electoral authoritarianism, to undermine the independence
of the legislature, or fiscal authoritarianism, to undermine the power of the purse, or both. We examine the latter,
purely legislative, strategy here.
In practice, fiscal authoritarians who lack a majority voting bloc in the legislature must rely on the executive’s
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agenda-setting rights in the budgetary process. The executive, under almost all constitutions, has the right to make
the first proposal on the budget. There are two main ways to turn this proposal right to the executive’s
advantage.One option involves denying the legislature any right to amend the proposed budget. It is well known
that the ability to make a take-it-or-leave-it offer confers substantial bargaining power (Romer and Rosenthal
1978).Another option relies on setting a favourable budgetary reversion and ensuring that the executive can
trigger that reversion. For example, suppose the budgetary reversion is the executive’s proposal: the reversion
comes into force automatically with the onset of the new fiscal year if no new budget has been enacted; the
executive can veto the budget; and the bicameral legislature needs a two-thirds majority in both chambers to
override the executive’s veto. In this case, the executive can enact any budget that has support from slightly more
than a third of the members of at least one chamber.
When the reversion is either the executive’s proposal or last year’s budget, I say that it is “executive-favouring.”
Executive-favouring reversions (or EFRs) deny the legislature the leverage gained by the English Parliament after
the Glorious Revolution. Because the flow of money would automatically stop if it did nothing, Parliament could sit
on its hands and wait for the Crown to approach it as a supplicant for the funds essential to carrying on the
government. In contrast, in the vast majority of contemporary cases with EFRs, life for the executive is not so bad if
the assembly simply fails to act.13
Beyond its executive-favouring or legislature-favouring character, three other features of a budgetary reversion
should be assessed: is it permanent or provisional? is the trigger broad or narrow? and are the executive’s
complementary powers strong or weak? In the next two sections, I consider five constitutions in four countries, with
an eye to illustrating these features and their consequences.
The general theme developed is that most of the world’s constitutions set up budgetary reversions that are sharply
more favour to the executive than that set up in the aftermath of the Glorious Revolution, and also enable their
chief executives to trigger that reversion. The result is that most legislatures’ de jure power over the budget is
weak, relative to the English benchmark. Indeed, many countries approximate Montesquieu’s (1989[1748], 164)
definition of tyranny:
If the executive power enacts on the raising of public funds without the consent of the legislature, there will
no longer be liberty, because the executive power will become the legislator on the most important point of
legislation.
(p. 702) 33.4 When the Budgetary Reversion is the Executive’s Proposal
In 2005, 38 of 156 surveyed constitutions—mostly in Latin America (seven), Francophone Africa (13), and the
Middle East (eight)—stipulated that the budgetary reversion was the executive’s proposal.14 Most of these also
established triggers and complementary executive powers that allowed the executive to gain substantial leverage
from the reversion. As examples, I discuss two earlier constitutions: Chile 1925 and Burkina Faso 1970. While
neither of these constitutions survived wholly intact until 2005, each illustrates the design principles involved in
many of the 2005 constitutions.
33.4.1 Chile 1925
Chile’s constitution of 1925 contained the following clause (originally Article 44, section 4):
The budget bill must be presented to the Congress four months before the date on which it should come
into force; and if, upon the expiration of this period, it has not been approved [aprobado], the bill
presented by the President of the Republic will come into force.
The same Article makes it clear that the budget can only be enacted by virtue of a law, while Articles 53–54 enable
the president to veto laws, with a two-thirds vote in both chambers needed to override.
Under Chile’s 1925 constitution, any of the following events (combined with the onset of the new financial year)
trigger the reversion: (E1) Congress fails to bring the budget to a final vote; (E2) Congress passes an amended
budget, the president vetoes it, and Congress does not override the veto; and (E3) Congress rejects the budget.In
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any of these listed events, the budget “has not been approved.” The only events that forestall the budgetary
reversion from coming into force are: (E4) Congress passes the executive proposal as submitted; (E5) Congress
passes an amended budget and the president accepts it; and (E6) Congress passes an amended budget, the
president vetoes it, and Congress overrides the veto.
Chile features what I call a “broad” trigger, in the sense that a wide array of events—anything in the set
{E1,E2,E3}—suffices to trigger the reversion. Constitutions with broad triggers describe the reversion as coming
into force when the budget “has not been approved,” “has not been adopted,” or “has not been completed.”
Other constitutions opt for a “narrow” trigger in which the reversion comes into force when the budget “has not
been voted” or “has not been acted on.” This language corresponds to a triggering set {E1}.
(p. 703) Given a broad trigger, the executive’s veto power becomes an important complementary power. Indeed,
the combination of a broad trigger and an executive veto means that only veto-proof majorities in the legislature
can amend the executive’s proposed budget against the latter’s wishes—and they can do this only if they fully
complete their override before the new financial year commences.
Chile also features what I call a “permanent” reversion. That is, once the budgetary reversion is triggered, the
expectation is that it will remain in force for the subsequent financial year. As we shall see, other constitutions
envision “provisional” reversions, in which the expectation is that a new budget will eventually be enacted and
supersede the temporary budgetary reversion.
The upshot of Chile’s constitution—the basic financial provisions of which have not changed since 1925—is that
the Chilean president can enact any budget that can secure the support of slightly more than a third of the
members in at least one chamber of Congress. Of course, the president may have other reasons to seek broader
legislative support. He or she may, for example, need such support to pass his/her legislative agenda or to secure
re-election. These sources of influence, however, fall well short of the “complete and effectual weapon”
envisioned by the classical theorists.
33.4.2 Burkina Faso 1970
The 1970 constitution of Burkina Faso contains a clause (Article 72), typical of Francophone Africa, that sets up a
two-stage budgetary reversion. The first stage is described as follows: “If the National Assembly has not acted
within 45 days of the filing of the [budget] bill, its provisions may be put into force by ordinance [by the
executive].” Here, the assembly’s failure “to act” in a timely manner results in the reversion, so the only event that
counts as a trigger is E1 (not reaching a final vote on the budget).
What if the Assembly wishes to amend the budget? The president wields no veto over laws. However, Article 85
states: “If the Government so requests, the National Assembly shall decide by a single vote on all or part of a text
under discussion, considering only amendments proposed or accepted by the Government.” Thus, the Assembly
has no independent ability to amend the budget in ways of which the government disapproves. To put it another
way, the executive’s key complementary power in Burkina Faso is the right to disallow amendments to the budget
(with no possibility of overriding the executive’s decision).
What if the Assembly rejects the budget entirely (E3)? It will then have “acted,” meaning that the proposed budget
cannot be put into force by ordinance, at least not under the authority of Article 72. In this case, the constitution
does not state explicitly what the budgetary reversion should be.
However, Article 35 clearly gives the government power to take actions that entail the expenditure of money “when
the normal functioning of the constitutional public authorities is interrupted,” as it surely would be were the flow of
money to stop. So, the (p. 704) budgetary reversion in Burkina Faso that follows a legislative rejection of the
executive’s proposed budget is clearly not a complete government shutdown; and may be tantamount to the
executive’s proposal.
If the Assembly has not acted within the 45 days allotted to it, Article 72 mandates a “second stage” in the
budgetary process. In particular, it requires the government to convene an extraordinary 15-day session and
stipulates: “If the Assembly has not passed the budget by the end of the extraordinary session it shall be
definitively established by ordinance.” Thus, the first stage ends with a provisional reversion, while the second
15
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stage ends with a permanent one.15
33.5 When the Reversion is Last Year’s Budget
In 2005, 61 of 156 surveyed constitutions stipulated that the budgetary reversion should be last year’s budget.
Such provisions were especially common in Latin America (eight), sub-Saharan Africa (18), the Middle East and
North Africa (nine), and Eastern Europe and the former Soviet region (13). Three twentieth-century examples are
considered below.
33.5.1 Spain 1931
Article 107 of the Spanish constitution of 1931 stipulated:
The formulation of the budget bill corresponds to the government; its approval to the Cortes. The
government will present to the Cortes, in the first half of October each year, the draft of the State Budget
for the next fiscal year. The validity of the budget will be for one year. Ifit could not be voted on before the
first day of the next fiscal year, the preceding budget will be extended quarterly, without these extensions
exceeding four.
Article 110 made it clear that the executive’s approval was not needed to enact the budget; the Cortes alone could
enact it.
The trigger in this case is the budget not being “voted on before the first day of the next fiscal year” (E1). Thus, if
the budget bill is rejected, the trigger is not pulled. Since the constitution clearly states that “the validity of the
budget will be for one year,” the consequence of the budget being rejected is that the government must operate
without a budget. But Article 109 makes clear that there must be a single budget covering ordinary expenditures
and that any extraordinary expenditures must be approved by an absolute majority of the Congress. Thus, the
consequence of the budget being rejected would (p. 705) be a government shutdown, modified by whatever
extraordinary spending Congress granted.
Since, however, an absolute majority of the Cortes could amend the budget in any way it saw fit (Article 108), the
legislature’s control of the budgetary process was nearly complete. Any leverage the executive enjoyed would
have stemmed from its control of the specialized staff and expertise to draft the budget, rather than the reversion.
33.5.2 Spain 1966
General Francisco Franco’s Organic Law of 14 December 1966, Article 54, stipulated: “If the Budget Law is not
approved before the first day of the following financial year, the budget of the preceding financial year shall be
considered automatically extended until the approval of the new budget.” Franco already wielded a veto over bills
emanating from the Cortes under Articles 15–17 of the law of 17 July 1942 on the Cortes, and there were no
provisions for override.16 Thus, he was assured of a floor on his expenditures, as the budgetary reversion was
triggered if the executive’s proposal “was not approved” (E1, E2, E3).
While it was extremely unlikely that Franco’s Cortes would have dared to reject one of his budgets, the
consequence of such a rejection would have been relatively mild. Since the constitution also allowed ample room
for unilateral executive action directly entailing expenditure, the real reversion in Francoist Spain was probably
closer to the executive’s proposal than to last year’s budget.
33.5.3 Pakistan 1962
Article 41, sections 3–4 of Pakistan’s constitution of 1962 stipulates:
(3) A demand for a grant in respect of a sum that is not shown in an Annual Budget Statement as new
expenditure may be discussed in the National Assembly, but, subject to clause (4) of this Article, the
demand shall not be submitted to the vote of the Assembly and the Assembly shall be deemed to
have assented to the demand:
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(a) at the expiration of fourteen days after the Statement was laid before the Assembly; or (b) at
the commencement of the financial year to which the Statement relates,whichever last occurs.
(4) The National Assembly may, with the consent of the President, reduce a demand for a grant
referred to in clause (3) of this Article and, in that event, the Assembly shall be deemed to have
assented to the demand as so reduced.
In essence, this provision ensures the executive that expenditure authorized in the previous year’s budget will
continue. As long as the government submits its budget at least 14 days beforehand, the budgetary reversion
(possibly with amendments agreed to by (p. 706) the president) is certain to be triggered no later than the
commencement of the new financial year. I refer to such a trigger as “automatic.”
What about requests for new expenditure? Here, the reversion—typical in Commonwealth constitutions—is “no new
expenditure.” Although the legislature’s bargaining position is thus better as regards new expenditures, bargaining
over new expenditures will potentially be much more favourable to the executive, given that the consequence of
bargaining disagreement is “last year’s budget” rather than a “government shutdown.”17
33.6 The Consequences of EFRs
The examples of EFRs discussed in the previous two sections are summarized in Table 33.1 In this section, we
explore the consequences of EFRs. Studies of EFRs in mature democracies sometimes advocate them as “best
practice” (Lienert 2010). EFRs have also been viewed as mitigating the fiscal common-pool problem (Alesina et al.
1999; Wehner 2010), albeit possibly at the expense of over-strengthening the executive (Santiso 2004; Cheibub
2007). When one considers the full range of polities, however, EFRs look much less benign.
Table 33.1 Classifying budgetary reversions
Country/year Reversionary trigger(s) Reversion Is reversion Complementary

provisional Powers: Comments on
or executive veto;
permanent? legislative amendments
Chile 1925 Broad: Lapse of 4 months Executive’s Permanent Two-thirds to override;

after executive submits proposal amendments must be
budget & budget not revenue neutral
approved
Spain 1931 Narrow: Onset of new FY & Last year’s Provisional No veto; No amendment
budget not voted budget (up to four restrictions
quarters)
Pakistan 1962 Automatic: Lapse of 14 Last year’s Permanent Two-thirds to override;

days after executive budget Legislature cannot amend
submits budget continuing expenditures
sans Government approval
Spain 1966 Broad: Onset of new FY & Last year’s Provisional No override envisioned; no
budget not approved budget (indefinite) amendment restrictions
Burkina Faso Narrow: Lapse of 45 days Executive’s Provisional in No veto; Legislature cannot
1970 after executive submits proposal first stage, amend budget sans
budget & assembly has permanent in Government approval
not acted second stage
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33.6.1 EFRs Invite Executive Dominance
The example of Spain 1931 shows that it is possible to preserve the legislature’s bargaining position in the face of
an EFR. Nonetheless, once an EFR is in place, many combinations of features result in serious erosions of the
legislature’s power over the purse, such as:
(Recipe 1) Automatic trigger. Example: Pakistan 1962.

