Brian F. Crisp

Vote-Seeking Incentives and Legislative Representation in Six Presidential Democracies

Through the use of an original data set of bill initiation activity in six presidential democracies, we advance scholarly understanding of how the institutional incentives faced by legislative candidates influence representation. We extend and adapt theory, derived primarily from the experience of the U.S. Congress, demonstrating its viability, once assumed constants from the U.S. case are explicitly modeled, in quite distinct institutional contexts. In particular, we find the focus of individual legislators on national versus parochial concerns responds to the incentives provided by the candidate selection process, general election rules, legislator career patterns, and interbranch relations.

The Socioeconomic Impacts of Structural Adjustment

The 1980s were painful years of structural adjustment during which many developing countries abandoned statist economic models in favor of market-oriented paradigms. The proponents of structural adjustment, including international lending agencies such as the IMF and World Bank, argued that reforms were necessary to restore growth and curtail inflation. The opponents of adjustment claimed its macroeconomic results were not a foregone conclusion and, regardless of them, such changes would drastically affect the already precarious position of the poor. We use data from sixteen Latin American cases to examine the socioeconomic impacts of structural adjustment. Adjustment was weakly associated with growth, and reform did seem to reduce inflation. Counterintuitively, the extent of structural adjustment appears to be negatively associated with both poverty and inequality. Finally, empirical data show that low levels of growth or even mere economic stability are the best remedy for poverty and inequality.

Democratic institutional design : the powers and incentives of Venezuelan politicians and interest groups

List of tables List of figures List of abbreviations 1. Studying democratic institutions in Venezuela 2. The electoral systems impact on the role of congress in the policy-making process 3. The Presidents legislative role: the initiation of legislation and presidential decree authority 4. Influencing the executive branch during policy formation: consultative commissions 5. Participating in the execution of policy: the decentralized public administration 6. Institutionalized dominance and its dynamics: the relative participation of business and labor 7. The policy impact: the economic development strategy and patterns of government spending 8. Political institutions, crisis, and reform 9. Venezuelan institutional design in comparative perspective Postscript: the 2000 constitution Notes References Index.

Incentives in Mixed-Member Electoral Systems General Election Laws, Candidate Selection Procedures, and Cameral Rules

Mixed-member systems have been characterized as encouraging politicians to balance the activities that enhance their personal reputations and those of their parties. Another literature challenges that legislators from one tier are not likely to behave differently from those of the other. After summarizing this debate, data from Venezuela are used to look for evidence supporting either side in a series of behaviors that span the entire legislative process—from bill initiation to committee consideration to final vote. The author concludes that the “best of both worlds” versus “contamination” debate has led to a focus on mixed-member institutions, to the exclusion of other incentive structures confronting legislators and that we need to engage in more careful theorizing about when and where they should expect the electoral tier to have an impact on legislator behavior.

Mandates, Powers, and Policies

Elections provide a mandate to pursue a set of policies. Party label provides a concise ideological cue for voters to choose among candidates, and research on industrial democracies verifies a link between the parties voters elect and subsequent policy outcomes. The combination of inchoate party systems and economic vulnerability elsewhere may weaken the link between voter choice and policy. When examining economic policies in Latin America, there is some controversy as to whether governments carried out “reform by surprise”—promising one thing during a campaign while implementing another in office. We test whether the ideological reputations of executives’ and legislators’ parties explain whether they adopt market-oriented policies. We find that the future behavior of presidential candidates is difficult for voters to predict. However, the ideological reputation of legislators is a reliable predictor of policy outcomes, and the relationship is clarified by the prospects of collective action by legislative delegations.

The Reputations Legislators Build: With Whom Should Representatives Collaborate?

How do legislators build the reputations they use in bids for reelection? Do they use their personal reputations or associate with other legislators? And how do parties, coalitions, and institutions affect these decisions? Research on how electoral systems affect parties in legislatures frequently focuses on the extent to which electoral rules make legislators more or less ideologically convergent with respect to other members of the chamber—copartisan and not. However, finding equilibrium strategies is often possible only under restrictive institutional and spatial assumptions. Instead of viewing ideology spatially, we conceive of ideological reputations as currencies, used to purchase electoral support in transactions we liken to auctions. In our test of the model, we use bill cosponsorship patterns as an indicator of the reputations incumbents use to purchase electoral support. We show that under relatively common institutional conditions, legislators may have strong incentives to cultivate reputations they must share with their toughest electoral competitors.

