Tanya Bagashka

Unpacking Corruption: The Effect of Veto Players on State Capture and Bureaucratic Corruption

Unpacking corruption has advantages over using aggregate measures of corruption when theory generates different predictions about the effects of political institutions on different kinds of corruption. We take advantage of the Business Environment and Enterprise Performance surveys conducted in 1999, 2002, and 2005 to investigate the effect of veto players on state capture and bureaucratic corruption in the postcommunist countries. According to our results, a greater number of veto players is associated with less state capture. By contrast, the number of veto players does not have a significant impact on bureaucratic corruption.

Invisible Politics: Institutional Incentives and Legislative Alignments in the Russian Duma, 1996–99

Previous analysis of legislative voting has focused on the behavior of nominal legislative parties, regardless of whether the country under examination was an established democracy or a newly democratized country. This approach is inadequate for countries with young party systems. To establish the extent to which legislative coalitions are party based, scholars must allow for the possibility that institutional incentives predominate over party influence. For this study, I applied a Bayesian discrete latent variable method to identify the legislative coalitions in the 1996-99 Duma. I found that legislative alignments cut across party lines: electoral incentives and support for the president contribute to divides within parties that lack coherent platforms. Here I present a novel methodological approach to the identification of intraparty divisions and the major determinants of legislative coalitions in many legislative settings. This approach allows a comparison of the importance of party influence relative to other institutional incentives. It is especially useful for analyzing legislative voting in young party systems and where constitutional frameworks and electoral systems subject legislators to competing pressures.

Electoral Rules and Legislative Particularism: Evidence from U.S. State Legislatures

We argue that state legislative politics is qualitatively different from national congressional politics in the extent to which it focuses on localized and geographically specific legislation salient to subconstituencies within a legislative district. Whereas congressional politics focuses on casework benefits for individual constituents, state legislative politics is more oriented to the delivery of localized benefits for groups of citizens in specific areas within a district, fostering a geographically specific group connection. A primary way to build such targeted geographical support is for members to introduce particularistic legislation designed to aid their specific targeted geographical area within the district. We argue that this is primarily a function of electoral rules. Using original sponsorship data from U.S. state houses, we demonstrate that greater district magnitude and more inclusive selection procedures such as open primaries are associated with more particularism. Our findings provide strong support for a voter-group alignment model of electoral politics distinct from the personal vote/electoral connection model that characterizes U.S. congressional politics and is more akin to patterns of geographically specific group-oriented electoral politics found in Europe and throughout the world.

Electoral Incentives and Legislative Organization An Examination of Committee Autonomy in U.S. State Legislatures

We investigate the relationship between electoral institutions and committee autonomy in the context of U.S. state legislatures. The distributive theories of legislative organization suggest that electoral rules that make personal reputations more important motivate legislators to decentralize power and enhance committee autonomy to be able to target particularistic goods to their local constituencies. We argue that the distributive theories have direct implications for the relationship between candidate selection procedures and committee autonomy. The need to reach out to a large number of voters and to amass significant financial resources in states with more inclusive candidate selection procedures such as the open primary makes representatives more dependent on special interests, which is conducive to legislative particularism and committee autonomy. We take advantage of the great variation across the American states to investigate the effects of candidate selection procedures, a factor neglected in the previous literature. Examining 24 state legislatures from 1955 to 1995, we find that the inclusiveness of the selectorate, or the body electing candidates, has a significant effect on committee autonomy with more inclusive primary elections leading to more autonomous committee systems. By contrast, however, term limits were not a significant predictor of committee autonomy. This contributes to our understanding of how legislators amend institutional arrangements to achieve their electoral goals.

Presidentialism and the Development of Party Systems in Hybrid Regimes: Russia 2000–2003

Abstract This article addresses the relationship between presidentialism and democracy by examining the role of parties in legislative bargaining in the 2000–2003 Russian Duma. Using a novel methodological approach, I empirically identify legislative voting coalitions to investigate whether the presidents preference for party-based legislative bargaining prevailed. I find that in contrast to the 1996–1999 Duma, legislative voting coalitions closely followed party lines and that factions representing narrow interests were less relevant. The results demonstrate that presidential politics dominates electoral incentives in this political system and, more broadly, that political parties could be indispensable for regimes in transition to authoritarianism.

Explaining dissensus on the Bulgarian constitutional court

ABSTRACT Using original data, this study investigates the determinants of dissent on the Bulgarian Constitutional Court, which occurs frequently and is high by comparative standards. This analysis contributes to the debate on whether courts and judges are driven by policy motivations or legal doctrine by providing evidence from a constitutional court created after a democratic transition. Dissent is more likely when the court as a whole and individual judges decide controversial cases, and when the benefits of dissensus outweigh their costs. Additionally, judges’ individual characteristics related to prior careers in politics and their party alignment with the governing coalition drive dissent. The effect of judges’ alignment, however, is conditioned on the case outcome, suggesting that justices use dissent when it is politically expedient to do so.

The Bulgarian “Nuclear Referendum” of 2013 and the independence of the Bulgarian media

This article analyses the media coverage of the 2013 Bulgarian “nuclear” referendum. We investigate the balance between Yes and No arguments on the construction of the Belene nuclear power plant, nuclear energy in general, and conducting a referendum on the nuclear issue. We also examine the quality of the reasons given and the frequency of government and ruling party sources. We find that the newspapers under examination voiced a diversity of viewpoints and sources. In light of recent assessments of the Bulgarian media, bias in media coverage of the referendum was not significant.