What are the ethical responsibilities that social science researchers have, not only to the people we study but also to ourselves as scholars and other scholars? This article argues that as political ...and social scientists, we need to expand our notion of research ethics, to adopt a notion that embraces treatment of our subject–participants and ourselves as researchers. This study is anchored in the still-growing literature on research ethics in fieldwork and draws on political science work on the ethical implications of the risks and realities of sexual violence for scholars who conduct fieldwork. The article looks beyond political science to feminist-informed research in the social sciences as it develops the argument about the ethical responsibilities of social scientists. In investigating the overarching question, the article addresses resources for survivors of sexual harassment and assault during field research.
Compared to U.S. political parties, parties in Italy (and Europe generally) are quite cohesive. Rarely do members of parliament vote against their copartisans in legislative divisions. Yet in Italy ...in recent years, legislators switch parties with seeming abandon. Between 1996 and spring 2000, one out of four deputies in the Chamber of Deputies switched parties at least once, compared to only 20 switches in the U.S. Congress from 1947 to 1997 (Nokken 2000). We examine the relationship between switching and observed party unity in Italy by focusing on individual legislators' switching decisions and voting behavior. Overall, switchers move out of highly disciplined parties, suggesting that they switch partly in order to escape strong discipline.
Under what conditions do local political elites in new democracies promote citizen health? To address the question, this paper advances hypotheses grounded in prominent political science debates and ...assesses them against comprehensive, granular data from the most recent South African national census. The evidence rejects the hypotheses that relatively great partisan competition and relatively great popular participation boost local population health. The evidence provides conditional support for the hypotheses that local health outcomes are enhanced in municipalities where the national ruling party commands relatively great citizen backing and where hereditary chiefs are strong. In particular, where local strongholds of the national ruling party coincide with strong chiefly authority, the predicted probability of infant and under-five death over all households is reduced, as is the predicted probability of infant and under-five death among majority Black African households, holding other things equal. In these nuanced ways, the actors holding power at the local level matter for the survival of babies and children in South Africa. The paper contributes to scholarship on institutions in new democracies, chiefly authority, the conditions for infant and under-five survival, and the political determinants of health. In doing so, it demonstrates the value of drilling down to the local level to probe the political determinants of population health.
•Weighs factors flagged in political science debates as affecting citizen wellbeing.•Analysis for South Africa uses granular census data, augmented by municipal data.•Under some conditions, the odds of infant and child death vary with local context.•Local context is municipal support for national ruling party and chiefly power.•The study shows the value of probing the local political determinants of health.
The conclusion to the special issue takes stock of both the first and the second generations of research on preferential proportional representation (PR) and electoral personalism. The article uses ...this appraisal in order to locate this project’s achievements within extant scholarship. It argues that the project not only reevaluates but also challenges the wisdom on preferential PR. In challenging the canon, the project enriches the study of electoral institutions, political parties, legislative politics, comparative politics, and political science more broadly.
In this book, Carol Mershon and Olga Shvetsova explore one of the central questions in democratic politics: how much autonomy do elected politicians have to shape and reshape the party system on ...their own, without the direct involvement of voters in elections? Mershon and Shvetsova's theory focuses on the choices of party membership made by legislators while serving in office. It identifies the inducements and impediments to legislators' changes of partisan affiliation, and integrates strategic and institutional approaches to the study of parties and party systems. With empirical analyses comparing nine countries that differ in electoral laws, territorial governance and executive-legislative relations, Mershon and Shvetsova find that strategic incumbents have the capacity to reconfigure the party system as established in elections. Representatives are motivated to bring about change by opportunities arising during the parliamentary term, and are deterred from doing so by the elemental democratic practice of elections.
This article examines politicians' changes of party labels during the life of a legislature. The authors view a legislator's choice of party as a strategic decision recurring throughout the ...parliamentary cycle. In their approach, individuals are open to switching parties as they pursue goals specific to the stage in the parliamentary cycle. Analyzing Italy and Russia, they identify among legislators in both countries patterns of heightened switching for office benefits, policy advantage, and vote seeking at distinctive moments in the parliamentary cycle. The commonalities across the two systems provide compelling support for their theoretical framework. The evidence also points to a midterm peak in switching in both countries. Differences appear, however, in the timing of preelectoral positioning—contrasts that the authors attribute to differences in the degree of party system institutionalization, the age of the democratic regimes, and thus the information available to players in electoral politics.
Almost one-fourth of the members of the lower house in Italy, the Chamber of Deputies, switched parties at least once between 1996 and 2001. Why would a legislator abandon one party and enter another ...during a legislative term? Starting from the basic assumption that politicians are ambitious, we examine electoral and partisan motivations for members of parliament (MPs) who switch parties. We conclude that party switching most likely is motivated by party labels that provide little information about policy goals and that pit copartisans against each other in the effort to serve constituent needs. Switching is especially frequent when ambitious politicians operate under heightened uncertainty.
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