Candidate Gender and Electoral Success in Single Transferable Vote Systems

The proportion of those elected to national legislatures who are women varies widely, with most countries falling far short of gender parity. In the average parliament, only 18 per cent of the members are women, but some countries have nearly obtained gender parity while others have no women at all in office. Most of the comparative, cross-national work on women’s representation tries to explain differences in the percentage of seats held by women using aggregate-level factors, such as socio-economic development, political culture or electoral institutions. While this answers an important question about women’s descriptive representation, its dominance has nearly precluded research on other equally essential and related questions. We examine two of these questions in this research note: once a prospective candidate has decided to enter a race, does the candidate’s gender systematically work against (or for) her? And do the individual-level, party-level and district-level characteristics that typically determine electoral success work differently for male and female candidates? To answer these questions, we adopt a novel approach to studying women’s representation. We approach it from the level of the individual candidate and use multilevel modelling to test hypotheses about how individual, party and districtlevel factors affect the election of women. We do this in three national settings – Australia, Ireland and Malta. When the election of women is addressed with a single observation taken at the level of the national legislature, it is impossible to tease out how individual, party and district-level factors condition the election of women. By making the unit of analysis the individual candidate, we can examine questions that have not received much attention in cross-national research. Candidate-level research in comparative politics is rare because of the demands of data collection and statistical modelling. Collecting candidate-level data across countries and over time is difficult and time-consuming. Most studies of gender’s effect on vote choice focus on one country and only one or two elections. We observe fifteen elections across three countries with more than three thousand individual candidates running under the banners of more than one hundred parties in almost seventy distinct electoral districts. What is more, modelling data where covariates are measured at multiple levels requires methodological tools that have become widespread in political

Party-System Nationalization and the Scope of Public Policy: The Importance of Cross-District Constituency Similarity

Party-system nationalization is supposed to result in the provision of nationally focused policy, including spending priorities with widespread benefits. Conversely, democracies characterized by parties with geographically narrower patterns of support are suspected of parochial policies, including targetable spending. The authors show that party-system nationalization alone is not sufficient to generate national benefits. In addition, governing parties’ constituents must be similar across districts. Nationalization can occur because parties are making the same appeal to similar constituents across different electoral districts, but it can also occur because parties are skillfully tailoring different appeals to diverse constituencies across districts. In the latter case, the authors expect to see the targeted spending priorities typically associated with party systems that are not nationalized. The authors test for the conditional effect of party-system nationalization in 36 elections across 20 countries using a Bayesian multinomial model and find support for their reasoning regarding the importance of cross-district constituency similarity.

The Electoral Connection and Legislative Committees

This article examines whether the career needs of legislators – to be re-elected or to move on to another political post – allow us to explain the rules governing committee structures and the committee assignments individual legislators obtain. It uses the institutional variations provided by Argentina, Costa Rica, and Venezuela to test hypotheses about committee assignments and committee assignment mechanisms. It finds that incentives created by candidate selection procedures and electoral rules show some relationship to committee assignments, but with a good deal of variation across national cases and individual careers.

The Sources of Electoral Reform in Venezuela

Bei der folgenden Kurzbibliographie handelt es sich um einen Auszug aus der Datenbank des „Fachinformationsverbundes Internationale Beziehungen und Länderkunde“ (FIV-IBLK). Die Titel sind alphabetisch geordnet. Zur Aufschlüsselung der Bibliothekssigel benutzen Sie bitte das Sigelverzeichnis online This short bibliography is an excerpt from the database of the „Special‐ ized Information Network International Relations and Area Studies“ (FIV-IBLK). The titles are arranged by alphabetic order. For decoding the library codes please use the Directory of Library Codes online. Herausgeber: GIGA German Institute of Global and Area Studies GIGA Informationszentrum Neuer Jungfernstieg 21 • 20354 Hamburg • Tel.: (040) 42825-598 • Fax: (040) 42825-512 E-Mail: info@giga-hamburg.de • Web: www.giga-hamburg.de/iz