Ryan J. Vander Wielen

Balancing Competing Demands: Position-Taking and Election Proximity in the European Parliament

Parties value unity, yet members of parliament have incentives to deviate from the party line. This article examines how members of the European Parliament (EP) respond to competing demands from national parties and European party groups. We examine ideological shifts within a single parliamentary term to assess how election proximity affects party group cohesion. Our formal model of legislative behavior suggests that when EP elections are proximate, national party delegations shift toward national party positions, thus weakening EP party group cohesion. Our Bayesian item-response analysis of roll calls in the 5th EP supports our theoretical predictions.

Measuring Variations in Party Unity Voting: An Assessment of Agenda Effects

Measures of party divisiveness have been widely used in scholarly literature for a variety of different purposes. However, conventional measures of party divisiveness, such as the percentage of party votes in a particular Congress, fail to consider important changes in the agenda from one Congress to the next. We introduce a measure that controls for such changes, drawing attention to the effect that agenda change has on observed party divisiveness and providing a more accurate account of party divisiveness across time. We analyse party voting in the U.S. House of Representatives between 1953 and 2004, and find that a sizeable amount of the fluctuation in party divisiveness identified by conventional measures is mitigated using this method. While we examine party voting in the U.S. House, our theory and method is applicable to similar measures used in the study of other legislatures (e.g. Rice and Attinà indices).

Adaptive behaviour in the European Parliament: Learning to balance competing demands

Parliamentary institutions and partisan norms are complex and new members of parliament are unlikely to possess an innate awareness of optimal behaviour. This paper examines how new legislators adopt the behavioural patterns of incumbent members in the Sixth European Parliament. The latter provides an excellent opportunity to study such adaptive behaviour; in addition to newly elected members from 15 former states, new members from ten accession countries took seats for the first time. We examine how voting behaviour differs between new members from the 15 former states, new members from accession countries, and incumbent members. Our analysis shows that new members from former states defect less from their European political group than incumbents, while new accession country members defect more. Over time, the differences between these groups disappear.

Dynamic elite partisanship: party loyalty and agenda setting in the US house

Legislators and legislative parties must strike a balance between collective and member-level goals. While there are legislative and reputational returns to coordinated behavior, party loyalty has a detrimental effect on members’ electoral success. We argue that members and parties navigate these competing forces by pursuing partisan legislation when the threat of electoral repercussions is relatively low — when elections are distant. We test our theory by examining House members’ likelihood of casting a party vote over the election cycle, assessing whether members strategically alter their levels of party loyalty as elections approach. We also explore whether majority parties strategically structure the agenda according to variation in members’ electoral constraints. Our approach allows elite partisanship to follow a dynamic process, which we term dynamic partisanship. We find that with increasing election proximity, members are less likely to cast party votes and parties are less inclined to schedule votes that divide the parties. ∗Please send all correspondence to Ryan J. Vander Wielen. Email: vanderwielen@temple.edu; Phone: 215.204.1466; Post: Department of Political Science, Temple University, Philadelphia, PA 19122. †René Lindstädt is Senior Lecturer in the Department of Government and Director, Essex Summer School in Social Science Data Analysis, University of Essex. Ryan J. Vander Wielen is Assistant Professor of Political Science at Temple University.

The Influence of Conference Committees on Policy Outcomes

This article examines the effect that the spatial location of conference committees relative to the parent bodies has on congressional policy outcomes. The article presents a theoretical model proposing that conferees choose policies that maximize their policy utility subject to the constraint of gaining House and Senate majorities on the conference report. I tested the model using conferences on bills associated with votes that generated liberal-conservative divisions. The results confirm that, under specified conditions, conferees pull outcomes away from the parent bodies toward conferee preferences.

Taming Intuition: How Reflection Minimizes Partisan Reasoning and Promotes Democratic Accountability

The success of democratic governance hinges on an electorates ability to reward elected officials who act faithfully and punish those who do not. Yet there is considerable variation among voters in their ability to objectively evaluate representatives performance. In this book the authors develop a theoretical model, the Intuitionist Model of Political Reasoning, which posits that this variation across voters is the result of individual differences in the predisposition to reflect on and to override partisan impulses. Individuals differ in partisan intuitions resulting from the strength of their attachments to parties, as well as the degree to which they are willing to engage in the cognitively taxing process of evaluating those intuitions. The balance of these forces - the strength of intuitions and the willingness to second guess ones self - determines the extent to which individuals update their assessments of political parties and elected officials in a rational manner.