(Recipe 2) Broad trigger + permanent reversion + complementary powers.18 Examples: Chile 1925, Spain
1966.
(Recipe 3) Narrow trigger + permanent reversion + complementary powers.19 Example: Burkina Faso 1970.
I provide further analysis of how EFRs erode the power of the purse elsewhere (Cox 2012b).
33.6.2 EFRs Undermine the Vote of Confidence
The English case reviewed earlier suggests the power of the purse was an important precondition for the
emergence and maintenance of votes of confidence. To elaborate on this claim, note first that many constitutions—
following British precedent—allow the (p. 707) head of state to respond to a vote of no confidence by dissolving
the assembly.20 Note next that the executive’s incentive to respond to a vote of no confidence by dissolving the
legislature and holding elections depends inter alia on the budgetary reversion. If an LFR is in place and no new
budget has yet been approved, then the government faces both a time constraint (it must get a new assembly in
place soon enough to pass the budget) and a campaign finance constraint (it has fewer rents). In contrast, if an
EFR is in place, then the government need not hurry the electoral process and can devote more rents to the
campaign.
If everyone knows the executive can respond to votes of no confidence by holding non-democratic elections in
which it deploys budgetary rents, then threats to withdraw confidence lose much of their efficacy. To put it another
way, constitutionally mandated confidence procedures are just “parchment barriers.” To convert such barriers into
politically binding constraints, assemblies must be able to punish executives who defy their votes of no confidence.
The most secure punishment is the ability to stop the flow of money. Without this mechanism of punishment,
executives will more often be tempted (p. 708) to appeal the assembly’s verdict of “no confidence” to the
electorate, especially if their appointees will administer the resulting elections and budgetary rents can help fund
the campaign.
Do these worries about EFRs’ potential to undermine parliamentary control over the executive pan out in the data?
The postulated pathway is that EFRs enable the manipulation of the electoral process, which in turn undermines the
efficacy of parliament’s threats to withdraw confidence. So, I shall focus on whether initially parliamentary countries
succeed in achieving and sustaining electoral democracy, as a function of their initial budgetary reversions.
The analysis focuses on all 130 countries that promulgated their first constitutions after 1875 and had populations
over 1,000,000 as of 1990. Let Pj denote the percentage of years that country j was an electoral democracy (from
its first constitution to either its dissolution as a state or 2005).21 Let EFRj = 1 if country j’s founding constitution
established an EFR = 0 otherwise; and let Parliamentaryj =1 if country j’s founding constitution allowed a majority
of the legislature to vote no confidence in the government = 0 otherwise. Table 33.2 displays the results of a
regression of Pj on EFRj, Parliamentaryj, and the interaction EFRj*Parliamentaryj.
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Table 33.2 Electoral democracy as a function of founding EFRs Dependent variable: Percentage of years a
country was an electoral democracy, from the date of promulgation of its first constitution until its dissolution or
2005
Independent variable Coefficients (standard errors)
Constant 18.3* (7.6)
EFRj -9.1 (8.5)
Parliamentaryj 40.3** (8.9)
EFRj*Parliamentaryj -32.9** (11.1)
Note: Number of observations = 130, Adjusted R2 = .34.
(***) p value <.01,
(**) p value <.05. Only countries who promulgated their first constitutions after 1875 are included in the
analysis.
As can be seen, initially non-parliamentary regimes with LFRs experience electoral democracy for 18.3 percent of
their lives on average. In contrast, initially non-parliamentary regimes with EFRs experience electoral democracy
for only 9.2 percent of their lives. This difference, however, is not statistically significant.
Consistent with previous work showing that parliamentarism promotes electoral democracy, initially parliamentary
regimes with LFRs are democratic for 58.6 percent of their lives—or about 40 percent more years than non-
parliamentary regimes with LFRs. In contrast, initially parliamentary regimes with EFRs are democratic for only (p.
709) 16.6 percent of their lives. The entire democratic advantage of initial parliamentarism is wiped out when the
initial budgetary reversion favours the executive.
33.6.3 EFRs Undermine the Regulation of Decree Power
The English case also suggested that EFRs should correlate with less tightly regulated executive decree power.
Table 33.3 provides some evidence on this score, showing a strong cross-tabular relationship between whether a
country has an EFR in 2005 and whether it strongly regulates executive decree power in that year. In particular, 89
percent of countries with LFRs strongly regulate executive decree powers, while 65 percent of countries with EFRs
weakly regulate decree powers.
Page 10 of 16
Table 33.3 The power of the purse and legislative regulation of executive decrees in 156 countries as of 2005
Legislature favouring reversion Executive favouring reversion
Weak regulation of decreesa 5 (11%) 71 (65%)
Strong regulation of decrees 42 (89%) 38 (35%)
Total 47 109
Notes: χ 2 = 43.34 (p-value = .000).
(a ) Regulation of decrees is “weak” if (i) the executive can emit legislative decrees—i.e., those with a legal
status equal to statutes—without prior legislative approval; and (ii) those decrees remain in force until explicitly
rejected by the legislature. Otherwise, it is “strong.”
It is likely that budgetary reversions and regulations of decree power co-evolve, rather than causality flowing only
from the former to the latter. Indeed, conceptually, the two are closely aligned. First, both strong regulation of
decrees and legislature-favouring reversions rely on the automatic lapse of executive edicts or authority at times
certain, so that mere legislative inaction is usually unpalatable to the executive. Second, if regulation of decrees is
weak, the door is considerably more open to “expenditure by decree,” thus knocking a different hole in the
legislature’s power over the purse.
33.6.4 EFRs Lower the Life Expectancy of Democracies
Cox (2012b) examines the relationship between EFRs and the duration of democratic episodes in 165 countries
over the period 1875–2005. A survival analysis shows that democracies die more quickly when they begin life
under an EFR, even controlling for GDP per capita, economic growth rate, regime type, previous democratic
breakdowns, and British origins.
(p. 710) 33.6.5 EFRs Are on the Rise
Cox (2012b) also shows that the percentage of the world’s large countries having EFRs rises from 33 percent in
1875 to 68 percent in 2005. This trend was driven mostly by the adoption of EFRs in newly independent countries.
However, a substantial number of countries also converted from LFRs to EFRs. The rationale for such changes—
when one was given (e.g. in Chile 1925, France 1958)—was typically that legislators were holding up passage of
the budget in order to extract concessions. While the Enlightenment theorists viewed legislators holding the budget
hostage favourably, since it allowed the taxpayers’ representatives to secure “a redress of every grievance” from
an unelected monarch, advocates of parliamentarisme rationalisé in Europe (compare Lavaux 1988) and what
might be called “strengthened presidentialism” in Latin America (compare O’Donnell 1994; Shugart 1998) viewed
such actions as inefficient and disruptive. Their solution was to break the budgetary power of the legislature and
put their trust in an elected chief executive.
EFR adoptions came in waves corresponding with the creation of new states after the First and Second World Wars
and the Cold War. As such, they largely coincided with Huntington’s (1991) famous waves of electoral democracy.
Since the consequences of EFRs have been more consistent with Montesquieu’s warning against entrusting the
purse to the executive than with the forecasts of those advocating the concentration of power in an elected
executive, one can say that waves of fiscal autocracy (EFRs) have countervailed the better-known waves of
electoral democracy.
33.7 Directions for Research
In this section, I consider some directions for research suggested by the discussion thus far.These are stated in the
Page 11 of 16
form of a series of questions.
33.7.1 How Should Legislative Power be Measured?
This essay suggests both a substantive and a methodological point on this score. First, any measure of legislative
power should be mostly about the legislature’s power over the purse. If that power fails, the others will likely be
illusory.22
Second, one should be skeptical of additive indices of legislative power (e.g. Fish and Kroenig 2009; Wehner
2010). A legislature’s power over the purse is secure only if it combines three rights: to approve, reject, or amend
state revenues and expenditures on an annual basis; to negotiate the state budget under a favourable reversion;
and to control virements, impoundments, and all manner of extraordinary expenditure. If the (p. 711) legislature
lacks any one of these rights, its financial control can be seriously impaired.Thus, a plausible form for an index of
legislative power would be a Cobb-Douglas production function. For example, one might consider:
Power = Budgetα ReversionβVirementγ
where Budget is the proportion of the state’s revenues and expenditures that must be approved by the legislature,
Reversion reflects how favourable the reversion is to the legislature, Virement measures the extent to which the
legislature controls post-approval transfers of funds across budgetary categories, and α, β, and γ are parameters
reflecting how important each component right is in determining the assembly’s overall ability to control state
finances. Taking logarithms might resuscitate a case for additive indices but this step should be explicit and
justified.
33.7.2 What About Statutory Provisions?
Many countries, including the United States, have changed their budgetary reversions substantially via statute.23
When do countries prefer to entrench their reversions in the constitution and when do they leave them to statute?
How many constitutions with inexplicit reversions have statutes clarifying the balance of power (one way or
another)?
33.7.3 How Are EFRs Exploited?
While I think the answer offered here—which highlights broad reversionary triggers and substantial complementary
powers—is basically correct, there may be other recipes for abuse.
33.7.4 How Are EFRs Tamed?
A handful of recognized democracies, such as France, Germany, and South Korea, possess EFRs and yet also
manage to endow their legislatures with relatively strong powers over the purse. Mostly this seems to be due to
instituting provisional reversions and carefully limiting their duration and scope; or to giving the legislature full
amendment rights and denying the executive any veto rights. But there may be other ways to render EFRs less
damaging to the legislature’s bargaining position and it would be good to have a more complete understanding of
this, especially given the large number of constitutions that now enshrine such reversions.
(p. 712) 33.8 Conclusion
A chief executive who can secure revenues, stay in office, and promulgate laws—all without much legislative
support—has little reason to cater to the interests that legislators represent. English MPs under the Stuarts were
quite familiar with this legislative fact of life. They faced kings with permanent revenues, lifetime holds on office,
and ample decree powers; and these monarchs often chose to rule for long periods without calling Parliament at
all.
In the generation after the Glorious Revolution, English parliamentarians managed to replace royal government with
England’s first system of parliamentary government. The Crown could not act except on the advice of ministers,
minsters could not stay in office except with the confidence of Parliament, and—undergirding it all—Parliament
Page 12 of 16
wielded a flexible and timely control over all state revenues and expenditures. The government thus became an
agent of the legislature, which could punish policies it disliked both by expelling ministers from office (at any time)
and, more fundamentally, by cutting budgets (on an annual opportunity). Crucially, to maintain the credibility of its
threat to cut funds, Parliament ensured that the budgetary reversion was something like a government shutdown,
modified by whatever extraordinary revenues Parliament itself saw fit to grant.
Many rulers have enshrined elements of English parliamentarism in their constitutions, while seeking to ensure
these elements failed to replicate anything like the original. Authoritarian leaders have been particularly careful to
limit their legislatures’ de jure powers over the purse, largely by re-engineering the budgetary reversion. In a
companion paper (Cox 2012b), I have shown that EFRs rose dramatically in the world’s constitutions over the
course of the twentiethcentury. Here, I have focused on a syndrome of institutional and behavioural features,
characteristic of authoritarianism, with which EFRs correlate.
These correlations suggest that we need a better understanding of the executive–legislative balance of power in
contemporary states, especially in autocracies, semi-democracies, and states that oscillate back and forth
between electoral democracy and autocracy. Legislatures can effectively hold executives accountable for their
actions if and only if they are armed with a secure power over the purse. Indeed, I would argue that the distinction
between regimes with and without fiscally strong legislatures may be more fundamental than the canonical
distinction between presidential, semi-presidential, and parliamentary regimes.
Acknowledgements
I thank the editors for their helpful comments.
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Notes:
(1) . The literature (see cites in text) considers leaders, dubbed “reluctant democrats,” “electoral authoritarians,”
and the like, who accept the introduction or continuation of electoral democracy only under pressure and seek to
subvert the electoral process, in order to stay in power.
(2) . For broader analyses of the role of legislatures in authoritarian regimes, see Gandhi (2008) and the cites
therein.
(3) . I do mean the English Parliament, as the key events occur before the Act of Union 1707. However, the British
(and then the UK) Parliaments inherited the powers first established in England.
(4) . Although there is some awkwardness in identifying English precedents for constitutionally stipulated legislative
powers, given the lack of a consolidated written constitution, one can identify the main documents of constitutional
stature in English (British, UK) history.
(5) . This section is based on Cox (2011; 2012a).
(6) . There are different definitions of what constitutes an annual budget system. By Dincecco’s (2009) criteria,
England had such a system starting in 1689. But of course elements of that system underwent important reforms
much later: for example, audits declined after the Whig Supremacy and only re-emerged as a consistent feature
after the consolidated fund was created (1787).
(7) . Even after the Crown’s permanent revenues were ended and the Civil List set up, it was still not true that the
failure to adopt a new budget would result in an immediate shutdown of the entire government, since many
independent accounts with varying authorizations and balances existed. Nonetheless, a substantial portion of both
revenues and expenditure authorizations were at stake.
(8) . As the constitutional norm that the monarch could act only on the advice of ministers developed, the Crown’s
ability to influence this stage declined. Eventually, the Crown was limited to two options: accept the ministers’
proposal or reject it and find new ministers.
(9) . The answer given in the next few paragraphs is based on Roberts (1966) and Cox (2011).
(10) . Every royal command, regardless of its precise form, had long needed to be approved and counter-signed
by a Minister, in order to acquire any legal force; see Roberts (1966, 4–7).
(11) . Neither Fish and Kroenig’s (2009) 32-point “legislative powers index” nor Elkins, Ginsburg, and Melton’s
(2009) comprehensive coding of contemporary constitutions document these powers. A survey conducted by the
International Parliamentary Union and the World Bank Institute in 2001 did ask whether the legislature approved the
state budget, finding that it did in 92 percent of the 52 countries responding (Pelizzo and Stapenhurst 2004, 7).
(12) . Some constitutions allow the executive to appoint enough legislators to ensure their aggregate compliance,
as was done in Libya (1951–68), South Korea (1972–9), and Thailand (1932–45, 1947–96). Other constitutions,
modeled on Stalin’s, outlaw opposition parties, allow the ruling party to run a single candidate for most or all
legislative seats, and help ensure that the executive controls the nomination of those candidates.
(13) . The exceptions are those constitutions that place time limits or scope limits on the budgetary reversion, such
as Germany, Singapore, and South Korea.
(14) . The sample began with the 158 countries included in Fish and Kroenig (2009)—a survey of all major
countries with legislatures—and dropped one country (Somalia) with a transitional assembly and one country
(Timor Leste) with less than a decade of independence.
Page 15 of 16
(15) . I am unsure whether the change in wording from “has not acted” to “has not passed” is accurate. Other
Francophone constitutions use the word voté (voted) in both clauses but here I have available only an English
translation. If this translation is accurate, then the first stage has a narrow trigger, while the second stage has a
broad one.
(16) . Moreover, the preamble to the Law on the Cortes states that “the supreme power of laying down the basic
measures of legislation continues to be invested in the Head of State...”
(17) . Suppose, for example, the budgetary pie is divided pursuant to Nash bargaining; and the executive’s share
under the old budget exceeds the legislature’s. In this case, the Nash solution when the reversion is zero spending
is (1/2,1/2) but the Nash solution when the reversion is last year’s spending will give the executive more than half.
(18) . Here, sufficient complementary powers include: (a) an executive veto that is difficult to override; (b) an
executive-appointed Senate that can veto or delay the budget; and (c) severe restrictions on the legislature’s
ability to amend the executive’s proposal.
(19) . Here, sufficient complementary powers include: (a) an executive-appointed Senate that can veto or delay
the budget; (b) severe restrictions on the legislature’s ability to amend the executive’s proposal; and (c) ample
opportunities for legislative minorities to prevent timely consideration of the budget.
(20) . According to Fish and Kroenig’s (2009) data, 89 percent of parliamentary regimes allowed the executive to
dissolve the legislature c.2005.
(21) . I use Boix, Miller, and Rosato’s (N.d.) classification of electoral democracy.
(22) . This point resonates both with Enlightenment thinking (e.g., Locke, Montesquieu, and Madison) and with an
important vein of historical research on public finance emphasizing the importance of legislative control—e.g.,
North and Weingast (1989), Hoffman and Norberg (1994), Barzel and Kiser (2002), Stasavage (2011), and
Dincecco (2011).
(23) . In the case of the US, the Anti-deficiency Act was the first statutory alteration of the US’s budgetary
reversion.
Gary W. Cox
Gary W. Cox is Distinguished Professor of Political Science at the University of California, San Diego.
Page 16 of 16
Name Index
Name Index

2014
Name Index
Note: includes all referenced authors.
Aberbach, J D 174, 569, 573

Abramson, P R 292
Abuza, Z 682
Acemoglu, D 687
Aceuska, L 668n
Acker, J 254
Ackerman, B A 571
Adams, J 128
Adeweg, R B 533
Adler, E S 357
Agh, A 648, 114
Ajzen, I 270
Akirav, O 473n
Alagappa, M 680
Albæk, E 560n
Alcantara, M 498, 637, 638
Aldrich, J H 3, 51n, 113, 154, 292, 357, 372, 373, 374, 378, 382, 383, 401, 418, 419, 420, 429,
431n, 448n, 551, 664
Aleman, E 482, 11, 114, 115, 474n, 632, 633, 635
Alesina, A 488, 516, 517, 519, 520, 579, 706
Allern, E H 534, 537
Almeida, P T 66
Almond, G 8
Alpert, E J 270
Alt, J E 335
Álvarez Junco, J 340
Page 1 of 39
Name Index
Ames, B 239, 407, 420, 644n

Amorim Neto, O 469, 473n, 633, 634, 642
Amselek, P 515
Andersen, S S 3
Andeweg, R B 9, 72, 73, 98n, 223, 276, 277, 279, 280, 281, 377, 441, 442, 470
André, A 240, 243
Andrews, J T 316, 649, 664
Ansolabehere, S 113, 168, 385, 407, 414n
Antall, Joseph 649
Aparicio, J 254
Apollonio, D E 298
Aquinas, Thomas 6
Aragort, Y 613
Arendt, H 676, 678, 679
Aristotle 6
Armstrong, D 118n
Arnold, R D 574
Arrow, K J 31, 198, 354, 383, 457, 581n
Art, D 677, 691
Arter, D 612, 618
Asher, H B 59, 60, 61, 169
Atmor, N 227n, 241
Auel, K 555, 556, 558, 560n
Auerswald, D P 548
Aung Sang Suu Kyi 680
Austen-Smith, D 35, 42, 51n, 146, 154, 155, 458, 532
Axelrod, R M 43
Bache, L 559
Bachrach, P 455
Bächtiger, A 151, 155
Bäck, H 620
Badura, B 9, 59
Bagashka, T 114
Bagehot, Walter 1, 4, 8, 41, 45, 85, 98n, 314
Bailer, S 189n, 601
Bailey, M A 114, 115, 550
Baker, R K 168, 176
Bakker, R 187
Baldez, L 252, 639
Bale, T 387, 534
Balinski, M 320
Balla, S J 581n
Banks, J S 32, 35, 40, 42, 51n, 290
Bara, J 160
(p. 718) Baratz, M S 455
Page 2 of 39
Name Index
Barkan, J D 98n, 647

