Holly Brasher

Policy agendas and births and deaths of political parties

The standard model of political party density emphasizing the interaction of social cleavages and district magnitude (M) is incomplete in accounting for number of parties in cases of high values of M in an arbitrary way. We explore an alternative model for such cases emphasizing the slack in the issue agenda available to parties with which to construct viable identities or niches they can employ to mobilize cognitively-limited voters. The model is tested with time series data and event history analysis on the sizes of the public policy agenda and the political party system in the Netherlands, an extreme case of large district magnitude given its single national district. Change in the slack of the issue agenda influences the births and deaths of political parties, a result that may also have implications for cases of lower district magnitude.

Listening to Hearings Legislative Hearings and Legislative Outcomes

In this study, I consider the role of legislative hearings in the legislative process. Previous studies of legislative outcomes often omit a discussion of hearings or do not incorporate hearings in a systematic way. One obvious purpose that hearings might serve is to provide the information and expertise necessary to solve any problems with the legislation, and once acquired, this information would allow the bill to move forward. I challenge the assumption that the information produced by legislative hearings makes it more likely that a bill will become law. I propose that in advancing a hearing, members of Congress signal that the legislation involves problems and may not be ready to move forward. To analyze the role of legislative hearings, I use bills introduced in the U.S. Senate during the 104th Congress (1995-1996). I use a bivariate probit model for hearings and subsequent events in the legislative process as dependent variables to determine whether legislative hearings and legislative outcomes are independent. Using information from the 103rd through 108th Congresses, I find that hearings do not increase the likelihood that a bill will become law during that Congress or in later Congresses.