Tevfik Murat Yildirim

Hiding behind the party brand or currying favor with constituents: Why do representatives engage in different types of constituency-oriented behavior?

Why do representatives prioritize certain types of constituency service in parliamentary systems? This study argues that the choice for constituency-oriented activities is conditioned by both partisan factors and legislative role orientations. Two novel data sets combining behavioral and attitudinal measures of constituency-oriented behavior are used for empirical tests: an elite survey including detailed interviews with 204 members of the Turkish parliament and 4000 parliamentary questions tabled by these members. The results from a series of ordered logit, ordinary least squares (OLS), and negative binomial regression estimations confirm that members of parliament choose different types of constituency-oriented activities based on their visibility to the party leadership and their constituency. This choice is primarily driven by partisanship and members of parliament’s perceptions about the influence of party leader in renomination. The analysis provides important insights about the role of partisan factors as drivers of parliamentary behavior.

Staying active and focused? The effect of parliamentary performance on candidate renomination and promotion

A large body of literature has focused on potential causes and consequences of candidate nomination procedures. One of the received wisdoms in this literature is that loyalty to the party leadership in centralized systems and personal vote-earning attributes in decentralized systems rank in priority for representatives’ career prospects. However, the determinants of candidate nomination in countries with centralized nomination procedures have been significantly undertheorized, due in part to the implicit assumption that party loyalty outweighs any other factor in determining career decisions. We close this gap by analyzing nomination and promotion decisions in Turkey, a closed-list PR system with highly centralized nomination procedures. We argue that representatives’ parliamentary performance such as parliamentary activeness and issue concentration influence parties’ nomination and promotion decisions. Utilizing original data sets of biographies of 1100 MPs who served in parliament between 2002 and 2011, and over 18,000 parliamentary speeches and 1040 bill cosponsorships, we estimate empirical models that are explicitly derived from the underlying theoretical model and find evidence that party leaderships favour incumbents who make more speeches and who display higher issue concentration, while penalizing electorally safe incumbents who seek legislative influence through private members’ bills (PMBs). Results offer important implications for the study of intraparty politics and parliamentary behaviour in general, and candidate nomination in particular.

Budgetary change in authoritarian and democratic regimes

ABSTRACT We compare patterns of change in budgetary commitments by countries during periods of democracy and authoritarianism. Previous scholarship has focused almost exclusively on democratic governments, finding evidence of punctuated equilibria. Authoritarian regimes may behave differently, both because they may operate with fewer institutional barriers to choice and because they have fewer incentives to gather and respond to policy-relevant information coming from civil society. By analysing public budgeting in Brazil, Turkey, Malta and Russia before and after their transitions from or to democracy, we can test punctuated equilibrium theory under a variety of governing conditions. Our goal is to advance the understanding of the causes of budgetary instability by leveraging contextual circumstances to push the theory beyond democracies and assess its broader applicability.

Book Review: Frank R Baumgartner and Bryan D Jones, The Politics of Information: Problem Definition and the Course of Public Policy in AmericaThe Politics of Information: Problem Definition and the Course of Public Policy in America by BaumgartnerFrank RJonesBryan D. Chicago, IL: University of Chicago Press, 2015. 231pp., £19.50 (p/b), ISBN 9780226198125

Wetzel and Jan Orbie’s edited volume attempts to offer such an explanation. In a remarkably clear introduction, Wetzel provides a conceptual framework drawing on work by Wolfgang Merkel. A distinction is made between external ‘context conditions’, such as socio-economic conditions, and five ‘partial regimes’: the electoral regime, political liberties, civil rights, the division of power, and the effective power to govern. To her credit, Wetzel notes that ‘a sole focus on the context conditions can ... be to the detriment of democratization’ (p. 7), an insight which, although repeated in the conclusion, remains mostly absent in the country chapters. A total of 11 chapters, each covering two countries, form the backbone of the book. In these, 15 collaborators examine the substance of EU democracy promotion. They look at what the EU does, that is, what projects are supported and how much money is allocated. Importantly, though, they also look at democratic indicators drawn from the Bertelsmann Transformation Index (BTI), potential power asymmetries and the institutional and interorganisational context. Wetzel and Orbie conclude that EU democracy promotion tends towards promoting external context conditions rather than partial regimes. This they label an ‘outward-oriented’ bias – following the now infamous distinction of inputand output-based legitimacy popularised by Fritz Scharpf. They argue that it is in the ‘nature of the [EU] beast’ to be oriented towards regulatory, technocratic outputs, but they also give credit to feasibility concerns, particularly the presence of resistance in target countries to partial regime promotion. With the exception of four theoretical chapters, which are less well integrated into the book, the project is tied together remarkably well. The country chapters generally report indicators that allow general empirical conclusions to be drawn, and they invariably incorporate the sophisticated analytic scheme that opens the volume. Unavoidably, not all the country chapters are equally good. Several, for example, do not refer to the BTI, complicating a comparative analysis. Furthermore, some chapters, like that on Croatia and Turkey by Balkır and Aknur, show little critical distance from EU rhetoric, barely going beyond an analysis of the documents to look at the actual substance. On the whole, however, Wetzel and Orbie have pulled off a remarkable editorial and scholarly feat.

Electoral protest and democracy in the developing world, by Emily Beaulieu

cal situation changed, and the author has definitely great theoretical findings to contribute. What left me hesitant after reading was the question regarding to what extent the Eastern European populist radical right could be defined as an ideal type, even though it does not constitute an entirely homogeneous group? And I wonder whether Eastern European right-wing populism can count as a distinctive phenomenon although its core ideological features – anti-European Union, anti-corruption, and anti-minorities – correspond to the core of most Western European populist radical right parties as well, notwithstanding their different origins. Despite these concerns, the book provides an inspiring basis for some crucial debates.

Book Review: Agenda Setting, Policies and Political Systems: A Comparative Approach and Policy Agendas in British Politics

broad and comparative study of how those theoretical perspectives are constructed. The book’s central argument focuses on representation which involves not only getting group members into an authoritarian role but also articulating group interests and translating those interests into policy. The first three contributions analyse the meaning of interests, intersectionality and the substantive representation of women. The subsequent chapters investigate those meanings within regions such as Western Europe, the United States, Latin America and Africa. Future research proposals and a testable line of investigation are outlined as the concluding observation. The book is important not only for scholars and policy makers but also for non-governmental agencies and students researching on gender representation. Using a comparative format, the editors identify a range of approaches that serve to transform the representation of women in the right direction and through the right channels within the power arena. The book presents factual and first-hand information to help readers understand in a precise and clear manner the importance of women’s representation and interest articulation. The authors must be acknowledged for regenerating and invoking interest for the comparative approach and empirical mode of investigation. Demonstrating how representation has unfolded in a highly complex environment laden with uncertainty, this book points to the importance both of contextual factors in shaping representation and women in leadership roles in fashioning strategies for change. Representation: The Case of Women is limited within the ambit of the process of representation and internal institutional arrangements and the political ambience of different nations. Therefore, perhaps more time is needed for a more realistic analysis of women’s representation turning into a plausible account of expanded interest articulation. Furthermore, it is surprising to see the omission of case studies from any Asian country. Still, the editors have done a praiseworthy job in presenting such dimensions around potential avenues for and the meaning of representation, as well as recommending measures for those desiring the interest expression of half of human society.