Barnes, S H 71
Barnes, T 115
Baron, D P 37, 43, 46, 51n, 202, 205, 208n
Barrett, A W 507n
Barrett, G 560n
Barry, B 487, 507n
Barzel, Y 714n
Battista, J H C 113, 115, 407
Bauer, R A 529
Baum, J R 569
Baumgartner, F R 319, 455, 527, 528, 529, 530, 531, 532, 535, 536
Baur, M 239
Bawn, K 128, 448n, 571
Bayley, P 159, 160
Bayliss, T A 659
Beaulieu, E 696
Beaver, D 64
Beckwith, K 257, 259n
Beer, C 613, 617, 619
Beer, S H 6, 526, 527, 528
Beigman, E 447
Bélanger, G 578
Bell, C G 59, 60, 61
Bellamy, R 559
Bendix, W 162, 163n
Bendor, J 578
Benedetto, G 404, 603
Bengtsson, A 72
Benoit, K 127, 129, 131, 132, 135, 136, 137, 140, 147, 187, 219, 419, 420, 425, 429, 445, 447,
597, 601, 636, 649
Bentley, A F 528, 570
Benz, A 556, 559, 560n, 613
Bergman, M 236, 241
Bergman, T 58, 318, 319, 322, 323, 377, 437, 438, 469, 556, 558
Berkman, M B 292
Berlinski, S 299
Bernauer, J 115, 131
Bernhagen, P 533, 535
Bernheim, B D 37
Berry, C 115
Berry, J M 530, 533
Berry, W D 292
Bertelli, A 578
Besley, T 412
Page 3 of 39
Name Index
Bessette, J M 150
Best, H 11, 58, 60, 61, 62–3, 64, 65, 66, 67, 68, 73, 74, 76, 118n, 298, 299, 301
Beyers, J 527, 529, 530, 531, 532, 535
Bianco, W T 200, 419, 420, 429, 431n
Biddle, B J 269, 272
Bielasiak, J 662
Biglaiser, G 238
Bille, L 218
Binder, S A 326, 333, 335, 463, 465, 508n
Binderkrantz, A 527, 530, 531, 532, 533, 534, 535
Binkley, W E 382
Birch, S 662, 669n
Black, D 29, 32, 104, 459, 467, 473n
Black, G S 288
Black, J 546
Blais, A 236, 335
Blaydes, L 692n
Blidook, K 70
Bloch, F 474n
Blomgren, M 9, 11, 189n, 268, 269, 270, 275, 277, 280, 281, 282, 289
Blondel, J 65, 85, 87, 88, 98n, 469, 662, 663
Bohte, J 579
Boix, C 335, 677, 682, 683, 687, 688, 690, 692n, 714n
Boldt, W 382
Bolingbroke, Henry St John, 1st Viscount 6
Bolleyer, N 223, 224, 611, 619, 620
Bond, J R 490
Boothroyd, D 506n
Borchert, J 64, 300, 615
Born, H 546, 548
Bottom, W P 335
Bouwen, P 531, 532, 533
Bowler, S 169, 219, 227n, 234, 239, 241, 242, 362, 413n, 418, 430n, 598, 599
Bowser, J D 298
Box-Steffensmeier, J 59, 290, 293
Brace, P 292
Brack, N 9
Bradbury, J C 335, 612
Brady, D W 5, 291, 532
Braga, S 621
Bratton, K A 253
(p. 719) Bräuninger, T 115, 131, 155, 168, 384, 474n
Brehm, J 186
Brennan, G 145
Brettschneider, F 70
Page 4 of 39
Name Index
Breunig, C 335
Brewer, J 699
Breyer, S 571
Brezianu, A 668n
Brill, A 72
Brinkmann, S 189n
Broach, G T 118n
Broockman, D E 205
Brooke, J 495, 496, 497, 509n
Brouard, S 470, 474n
Broughton, S 254
Brown, D D 252
Browne, E C 41, 42
Browning, G 76
Brownlee, J 686, 691
Broz, J L 550
Bruhn, K 431n
Brunclik, M 474n
Brunner, M 168, 337, 339, 340
Bryce, J 3, 8, 98n, 381
Brzezinski, Z 676, 678, 679
Buchanan, J M 151, 268, 335, 571
Buck, V J 234
Budge, I 127, 128, 129, 131, 132, 383
Bullock, C S 289, 290, 615
Bunce, V 690, 692n
Burgin, E 559
Burke, Edmund 6, 267, 274
Burns, T R 3
Burton, I 508n
Bush, George W 481
Bütikofer, S 336
Butler, D M 205
Caesar, Julius 567
Cain, B E 231, 232, 234, 235, 239, 242, 243, 296, 298
Cairney, P 618
Calda, M 649
Caldwell, M 569
Callander, S 51n
Caluwaerts, D 154, 163n
Calvert, R 39, 46, 572
Calvo, E 115, 632, 634, 635, 639–40, 641
Cameron, C 466, 488, 507n
Campion, Lord G 334, 335
Cannon, J 496
Page 5 of 39
Name Index
Canon, D T 290
Cantu, F 690
Caplanova, A 663
Cardozo, B N 580n
Carey, J M 116, 168, 185, 231, 232, 234, 235, 236, 237, 240, 242, 244n, 258, 292, 297, 299,
389, 405, 407, 425, 485, 498, 509n, 517, 633–4, 639, 640, 643, 647, 651, 656
Carlin, J B 105
Carman, C J 243, 617
Carpenter, D P 574, 578
Carroll, J D 105
Carroll, R 112, 113, 363, 438, 444, 445
Carroll, S J 252, 253, 277
Carrubba, C J 116, 321, 403, 602
Carsey, T M 70
Carson, J L 291, 293, 464
Carter, R C 552, 559
Carty, R K 225
Castle, D 420, 421
Catalano, A 254, 258
Catt, H 612
Caul, M 218, 251, 252
Celis, K 257, 277
Chaffey, D C 611
Chambers, S 149
Chan, S 548
Chandler, W M 463
Chaney, E M 252–3, 254
Chang, E C C 238
Chang, J J 105
Chang, K H 115
Chari, V 51n
Chaudoin, S 552
Chee, C H 9
Cheibub, J A 468, 469, 470, 474n, 485, 491, 494, 508n, 509n, 638, 641, 706
Chen, J 336
Cheney, R B 113
Childs, S 217, 251, 252, 254, 257, 259n
Chinaud, R 515
Chiou, F-Y Y 113, 339
Chiva, C 665
(p. 720) Cho, Y 614
Chong, D 455
Christensen, R K 651, 668n
Christiansen, P M 527
Chu, Y-h 189n
Page 6 of 39
Name Index
Chubb, B 515
Chunli, X 614
Cicero 6
Ciftci, S 362
Cingranelli, D 238
Clark, J F 621
Clark, T 363
Clarke, H D 9, 614
Clausen, A R 113
Clinton, Bill 547
Clinton, J D 105, 112, 113, 116, 118n
Clucas, R A 611, 614, 615, 617
Cockerell, M 325
Codispoti, F 292
Cohen, B C 455
Cohen, L R 571
Colaresi, M P 447
Coleman, J S 9, 10
Coleman, S 76
Colley, L 497
Collie, M P 113, 118n
Colomer, J M 244, 457, 638
Colton, T 650
Combes, H 223
Conaghan, C 680
Congleton, R D 335, 384, 390
Conlan, T J 621
Conti, J A 172
Converse, P E 9, 71, 275
Coombes, D L 516
Coombs, C 104
Cooper, A 185
Cooper, C A 276, 621
Cooper, J 289
Copeland, G 98n
Costa, O 612
Costello, R 339, 603
Cotta, M 11, 61, 62–3, 65, 66, 298, 299, 301
Couper, M P 186
Cover, A D 243
Covington, C R 489
Cowell-Meyers, K 257, 259n
Cowley, P 387, 392, 508n
Cox, G W 3, 49, 50n, 51n, 59, 113, 114, 231, 235, 239, 241, 287, 299, 313–14, 315, 319, 320,
324, 338, 352, 357–8, 363, 373, 374, 378, 384, 385, 386, 387, 389, 392, 401, 403, 404, 407,
Page 7 of 39
Name Index
418, 421, 425, 438, 444, 445, 458, 460, 462, 463, 464, 471, 473n, 485, 490, 495, 572, 599,
633, 634, 647, 662, 698, 699, 709–10, 712, 713n
Crain, M W 516, 335, 484
Crepaz, M L 527, 530
Crewe, I 159
Crick, B 381
Crisp, B F 115, 236, 238, 239, 240, 241, 300, 362, 629, 635, 639
Crombez, C 115, 466
Cromwell, V 118n
Cross, W P 217, 225
Crowe, E 169
Crowther, W E 656, 664, 665
Crum, B 559
Curini, L 114
Curtice, J 188, 234
Curtin, D 559
Cutrone, M 332, 335, 340
Cygan, A 554
Dahl, R A 381, 526, 528, 610
Dahlerup, D 252, 259n
Dalton, R J 3, 65, 68, 71, 72, 379
Dancy, L 254
Dandoy, R 439
Dannwolf, T 557
Däubler, T 168
Davidson, S 158
Davidson-Schmich, L K 617
Deardorff, A V 533, 534
Dearing, J W 455
Debus, M 114, 131, 337, 339, 340, 384, 474n
De Dijn, A 335
De Heer, W 185
De Leeuw, E D 177
De Leeuw, J 105, 117n
Delery, J E 185
Delors, Jacques 557
De Miñón, M H 335
Denzau, A T 36, 466, 473, 489
(p. 721) Depauw, S 158, 240, 363, 405
De Ruiter, R 557
Desmond, M 171
Desposato, S 114, 115, 187, 241, 419, 420, 421, 422, 424, 425, 507n, 629, 634, 635, 690, 691
Dessein, W 578
Devlin, C 253, 254, 255, 260n
De Vries, C E 71, 558
Page 8 of 39
Name Index
De Vries, M 610
Dewan, T 207, 405–6
De Wilde, P 555
De Winter, L 318
Dexter, L A 169, 172, 189n, 529
Diaz, C 629
Dierickx, G 614
Diermeier, D 10, 32, 33, 37, 39, 42, 43, 44, 46, 47, 48, 50n, 51n, 138, 147, 202–3, 204, 208n,
294, 333, 336, 337, 359, 393, 404, 447, 468, 474n, 507n, 509n
Dietrich, F 162
Dietrich, S 549
Dimock, M 291
Dincecco, M 713n, 714n
Dion, D 326, 464
Dixit, A K 464
Dolan, K 254
Döring, H 10, 40, 91, 92, 96, 319, 320, 327, 373, 405, 449n, 462, 464, 468, 469, 489, 507n,
516
Dovi, S 242
Downs, A 32, 104, 231, 371, 379
Downs, W 610, 613, 620
Doyle, O 663
Drewry, G 323, 508n
Driscoll, A 635
Druckman, J N 194, 195, 197, 203, 207, 208n, 337, 455
Dryzek, J 149, 162
Dudley, R L 621
Duerst-Lahti, G 254
Duina, F 557
Dür, A 529, 530, 536
Duverger, M 214, 232, 287, 378, 526, 527, 651
Easton, S T 42
Eaton, K 613
Eckart, C H 104
Edwards, E E 71
Edwards, G C 490, 572
Edwards, M S 238
Eggers, A C 294
Egner, B 610
Eguia, J 39, 51n
Eichorst, J 113
Eickenboom, P 515
Einaudi, M 336
Einzig, P 515, 522
Eising, R 527, 530, 532, 533, 535
Page 9 of 39
Name Index
Elgie, R 253, 254, 255, 260n

Elkins, Z 713n
Elling, R C 70, 276
Elman, M F 548
Elster, J 154, 464, 648, 649, 668n
Enelow, J 468
Engstrom, R L 252
Epstein, D 51n, 571, 575, 579, 580n, 581n
Epstein, L D 222, 456
Epstein, S 698
Eraslan, H 37, 43, 44, 337
Erdogan, Recep Tayyip 481–2
Erikson, R S 70, 276
Esaiasson, P 71, 72, 73, 276, 289, 521
Escobar-Lemmon, M C 629
Esterling, K M 150, 151, 157, 158, 206
Eulau, H 9, 15, 64, 72, 169, 268, 269, 272–6, 278–9, 280
Evans, D 685
Evans, P B 544, 550
Ezrow, L 71
Faas, T 220
Fabrizio, S 520
Fagan, B 621
Fagan, J C 621
Fainsod, M 676, 678, 679–80
Farah, B 71
Farmer, R 298
Farquharson, R 32
Farrell, D M 71, 169, 177, 227n, 234, 239, 244, 244n, 274, 279, 362, 413n, 418, 430n, 593,
594, 598, 599
Fearon, J 234, 699
Feddersen, T J 39, 46, 48, 51n, 154, 404, 468, 509n
Feld, S L 383, 458
(p. 722) Feldmann, S 578
Fenno, R F 9, 59, 60, 147, 169, 226, 237, 239, 353, 413n, 489, 515, 578, 629
Ferber, P 621
Ferejohn, J A 37, 51n, 202, 208n
Ferguson, L 268
Ferrara, F 239
Ferrié, J-N 150
Fett, P J 420, 421
Fidrmuc, J 663
Figueiredo, A C 469, 634
Filippov, M 238, 339, 340
Finer, S E 527
Page 10 of 39
Name Index
Finke, D 557
Fink-Hafner, D 663
Fiorina, M P 199, 200, 287, 292, 463, 489, 571, 572, 580n
Fiorino, N 618
Firsch, S A 254
Fish, M S 10, 187, 361, 710, 713n, 714n, 91, 92, 96, 97, 482, 484, 507n, 520–1, 647, 650, 659,
667
Fishbein, M Y A 270
Fisher, L 571
Fishkin, J S 150, 571
Fisk, D 334, 337
Fleisher, R 490
Flinders, M 326, 559
Follesdal, A 162
Foltz, F 621
Fong, P 37, 43
Ford, L E 254
Forgette, R 113
Forrest, W 362
Fortunato, D 438, 440
Fossum, J E 559
Foweraker, J 485
Fowler, J H 115
Fowler, L L 290
Fox, R L 293
Franceschet, S 252, 253, 255
Francis, W L 292, 611
Franck, T M 560n
Franco, Francisco 705
Franklin, B 325
Franklin, M N 60
Frantzich, S E 289
Fréchette, G R 203, 204
Fredriksson, P G 336
Freeman, P K 253
Freidenvall, L 252
Friedman, S 254
Friedrich, C 676, 678, 679
Friesema, H P 70, 276
Froman, L A 471
Frumin, Alan S 5
Fu, Y-c 189n
Fugiero, M 615
Fujimori, Alberto 680
Fukumoto, K 293
Page 11 of 39
Name Index
Furlong, M 253
Gabel, M 116
Gaddie, R K 290, 615
Gailmard, S 359–60, 578
Gaines, B J 404
Galasso, V 412
Gallagher, M 48, 154, 215, 219, 226, 239, 241, 244, 271, 298, 436
Gallhofer, I 175
Gamm, G 268, 313, 326, 449n, 489
Gamson, W A 203
Gandhi, J 344, 345, 430, 677, 681, 682, 683, 686, 688, 690, 691, 692n, 713n
Ganghof, S 155, 460
Garcia Montero, M 637, 638
Gardner, J 162
Garland, M 238
Garrett, G 404
Garry, J 127, 129, 131, 447
Gartzke, E 488
Gates, A M 560n
Gauja, A 275
Gaviria, A 238
Geddes, B 648–9, 677, 681, 685, 686
Gehlbach, S 682, 684, 688
Gelfand, A E 105, 111
Geman, D 105, 111
Geman, S 105, 111
Gerber, B J 574
Gerring, J 333, 341, 345
Gerrity, J D 253
Giannetti, D 131, 219, 413, 426
Gibson, R 76
(p. 723) Gill, J 105
Gilligan, G 38, 39, 40, 356
Gilligan, T W 356, 598
Gilmour, J B 291
Gingrich, Newt 572, 577
Ginsburg, T 713n
Ginter, D E 509n
Gleich, H 657, 666
Godbout, J-F 114
Goetz, K H 554
Golden, M A 238
Golder, M 201, 205, 508n
Goldstein, K 172, 186
Goodin, R E 269
Page 12 of 39
Name Index
Gormley, W T 578
Gorsuch, Anne 578
Gower, J C 117n
Grace, M F 578
Grangé, J 335
Grant, W 527
Gray, V 527, 529, 537
Green, M C 185
Greene, K F 429–30, 431n
Green-Pedersen, C 535
Greif, A 581n
Gretlein, R J 467
Griffith, J A G 508n
Grimmer, J 127, 129, 133, 134, 135, 242
Grizzle, J E 186
Grofman, B 232, 234, 236, 237, 239, 244, 383
Grose, C 421, 552
Groseclose, T 51n, 113, 127, 130, 135, 357, 359, 407, 488, 489, 507n
Gross, D A 276
Gross, D R 338
Groves, R M 186
Gschwend, T 167
Guala, F 197
Guan, S 185
Gueorguiev, D 690
Gül, Abdullah 481, 482
Gupta, N 185
Güth, W 337
Gutmann, A 149, 152, 160
Guttman, L L 104
Gwiazda, A 420, 421
Haas, E B 596
Habermas, J 3, 149–50, 152, 158
Hagemann, S 114, 593, 604
Hagen, J von 438, 516, 520
Haggard, S 516, 517, 519, 520
Hagger, M 9
Hainmueller, J 294
Hakhverdian, A 131
Hale, H 656
Hall, R L 169, 291, 300, 532, 533, 534
Hallerberg, M 40, 91, 96, 320, 324, 327, 363, 438, 464, 517, 519, 522
Halligan, J 613, 616
Halpin, D 532, 534
Hamilton, J T 579
Page 13 of 39
Name Index
Hamlin, A 145
Hamm, K E 118n, 611
Hammond, T H 335, 359–60
Han, J-H 594
Hancock, A M 256
Hangartner, D 151, 155
Hänggi, H 546, 548
Hankla, C R 520, 522, 610
Hansen, J M 530, 532, 533
Hansen, M E 114, 362
Harden, J J 70, 516, 520
Harfst, P 444, 445, 449n
Harmel, R 118n
Harper, D 97n
Harvey, W S 173, 174
Haspel, M 650, 656
Hastings, W K 105, 111
Hatsell, J 7
Haughton, T 649, 662
Hausemer, P 604
Havel, Vaclav 649
Hawes, M B 550
Hawker, G 613
Hawkesworth, M 254, 256, 259n
Hayden, J 649
Haynie, K L 615
Hayton, D W 699
Hazan, R Y 214, 215, 223, 227n, 241, 360, 391, 408
Headey, B 268
Heaney, M T 527, 532, 537
Heath, R M 253, 254
(p. 724) Hebert, T F 169
Hechter, M 390
Heckman, J J 186
Heclo, H 572
Hedlund, R D 70, 276, 336
Heidar, K 317, 376, 385, 393, 393n, 521
Heinelt, H 610
Heinz, J P M 536
Heiser, W J 117n
Heitshusen, V 235, 242
Helbling, M 188
Heller, W B 320, 333, 336, 337, 340, 341, 403, 419, 420, 421, 424, 426, 429, 430n, 470, 488
Hellman, J 663
Henehan, M T 560n
Page 14 of 39
Name Index
Henisz, W 333, 341, 345

Hermanowicz, J C 175, 176
Herrick, R 292
Herrnson, P S 621
Herron, E S 239, 419
Hess, S 572
Hetherington, M 63
Hibbing, J R 72, 289, 292
Hicken, A 238, 418, 419
Hill, B W 698
Hill, K Q 70, 71
Hinckley, B 560n
Hine, D 322
Hiroi, T 335
Hirsch, J 515
Hiscox, M J 550
Hix, S 107, 114, 115, 162, 168, 177, 220, 404, 405, 406, 407, 410, 553, 592, 593, 596, 597,
601, 602, 604
Hobbes, Thomas 6
Höbelt, L 316
Hobolt, S B 593
Hoffman, P 714n
Hoffmann-Lange, U 172, 185
Hojnacki, M 534
Holbrook, A L 185
Holcombe, R 484
Holland, P W 195
Holliday, I 271
Holman, C 526
Holmberg, S 71, 72, 73, 276
Holmes, G 496
Holmes, O W 580n
Holzhacker, R 560n
Holzinger, K 158
Hönnige, C 468
Hooghe, L 187, 558
Hopkin, J 380
Hopkins, D J 138
Hoppit, J 496, 509n
Horiuchi, A 578
Horn, M J 579
Hotelling, H 104
Hough, D 616
Hough, J 680
Howell, C 527, 534, 537
Page 15 of 39
Name Index
Howell, W G 547, 552, 560n, 573

Hox, J J 177
Hoyland, B 114, 593, 599, 602, 604
Hoyo, V 241
Htun, M 252, 253, 256
Huang, T-F 485
Huber, E 333
Huber, J D 6, 40, 51n, 71, 130, 134, 268, 313, 326, 341, 345, 404, 444, 449n, 464, 466, 468,
470, 471, 489, 509n, 569, 581n
Hudson, J 663
Hug, S 114, 116, 187, 321, 322, 336, 339, 373, 422, 602
Hughes, M M 252, 260n
Hume, David 6
Humphreys, R F 317
Hunt, W B 187, 445
Huntington, S P 500, 679, 681, 691, 710
Hurley, P A 70, 71
Hwang, W 114, 633
Hyde, S 679, 690, 692n, 696
Iaryczower, M 413
Ilie, C 159–60
Ilonszki, G 419, 665
Ingberman, D E 488
Inglehart, R 259n
Isberg, M 485
Ishiyama, J T 612
Ismayr, W 374, 385
Iyengar, S 455
Jack, M 7
Jackman, R W 649
Jackman, S D 105, 111, 112, 118n
(p. 725) Jackson, J E 414n, 489
Jackson, R 676, 678
Jacob, P 296
Jacobs, L R 71
Jacobson, G C 290, 291, 293
Jahr, S 177
Jain, C M 613
Janda, K 393, 431n
Jedruch, J 316
Jefferson, Thomas 7
Jeffery, C 616
Jenkins, J 113
Jenkins, S 113
Jennings, I 8
Page 16 of 39
Name Index
Jenny, M 277, 316, 319, 473

