Michael Malecki

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

The Politics of Constitutional Review: Evidence from the European Court of Justice

OF THE DISSERTATION e Politics of Constitutional Review: Evidence from the European Court of Justice by Michael Malecki Doctor of Philosophy in Political Science Washington University in St. Louis,  Matthew J. Gabel, Chair Judges who perform judicial review have the extraordinary power to strike down laws that do not conform to their own policy preferences. eir political independence is generally regarded as a normative good.In this work, I consider the microfoundations of judicial preferences and how those preferences interact with institutional independence to determine the policy impact of judicial review. e following argument is developed in the context of the Court of Justice of the European Union (European Court of Justice, or ECJ). Constitutional Courts generally and the ECJ in particular are considered “independent” when they enjoy discretion to act counter to the interests of other policymaking bodies and their political principals. In the European Union, the primary political actors are the member states, which directly appoint the judges and play a significant role in the legislative process. But whether their independence implies policy outcomes that exploit this discretion depends on the preferences of the judges – which may or may not diverge from those of the principals. Indeed, in standard theories of delegation, broad discretion is likely to be granted when policy preferences of principal and agent align. A considerably body of scholarly work has asserted that the ECJ’s institutional independence has implied behavioral independence: in short, that the ECJ has pursued a prointegration agenda counter to member state governments’ preferences. e typical expla-