Shane Martin

Using Parliamentary Questions to Measure Constituency Focus: An Application to the Irish Case:

Individual legislators differ in the degree to which they work to cultivate personal votes. While conventional wisdom declares that the electoral system typically motivates the choice of legislative role, researchers have found difficulty assessing empirically the role behaviour of legislators. This study suggests using the content analysis of parliamentary questions as a mechanism to measure variations in personal vote-earning strategies. To demonstrate the usefulness of this approach, and the constituency focus of Irish parliamentarians, 123,762 questions tabled by Dáil Deputies between 1997 and 2002 are analysed. While evidence of some orientation toward localism is apparent, the data suggest significant variations in role orientation among legislators. Competing electoral system and non-electoral system explanations of intra-system variation in personal vote-earning effort are hypothesised and tested. Characteristics such as district magnitude, intra-party competition, electoral vulnerability, geography, education, gender and career incentives only partially explain the variation. The results highlight the need to move beyond using electoral rules as a general proxy for role orientation and behaviour.

Parliamentary Questions, the Behaviour of Legislators, and the Function of Legislatures: An Introduction

The ability of parliamentarians to ask questions of members of the executive either in written form or on the floor of the chamber is a feature of many legislatures. Parliamentary questions often generate significant media attention and public interest. Despite the interest and importance, the nature and consequences of questioning in parliament remains obscure. As a working tool of parliamentarians, questions provide recorded data on individual members and the parliament as a collective institution. This paper suggests an analysis of parliamentary questions as a method for gaining better understanding of the preferences and behaviour of individual legislators and the role and function of modern-day parliaments.

Electoral Systems and Legislators’ Constituency Effort The Mediating Effect of Electoral Vulnerability

In so far as legislators value re-election, electoral institutions are said to shape their strategic behavior. Yet, the empirical evidence linking legislators’ behavior to electoral institutions is weak at best. Previous studies, we argue, have either ignored or misspecified how legislators’ vulnerability to electoral defeat mediates the expected effect of electoral institutions. To test this argument, we develop and operationalize a new comparative measure of electoral vulnerability which we combine with new individual-level data on legislators’ constituency effort in 14 (mostly European) countries. Our data demonstrate that the effect of electoral institutions on constituency effort is different dependent on legislators’ electoral precariousness. In party-centered systems, district magnitude’s negative effect grows weaker among those most vulnerable. In candidate-centered systems, by contrast, district magnitude’s positive effect grows even stronger among those most vulnerable. The results suggest the need to revisit studies focusing exclusively on the impact of institutions on legislators’ constituency-oriented behavior.

Why electoral systems don’t always matter The impact of ‘mega-seats’ on legislative behaviour in Ireland

A significant and influential body of research suggests that electoral systems influence legislators’ behaviour. Yet, individual legislators are potentially motivated by other concerns, such as policy and office. What happens when competing goals predict contradictory behaviour, for example, when electoral incentives clash with enticements to win prized post-election positions (mega-seats)? When party leaders cartelize the allocation of mega-seats, the anticipated effects of the electoral system on legislators’ behaviour may dissolve – creating strong parties in the legislature despite a candidate-centred electoral system. New data on mega-seats and voting behaviour in the Irish parliament between 1980 and 2010 supports the notion that mega-seat considerations trump the impact of the electoral system on roll-call behaviour. The implication is that what goes on within the legislature may be more important for influencing legislators’ behaviour than what goes on at the ballot box.

Policy, Office and Votes: The Electoral Value of Ministerial Office

Parties are not unitary actors, and legislators within the same party may have divergent interests, which complicates the understanding of parties’ motivations and behaviour. This article argues that holding a ministerial portfolio confers an electoral advantage, and so, in contrast to their co-partisans, politicians who are ministers simultaneously maximize policy, office and votes. New data on Irish elections over a thirty-year period show that ministers are insulated from the electoral cost of governing compared with their co-partisans. Differentiating between ministers and their co-partisans helps to resolve the puzzle of political parties’ choosing to enter government despite the evident electoral costs they will encounter. Moreover, previously overlooked electoral benefits of ministerial office help explain their desirability, and thus their ability to incentivize legislative behaviour in parliamentary regimes.