Jensen, N 688
Jeong, G-H 201
Jewell, M E 98n, 274, 276, 611, 617
Jochum, M 527
Johannes, J R 243
Johnson, G B 639
Johnson, J W 241, 498
Johnston, R 177, 186
Jones, B D 319, 455
Jones, B S 293, 629
Jones, J R 697, 698
Jones, L E 51n
Jones, M P 114, 252, 253, 299–300, 485, 629, 631–2, 633, 635
Jones, R S 611
Jordan, A G 3, 527, 534, 535
Judge, D 9
Jun, H W 114
Jurgelevilt, D 363
Kaarbo, J 548
Kaeding, M 598
Kalandrakis, A 37
Kalandrakis, T 340
Kaldor, M 648
Kalt, J P 489
Kam, C 114, 197, 207, 240, 243, 388, 404, 407, 413n, 509n
Kaminski, M M 649, 681, 689
Kanawati, N 567
Kang, A 252
Kaplan, N 635
Karasimeonov, G 662
Karlas, J 555, 556
Kathlene, L 253, 254
Kato, J 421, 426, 429
Katz, J N 287, 355
Katz, R 66, 68, 217, 223–4, 227n, 235, 244n, 274, 276, 372, 376, 380, 387, 413n, 418, 430n
Katznelson, I 10, 11
Kearney, M C 115, 635
Keating, M 616
Keefer, P 508n, 522, 682, 684, 688
Kellerman, M 115
Kelley, D R 560n
Kelly, S Q 254
Kennan, J 488
Kennedy, E M 465
Page 17 of 39
Name Index
Kenny, L W 292
Kenworthy, L 251
Keohane, R O 167, 168
Kernell, S 290, 291, 293
Kerr, H 594
Kerremans, B 531, 532, 535
Kesgin, B 548
Kessler, D P 5
Key, V O 222, 372
Khemani, S 522
Khmelko, I S 665
Kiewiet, D R 91, 96, 114, 231, 290, 291–2, 338, 375, 384, 388, 568, 571, 575, 577, 581n
Kiiver, P 554, 560n
Kim, C L 87, 98n, 276, 444, 445
Kim, D-H 438
Kim, J 51n
Kimball, D 534
King, A 2, 279, 288
King, D C 359, 489
King, G 42, 138, 167, 168, 186, 490
Kingdon, J W 414n, 455, 489
Kirchheimer, O 379
Kiser, E 714n
Kitschelt, H 72, 662
Kittilson, M 251, 252, 259n
Klebanov, B B 447
Klemmensen, R 131
Klingemann, H-D 128
Kluxen, K 4
Knight, J 581n
Koehler, D 468
Koford, K 113
(p. 726) Koh, D 692n
Kohl, Helmut 4
Kohler-Koch, B 527, 531
Kolko, G 571
Kollman, K 531
Kolodny, R 227n
Komito, L 239, 244
König, T 132, 336, 340, 460, 604
Koole, R 317, 376, 385, 393, 393n
Kopecky, P 419, 648, 663, 666
Kornberg, A 614
Körösényi, A 58, 71
Kousser, T 296, 298
Page 18 of 39
Name Index
Kraft-Kasack, C 559
Kramer, G H 35
Krauss, E S 376
Krehbiel, K 10, 17, 33, 38, 39, 40, 45, 46, 47, 50n, 51n, 113, 227n, 335, 338, 356, 357, 364,
372, 374, 378, 383, 385, 393, 401, 402, 403, 406, 413n, 456, 464, 465, 598, 638
Kreppel, A 87, 98n, 594, 600, 601
Kreuzer, M 419, 662
Kricheli, R 677, 679, 689
Kriesi, H 527, 530, 535
Krippendorff, K 127
Kristjánsson, S 223
Kroenig, M 10, 91, 92, 96, 97, 187, 361, 482, 484, 507n, 659, 667, 710, 713n, 714n
Krook, M L 217, 251, 252, 259n
Krosnick, J A 185
Krøyer, S 531
Kruskal, J B 104
Kuklinski, J H 70, 276
Kunovich, S 251
Kupchan, C 552
Kuran, T 681
Kurtz, K T 298
Kvale, S 189n
Lacina, T 114
Ladha, K K 118n
Laffin, M 620
Lago, I 236
Landis, J 570
Landwehr, C 158
Langston, J 254, 634
LaPalombara, J 444
Lapinski, J 116, 357
LaPlant, J T 612
LaRaja, R J 298
Laraki, R 320
Larkin, P 337
Lascher, E L 154
Lasswell, H D 67, 288
Lau, R R 242
Laursen, F 554
Laver, M 4, 35, 41, 42, 46, 51n, 97n, 127, 129, 131, 132, 135, 136, 137, 147, 187, 299, 338,
383, 384, 386, 388, 392, 404, 413, 419, 420, 425, 426, 429, 436, 437, 438, 440, 445, 447,
448n, 449n, 469, 471, 474n, 575
Lawless, J 293
Lazarus, J 296
Leblang, D 548
Page 19 of 39
Name Index
Leech, B L 173, 175, 528, 529, 530, 531, 532, 536, 537
Lees, J D 41, 360, 363, 444
Leston-Bandeira, C 70
Leuffen, D 172
Levi, M 57
Levin, L S 260n
Levine, M 579
Levitsky, S 680, 692n, 696
Levitt, S 113, 489
Levmore, S 335, 339
Lewis, P G 662, 679
Lidström, A 610
Lienert, I 519, 706
Lijphart, A 8, 98n, 153–4, 333, 334, 335, 339, 341, 345, 364, 444, 647, 648, 649, 651
Lilleker, D G 167, 171, 173, 176
Limongi, F 469, 470, 634
Lindeboom, G J 537
Lindsay, J M 549, 560n
Lindstädt, R 595
Linz, J 95, 485, 676, 678, 679
Lipsmeyer, C S 128, 442
List, C 162
Little, R J A 186
Little, T H 298
Locke, John 6, 543
Lodge, T 613
Loewen, P J 465
Loewenberg, G 1, 2, 4, 6, 7, 10, 85, 91, 96, 169, 324, 374, 378, 438, 444, 445, 449n
Londregan, J 113, 118n, 489
(p. 727) Lord, C 156, 163n, 546, 596
Lorenz, E N 32
Loughlin, J 610
Lovenduski, J 62, 257
Lowe, W 131, 132
Lowell, A L 3, 194, 317, 380, 400
Lowery, D 527, 529, 537
Lowi, T 571, 572
Lowry, R C 335
Ludwikowski, R R 668n, 669n
Luna, J 71
Lundberg, T C 239, 240, 242
Luneburg, W 526
Lunn, D J 118n
Lupia, A 39, 43, 153, 194, 373, 377, 390, 474n, 485, 620
Luskin, R C 150
Page 20 of 39
Name Index
Lust-Okar, E 430, 682, 692n

Lyons, P 114
Maatsch, A 555
McAdams, J C 243
McAllister, I 71, 72, 244n, 258, 271
MacAvoy, P W 571
McCarty, N M 113, 115, 332, 335, 340, 407, 422, 466, 488
McClosky, H 72
McCombs, M E 455
McConnell, G 571
McCormick, J M 552, 560n
McCrone, D J 70, 276
McCubbins, M D 3, 51n, 113, 114, 231, 319, 320, 336, 338, 357–8, 373, 374, 375, 384, 386,
388, 389, 392, 401, 403, 418, 460, 464, 471, 473n, 484–5, 490, 516, 517, 519, 520, 568, 571,
572, 573–4, 575, 577, 578, 579, 580, 581n, 599, 633, 634
McDonald, J A 253
McDonald, M D 128
McDowell, L 173
McElroy, G 187, 362, 420, 421, 431n, 597, 598, 599, 601, 604
Macey, J R 579
McFadden, D 105
McFaul, M 648, 649
McGann, A J 470, 651, 665
McGee, D G 518
McGregor, J P 665
McGuire, M 682
McKay, A 536
Mackay, R J 36, 466
McKelvey, R D 32, 39, 48, 51n, 198, 199, 200, 201, 202, 203, 319, 335, 383, 456, 457, 461,
468
MacKenzie, S A 301
McKibbin, C 289
Mackuen, M B 70
McLaughlin, E 419, 431n
McLean, I 116, 457
McLeay, E 239
McLemore, L E 169
McMahon, G 571
McMenamin, I 420, 421
McNeal, R S 621
MacRae, D 104–5
Madison, J 335, 371, 526, 572, 580, 698
Maeda, K 132, 147
Maestas, C 172, 185, 292, 293
Magaloni, B 429, 431n, 677, 679, 682, 689, 692n
Page 21 of 39
Name Index
Mahoney, C 527, 528, 529, 531, 535, 536

Maier, H 9
Mainwaring, S 419, 485, 498, 637, 664
Mair, P 66, 68, 72, 216, 223, 372, 376, 380, 436, 662
Maisel, L S 218
Malami, M 251
Malesky, E 681, 690, 692n
Maloney, W 527
Malova, D 649, 662
Maltzman, F 130, 134, 147
Mamadouh, V 599
Manin, B 237, 314
Mann, T E 560n
Manning, B 551
Manow, P 7
Mans, T C 169
Mansbridge, J 64, 71, 158, 162, 233, 242, 259n
Mansfeldova, Z 663, 665
Mansfield, E D 550
Mansfield, H C 6
Mao Zedong 690
March, J G 10, 270
Marier, P 517, 520, 522
Marimon, R 51n
Marinov, N 679, 690, 692n
Marks, G 187, 188, 558
(p. 728) Marschall, S 1, 559
Marsh, M 185, 215, 226, 298, 592
Marshall, D 599
Marshall, W J 40, 320, 355, 401, 413n
Martin, A D 105, 339
Martin, L L 550–1, 560n
Martin, L W 127, 128, 130, 132, 134, 138, 148, 201, 318, 325, 361, 363, 364, 437, 439–40,
442, 443, 445, 447, 448n, 507n
Martin, S 168, 239, 240, 243, 322, 363, 405, 464, 473, 559, 611, 666
Martínez, A 72, 73
Martinez-Gallardo, C 642
Mashaw, J 571, 580
Masket, S E 537
Massey, D S 185
Massicotte, L 611
Mastias, J 335
Masuyama, M 403, 473n
Matland, R E 240, 251, 252
Matthews, D R 59, 287, 301
Page 22 of 39
Name Index
Matthews, S 488
Mattozzi, A 412
Mattson, I 41, 323, 360–1, 444, 445, 449n, 464, 474n, 536
Maurer, A 556, 560n
May, J D 379
Mayhew, D R 147, 226, 231, 287, 345, 353, 372, 383, 401, 436, 629
Meernik, J 560n
Meirowitz, A 578
Meissner, P 189n
Mejía Acosta, A 420, 421, 424
Mello, P A 549
Mellors, C 620
Melnick, R S 571
Melton, J 713n
Mendelberg, T 154
Méndez-Lago, M 72, 73
Merlo, A 37, 39, 43, 44, 51n, 337, 412
Merrill, S 467
Mershon, C 419, 420, 421, 424, 425, 426, 427, 429, 430n, 431n
Messerschmidt, R 374, 375, 376, 387, 392
Metcalf, L K 656–7
Metcalf, M 384
Metoyer, C C 252, 253
Metropolis, N C 105, 111
Meyer-Sahling, J-H 554
Mezey, M L 8, 87, 89–91, 286, 290, 438, 449n, 516
Michel, Robert H 34
Michels, R 65, 380
Micozzi, J P 114
Middlemass, K A 552
Migué, J-L 578
Mikhaylov, S 131, 136, 137
Milazzo, C 613
Milgrom, P R 581n
Mill, J S 314, 322, 324
Miller, G J 198, 199, 208n, 335
Miller, J M 537
Miller, M 714n
Miller, N R 32, 339, 456, 467
Miller, W E 70, 71
Millimet, D L 336
Milner, H V 550, 552
Milyo, J 127, 130, 135, 489
Mitchell, J 612
Mitchell, N J 535
Page 23 of 39
Name Index
Mitchell, P 234, 237, 240

Mody, A 520
Moe, T M 321, 569, 571, 572–3
Moncrief, G 296, 297, 611, 617
Money, J 46, 333, 334, 335, 336, 338, 339, 466, 658
Monroe, B L 132, 147, 447
Monroe, N W 385, 464
Montero, A P 615
Montesquieu, Charles de Secondat, Baron de 6, 332, 701
Montgomery, J M 185
Moore, M K 292
Moran, M J 569, 572, 574
Moraski, B 612
Moravcsik, A 544
Morelli, M 203–4
Moreno, C 345
Morgenstern, S 114, 237, 244, 298, 407, 408, 409, 498, 520, 630, 632, 637–8
Morris, S 147
Morris, Z S 167, 173, 175
Morton, R 203
Mosca, G 65
(p. 729) Moser, R G 251, 662, 670n
Moses, J C 612
Mucciaroni, G 156–7, 158
Mughan, A 59, 60, 407
Müller, W C 4, 9, 58, 207, 221, 268, 277, 289, 313, 316, 319, 372, 377, 379, 389, 391, 407,
436, 437, 438, 441, 473
Müller-Rommel, F 662, 663
Munro, N 662
Muris, T J 516
Murphy, M 612
Murray, R 254, 255
Muthoo, A 51n
Myagkov, M G 114
Myatt, D P 207
Myerson, R B 51n, 333, 336, 359
Myerson, R M 36, 39, 46, 48
Nacif, B 637–8
Nalebuff, B J 464
Nalewajko, E 665
Namier, L B 495, 496, 497, 509n
Nannicini, T 412
Narin, I 9
Narud, H M 71, 72, 218
Navarro, J 277
Page 24 of 39
Name Index
Nay, O 612
Neblo, M A 206
Neeley, G W 172
Negretto, G L 638
Neuendorf, K A 127
Neuhold, C 603
Neumann, S 378
Neustadt, R E 572
Newcastle, Duke of 496–7
Nickerson, D W 205
Nicolas, M A 621
Niedermayer, O 596
Nielson, D L 238, 498
Niemi, R G 297, 298, 383, 467, 468
Nijzink, L 98n, 470, 533
Niskanen, W 572, 578
Nogee, J 560n
Nokken, T P 418, 422
Noll, R G 489, 570, 571, 573–4, 578, 579, 580
Norberg, K 714n
Norris, P 61, 62, 218, 236, 251, 252, 258, 259n, 298
North, D C 335, 581n, 684, 698, 714n
Norton, A 610
Norton, P 1, 70, 326, 374, 375, 376, 378, 387, 449n, 482, 530, 534, 554, 649, 663, 664, 665
Noury, A 107, 114, 168, 405, 406, 407, 594, 602, 604
Nurmi, H 467
Nuytemans, M 128
Nyiri, Z 615
Obama, Barack 5, 547
Öberg, P 530, 533
Obler, J 469
O’Brennan, J 555, 560n
O’Brien, D Z 424, 425
O’Brien, E E 253
Odendahl, T 172
O’Dwyer, C 613
O’Halloran, S 571, 575, 579, 580n, 581n
Ohmura, T 189n
Oleszek, W J 5, 315
Oliver, S 690
Olonszki, G 9
Olsen, J P 10, 270
Olson, D 85, 87, 98n, 483, 516, 647, 649, 663, 664, 665
Olson, M 526, 529, 581n, 682
O’Neil, M 172
Page 25 of 39
Name Index
Oppenheimer, B I 177, 514, 515, 521

