Representation, Competing Principals, and Waffling on Bills in US Legislatures

Kirkland, Justin H.; Harden, Jeffrey J.

doi:10.1111/lsq.12132

Cited by 21 publications

(7 citation statements)

References 25 publications

(39 reference statements)

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“…Scholars of comparative politics have analysed how formal institutions and party‐specific factors drive party unity and legislators’ choice between multiple principals, both across countries (e.g., Carey , ) and within (e.g., Sieberer ; Kirkland & Harden ). Likewise, extensive work on EU legislative politics has explained the cohesion of the EP's political groups (e.g., Kreppel ; Hix et al.…”

Section: Introductionmentioning

confidence: 99%

When politics prevails: Parties, elections and loyalty in the European Parliament

Koop

Reh

Bressanelli

2017

European J Political Res

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In many political systems, legislators serve multiple principals who compete for their loyalty in legislative votes. This article explores the political conditions under which legislators choose between their competing principals in multilevel systems, with a focus on how election proximity shapes legislative behaviour across democratic arenas. Empirically, the effect of electoral cycles on national party delegations’ ‘collective disloyalty’ with their political groups in the European Parliament (EP) is analysed. It is argued that election proximity changes the time horizons, political incentives and risk perceptions of both delegations and their principals, ‘punctuating’ cost‐benefit calculations around defection as well as around controlling, sanctioning and accommodating. Under the shadow of elections, national delegations’ collective disloyalty with their transnational groups should, therefore, increase. Using a new dataset with roll‐call votes cast under legislative codecision by delegations between July 1999 and July 2014, the article shows that the proximity of planned national and European elections drives up disloyalty in the EP, particularly by delegations from member states with party‐centred electoral rules. The results also support a ‘politicisation’ effect: overall, delegations become more loyal over time, but the impact of election proximity as a driver of disloyalty is strongest in the latest parliament analysed (i.e., 2009–2014). Furthermore, disloyalty is more likely in votes on contested and salient legislation, and under conditions of Euroscepticism; by contrast, disloyalty is less likely in votes on codification files, when a delegation holds the rapporteurship and when the national party participates in government. The analysis sheds new light on electoral politics as a determinant of legislative choice under competing principals, and on the conditions under which politics ‘travels’ across democratic arenas in the European Union's multilevel polity.

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Section: Introductionmentioning

confidence: 99%

When politics prevails: Parties, elections and loyalty in the European Parliament

Koop

Reh

Bressanelli

2017

European J Political Res

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“…Legislative institutional research has a rich history of addressing numerous areas of strategic legislative behavior from district casework (Freeman & Richardson, 1996) to policy representation of constituents’ interests (Erikson & Wright, 1980; Harden, 2016) and committee work within the chamber (Bibby, 1966; Gilligan & Krehbiel, 1989; Kathlene, 1994). These and many other studies of legislative institutions underscore the reality that legislators in the American context are utility maximizers, constantly working to balance daily cross-pressures, all the while serving as a single representative of a unique constituency (Kirkland & Harden, 2016). This representative tension has led to mixed findings on the degrees to which legislators are doing their jobs of representing the interests of their constituencies, casting doubt on whether constituents should drive issue-specific sponsorship.…”

Section: Background and Contextmentioning

confidence: 99%

Do Constituents Influence Issue-Specific Bill Sponsorship?

Waggoner

2018

American Politics Research

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Bill sponsorship is a valuable form of legislative activity in which all legislators are free to signal priorities, stake out positions, and influence legislative agendas. However, decisions to hone in on specific issues have been mostly overlooked, resulting in drivers of issue-specific sponsorship remaining unclear. A reasonable place to look for drivers is constituent preferences, given the representational responsibilities underlying most legislative behavior. To address this question, I leverage advances in opinion estimation to generate a new fine-grained measure of constituent issue preferences at the district level. By keeping the focus on issues, this approach is preferable to other measures of constituent preferences, in that it assumes nothing about constituents’ ideology. Through numerous tests across several issues spanning the 109th to 113th Congresses, I find a largely indirect effect of preferences on sponsorship through employment proxies, yet no consistent direct impact from constituents, opposite expectations of the delegate model of representation.

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“…The study period for states with odd-year elections is 2010-2013.7 State legislative scholars have recently begun to take advantage of the extensive OpenStates data(Kirkland and Harden 2016;Kirkland and Williams 2014;Shor 2018). More information on OpenStates' methodologies as well as access to the data are available on their website: https://openstates.org/.…”

mentioning

confidence: 99%

Marginalization and Mobilization: The Roots of Female Legislators’ Collaborative Advantage in the States

Swift¹,

VanderMolen

2021

State Politics Policy Q.

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Scholars have argued that female legislators are more prone to collaborate than their male counterparts. Though collaboration may be more or less evident in particular situations, we seek to more clearly establish the mechanism behind women’s collaborative activity using the framework of marginalization. In this paper, we use cosponsorship data from 74 state legislative chambers from 2011–2014 to analyze collaborative patterns and mobilizing institutions. We find female legislators are more collaborative than men, and that their collaborative advantage strengthens in chambers where women are systematically excluded from leadership positions. The advantage also extends to bipartisan collaboration, but only in less polarized settings with women’s caucuses. Furthermore, our findings imply that as women are integrated into leadership collaboration will actually decline, especially within their own party. We believe these results are important for understanding both the roots of collaborative behavior among female legislators and consequences of chambers that marginalize women from leadership positions.

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Representation, Competing Principals, and Waffling on Bills in US Legislatures

Cited by 21 publications

References 25 publications

When politics prevails: Parties, elections and loyalty in the European Parliament

When politics prevails: Parties, elections and loyalty in the European Parliament

Do Constituents Influence Issue-Specific Bill Sponsorship?

Marginalization and Mobilization: The Roots of Female Legislators’ Collaborative Advantage in the States

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