Government Selection and Executive Powers: Constitutional Design in Parliamentary Democracies

Provisions for a parliamentary investiture vote have become increasingly common in parliamentary democracies. This article shows that investiture provisions were largely introduced when new constitutions were written or old ones fundamentally redesigned. It also shows that the constitutions that endowed executives with strong legislative agenda powers also endowed parliaments with strong mechanisms to select the executive. It is argued that constitution makers’ decisions can be seen in principal–agent terms: strong investiture rules constitute an ex ante mechanism of parliamentary control – that is, a mechanism to minimise adverse selection and reduce the risk of agency loss by parliament. The findings have two broad implications: from a constitutional point of view, parliamentary systems do not rely exclusively on ex post control mechanisms such as the no confidence vote to minimise agency loss; parliamentarism, at least today and as much as presidentialism, is the product of conscious constitutional design and not evolutionary adaptation.

Trust Is Good, Control Is Better: Multiparty Government and Legislative Organization

Even though institutional design clearly shapes legislative processes and outputs, explanation of cross-national variation in how legislatures are organized remains elusive. Building on research that emphasizes the role of legislatures in enforcing coalition agreements, we provide new data on committee structures in thirty-one parliamentary democracies, demonstrating that where multiparty government is the norm, legislatures tend to develop strong committees that are structurally equipped to enable the governing parties to keep tabs on one another’s ministers. To probe the institutional argument further, we present a case study of committee reform in the Irish parliament. We demonstrate that institutional change within the Irish parliament is directly related to the shift from single-party to multiparty government and in particular to the desire of the smaller coalition party to be able to keep tabs on the larger party’s ministers. The paper aims to spark a deeper dialogue among party and legislative scholars in search of the micro-foundations of legislative organization.

Two Houses: Legislative Studies and the Atlantic Divide

Legislative scholars have a history of stepping back occasionally to examine the development and state of the sub-discipline (Budge 1973 ; Gamm and Huber 2002 ; Loewenberg, Patterson, and Jewell 1985 ; Mezey 1993 ; Morris-Jones 1983 ; Pasquino 1973 ; Patterson 1989 ). Many of these existing reviews, although valuable, are predominantly of a qualitative and subjective nature and are, in most cases, now dated. This paper provides a bibliometrical analysis of the state of legislative studies in the United States and Europe by exploring the content of eight political science journals. I looked at six general political science journals, three originating in the United States and three in Europe, as well as the content of two legislative studies journals—the American-based Legislative Studies Quarterly and the British-based Journal of Legislative Studies .

Bicameralism in the Republic of Ireland: The Seanad Abolition Referendum

Abstract Whether or not a legislature is uni- or bi-cameral has been found to have important consequences. Irelands 1937 constitution provided for a directly elected lower chamber (Dáil Éireann) and an indirectly elected upper chamber (Seanad Éireann). With the appointment to government in 2011 of two political parties with a common electoral commitment to abolish bicameralism, the subsequent coalition agreement included a promise to hold a referendum offering voters the option to move to a unicameral parliamentary system. On 4 October 2013, the electorate voted to retain the upper chamber, albeit by a narrow majority of 51.7 per cent, on a turnout of 39.17 per cent. The outcome was arguably surprising, given that opinion polls signalled a plurality of voters favoured abolition, and there was a general public antipathy towards political institutions in the midst of a major economic crisis. Public opinion research suggests that a combination of factors explained voting behaviour, including a lack of interest amongst those who did not vote. A cost savings argument was a significant factor for those favouring abolition, while concerns over government control of the legislative process appear to have been most prominent in the minds of those who voted to retain the upper chamber.

Political Parties and Constitutional Change

This chapter explores why constitutions are changed. The chapter begins with an overview of why constitutional design and redesign are important questions. The second section provides a background to the study of constitutional change which has tended to be embedded within legal scholarship rather than political science. The third section reviews competing theories of constitutional change, noting the general absence of political parties from these theories and the lack of success in explaining observed patterns of constitutional amendments. The next section suggests the need to “bring the party in” and suggests how incorporating the preferences of parties and the shape of the party system can advance our understanding of constitutional change. A number of empirical cases suggest that parties and party systems shape constitutional change are discussed briefly. The chapter concludes with suggestions for how further progress can be made in integrating research on parties and party systems with research on constitutional change.