Ordeshook, P C 32, 199, 201, 339, 340
Ornstein, N 98n
Orren, K 574
Orviska, M 663
Osiatynski, W 649
Ostrogorski, M 3, 380, 408
Ostrom, E 581n
Ostrow, J 664
Overby, L M 611, 618
Owens, J E 552
Ozbudun, E 399
Packenham, R A 8
Page, B I 70
Page, T 571, 581n
Pahre, R 544, 550, 556
(p. 730) Pallarés, F 616
Palmer, H D 292
Palmer, R R 495, 496
Palmieri, S 254
Panebianco, A 379
Paolucci, C 380
Papadopoulos, Y 559
Pappas, S A 554
Parkinson, J 158
Pasek, J 185
Pastor, R 560n
Patten, J N 559
Patterson, S 85, 98n, 324, 449n
Patty, J W 474n, 578
Patzelt, W J 9, 61, 189n, 287, 298, 300
Pauwels, T 225
Paxton, P 251, 252, 260n
Payne, M J 482
Pearson, J 572
Pearson, K 104, 254, 464, 465
Pedersen, H H 536
Pedersen, M N 218
Pedrini, S 155
Peery, G 298
Pekkanen, R 299, 376
Pelizzo, R 514, 518, 520, 552, 713n
Pelletier, R 253, 257
Peltzman, S 571
Peng Dehuai 690
Page 26 of 39
Name Index
Penner, E 70
Pennings, P 132
Pepinsky, T 677, 687, 689, 692n
Pereira, C 421, 640, 644n
Persson, T 238, 448n
Peters, B G 7, 9
Peters, D 543, 546, 547, 548, 557, 560n
Peters, J G 290
Peterson, M A 490
Petracca, M 294
Pettai, V 419, 662
Pettersson, T 72
Pevehouse, J C 547, 560n
Phillips, A 217
Phillips, R D 578
Pierce, H N 128, 442
Pierce, R 9, 71, 275
Pierson, P 58
Piscopo, J M 252, 253, 255
Pitkin, H F 64, 70, 86, 242, 251, 267, 275
Pitt the Elder, William 496
Plato 6
Platt, G M 268, 269
Plott, C R 32, 199, 200, 335, 473n
Poggione, S 253
Poguntke, T 216
Poincaré, H 32
Pollack, M 569
Polsby, N W 8, 16, 48, 87, 88–9, 91, 95, 98n, 286, 287, 289, 295, 301, 325, 449n
Pomper, G M 371
Pool, I S 529
Poole, K T 105, 107, 111, 113, 114, 115, 116, 117n, 118n, 385, 407, 418, 422, 466, 468
Popkin, S L 231
Potoski, M 574
Pound, R 580n
Powell, E N 662
Powell, G B 8, 71, 364, 381, 405, 444
Powell, L W 70, 297
Powell, R J 295
Power, G 274
Powers, T J 253, 640, 644n
Prendergast, C 578
Presser, S 175
Prewitt, K 288
Price, C M 59, 60, 61
Page 27 of 39
Name Index
Price, K C 279
Price, R G 9
Pridham, G 596, 663
Pridham, P 596
Prince, D W 611, 618
Probyn, J W 515, 516
Proksch, S O 115, 127, 129, 131, 132, 134, 136, 138, 139, 140, 145, 146, 148–9, 168, 325,
447, 448n, 594
Protysk, O 663, 664
Przeworski, A 244, 500, 508n, 568, 641, 648, 682, 686, 688, 691, 692n
Pugliese, R 621
Puri, S L 9
Putin, Vladimir 656
Putnam, R D 72, 544, 550, 569, 612
Puwar, N 168, 173
(p. 731) Quinn, K M 105, 127, 129, 133, 138, 147, 447
Quirk, P J 156–7, 158, 162, 163n
Qvortrup, M 385
Raghunathan, T E 186
Ragsale, L 490
Rahat, G 214, 215, 223, 224, 227n, 241, 391, 408
Rai, S M 159
Ramsden, G P 614
Ramseyer, J M 489, 569, 581n
Rangel, A 37
Ranney, A 400–1
Rapoo, T 613, 617
Rasch, B E 150, 320, 321, 335, 459, 460, 466, 467, 468, 470, 471, 473, 474n
Rasmusen, E 489
Rasmussen, A 537, 603
Rasmussen, M 531
Raunio, T 553, 554, 555, 556, 557, 558, 560n, 594, 599, 603, 612
Rayo, L 37
Reagan, Ronald 547
Redlawsk, D P 242
Redlich, J 317
Reed, S 419, 420, 421
Reese, J 9, 59
Rehfeld, A 274
Reich, G 640–1, 662
Reid, G 515
Reif, K 615–16
Reilly, B 419
Reingold, B 252, 253, 256, 257, 260n
Reiser, M 60, 61
Page 28 of 39
Name Index
Reiter, D 548
Reiter, J 185
Remington, T F 649, 656, 664
Rennó, L 421, 640, 644n
Reutter, W 619
Reynolds, A 251, 252
Ricciuti, R 618
Rice, S A 224
Richards, D 167, 171
Richardson, J J 3, 527, 534, 535
Richardson, Jr, L E 172, 253, 276
Richman, J T 407
Rickard, S J 238
Riezman, R 39, 48, 51n
Riggs, K 253
Riker, W H 10, 32, 34, 35, 50n, 195, 197, 198, 203, 207, 312, 313, 332, 335, 383, 456, 458,
467, 473n
Ringe, N 603
Rittberger, B 554
Rivers, D 105, 112, 118n, 383, 490
Roberts, A 650, 662, 669n
Roberts, C 713n
Roberts, J M 291, 581n
Roberts, M 384
Robinson, G 464
Robinson, J 560n, 687
Rockman, B A 174, 569
Rockow, L 335
Roeder, P 690
Rogers, E M 455
Rogers, J R 333, 337
Rogowski, J C 552
Rogowski, R 41
Rohde, D W 51n, 113, 154, 292, 357, 374, 401
Rohrschneider, R 71, 237
Rokkan, S 57, 65, 527, 528, 530
Roland, G 107, 114, 168, 406, 407, 448n, 602
Romer, T 36, 319, 336, 405, 459, 460, 461, 464, 471, 577, 701
Rommetvedt, H 527, 530, 531, 534, 535
Roosevelt, Franklin D 560n
Roper, S D 651
Rosas, G 115, 634, 635
Rosato, S 714n
Rosberg, C 676, 678
Rose, N 490
Page 29 of 39
Name Index
Rose, R 662
Rosen, R 64
Rosenbluth, F 128, 421, 448n, 569, 581n
Rosenthal, A 295, 611
Rosenthal, H 36, 105, 113, 114, 115, 116, 319, 336, 405, 422, 459, 460, 461, 464, 468, 471,
488, 577, 701
Ross, A 260n
Roth, A E 196
Rothenberg, L S 51n, 113, 339
Rothstein, P 291
Rottier, S 474n
Roulston, K 173, 189n
Rovny, J 187
(p. 732) Rozell, M J 526, 533
Rozenberg, O 9, 11, 168, 189n, 268, 269, 270, 275, 277, 280, 281, 282, 289, 322
Rubin, D B 105, 186
Rubio Llorent, F 340
Rule, W 251, 252
Rundquist, B S 48
Russel, A 537
Russell, M 335, 339
Russo, F 448n
Rustow, D 680
Rydz, D L 699
Saalfeld, T 9, 241, 268, 289, 318, 321, 375, 376, 379, 389, 390, 403, 467, 482, 485, 527, 537,
556
Šabič, Z 559
Sagarzazu, I 115, 632, 634
Saglie, J 537
Saiegh, S M 114, 116–17, 407, 474n, 631–2, 636, 640, 641
Sainsbury, D 260n
Saint-Germain, M A 252, 253
Sajó, A 649
Sala, B R 113, 287, 355
Salisbury, R H 534
Salmond, R 569
Salomon, M 692n
Samuels, D J 234, 241, 244n, 299, 420, 613, 630
Sandri, G 225
Santiso, C 706
Sarbaugh-Thompson, M 298
Saris, W E 175
Sartori, G 61–8, 95, 214, 358, 678–9
Sassoon, D 382
Sauger, N 114
Page 30 of 39
Name Index
Saward, M 244
Scarrow, S E 60, 300, 593
Schaeffer, N C 175
Schattschneider, E E 408, 455, 528, 530, 685
Schedler, A 696
Scheimann, J W 649
Scheiner, E 419, 420, 421, 424, 613, 662, 670n
Schelling, T C 8, 464, 550, 581n
Scheufele, D A 455
Schick, A 522
Schickler, E 326, 463, 464, 465
Schirmer, R 61
Schlesinger, A 545
Schlesinger, J A 16, 287, 289, 290, 291, 292, 301, 302
Schlozman, K L 532, 534
Schmidt, G D 252, 255
Schmidt, V 612
Schmitt, C 3, 8, 381
Schmitt, H 615–16
Schmitt-Beck, R 534
Schmitter, P C 527, 528
Schnapp, K-W 444, 445, 449n
Schneider, H P 7
Schofield, N 32, 51n, 335, 383, 413, 426, 429, 437, 448n, 456
Schonhardt-Bailey, C 114, 127, 160, 161
Schroeder, C H 579
Schuler, P 681, 690, 692n
Schulz, T 114
Schumpeter, J A 58, 61, 68, 381
Schüttemeyer, S S 377, 387, 392
Schwartz, T 32, 571, 573
Schwindt-Bayer, L A 252, 253, 260n, 630
Scott, J M 552, 559
Scully, R 59, 177, 239, 274, 279, 593, 594
Scully, T R 485
Searing, D D 11, 16, 60, 167, 169, 239, 244n, 268, 269, 271–2, 274, 277–81, 288–9
Seidenfeld, M 571
Seidman, H 572
Selb, P 189n, 236, 616
Sened, I 51n, 413
Serra, G 243
Shabad, G 300, 424
Shackleton, M 603
Shaffner, B F 113
Shapira, A 224
Page 31 of 39
Name Index
Shapiro, M 570, 571

Shapiro, R Y 70, 71
Shapiro, S A 579
Shaw, A M 172
Shaw, D L 455
Shaw, J D 185
Shaw, M 41, 325, 360, 363, 444, 647, 664
Sheafer, T 223, 241
Shell, D 334, 335
Shepard, R N 104
Shephard, M 617
(p. 733) Shepsle, K A 4, 10, 11, 33, 34, 35, 39, 40, 41, 42, 46, 51n, 286, 299, 313, 319, 320,
336, 338, 339, 354, 355, 384, 386, 401, 413, 438, 440, 449n, 458, 459, 461, 464, 468, 469,
471, 473n, 474n, 488, 507n, 575, 576, 579, 581n, 592, 598, 647, 664
Shimizu, K 578
Shipan, C R 130, 134, 449n, 569, 575–6, 581n
Shively, P 234
Shomer, Y 115, 424, 425, 635
Shor, B 113, 115, 421, 422, 429
Shugart, M S 231, 232, 234, 235, 236, 237, 238, 240, 241, 242, 244n, 252, 258, 287, 425, 485,
498, 517, 637, 640, 643, 647, 651, 656
Shull, S A 490
Shvetsova, O V 339, 340, 419, 424, 425, 427, 431n, 456, 649
Siavelis, P M 298, 408, 498, 630
Sieberer, U 10, 91, 219, 240, 318, 319, 326, 473, 473n, 507n
Sieyès, Abbé 334
Sigelman, L 147
Sikk, A 662
Simmons, J W 238
Skach, C 485
Skjaeveland, A 169
Skog, O-J 458
Skowronek, S 574
Slapin, J B 115, 127, 129, 131, 132, 134, 136, 138, 139, 140, 145, 146, 148–9, 168, 325, 447,
448n, 594
Slater, D 682, 689
Slaughter, A-M 559
Slomcynski, K M 300, 424
Smith, A F M 105, 111, 474n
Smith, A R 256
Smith, D M 436, 438
Smith, E 554
Smith, M 297
Smith, S S 374, 375, 376, 385, 463, 649, 664
Smooth, W 252, 256
Page 32 of 39
Name Index
Snijkers, G 177
Snyder, J M 51n, 113, 168, 385, 407, 488, 507n
Somer-Topcu, Z 662
Somit, A 217
Sorauf, F 276
Soroka, S 70
Sousa, M M 558
Spanier, J 560n
Spânu, V 668n
Spary, C 159
Spearman, C 104
Speck, W 495
Spence, D B 574
Spiller, P T 578, 631–2
Spirling, A 116, 138, 405–6
Spirova, M 419
Spörndli, M 156, 163n
Sprungk, C 558
Squire, P 91, 96, 292, 611
Stapenhurst, R 324, 514, 520, 521, 713n
Stark, A 158
Stasavage, D 154, 714n
Stecker, C 617
Steen, J A 296
Steenbergen, M R 71, 151, 187, 188
Stefuriuc, I 620
Stein, E 520
Steiner, J 130, 135, 151, 156, 157, 325
Stepan, A 485, 679
Stephenson, M C 579
Stern, H S 105
Stevenson, C A 547
Stevenson, R 42, 51n, 128, 201, 318, 438, 440
Stewart, C 113, 168, 385
Stigler, G J 571, 618
Stiglitz, E H 113
Stimson, J A 70
Stokes, D E 70, 71
Stokes, G 648
Stolz, K 60, 615
Stone, W J 70, 218
Stourm, R 515, 522
Straayer, J 298
Strahan, R W 385, 388
Stratmann, T 239
Page 33 of 39
Name Index
Strolovich, D 256, 537

Strøm, K 4, 39, 41–2, 43, 44, 58, 153, 207, 221, 227n, 232, 237, 244n, 269, 270, 271, 279, 318,
323, 360–1, 366, 371, 377, 387, 388, 390, 407, 413, 436, 437, 438, 441, 444, 445, 449n, 464,
468, 469, 474n, 485, 536, 620, 647, 662
Stuart, M 508n
Studlar, D T 240, 251, 252, 258, 271
(p. 734) Sturm, R 515
Suberu, R 613
Sumner, W G 58
Sundquist, J L 572
Sunstein, C 571
Susskind, L 571
Svolik, M 682, 683–4, 686, 688, 691, 692n
Swaab, R I 204
Swers, M L 253, 254, 257, 258, 259
Swindle, S M 241
Szalay, K 555, 560n
Szechi, D 496
Taagepera, R 287
Tabellini, G 238, 448n, 579
Takane, Y 105
Tambulasi, R 613
Tamvaki, D 156, 163n
Tans, O 560n
Tavits, M 662
Taylor, M M 242, 252, 629
Taylor-Robinson, M M 253, 254, 260n, 629
Tekin, Y 362
Tenscher, J 534
Testa, C 333, 336
Tewksbury, D 455
Thacker, S C 345
Thames, F C 238, 240, 419, 420, 421, 424
Thatcher, M 578
Thatcher, Margaret 506n
Thayer, C 680
Thaysen, U 326
Theiss-Morse, E 72
Thies, M F 195, 231, 235, 239, 337, 387, 437, 438, 442, 448n, 569, 577
Thomas, C S 534
Thomas, R P 581n
Thomas, S 253, 258–9, 617
Thomassen, J 71, 73, 223, 274, 275, 277, 377, 594
Thompson, D 149, 152, 160, 162
Thompson, J A 169, 611, 617
Page 34 of 39
Name Index
Thompson, L 508n
Thomson, R 579, 603
Thurmond, Strom 474n
Thurstone, L L 104
Tietz, R 337
Tillman, E R 548, 558
Timmermans, A 441, 442
Tingley, D H 550, 552
Tirole, J 581n
Tocqueville, Alexis de 8, 543
Toka, G 662
Tollison, R 484
Tomkowiak, M 421, 422, 429
Tommasi, M 631–2
Tomz, M 207
Torgerson, W S 104
Toshkov, D 603
Tourangeau, R 185
Towns, A 254
Tran, A 690
Trani, B 533
Treier, S 115
Treisman, D 340, 610
Tremblay, M 251–2, 253, 257
Tresch, A 188, 527
Tripp, A M 252, 255
Trivelli, L 335
Trubowitz, P 552
Truex, R 681, 690, 692n
Truman, D 380, 526, 528, 570, 572
Truman, Harry 547
Tsebelis, G 10, 46, 88, 319, 320, 326, 333, 334, 335, 336, 338, 339, 379, 387, 460, 461, 466,
469, 470, 471, 473, 474n, 482, 485, 488, 490, 594, 647, 658, 662
Tucker, J A 662, 692n
Tullock, G 335, 355, 571
Turan, I 98n
Twain, M 316
Tzelgov, E 670n
Uhr, J 158, 334, 337
Ulam, S 105, 111
Uslaner, E M 233
Valen, H 71, 72, 218
Valenzuela, A 485
Van Assche, D 614
Vanberg, G 130, 132, 134, 138, 148, 325, 363, 437, 439–40, 442, 443, 445, 447, 448n, 507n
Page 35 of 39
Name Index
Vanberg, V 151
Van Biezen, I 216
Van Dijk, T A 159
Vandoren, P M 414n
VanDusky-Allen, J 333, 336, 337, 341
(p. 735) Van Houweling, R P 291, 300
Van Oudenhove, G 596
Van Vechten, R B 297
Van Vonno, C 223, 281
Vázquez-D’Elía, J 237, 244
Vejvoda, I 648
Vengroff, R 615
Verba, S 167, 168, 532
Vermeule, A 465
Vincent, L 255
Vlaicu, R 39, 51n, 474n, 507n
Vliegenthart, R 439
Voeten, E 114, 116
Vogel, L 60, 73, 74
Vogel, R J 292
Volden, C 50n
Vowles, J 239
Wagner, W 546, 547, 548, 560n
Wahlke, J C 9, 15, 70, 169, 268, 269, 270, 272–6, 278–9, 280, 281, 288
Walgrave, S 128, 439
Wallack, J S 498, 508n
Wängerud, L 253, 277
Ward, S 76
Ware, A 217
Warwick, P 42, 128, 203, 662
Wass, H 72
Watson, G L 614
Watt, K A 241
Wattenberg, M P 379
Wauters, B 277
Wawro, G J 317, 463
Way, L 680, 692n, 696
Wayman, F 532
Weale, A 160–1
Webb, J 572
Weber, M 65, 380, 570
Wehner, J 324, 518, 519, 520, 522, 523, 706, 710
Weingast, B R 10, 34, 40, 51n, 113, 320, 335, 338, 354, 355, 401, 413n, 459, 464, 488, 516,
569, 571, 572, 573–4, 578, 579, 580, 598, 618, 647, 664, 684, 698, 714n
Weisband, E 560n
Page 36 of 39
Name Index
Weisberg, H F 118n
Weissberg, R 70
Welch, S 253, 290, 617
Weldon, L S 259n
Wendler, F 555
Wesolowski, W 665
Wessels, B 71, 74
Weßels, B 169, 185, 234, 274, 527
Wessels, W 556, 560n
West, W 289
Wheare, K C 4, 8, 97n
Whicker, M L 617
Whip, R 258, 260n
Whitaker, R 362, 599
White, C S 76
Whitefield, S 71, 649
Whitmore, S 665
Wiberg, M 448n, 557, 558
Wiesehomeier, N 636
Wilcox, C 113, 526, 533
Wilcox, F O 560n
Wildavsky, A B 515, 545, 560n
Will, G F 295
Williams, L K 469, 662
Williams, M S 240
Williams, O C 699
Williams, R 613
Williamson, O 581n
Wilmerding, L 571
Wilson, C 43
Wilson, J Q 288, 571, 572, 575
Wilson, R K 200
Wilson, Woodrow 8, 352, 570, 572, 578
Wing, M 9
Wintrobe, R 678, 681
Winzen, T 555, 556
Wiseman, A E 50n
Withey, J 254
Wittkopf, E R 552, 560n
Wlezien, C 71
Wodak, R 159
Wolbrecht, C 253
Wolchik, S 692n
Wolf, K D 544
Woll, C 531, 535
Page 37 of 39
Name Index
Woll, P 570, 571

Woo, B-K 276
Wood, B D 575, 579
Wright, A 612
Wright, G C 113, 298
Wright, J R 532, 677, 679, 682, 685, 686–7, 688, 690, 692n
(p. 736) Wu, C-L 223
Wüest, R 422
Xia, M 614
Yao, D A 488
Yeltsin, Boris 316, 656
Yläoutinen, S 520
Yoon, M Y 251
Yordanova, N 362, 598, 604
Yoshinaka, A 421, 599, 601
Young, D J 420, 421
Young, F W 105
Young, G 104
Young, L 225
Zajc, D 665
Zechmeister, E 71
Zeckhauser, R 489
Zeh, W 7
Zeiss, J 64
Zeng, L 291–2
Zetterberg, P 254, 255, 260n
Zielinski, J K 424
Zimmermann, E 379
Zittel, T 167, 233, 271
Zubek, R 473n
Zucchini, F 114, 473n
Zucco, C 114, 632
Zupan, M A 489
Zürn, M 3
Page 38 of 39
Subject Index
Subject Index

