•State capacity and legislative strength shape the nature of electoral relationships between voters and candidates in legislative elections.•Established expectations of “what politicians can do” ...define the feasible set of credible campaign promises.•Clientelistic promises are likely to be more credible and therefore predominate in low-capacity states with weak legislatures.•In Kenya, rising costs of clientelism under the Harambee Movement precipitated the creation of the Constituency Development Fund (CDF).•Legacies of clientelism and legislative weakness reinforce voters’ preference for direct constituency service over institutional effort.
Why does clientelism persist? What determines how politicians signal responsiveness to voters and exert effort towards fulfilling campaign promises? This article explores how state capacity, legislative institutional strength, and established ideas about what politicians can do structure the political market in legislative elections. The argument herein is that campaign promises must be credible to have any currency. Therefore, programmatic campaign promises are likely to be more credible in countries with strong states and legislatures, while clientelism predominates in weak states whose legislatures cannot compel the executive branch to implement legislators’ campaign promises. Historical experience also matters in shaping shared expectations of what politicians can do and the feasible set of credible campaign promises. I support these arguments with a historical institutionalist analysis of Kenya’s Harambee Movement and the Constituency Development Fund (CDF), as well as evidence from a nationally representative survey. Findings corroborate the claim that clientelism persists when it is the most credible means of fulfilling campaign promises. This article also shows that rising costs can precipitate legislative reforms away from clientelism – as happened with the creation of Kenya’s CDF in 2003. Overall, this article increases our understanding of the origins and persistence of clientelism in low-income states and potential avenues for reform towards programmatic politics.
The absence of young adults in elected legislative assemblies is a democratic deficit with potentially severe repercussions. Yet, research is rarely able to address the issue of age group ...representation systematically because we are lacking empirical information on the age distribution in parliaments. The Worldwide Age Representation in Parliaments (WARP) data set remedies this dearth of data. It provides information about the numerical presence of age groups in parliaments, spanning across the globe and over time and includes age data on legislators, such as the share of members of parliament (MPs) aged 30 years or under, 35 years or under, or 40 years or under. The data set also reports measures that compare the presence of legislators aged 30 years or under, aged 35 years or under, aged 40 years or under, aged 41 to 60 years, as well as aged 61 years or over in relation to the same age group in the general population of a given country. Moreover, it includes gendered figures, such as the presence of young female MPs. The WARP data set contains data for more than 700 elections in 149 countries, so far, and is freely available online. It allows for a novel analysis of the age composition of legislatures.
If you want to win battles in the culture war, you enact legislation that regulates firearms, prohibits abortions, restricts discussion of critical race theory, or advances whatever other substantive ...policy preferences represent a victory for your side. But to win the war decisively with an incapacitating strike, you make it as difficult as possible for your adversaries to challenge those laws in court. Clever deployment of justiciability doctrines will help to insulate constitutionally questionable laws from judicial review, but some of the challenges you have sought to evade will manage to squeak through.
To fully disarm your opponents in an age of cultural and constitutional warfare, you must cut off their access to counsel. Here is how to do it in three easy steps: (1) delineate an entire area of law, such as abortion, in which proponents of the state-favored view may obtain attorney's fees upon prevailing in litigation while proponents of the opposing view may not; (2) impose joint and several liability on the attorneys for the disfavored side, so that attorneys cannot bring challenges to state law without being personally responsible for what could amount to millions of dollars in the opposing party's legal fees; and (3) define "prevailing party" so broadly that this shared liability is triggered by the dismissal of even a single claim.
This is what the Texas legislature did in S.B. 8, the Texas Heartbeat Law, pioneering a model that several other states have now followed. The extraordinary nature of this scheme has been overshadowed by both the private enforcement mechanism at the core of S.B. 8, intentionally designed to evade judicial review, and by the Supreme Court's decision to overrule Roe v. Wade, ending constitutional protection for the right to terminate a pregnancy. As this Article shows, it would be a grave mistake to think that S.B. 8's weaponization of attorney's fees has lost its relevance. The end of Roe ushered in a new era of legal challenges to abortion regulation, for which Texas and its imitators have already stacked the deck. But perhaps even more significantly, there is little reason to think that the weaponization of attorney's fees is limited to the abortion context or to conservative causes more broadly. California has already repurposed Texas's strategy in an effort to deter Second Amendment challenges to its new firearm law, implementing an identical attorney's fee regime for different ideological purposes. And why should the embrace of this strategy stop there? Can all state legislatures insulate their most troubling laws from judicial scrutiny by making it prohibitively risky for attorneys to challenge them?
Health and the Political Agency of Women Bhalotra, Sonia; Clots-Figueras, Irma
American economic journal. Economic policy,
05/2014, Volume:
6, Issue:
2
Journal Article
Peer reviewed
Open access
We investigate whether women's political representation in state legislatures improves public provision of antenatal and childhood health services in the districts from which they are elected, ...arguing that the costs of poor services in this domain fall disproportionately upon women. Using large representative data samples from India and accounting for potential endogeneity of politician gender and the sample composition of births, we find that a 10 percentage point increase in women's representation results in a 2.1 percentage point reduction in neonatal mortality, and we elucidate mechanisms. Women's political representation may be an underutilized tool for addressing health in developing countries.