The General Segmented Distribution

We develop a distribution supported on a bounded interval with a probability density function that is constructed from any finite number of linear segments. With an increasing number of segments, the distribution can approach any continuous density function of arbitrary form. The flexibility of the distribution makes it a useful tool for various modeling purposes. We further demonstrate that it is capable of fitting data with considerable precision—outperforming distributions recommended by previous studies. We suggest that this distribution is particularly effective in fitting data with sufficient observations that are skewed and multimodal.We develop a distribution supported on a bounded interval with a probability density function that is constructed from any finite number of linear segments. With an increasing number of segments, the distribution can approach any continuous density function of arbitrary form. The flexibility of the distribution makes it a useful tool for various modeling purposes. We further demonstrate that it is capable of fitting data with considerable precision—outperforming distributions recommended by previous studies. We suggest that this distribution is particularly effective in fitting data with sufficient observations that are skewed and multimodal.

Majority Party Bias in U.S. Congressional Conference Committees

This article examines the representativeness of conference committees in the U.S. Congress by measuring the difference in observed policy preferences between the conference delegations and the parent bodies. We predict and find significant differences between the House and Senate in terms of the partisan bias of conference delegations. House conference delegations are systematically biased in favor of the majority party and away from the chamber median. We take the additional step of exploring the source of this bias. In particular, we examine whether majority party bias in conference is a function of partisan processes at work directly in the selection of conferees. We find evidence that the conditions of majority party influence in the House are consistent with some existing theoretical models of party influence in legislating. There is less conclusive evidence of partisan processes in the Senate, which is consistent with institutional differences in appointment practices.

The Standing Committees

The Group executive is called the Clinical Trials Committee. This Committee is responsible for advising the Director on all substantial issues concerning the Canadian Cancer Trials Group clinical trials programme. The Director appoints members for a three-year term. This Committee reviews the proposals for studies brought forward by the disease site committees and recommends for or against activation. It is important to emphasize that the Clinical Trials Committee considers all proposals for new studies and assigns priorities to them on an individual basis. It must, at times, decide between new trials in, for example, breast cancer and lung cancer. The Committee also advises on all major policy issues (e.g., authorship of publications). The CTC is also responsible for receiving and acting on the recommendations of the Data Safety Monitoring Committee. Finally, it recommends overall policies such as the level of per capita funding, the establishment of new disease site committees, etc. Go to Committee

Why conference committees? A theory of conference use in structuring bicameral agreement

Little scholarly literature has examined why the chambers of the US Congress use conference committees to reconcile inter-cameral legislative differences. Historically, conference committees handle the most important legislation. Why would the chambers be willing to delegate conciliation authority to a subset of the membership that is then granted wide leverage in shaping the policy choices on legislation with such broad implications for the membership? We theorize that conference committees, by way of an information advantage, offer a means of promoting bicameral agreement and avoiding the risk of failure associated with bargaining between the chambers. We develop a formal model of two-sided incomplete information and find that certain conditions on preferences and information yield the chambers, who must be complicit in the decision to go to conference, higher expected policy returns to delegating this authority to utility maximizing conferees. The results of this model suggest that centrally located conference committees, and a reduction in the chambers’ information, encourage the use of conference. We offer preliminary empirical support for these propositions.Little scholarly literature has examined why the chambers of the US Congress use conference committees to reconcile inter-cameral legislative differences. Historically, conference committees handle the most important legislation. Why would the chambers be willing to delegate conciliation authority to a subset of the membership that is then granted wide leverage in shaping the policy choices on legislation with such broad implications for the membership? We theorize that conference committees, by way of an information advantage, offer a means of promoting bicameral agreement and avoiding the risk of failure associated with bargaining between the chambers. We develop a formal model of two-sided incomplete information and find that certain conditions on preferences and information yield the chambers, who must be complicit in the decision to go to conference, higher expected policy returns to delegating this authority to utility maximizing conferees. The results of this model suggest that centrally located conference committees, and a reduction in the chambers’ information, encourage the use of conference. We offer preliminary empirical support for these propositions.