2014
Subject Index
Note: bold entries refer to figures or tables.
accountability, and electoral systems 232, 234

agenda-setting 18, 455–6
agenda control 456
alternative sets 456
bicameralism 466
committees 464–5
final stage decision-making 456
framing 455
gatekeeping 466–7
institutional aspects of 456, 461–2, 471–2
distribution of agenda powers 472
legislative parties 386
parliamentary systems 403–6
United States Congress 403
under majority rule 456–61
cycling majorities 456–7
setter model 459–60
veto-player theory 460–1
mass media 455
negative agenda power 465
parliamentary government 468–71
parliamentary rules and procedures 319–20
policy agenda dynamics 455–6
presidential systems 469
proposal and amendment rights 463–5
research gaps 473
Page 1 of 46
Subject Index
Romer-Rosenthal model 36
sequencing and ordering 467–8
timetable control 462–3
veto power 465–6
Albania 648, 651, 669n
Alceste 160
Alliance of Socialists and Democrats (S&D) 596, 597
ambition:
formation of 293–4
legislative careers 290, 292, 302
Latin America 630
American Political Science Association 2, 194
political parties 400
antagonistic cooperation 57, 58, 69, 75
institutional socialization 59–61
appropriateness, logic of 10, 270
arena legislatures 88, 89, 286
Argentina:
committee assignments 362
chairs 631–2
gatekeeping by committees 632
gender quotas 251
legislative careers 299–300
voting behavior of legislators 633
Austria 316, 321
authoritarian legislatures 21–2, 692
challenges in studying 677–8
changed nature of authoritarian regimes 679
classic works on authoritarian institutions 678–80
focus on totalitarian regimes 679
Cold War-era views of 678–80
constraining function of 676, 682–5
delegate selection 690–1
distribution among regime type 677, 685, 686
effects of 688–9
economic growth 688–9
regime longevity 688, 689
focus of research on 676–7
functions of 690
future research 692
non-constraining roles of 678–9
number of parties allowed 686
party-assembly interactions 691
(p. 738) prevalence of 677, 686
reasons for establishing 680
Page 2 of 46
Subject Index
cooptation of opposition 682–3

cooptation theory 684, 685
dividing the opposition 682
elite investment 684
information provision 681–2
legitimization of regime 680–1
limitations on empirical study of 687
natural resource endowments 686–7
power-sharing 683–4, 685
regime type 685
rent-distribution 682–3
risks faced by members of 690
risks in establishing/liberalizing 689–90
as rubber stamps 681
autocracies, party switching 429–30
Bank of England 698
behaviorism 9
Belarus 668n
bicameralism 16–17, 332–4, 345–6
agenda-setting 466
chamber symmetry 333
compositional congruence 333
definition of 334
difficulty in measuring effects of 332–3, 336
effects of 338
federalism 339–40, 345
formal authority of chambers 333
government formation strategies 337
government problems with 337
institutionalist approach to 333
interchamber competition 336
interchamber conflict 337
legislative process 336–8, 339
measurement of 340–1, 344–5
international comparisons 342–4
paradoxical position of 332–3
party organization 337
policy effects 335–6
protecting minority interests 335
reduction of corruption 336
representation 335
research approaches 338
spending policy 336
territorial representation 339–40
typology of 333
Page 3 of 46
Subject Index
bicameral-rivalry theory, and Congressional committees 358–60

competition for policy influence 359
maximizing payments from lobbyists 359
Bill of Rights (1689, England) 697, 700
Bosnia and Herzegovina 668n, 669n
Brazil 299, 633, 690, 691
Brazilian Workers Party (PT) 241
budgetary reversions 22
definition of 696
English Parliament's power of the purse 698
executive control of 701
executive-favoring reversions (EFRs) 701, 702–6, 707
executive dominance 706
exploitation of 711
increased adoption of 710
lowered life expectancy of democracy 709
reducing damaging effects of 711
undermining control of decree power 709
undermining of electoral democracy 708–9
undermining of vote of confidence 706–8
executive's complementary powers 697, 703
as executive's proposal 702
Burkina Faso (1970 constitution) 703–4
Chile (1925 constitution) 702–3
future research 710–11
as last year's budget 704
Pakistan (1962 constitution) 705–6
Spain (1931 constitution) 704–5
Spain (1966) 705
legislatures weak power over the budget 701
measurement of legislative power 710–11
permanent reversions 703
provisional reversions 704
re-engineering of 696, 697
reversionary trigger 696–7, 706
Burkina Faso (1970 constitution) 703–4
Chile (1925 constitution) 702–3
Pakistan (1962 constitution) 705–6
(p. 739) Spain (1931 constitution) 704
Spain (1966) 705
statutory provisions 711
see also public finance and legislatures
Bulgaria 647, 651, 668n
Bundestag 156, 337, 375, 390, 463
staff resources 375
Page 4 of 46
Subject Index
bureaucracy, control of 567, 569

agency loss 567, 568
methods for mitigating 568–9, 577
bureaucratic drift 576–7
delegation over time 579–80
institutional constraints 574
multiple principals 568, 572–3
spatial models for 575–6
perspectives on:
bureaucratic autonomy 570
Civic Republicans 571
democratic theory 570
Neodemocrats 571
Neoprogressives 571
Pluralist School 570–1
Progressives 570
Public Choice School 571
preferences of bureaucrats 576–8
temporal instability of principals 568, 579
United States:
Congressional abdication 572
Congressional dominance 572
ex ante controls 574, 579
fire alarms 573
incentives for 573
legislative coalition 573–4
multiple principals 572–3
police patrols 573
presidential control 572, 573, 574–5
Burkina Faso 703–4
cabinets:
cabinet stability 42, 44
delegation of policy-making 440
ministerial drift in coalition government 440–1
policing coalition bargain 441–2
portfolio allocation 42, 384
California state assembly, institutional socialization 60
Canada 70, 225
candidate selection:
authoritarian legislatures 690–1
consequences of 215, 216
criteria for classifying methods of 215
as defining function of political parties 214
democratization of 216
impact on competition 218
Page 5 of 46
Subject Index
impact on representation 217–18

impact on responsiveness 218–19
impact on legislative behavior 213, 214, 218–19, 220, 226, 241, 391
party cohesion/discipline 221
impact on party unity 218–20
cartel party 223–4
disjointed party 222–3
stratarchical party 224–5
incumbency advantage 218
Latin America 630, 631
legal regulation of 214
party cohesion/discipline 408–10, 411–12
passage rates of executive legislation 498–9, 505–6
primary elections 218, 219, 221, 222–3, 391, 393n
relevance for legislative studies 214–15
reselection as primary political goal 213
screening of candidates 408–9
selectorates 215
inclusive vs exclusive 215–16
see also legislative recruitment
careers, see legislative careers
Central and Eastern Europe 21, 647–8, 661
cabinet instability 662–3
classification of governmental systems 651–6
constitutional powers of legislatures 652–5, 660
inconsistencies in 650–1
legislative power 656–7
committees:
membership 665
party-committee relationship 664–5
constitutional design 648–50
continued amendment of 650
European Union influence 649
(non)-strategic calculation 648–9
(p. 740) European Union accession 663
executive dominance 663
executive turnover 662–3
executive weakness 662
institutionalization of legislatures 664–6
committee membership 665
party-committee relationship 664–5
professionalization 665
legislative careers 300
legislative control over composition of executive 659
legislative control over composition of legislature 658
Page 6 of 46
Subject Index
legislative control over policy-making 657–8, 665–6

legislative strength 656–7, 659–61
factors affecting 647, 657
impact of party system 661–4
impact on democratization 647, 667–8
index of constitutional powers 652–5, 660
parliamentary dissolution 658
party system and legislative strength 661–4
high party fragmentation 662
low party institutionalization 662
public finance and legislatures 657–8, 665–6
sub-national legislatures 612–13
Centrum voor Parlementaire Geschiedenis (Netherlands) 7
Chile:
budgetary reversions (1925 constitution) 702–3
candidate selection 408
public finance and legislatures 639
Civic Republicans, and bureaucratic control 571
coalition government 18
committees 363–4
experimental research on coalition formation 201–5
context of experiments 204
demand bargaining 203–4
trust 204
formal models of legislatures 41–5
efficient bargaining model 43–4
game theory 41
government formation 41–4
multi-stage game 44
sequential bargaining models 42–3
joint policy-making and separate accountability 436–7, 447
Latin American legislatures 641–2
legislative debate 148
minority governments 41–2
opportunistic behavior by partners 437
passage rates of executive legislation 491–2
policing the coalition bargain 440
cabinet-level 441–2
coalition committees 442
committee chair assignments 445
inside parliament 443–6
junior ministers 442–3, 446, 448
legislative committees 443–5
Page 7 of 46
Subject Index
legislative policing strength 445–6

ministerial drift 440–1
ministers' informational advantage 440, 441
outside parliament 441–3, 447–8
party summits 442
policy-making challenges 437
portfolio assignment 42
position-taking by partners 438
future research 447
legislation 439–40
legislative amendments 440
parliamentary speech 438–9, 447
prevalence of 436
surplus coalitions 42
tensions arising from need to compromise 436
tensions between party elite and supporters 437
voter perceptions of party policy positions 438
Cobden Club 515–16
collective representation 70–1
Colombia 408, 629
(p. 741) Comité d’Histoire Parlementaire et Politique (France) 7
committees 17
agenda-setting 464–5
assignment to 361–2
Central and Eastern Europe 664–5
coalition government 363–4
comparative research on 360–1, 363–5
definition of 352
distributive approach to 40
empirical testing of theories of 365–6
future research 366
impact of term limits 298
informational theory of 40
legislative efficiency 352
measures of strength of 361
monitoring functions 363–4
paucity of comparative research 352–3, 360, 365
personal vote-seeking 364–5
in proportional representation systems 364
Page 8 of 46
Subject Index
rules and procedures 323

sub-national legislatures 618
women's assignments 254, 260n
see also Congressional committees
Commons, House of (UK):
control of royal decrees 699–700
emergence of vote of confidence 699
guillotine 463
institutional socialization 60
power of the purse 697–8
Public Accounts Committee 518–19, 522
rules and procedures, failures of 317
Temporary Standing Orders 312
vote-buying in eighteenth century 495–7
see also English Parliament
Comparative Manifestos Project (CMP) 128, 131
competition:
democracy 217
electoral systems 232, 234–5
alternative operationalizations of 235–7
inter/intra-party defeat 235
inter-party competition 235–6
intra-party competition 236
conditional party government 374
Conference of Parliamentary Committees for Union Affairs of Parliaments of the European Union
(COSAC) 554, 560n
confidence procedures 318–19, 468–9
emergence in English Parliament 699
executive-favoring reversions (EFRs) 706–8
party cohesion 403–5
Congressional Budget Office (USA) 518
Congressional committees 345, 358–60
assignment to:
distributional theory 354–5
informational theory 356–7
party cartel theory 358
bicameral-rivalry theory 358–60
competition for policy influence 359
maximizing payments from lobbyists 359
distributional theory of 40, 353–5
committee characteristics 355
overcoming decision instability 354–5
unrepresentativeness of members 355
formal models 35, 40
Page 9 of 46
Subject Index
future research 365

gatekeeping powers 355
golden age of research on 352, 353, 365
informational theory of 40, 356–7
organizational efficiency 356
representativeness of members 356–7
specialization by members 356
party cartel theory of 357–8
self-selection of members 355
as solution to legislative problem 401
(un)representativeness of members 357
distributional theory 355
as veto players 355
women's committee assignments 254
see also committees
(p. 742) congressional systems:
individual autonomy 94–5
institutional autonomy 93–4
partisan autonomy 94
consequentiality, logic of 270
Conservative Party (UK), 1922 Committee 374
constituency service:
content analysis 134–5, 136, 138
Costa Rica 242, 629
electoral institutions 242
European Parliament 239–40
Latin American legislatures 629
personal vote-seeking 239–40, 243
role behavior 271
women legislators 252, 253
constitutionalism, rise of 6
content analysis 13, 126–7, 141
accounting for what is not said 140–1
applications of 129–30
computer-based analysis 127–8
Alceste 160
Wordfish 132
Wordscores 131–2
constituency service by legislators 134–5
debate and deliberation in legislatures 135, 147, 160
definition of 127
goal of 127
Page 10 of 46
Subject Index
latent variables 135, 139–40

legislative oversight 134
levels of analysis 139
media bias 135
origins and evolution of 127
party manifestos and ideology:
agenda effects 132–3
Comparative Manifestos Project 128–31
Wordfish 132
Wordscores 131–2
policy agenda 133
topic models 133–4
recent trends in 138
research design issues 135–6
human vs machine coding 137
inter-coder reliability 137
reliability 137
strategic nature of texts 136–7
use of comparable texts 137–8
validity 136
selection effects 140
strategic data-generating process 138–9
uncertainty 140
conventions, parliamentary 311
cooptation theory, and authoritarian legislatures 682–3, 684, 685
Costa Rica 299
constituency service 242, 629
Croatia 648, 650, 651, 656, 669n
Cuban Missile Crisis 547
Cyprus 4
Czech Republic 647, 650, 651, 656, 668n, 669n
debate and deliberation in legislatures 145–6, 162–3
content analysis 135, 147, 160
conventional view of 145, 161
deliberative approach to 145, 149–58
constraints on deliberation 150
criticism of 150
cross-national comparison of deliberative action 151–3, 154–6
deliberation in US Congress 156–8
extent of deliberative action 152
factors affecting quality of deliberation 152–6
goals of deliberation 149
government/opposition parties 155
institutional factors 150–1, 161–2
Page 11 of 46
Subject Index
interaction with public sphere 158

learning 151
legislative outcomes 156
quality of deliberation 151–2, 156–8
discourse approach to 145–6, 159–61
future research 162
information revelation 146
position-taking by coalition parties 438–9
rational choice approach to 146–9
role of 13, 162
strategic/partisan-rhetoric approach to 145, 146–9
coalition parties 148
electoral system effects 148–9
(p. 743) intraparty politics 148–9
limited impact on policy-making 147
reasons for speaking 147
women's participation in 254
decision-making:
agenda-setting 456
under majority rule 456–61
cycling majorities 456–7
Declaration of the Rights of Man and of the Citizen (1789) 514
decree power:
control undermined by executive-favoring reversions 709
English Parliament's control of royal decrees 699–700
presidential systems 640–1, 656, 658
deliberation, see debate and deliberation in legislatures
democracy:
elements of 216–17
political parties 372
democratization and legislative strength, Central and Eastern Europe 647, 667–8
Denmark 362, 530
discourse analysis, and debate and deliberation in legislatures 159–61
Discourse Quality Index (DQI) 151–2
distributional theory:
committee characteristics 355
as solution to decision instability 354–5
unrepresentativeness of members 355
European Parliament committees 362, 598
Eastern Europe, see Central and Eastern Europe
economic growth, and authoritarian legislatures 688–9
e-government, and sub-national legislatures 621
elections:
interest group influence 537
Page 12 of 46
Subject Index
second-order elections 616

sub-national legislatures 614, 615–16
electoral competition:
sociology of legislatures and legislators 57, 58, 75
voters' control of legislators 69
electoral systems:
accountability 232, 234
budgetary politics 517, 520
collective action problems 238
competition 232, 234–5
alternative operationalizations of 235–7
inter/intra-party defeat 235
inter-party competition 235–6
intra-party competition 236
congruence between legislators and voters 71
election of women 251–2
as embedded systems 244
endogeneity problem 244
European Parliament 593
legislative behavior 15, 231–2, 233, 243–4
legislative speech 148–9
mechanical effects of 232
monitoring and sanctioning:
political parties 240–2
voters 242–3
personal vote-seeking 231, 232–3, 234–5, 410–11
constituencies appealed to 237–8
constituency service 239–40, 243
diffuse constituencies 240
electoral benefit of 243
impact of candidate selection methods 241
incentives for 237
methods 237
pork-barrel politics 238–9
responsiveness to local interests 238
psychological effects of 232, 237–40
elite studies, interviews 171
El Salvador 547
English Parliament 696, 697, 700, 712
vote of confidence, emergence of 699
see also Commons, House of (UK); Parliament, Houses of (UK)
Estonia 647, 651, 656, 668n
Page 13 of 46
Subject Index
(p. 744) European Affairs Committee (EAC) 554, 555, 556

European Candidate Survey 167
European Central Bank 4
European Commission, and interest groups 531
European Consortium for Political Research 2
European Court of Justice 596–7
European integration, and national legislatures 3, 553
academic interest in 554
constraint on national democracy 553
deparliamentization 553–4
European Affairs Committee 554, 555, 556
Europeanization of national parliaments 557
Eurosceptic parties 556
future research 558, 559–60
institutional adaptation 556
institutional convergence 555
interconnection of European and domestic agendas 557–8
intergovernmental policy coordination 561n
inter-parliamentary networking 554–5
mandating ministers 556
opposition parties 555–6
participation rights in EU governance 554
plenary debates 555–6
scrutiny of EU matters:
factors influencing 556, 557
increase in 554–5, 558
variations in 556
European Parliament (EP) 1, 20
career backgrounds of candidates 593
committees:
appointment of rapporteurs 599, 600
assignment to 362, 599
distributional theory 598
impact on legislative behavior 603–4
influence of political groups 599
influence of rapporteurs 603
legislative outputs 603
partisan perspective on 599
research gaps 600, 603–4
seniority 599, 600
constituency service 239–40
diversity of electoral systems 592, 593
influence on behavior 593
Page 14 of 46
Subject Index
future research 605

growth of academic interest in 591–2, 604
influence of national parties on MEPs 594–5
institutional socialization 60
interest groups 527, 531, 599
legislative careers 300, 593, 595
policy preferences of MEPs 594, 595
political groups in 594
allocation of positions in 598
coalition formation 602
congruence with national parties 597
ideological nature of 596–7
impact on legislative behavior 600–2
influence on committees 599
research gaps 602
roll call requests 602
similarity to factions 597
switching between 598
voting cohesion 600–2
quality of MEPs 595
rapporteurs in 592, 599, 600
influence of 603
research gaps 595
similarities with US Congress 591
trustee/delegate roles 276
turnover of MEPs 595
types of MEPs 593, 595
views of MEPs on European integration 593–4
weak MEP/voter connection 592–3, 595
European Parliament Research Group 177
European People's Party (EPP) 596, 597
European Science Foundation 188
European Social Survey 188
European Union (EU) 548
divergent preferences of voters and legislators 73
economic bailout of Cyprus 4
interest groups 527, 531
(p. 745) executive agencies, and decline of legislatures 3
see also bureaucracy, control of
experimental research 14, 194
average treatment effect 196
causal inference 195, 196
causal questions 194–5
Page 15 of 46
Subject Index
coalition formation 201–5

Baron-Ferejohn model 202–3
context of experiments 204
demand bargaining 203–4
trust 204
control groups 195
experimental design:
between-subjects design 196, 197
context 197
external validity 198
induced value 197, 207
influence of research traditions 197
internal validity 197
random assignment and sampling 196
use of student subjects 206–7
within-subjects design 196–7
experimental inference 207
future research 207
legislator-voter relations 205–6
mundane realism 206
random assignment 195, 196
responsiveness 205–6
roles of experiments 196
voter participation in deliberations 206
voting in legislatures 198–201
backward/forward agendas 199–200
institutional effects 200–1
majority rule (in)stability 198–200
expert surveys 186–8
factional affiliation, Japan 299
factor analysis 104
federalism:
bicameralism 339–40, 345
sub-national legislatures 611, 613
Fianna Fáil 224, 597
filibuster 5, 463, 474n
Fine Gael 597
Finland 72, 214, 557
Food and Drug Act (1906, USA) 567
foreign policy, and legislatures 19–20, 552–3
constraints on involvement in 552
delegation of policy-making to government 543–4
executive domination of foreign policy 543–4
foreign economic relations 549–51
Page 16 of 46
Subject Index
increasing involvement of 551–2

electoral considerations 551
global interdependence 551
influence of 544
information asymmetry 552
United States Congress 545–6
foreign economic relations 550, 551
increased assertiveness of 551–2
security policy 546–7
War Powers Resolution (1973) 547
war on terror 552
war powers and security policy 546–9
constraining influence of legislatures 548
ex-ante approval 549
joint military missions 548
parliamentary veto power 547–8
participation in Iraq War 549
reasons for limited involvement in 549
see also European integration, and national legislatures
formal models of legislatures 11–12, 29–31
coalition government 41–5
game theory 41
government formation 41–4
minority governments 41–2
multi-stage game 44
portfolio assignment 42
committees 40–1
distributive approach to 40
informational theory of 40
comparative perspective 45–9
institutional equilibria 47–9
veto players approach 46–7
criteria for 30, 38
(p. 746) empirical content 30
equilibrium institutions 30
universality 30
game theory 35–9
Baron-Ferejohn model 37, 202–3
Page 17 of 46
Subject Index
empirical content 38–9

