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This article examines the extent to which legislators use legislative debates to engage in localism activities to cater to the interests of their selectorate in nonpreferential electoral systems. We define localism activities as the delivery of tangible and intangible benefits to a geographically confined constituency that is instrumental to legislators’ re-selection. Our primary argument is that legislators whose selectorate operates at the local level make more speeches with parochial references. Results show strong support for this assertion. Furthermore, we find that high district magnitude leads to higher levels of localism. We use a mixed-methods research design, combining an original data set of 60,000 debates in Portugal with qualitative evidence from elite interviews. We make a methodological innovation in the field of representation and legislative studies by using a Named Entity Recognition tool to analyze the debates.

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

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As semi‐presidentialism has become increasingly common in European democracies, so have the debates about the consequences of several of its political and institutional features. In particular, in those regimes, cohabitation between presidents and cabinets of different parties and cabinet dismissal powers on the part of presidents are thought to be a source of inter‐branch conflict and government instability. However, so far, most empirical work on government survival has failed to confirm any of these expectations. This article addresses this disjuncture between theory and empirical results by making a twofold contribution. First, it takes into account the internal diversity within semi‐presidentialism, modeling the implications for government survival of different configurations between presidential powers’ of cabinet dismissal, parliament dissolution and cohabitation in European semi‐presidential systems. Second, it reconsiders traditional government survival using the competing risks framework by adding a distinction between two different types of non‐electoral replacement: those where replacements imply a change in the party of the prime minister and those where they do not. Once such an approach is adopted, that presidential powers of parliamentary dissolution and cabinet dismissal indeed emerge as highly relevant for explaining government survival in these regimes.

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

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