Gilligan-Krehbiel model 38
lack of explanatory power 38
multi-stage game 44
problems with 49
Romer-Rosenthal model 36–7
universality 38
general theory of legislatures 49–50
institutional analysis 32–4
mathematical representation 29
nature of formal modeling 30
purposes of 29
rational choice theory 29
social choice theory 31–2
aggregation function 31
Structure-Induced Equilibrium 34–5, 355
framing, and agenda-setting 455
France:
dual mandates 615
staff resources 376
presidency 466
sub-national legislature research 612
French Constitution:
guillotine 470
package vote 470
Frontex 568
game theory 12
multi-stage game 44
Baron-Ferejohn model 37, 202–3
empirical content 38–9
Gilligan-Krehbiel model 38
institutional equilibria 47–9
lack of explanatory power 38
problems with 49
Romer-Rosenthal model 36–7
universality 38
veto players approach 46–7
Page 18 of 46
Subject Index
Gamson's law 203

gatekeeping:
Congressional committees 355
gender:
gendered nature of legislatures 254
see also women in legislatures
gender quotas 251, 252, 255, 260n
General Agreement on Tariffs and Trade (GATT) 551
German Conference Committee 156
Germany:
legislative deliberation 151–3, 154–6
legislative parties:
conditional leadership dominance 376
policy committees 376
staff resources 375
legislator-voter relations 74
parliamentary involvement in military affairs 547
role of legislature in government formation 4
globalization, and decline of legislatures 3
Glorious Revolution (1688) 546, 697
gridlock:
bicameralism 333, 335, 339
consensus decision-making 580
executive/legislator interaction 485
Latin American legislatures 637, 638
rules and procedures 16, 317, 321
guillotine 444, 463, 470
head of state, role in constitutional systems 651
Hicks paradox 488
History of Parliament Trust (UK) 7
(p. 747) home style 9, 239, 240, 629, 631
Honduras 629
Hungary 321, 647, 649, 650, 651, 668n
hybrid regimes 676
Iceland 222–3
ideology:
content analysis of party manifestos:
Wordfish 132
Page 19 of 46
Subject Index
Wordscores 131–2
legislator-voter relations 71–2
impeachment 699
induced value theory, and experimental research 197, 207
influence, use in eighteenth-century England 495–7
informational theory:
organizational efficiency 356
representativeness of members 356–7
specialization by members 356
European Parliament committees 362, 598–9
institutional change:
critical junctures 57–8
path dependency 58
path inefficiency 58
institutional equilibria, and formal models of legislatures 47–9
institutionalism 12
evolution of legislative studies 7–11
Structure-Induced Equilibrium 34–5, 355
historical institutionalism 10–11
as methodology 33
new institutionalism 9–10, 33, 75
old institutionalism 7–8
party switching 419
sociological institutionalism 10, 11
Institutional Revolutionary Party (PRI, Mexico) 430
institutions:
impact on political behavior 150–1
political institutions 57
establishment of 57–8
social institutions 57
Interamerican Development Bank, Structural Policy Index 639
interest groups 19, 526
accessing legislators 532
resource exchange 532–3, 534
benefits of 526
detrimental effects of 526
development of research on 528–9
diversity of 533
electoral influence 537
European Commission 531
Page 20 of 46
Subject Index
European Parliament 527, 531, 599

European Union 527, 531
evolution of 526–7
future research:
influence of 536–7
legislator-interest group linkages 537
legislator-interest group relations 535–6
goals of 526, 536–7
influence of 530, 536–7
integration into public policy-making 527
decline in 530
legislative tactics and strategy 530–2
legislator-interest group relations 535–6
parliaments 527, 530–1, 534
patterns of legislator-interest group contacts 533–4
focus on sympathetic legislators 534
political role of 529
relationship with political parties 527, 534, 537
renewed interest in 529
variation in activity across issues 531–2
International Commission for the History of Representative and Parliamentary Institutions 7
International Monetary Fund 4, 550
International Political Science Association 2
Internet, sub-national legislatures' use of 621
Inter-Parliamentary Union 489–90, 516
intersectionality, and women in legislatures 255–6
(p. 748) Interuniversity Consortium for Political Research 289
interviews 14, 167
advantages of 168
behaviour during 173–4
constructivist theories of 173
contacting subjects 172–3
disadvantages of 167
elite studies 171
focus of representation 274
interviewer/interviewee relations 171–2
judging quality of 176–7, 188
qualitative analysis 167
questions 174–6
closed questions 174–5
formatting 175–6
open questions 174
order of 175
sensitive 175
wording 175
Page 21 of 46
Subject Index
recording of 176
response rates 185–6
sampling 172
selection bias 186
as social exchange 172
use in exploratory research 169
use in legislative studies 169–70
parliamentary norms 169
roles 169
value of 167
Iraq War 549
Ireland 362, 364
Israel 223, 224, 241
Italy 87, 95
parliamentary voting methods 322
regional councils 611–12, 618
Item Response Theory 104
Japan 299, 376, 547
junior ministers, policing coalition bargain, 442–3, 446, 448
Kommission für Geschichte des Parlamentarismus und der politischen Parteien (Germany) 7
Korean War 547
Kosovo 547, 668n, 669n
Kuomintang party 223
Labour Party (UK) 375
ambition 630
candidate selection 630, 631
coalition politics 641–2
committees 631–2
chair assignments 631–2
electoral connection 629–30
bill initiation 629–30
constituency service 629
constituent-representative relations 631
growth of research on 628
home style 629, 631
legislative careers 299–300, 630
legislative-executive relations 642–3
gridlock 638
literature on 637–8
policy outcomes 637, 639
presidents' agenda implementation 639–41
legislative recruitment 630
Page 22 of 46
Subject Index
presidents' agenda implementation 639–41

agenda-setting 639
bill approval rates 639–40
determinants of 640
presidential decrees 640–1
uncertainty over legislators' preferences 640
representation of women 630
research gaps 636–7
voting behavior of legislators 632–4
abstentions 635
alternative to roll-call analysis 635–6
cartel thesis 632, 633
competing principals approach 632–4
co-sponsorship of bills 635–6
electoral rules 634
gubernatorial pressure 634
party cohesion/unity 632, 635
Latvia 647, 651, 668n
lawmaking 18–19, 495–7
defeat of government bills 482, 486, 488, 506n
dominant role of government 482
executive/legislator interaction 482
(p. 749) influence of party systems 485
passage rates of executive legislation:
bill initiation and statutory achievements 494–5
box scores 490–1
influence of partisan support 485–6
lack of comparative research 489–90
measures of legislative success 490
multivariate analysis 492, 493
national constituencies 492–4
parliamentary systems 491–2, 494, 499
party control over ballot access 498–9, 505–6
by political system/government status 491–2
use of partisan resources 498–9
process in democratic countries 483–4
initiators of bills 484
Turkish parliament 481–2
uncertainty 482
United States Congress, fast-track bill 481
unpredictability of legislators' voting 482, 486
cross-pressures on 486, 488–9
vote-buying 482–3, 486–7, 495
Page 23 of 46
Subject Index
eighteenth-century England 495–7

winning voting coalitions 486, 487
leader democracy 58
legislative behavior:
antagonistic cooperation 57, 58
electoral systems 15, 231–2, 233, 243–4
constituency service 239–40
monitoring and sanctioning by parties 240–2
personal vote-seeking 232–5, 237–40
pork-barrel bills 238–9
European Parliament:
impact of committees 603–4
impact of political groups 600–2
impact of candidate selection methods 213, 214, 218–19, 220, 226, 241, 391
institutional approach to 221
preferences of legislators 373
pre-parliamentary socialization 60
significant party behavior 406
sociological approach to 221
role perceptions 616–17
voting behavior 617
term limits 296–8
legislative careers 16, 286–7, 300–2
ambition 290, 292, 302
candidate emergence 290, 293
comparative studies 298–300
definitional difficulties 287–8
electoral systems 287
European Parliament 300, 593, 595
European Parliament MEPs 593
event history models 292–3, 300
Latin America 299–300, 630
macro-level studies 290–1
measurement difficulties 288–9
methodology for studying 300–1
micro-level choice studies 291, 300
political institutions 289–90, 301
Page 24 of 46
Subject Index
professional politicians 288, 292

research challenges 301–2
lack of data 301–2
methods of study 301
significance of 302
strategic interaction of incumbents and challengers 293
strategic retirement 293
studies of US Congress 291–2
term limits 294–5
effects of 297–8
impact on legislators' origins 296
impact on turnover 295, 296
post-legislative careers 295–6
transformative legislatures 286
transitions 292
value of holding office 294
see also candidate selection; legislative recruitment
(p. 750) legislative committees, see committees; Congressional committees
legislative parties 372–4
agenda-setting 386, 403–6
analytical models 372
catch-all parties 379–80
caucus 374
complexity of 372–3
definition of 371, 393n
elite parties 378
entrepreneurial party 380
extra-parliamentary party organization 372
dominance over 376
elite parties 378
mass parties 378–9
factors affecting legislative impact of
access to office 390
costs of exit 390–1
partyness of government 387–8
party size 389
party unity 388–9
stability of 389–90
functions of 372, 418
hierarchical structure 374–6
conditional party government 374
Page 25 of 46
Subject Index
leadership 375
middle management 375
staff resources 375–6
idiographic literature on 387
independence of 379–80
internal specialization 376–7
policy committees 376–7
principal-agent framework 373, 377–8
elite parties 378
leader-caucus relations 375
as procedural cartels 386, 403
reasons for existence of 380–1
allocation of cabinet portfolios 384
collective action problems in legislature 382–3
functionalist perspective 381
legislators' perspective 382–6
normative accounts 381–2
policy impact 385–6
social choice problems 383
voter mobilization 383–4
responsible party government 372
significant party behavior 406
state legislatures (USA) 617
veto-player theory 387
see also party cohesion; party discipline; party switching; party unity; political parties
legislative recruitment 14–15, 61–8
assets for legislative recruitment and careers 63
barriers and obstacles 66
challenge-response model 66–7
impact of end of Cold War 67–8
legitimacy challenge 68
competition for political leadership 61–2
contenders 62
contenders' resources 63, 64
contradiction in 65
electorates 62
elite restrictions on access 62
inequality 61
insider-outsider differential 66, 68
Latin America 630
Page 26 of 46
Subject Index
party selectorates 62
political professionalization 64, 65
public and media scrutiny 63
from public sector 66
selectorates 62
double task of 64
external focus of 63
internal focus of 63–4
from teaching profession 68
turnover rates 68
see also candidate selection; legislative careers
legislative strength:
Central and Eastern Europe 656–7, 659–61
factors affecting 647, 657
impact of party system 661–4
(p. 751) impact on democratization 647, 667–8
index of constitutional powers 652–5, 660
democracy 647
legislative studies:
evolution of 5–11
behaviorism 9
dominance of American scholars 11
functionalist approaches 8
historical institutionalism 10–11
historical research 7
legal-constitutional scholarship 6–7
new institutionalism 9–10
old institutionalism 7–8
philosophical roots of 6
sociological institutionalism 10, 11
systems theory 8
growth of 2
influence of micro-level approach 91, 96
information availability 2–3
journals 2
supply-and-demand model 62–3
theoretical approaches in 11–12
Legislative Studies Quarterly (LSQ) 169–70
legislative viscosity 88
legislative voting:
amendment procedure 467–8
experimental research 198–201
backward/forward agendas 199–200
Page 27 of 46
Subject Index
institutional effects 200–1

majority rule (in)stability 198–200
parliamentary rules and procedures 320–2
sequencing and ordering 467–8
spatial models of 105–13
DW-NOMINATE 107–11
Markov Chain Monte Carlo methods 111–13
successive procedure 467–8
unpredictability of 482, 486
cross-pressures on legislators 486, 488–9
vote-buying 486–7, 495
see also legislative behavior; roll-call analysis
legislator-voter relations 69, 75
asymmetric nature of 69, 70–1
collective congruence 71
collective representation 70–1
congruence between 70
congruence concerning politics 72
content analysis of constituency service 134–5
control through electoral competition 69
convergent preferences 70
divergent preferences 70, 73
electoral systems 71
ideological congruence 71–2
as principal-agent relationship 69, 74
process preferences 72–3
reciprocal nature of 71
responsible-party model 71
legislatures:
decline of 3–4
definition of 1
different names for 1
elective function 1–2, 4
etymological roots of term 1
general theory of 49–50
organizational variety 40
policy influence of 4–5
significance of 4–5
see also formal models of legislatures; typologies and classifications of legislatures
Libya 547
Lisbon Treaty 554
Lithuania 647, 651, 656, 668n
Macedonia 648, 650, 651, 656, 668n
Page 28 of 46
Subject Index
Magna Carta (1215) 514

majority rule, agenda-setting under 456–61
setter model 459–60
veto-player theory 460–1
manifestos, content analysis of:
Wordfish 132
Wordscores 131–2
Markov Chain Monte Carlo (MCMC) simulation 105, 111–13
mass media, and agenda-setting 455
(p. 752) media bias, and content analysis 135
median voter theorem 104
methodology 12–14
see also content analysis; debate and deliberation in legislatures; experimental research;
formal models
of legislatures; interviews; scaling methods; surveys
Mexico 87, 95, 223, 634
ministerial drift in coalition government 440–1
minority interests, and bicameralism 335
minority representation, and sub-national legislatures 615
mixed systems 651
models, see formal models of legislatures
Moldova 647, 650, 651, 668n, 669n
Montenegro 669n
motivations of legislators 226, 244n
multidimensional scaling (MDS) 104
multilevel governance:
exclusion of legislatures 559
Mutiny Act (1689, England) 700
Myanmar 676, 680
National Action Party (PAN, Mexico) 430
National Audit Office (UK) 522
National Labour Review Board 573
neo-corporatism, and decline of legislatures 3
Neodemocrats, and bureaucratic control 571
neo-institutionalism, and role analysis 268–9
Neoprogressives, and bureaucratic control 571
Netherlands 73, 223, 311, 377
new media, sub-national legislatures use of 621
New Zealand 214
NOMINATE model 105
North American Free Trade Association (NAFTA) 551
North Atlantic Treaty Organization (NATO) 548
Page 29 of 46
Subject Index
Northern Ireland 612

Norway 214, 530
observational research 195
Omnibus Trade and Competitiveness Act (1988, USA) 551
Organization for Economic Cooperation and Development (OECD) 666
oversight 20
content analysis 134
functions of legislatures 86
cabinet-level 441–2
inside parliament 443–6
junior ministers 442–3, 446, 448
legislative committees 443–5
legislative policing strength 445–6
outside parliament 441–3, 447–8
party summits 442
see also bureaucracy, control of
Pakistan 705–6
Paraguay 679
Parliament, Houses of (UK):
financial scrutiny of government 518, 522
role in budgetary decisions 519
Parliamentary Elites of Latin America project 636
parliamentary questions 126
bureaucratic delegation 569
content analysis 134–5, 138, 139
functions of 138
opposition use of 439
European Parliament 448n
parliamentary control of government 322–3
parliamentary systems:
confidence convention 403–5
definition of 508n, 651
as fused power systems 84
individual autonomy 94–5
legislatures' elective function 1–2, 4, 41
legislatures in 84
partisan autonomy 94–5
party cohesion 403–6
Page 30 of 46
Subject Index
passage rates of executive legislation 491–2, 494, 499

parliaments, origins of term 1
(p. 753) Partial-Birth Abortion Ban Act (USA, 2003) 160
Parti-Rep (Participation and Representation) project 223
party cohesion 220–1, 388, 412
agenda-setting:
centrist parties 409
Congressional parties 400–2
constitutional context 400
definition of 399
impact of candidate selection methods 408–10, 411–12
Krehbiel's model of 402
leader-induced equilibrium 412
multiparty settings 409–10
political accountability 400
selective incentives 410–12
candidate selection 411–12
electoral system 410–11
legislative organization 411
significant party behavior 406–7
party competition, salience theory of 128
party discipline 220–1, 388, 412
Congressional parties 400–2
Krehbiel's model of party cohesion 402
definition of 399
impact of candidate selection methods 408–10, 411–12
multiparty settings 409–10
parties-or-preference debate 399, 407
party leadership 412
party switching 421
as theoretical construct 399
Party of the Democratic Revolution (PRD, Mexico) 430
party organization, legislative independence 89
party switching 18, 418–19
approaches to studying 419–20
institutional 419
strategic 419
autocracies 429–30
Page 31 of 46
Subject Index
contextual conditions of 422–4

coordination of 429
definition of 430n
diversity in research on 427, 428
electoral costs of 421
electoral deterrents 425
electoral systems 424, 425
evolution of research on 420–4
questions and findings 422–3
frontier of research 424–8
impact of candidate selection methods 424–5
impact on democratic representation 419
incumbents/candidates 429
leadership strategy 425–6
office rewards of 421–2
party discipline 421
party government status 421
party size 421
policy influences 421
puzzling nature of 418
reasons for 420–1
seniority 421
systemic effects of 426–8
party unity:
agenda-setting:
impact of candidate selection methods 218–20, 221, 408–10, 411–12
impact on legislative output 388
institutional approach to 221
leader's role 388–9
party cohesion/party discipline distinction 220–1, 388, 399, 412
primary elections 219, 221, 222–3
significant party behavior 406–7
sociological approach to 221
(p. 754) Patient Protection and Affordable Care Act (2010, USA) 4–5
personal vote-seeking 231, 232–3
Page 32 of 46
Subject Index
committees 364–5
electoral benefit of 243
electoral systems 234–5, 237, 410–11
constituencies appealed to 237–8
constituency service 239–40, 243
diffuse constituencies 240
responsiveness to local interests 238
impact of candidate selection methods 241
methods used in 237
Peru 680
philosophy, study of legislatures 6
Pluralist School, and bureaucratic control 570–1
Poland 647, 649, 651, 668n, 669n, 681
policy agenda:
topic models 133–4
policy-making:
bicameralism 335–6
function of legislature 87
see also agenda-setting; foreign policy, and legislatures; interest groups; public finance and
legislatures; statutory policy-making
Polish Sejm, rules and procedures 315–16
Polish United Workers' Party 689
political opportunity structure, and women in legislatures 257–9
electoral systems 257–8
government spending levels 258
party ideology 258
policy priorities 258–9
political parties 17–18
catch-all parties 379
Congressional committees 357–8
constitutional context 400
definition of 214, 371
democracy 372
elite parties 378
as franchise systems 225
goal of 371
impact of democratization 217
manifestos, content analysis of
Page 33 of 46
Subject Index
Wordfish 132
Wordscores 131–2
monitoring and sanctioning abilities 240–2
party cohesion/party discipline distinction 220–1
reasons for existence of:
functionalist perspective 381
legislators' perspective 382–6
normative accounts 381–2
relationship with interest groups 527, 534, 537
responsible-party model 71
see also candidate selection; coalition government; legislative parties; party cohesion; party
discipline;
party switching; party unity
political professionalization 64, 65, 288, 292
Political Studies Association (UK) 2
Congressional committees 353, 354
power-sharing:
authoritarian legislatures 685
authoritarian regimes 683–4
premier-presidential systems 651
presidential systems:
agenda-setting 469
definition of 508n, 651
gridlock 485
legislatures in 2, 84–5
passage rates of executive legislation 491–2, 494, 499
policy influence of legislatures 4–5
presidential decrees 640–1, 656, 658
separation of powers 84–5
president-parliamentary systems 651, 656
pressure groups, see interest groups
primary elections 393n
(p. 755) impact on candidate competition 218
party unity 219, 221, 222–3
principal-agent relations 58
legislative parties 373, 377–8
agency problems 377–8
elite parties 378
Page 34 of 46
Subject Index
sociology of legislatures and legislators 75

see also legislator-voter relations
Principle Component Analysis 104
process preferences, and legislator-voter relations 72–3
Progressives, and bureaucratic control 570
proportional representation systems:
committee strength 364
election of women 251–2, 257–8
European Parliament 593
party switching 424
see also electoral systems
Public Accounts Committees 518–19, 522
Public Choice School, and bureaucratic control 571
public finance and legislatures 19, 514–15, 523
case studies 516
Central and Eastern Europe 657–8, 665–6
changes in legislative-executive relations 522–3
Chile 639
Cobden Club study 515–16
common pool resource problem 516, 517
effects of involvement in financial decisions 522
English Parliament's control of:
censure procedures 699
difficulty in transplanting elsewhere 700–1
ex ante budget approval 515, 521–2
ex post budget scrutiny 515, 518, 522
Public Accounts Committees 518–19, 522
impact on fiscal outcomes 516, 520
impact on public finances 519
legislative power 710–11
legislative strengthening programs 521
political economy literature 516
reforms to strengthen fiscal discipline 520
role in budgetary decisions 516–17
budgetary authority 517
impact on development outcomes 520, 521
influence of electoral system 517, 520
majority/minority governments 520
organizational capacity 517
variations in 519
variations in financial scrutiny of government 517–18, 519
Page 35 of 46
Subject Index
United Kingdom 518, 522

United States 517–18, 521–2
see also budgetary reversions
public sector, legislative recruitment from 66
question time, see parliamentary questions
debate and deliberation in legislatures 146–9
formal models of legislatures 29
legislative studies 10
party switching 419
see also social choice theory
Reasoned Action, Theory of 270
Reform Act (1867, UK) 378
Regional and Federal Studies 300
regional assemblies, Europe 611–12
see also sub-national legislatures
reluctant democrats:
re-engineering of budgetary reversions 697
subversion of legislatures 696
representation:
bicameralism 335
content analysis of constituency service 134–5
delegate conception of 64, 267, 274–5
democracy 217
focus of 274
function of legislature 86
style of 274
trustee conception of 64, 267, 274–5
(p. 756) Republican Party (USA), and women representatives 258
resource exchange, and legislator-interest group relations 532–3, 534
responsiveness:
democracy 217
roles, legislative 15–16
Burke's influence on 267–8
congruence between typologies of 279
Eulau-Wahlke typology 272–3, 274, 278–9
behavioral consequences 275–6
critiques of 274–6
focus of representation 274
role switching 280
trustee/delegate 274–5
Page 36 of 46
Subject Index
meaning of roles 268–9

motivational approach to 271–2
position/preference roles 272, 277
prospects for study of 281–2
role-behavior relationship 269
role-position relationship 268–9, 270
roles as perceived expectations 270
roles as strategies 270–1
role switching 280
Searing's typology 277–8, 279–81, 288–9
theoretical weakness 272
roll-call analysis:
evolution of scaling techniques and spatial analysis 104–5
NOMINATE model 105
problems and issues with scaling techniques 115–17
spatial models of voting 105–13
abstentions 115
comparability between different chambers 114–15
compatibility across time 114
Romania 647, 649, 651, 668n, 669n
rules and procedures 16, 311–13, 326–7
access to the plenary 324–5
proposal and amendment rights 463–5
timetable control 462–3
areas covered by 312
cabinet inauguration/removal 318–19
confidence procedures 318–19, 403–5, 468–9
in constitutions 311–12
conventions 311
criteria for good rules 315
definition of 311
diversity of 315
effectiveness of parliament 314–15
electoral rules in parliament 317–19
emergence of 313–14
evolution of 6–7
failures of 315–17
Habsburg Austria 316
House of Commons 317
obstruction 316–17
Polish Sejm 315–16
Page 37 of 46
Subject Index
post-Soviet Russia 316

formal rules 311
importance of 34
institutional stability 312–13, 326
parliamentary control of government 322–4
budget rules 323–4
parliamentary committees 323
parliamentary questions 322–3
reaching out to the public 324–5
reporting of parliament 325
research gaps 327
rule change 326
sources of 311–12
standing orders 311, 312
United States Senate 5
voting rules 320–2
Russia 647, 651, 666, 668n, 669n
institutionalization of legislature 664
presidential dominance 656, 658
presidential/semi-presidential system 650
regional assemblies 612
(p. 757) rules and procedures 316
Rwanda 251, 254, 260n
safe seats 214
salience theory of party competition 128
scaling methods 13
applications in legislative studies 113–14
evolution of 104–5
problems and issues with 115–17
abstentions 115
Schelling Conjecture 550
Schengen Agreement 567–8
Schröder, Gerhard 4
Scottish parliament 60, 158, 612
securitization 552
security policy, see foreign policy, and legislatures
selectorates:
inclusive vs exclusive 215–16
Page 38 of 46
Subject Index
impact of democratizing candidate selection:

competition 218
legislative behavior 217–20
party unity 218–20
representation 217–18
responsiveness 218–19
double task of 64
external focus 63
internal focus 63–4
seniority systems 48, 599, 600
separation of powers, and presidential systems 84
Serbia 648, 651, 669n
Slovakia 647, 650, 651, 668n
Slovenia 648, 650, 651, 668n, 669n
social choice theory 12, 31–2
aggregation function 31
Congressional committees 354, 355
socialization, institutional 59–61
sociology of legislatures and legislators 12, 57–9, 74–6
antagonistic cooperation 57, 58, 69, 75
electoral competition 57, 58, 75
insider-insider relations 57
insider-outsider relations 57
institutional formation and change 57–8
principal-agent relations 75
see also legislative recruitment; legislator-voter relations
Soviet Union 678, 679–80, 689–90
Spain 704–5
spatial models 103
abstentions 115
applications of scaling methods 113–14
evolution of scaling techniques and spatial analysis 104–5
problems and issues with scaling techniques 115–17
Page 39 of 46
Subject Index
state legislatures (USA) 611

committees 618
e-government 621
elections 614
inter-parliamentary activism 621
legislative behavior 617
minority representation 615
professionalization of 292
research on 611
turnover and career changes 295, 296
women's committee assignments 254
(p. 758) statutory policy-making:
defeat of government bills 486, 488, 506n
passage rates of executive legislation:
bill initiation and statutory achievements 494–5
box scores 490–1
influence of partisan support 485–6
lack of comparative research 489–90
measures of legislative success 490
multivariate analysis 492, 493
national constituencies 492–4
parliamentary systems 491–2, 494, 499
party control over ballot access 498–9, 505–6
by political system/government status 491–2
use of partisan resources 498–9
unpredictability of legislators' voting 486
cross-pressures on 486, 488–9
vote-buying 486–7, 495
winning voting coalitions 486, 487
Stolper-Samuelson theory 550
structural functionalism 8
Structure-Induced Equilibrium (SIE) 34–5, 41, 355
America-Europe divide in research on 610–11
American state legislatures 611
development of research on 614
e-government 621
elections 614, 615–16
entrepreneurial activities of 620
European research on 611–12
Page 40 of 46
Subject Index
in European Union 613

federalism 611, 613
future research 622
implications for democratic theory 610
institutional design 617–19
committees 618
executive/legislature relations 618–19
size 618
international activities of 620–1
legislative behavior 616–17
role perceptions 616–17
voting behavior 617
legislative recruitment 614–15
links with national politics 615
minority representation 615
multilevel governance 613
new media 621
post-communist countries 612–13
reasons for growth of 609–10
regional assemblies 611–12
significance of 609
United Kingdom 612
voter behavior 615–16
women's representation 615
super-majorities 5, 48, 154, 196, 316, 321, 359, 392, 484, 658
supreme audit institutions 519, 522
surveys 14, 167
advantages of 168, 177
coordination amongst researchers 188–9
disadvantages of 168
expert surveys 186–8
legislative surveys 177–85
on-line surveys 177
overview of parliamentary surveys 178–84
quantitative analysis 168
response rates 185–6
selection bias 185, 186
self-administered 168
structured nature of 168–9
telephone surveys 177–85
use in legislative studies 169–70
parliamentary norms 169
roles 169
Page 41 of 46
Subject Index
value of 167
Sweden 520
Switzerland, legislative deliberation 151–3, 154–6
systems theory 8
Taiwan 223
teaching profession, legislative recruitment from 68
(p. 759) term limits 294–5
effects of 297–8
impact on legislative behavior 295, 296–8
impact on legislators' origins 296
impact on turnover 295, 296
legislative capacity 297–8
post-legislative careers 295–6
territorial representation, and bicameralism 339–40
Thailand 507n
timetable control, and agenda-setting 462–3
totalitarianism, decline in 679
Trade Act (1974, USA) 551
trade issues, parliamentary involvement in 549–51
transformative legislatures 88, 89
transnational legislatures 1
Turkey 362, 481–2, 548
turnover rates:
impact of term limits 295, 296
typologies and classifications of legislatures 12, 82–3
arena/transformative legislatures 88–9, 91, 286
Blondel's typology 88
comparative legislative autonomy 92–6
explanation of policy power 95
individual autonomy 93, 94–5
integration of micro and macro approaches 95
level of exogenous control 92–3
partisan autonomy 93, 94–5
temporal change 95–6
comparing legislatures across political systems 87
definitional clarification 83–5
functions of legislatures 85
control 86
linkage of citizens and government 85–6
oversight of executive 86
policy-making 87
relative balance between 87
representation 86
Page 42 of 46
Subject Index
hierarchy of institutions 83, 84

historical evolution of 85–92
impact of party organization 89
influence of micro-level approach 91
limited explanatory power of 82
Mezey's typology 89–90, 91
negative powers/legislative viscosity 88
parliamentary systems 84
as fused power systems 84
policy-making power 90
Polsby's typology 88–9, 91
popular support 89–91
presidential systems 84
separation of powers 84–5
static nature of 82–3
variations in approach to 82
Ukraine 647, 650–1, 656, 665, 666, 668n
presidential powers 651–6
unfolding analysis 104
United Kingdom:
ministerial tenure 299
see also Commons, House of (UK); English Parliament; Parliament, Houses of (UK)
United Nations 548
United States Congress:
Biographical Directory of the US Congress 289
bureaucratic oversight/control:
bureaucratic preferences 576–8
Congressional abdication 572
Congressional dominance 572
ex ante controls 574, 579
fire alarms 573
incentives for 573
legislative coalition 573–4
mitigating agency loss 568–9, 577
multiple principals 572–3
police patrols 573
presidential control 572, 573, 574–5
spatial model for multiple principals 575–6
collective challenges facing members 401
fast-track bill 481
financial scrutiny of government 517–18, 521–2
(p. 760) foreign policy 545–6
foreign economic relations 550, 551
Page 43 of 46
Subject Index
increased assertiveness in 551–2

security policy 546–7
legislative careers 291–2
legislative deliberation 151–3, 154–6
quality of 156–8
legislative parties:
agenda-setting 386, 403
impact of 401–2
Krehbiel's model of party cohesion 402
party discipline/cohesion 400–2
policy committees 376
policy impact 385–6
as procedural cartels 386, 403
role of 357–8
staff resources 375–6
weakness of 400
legislative problem 401
party unity 219
roles of 685
Roster of 289
rules and procedures 7
transformative capacity 286
see also Congressional committees
United States Constitution 514, 580
United States House of Representatives:
length of legislative careers 289
Rules Committee 315, 464
United States Presidency:
control of bureaucracy 572, 573, 574–5
veto power 465–6
United States Senate:
filibusters 5, 463, 474n
foreign policy 545
Parliamentarian of 5
passage of Patient Protection and Affordable Care Act 4–5
rules and procedures 5, 7
United States Supreme Court, and rule of four 465
United States Trade Representative 551
validity:
Page 44 of 46
Subject Index

experimental design 197–8
Venezuela 299, 362
veto players:
agenda-setting under majority rule 460–1
Congressional committees 355
Vietnamese Communist Party 682
Vietnamese National Assembly 690–1
Vietnam War 545, 547
vote-buying, and lawmaking 486–7, 495
voter behavior:
impact of electoral systems 231
accountability of legislators 234
monitoring and sanctioning abilities 242–3
rational ignorance 242
voter mobilization, and political parties 383–4
Voteworld 186
Wales 612
war powers and security policy 546–9
constraining influence of legislatures 548
ex-ante parliamentary approval 549
joint military missions 548
parliamentary veto power 547–8
participation in Iraq War 549
reasons for limited legislative involvement 549
War Powers Resolution (1973, USA) 547
welfare states, and decline of legislatures 3
women in legislatures:
activities of:
bill initiation 253–4, 259n
committee assignments 254, 260n
debate participation 254
(p. 761) attitudes towards role of 252–3
descriptive representation 251, 255
elite women 256
evolution of research field 250–1
factors affecting election of 259n
district magnitude 252
Page 45 of 46
Subject Index
proportional representation systems 251–2

gendered nature of legislatures 254
gender quotas 251, 252, 255, 260n
intersectionality 255–6
Latin America 630
from minority groups 256
multiparty group 256
party affiliation 256
political opportunity structure 257–9
electoral systems 257–8
government spending levels 258
party ideology 258
policy priorities 258–9
substantive representation 251, 255
under-representation of 15, 250, 255–6
women's interests 256–7
Wordfish 132
Wordscores 131–2
Page 46 of 46

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Oxford Handbooks Online

Print Publication Date: Jun 2014 Subject: Political Science

Great Clarendon Street, Oxford, OX2 6DP,

Oxford Handbooks Online

Print Publication Date: Jun 2014 Subject: Political Science

Oxford Handbooks Online

About the Contributors

Print Publication Date: Jun 2014 Subject: Political Science

About the Contributors

Rudy B. Andeweg is Professor of Political Science at Leiden University.

Audrey André is Post-Doctoral researcher at the Vrije Universiteit, Brussels.

Josephine T. Andrews is Associate Professor of Political Science, University of

André Bächtiger is Swiss National Science Research Professor at the University of

Stefanie Bailer is Assistant Professor for Global Governance at ETH Zurich.

Heinrich Best is Professor of Sociology and Chair of Social Science Research

Anne Skorkjær Binderkrantz is Professor of Political Science at Aarhus University.

Diana M. Branduse is Doctoral Candidate in the Department of Political Science,

Royce Carroll is Associate Professor of Political Science at Rice University.

Gary W. Cox is William Bennett Munro Professor of Political Science at Stanford

Brian F. Crisp is Professor of Political Science at Washington University in St Louis.

Sam Depauw is Assistant Professor and Post-Doctoral Researcher at the Department of

Daniel Diermeier is IBM Professor of Regulation and Competitive Practice, Kellogg

Bjørn Høyland is Professor of Political Science at the University of Oslo.

Christopher Kam is Associate Professor in the Department of Political Science at the

Thad Kousser is Professor of Political Science, University of California, San Diego.

Thomas J. Leeper is Post-Doctoral Researcher in the Department of Political Science

Scott A. MacKenzie is Assistant Professor of Political Science, University of California,

Edmund J. Malesky is Associate Professor of Political Science, Duke University.

Lanny W. Martin is Associate Professor of Political Science, Rice University.

Shane Martin is Reader in Comparative Politics, University of Leicester.

Mathew D. McCubbins is Professor of Political Science and Law, at Duke University.

Carol Mershon is Associate Professor, Department of Politics, University of Virginia.

Wolfgang C. Müller is Professor of Democratic Governance at the University of Vienna.

Sven-Oliver Proksch is Assistant Professor of Political Science, McGill University.

Tapio Raunio is Professor of Political Science, University of Tampere.

Sebastian M. Saiegh is Associate Professor of Political Science, University of California,

(p. xiii) Constanza F. Schibber is Doctoral Candidate in the Department of Political

Paul Schuler is Doctoral Candidate in the Department of Political Science, University of

Matthew S. Shugart is Professor of Political Science, University of California, Davis.

Jonathan B. Slapin is Associate Professor of Political Science, University of Houston.

Kaare W. Strøm is Distinguished Professor of Political Science at the University of

Michelle M. Taylor-Robinson is Professor of Political Science, Texas A&M University.

Georg Vanberg is Professor of Political Science at Duke University.

Oxford Handbooks Online

Abstract and Keywords

1.2 Legislatures Matter

1.3 The Evolution of Legislative Studies

1.4 The Handbook

1.4.1 Theoretical Approaches in Legislative Studies

and individual autonomy.

1.4.2 Methods of Legislative Research

1.4.3 Representation and Legislative Careers

1.4.4 Organization and Rules

1.4.5 Parties in the Legislature

1.4.6 Policy-Making and Oversight

In all democracies—presidential or parliamentary—the chain of political delegation is complex where there is a

1.4.7 Expanding the Scope of Legislative Analysis

Bagehot,W., 1867 [1936]. The English Constitution. London: Humphrey Milford.

Cox, G. W. 1987. The Efficient Secret. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press.

Marschall, S., 2005. Parlamentarismus: Eine Einführung. Baden-Baden: Nomos.

Mezey, M. L., 1979. Comparative Legislatures. Durham: Duke University Press.

Schlesinger, J. A., 1966. Ambition and Politics. Chicago: Rand MacNally.