Despite substantial research on descriptive representation for Blacks and Latinos, we know little about the electoral conditions under which Asian candidates win office. Leveraging a new dataset on ...Asian American legislators elected from 2011 to 2020, combined with pre-existing and newly conducted surveys, we develop and test hypotheses related to Asian American candidates’ ingroup support, and their crossover appeal to other racial and ethnic groups. The data show Asian Americans preferring candidates of their own ethnic origin and of other Asian ethnicities to non-Asian candidates, indicating strong ethnic and panethnic motives. Asian candidates have comparatively strong crossover appeal, winning at higher rates than Blacks or Latinos for any given percentage of the reference group. All else equal, Asian American candidates fare best in multiracial districts, so growing diversity should benefit their electoral prospects. This crossover appeal is not closely tied to motives related to relative group status or threat.
This Article offers an alternate account of federalism's late eighteenth-century origins. In place of scholarly and doctrinal accounts that portray federalism as a repudiation of models of unitary ...sovereignty, it emphasizes the federalist ideology of dual sovereignty as a form of centralization–a shift from a world of diffuse sovereignty to one where authority was increasingly imagined as concentrated in the hands of only two legitimate sovereigns. In making this claim, the Article focuses on two sequential late eighteenth-century transformations. The first concerned sovereignty. Pre-Revolutionary ideas about sovereignty reflected early modern corporatist understandings of authority as well as imperial realities of uneven jurisdiction. But the Revolution elevated a new understanding of sovereignty in which power derived from the consent of a uniform people. This conception empowered state legislatures, which, throughout the 1780s, sought to use their status under new state constitutions as the sole repositories of popular authority to subordinate competing claims to authority made by corporations, local institutions, Native nations, and separatist movements. The second shift came with the drafting and ratification of the U.S. Constitution, which bolstered federal authority partly in order to protect state authority against internal competitors–an aim reflected in the Guarantee and New State Clauses. Ultimately, the Constitution both limited and enhanced state authority; it entrenched a framework of dual sovereignty. After ratification, competitors to state sovereignty were increasingly constrained to appeal to some federal right or power. What had previously been contests among supposedly coequal sovereigns–what modern scholars would call horizontal federalism–became questions of vertical federalism, issues of whether federal authority would vindicate states or their opponents. Although the Article concludes with some implications of this history for present-day federalism doctrine and theory, its primary contribution is descriptive. Judges and lawyers routinely and almost unthinkingly invoke localism and power diffusion as the historical values of federalism. Yet the history explored here challenges whether these near-universal assumptions about federalism's aims actually reflect what federalism was designed to accomplish.
Does majority party control cause changes in legislative policy making? We argue that majority party floor control affects legislator behavior and agenda control. Leveraging a natural experiment ...where nearly one tenth of a legislature’s members died within the same legislative session, we are able to identify the effect of majority party floor control on the legislative agenda and on legislator choices. Previous correlational work has found mixed evidence of party effects, especially in the mid-twentieth century. In contrast, we find that majority party control leads to (1) changes in the agenda and (2) changes in legislators’ revealed preferences. These effects are driven by changes in numerical party majorities on the legislative floor. The effects are strongest with Republican and nonsouthern Democratic legislators. The effects are also more pronounced on the first (economic) than the second (racial) dimension. Additional correlational evidence across 74 years adds external validity to our exogenous evidence.
The US two-party system was transformed in the 1960s when the Democratic Party abandoned its Jim Crow protectionism to incorporate the policy agenda fostered by the civil rights movement, and the ...Republican Party redirected its platform toward socioeconomic and racial conservatism. The authors argue that the policy agendas promoted by the two parties through presidents and state legislatures codify a racially patterned access to resources and power detrimental to the health of all. To test the hypothesis that fluctuations in overall and race-specific infant mortality rates (IMRs) shift between the parties in power before and after the political realignment (PR), the authors apply panel data analysis methods to state-level data from the National Center for Health Statistics for the period 1915 through 2017. Net of trend, overall, and race-specific IMRs were not statistically different between presidential parties before the PR. This pattern, however, changed after the PR, with Republican administrations consistently underperforming Democratic ones. Net of trend, non-Southern state legislatures controlled by Republicans underperform Democratic ones in overall and racial IMRs in both periods.
Objective
This paper studies the direct and indirect impacts of political regimes on corruption. Whereas the interplay of government is fundamental to corrupt acts, the present research sheds new ...light by showing the direct and indirect influences of dimensions of government structure on corruption.
Methods
We employ two different estimation techniques. First, we use OLS regressions, with year and regional dummies. Second, we employ mediation analysis to account for the intermediate role of government size in the relation between government structure and corruption in order to gauge the direct and indirect influences on corruption
Results
Results show that government structure, across various dimensions of authoritarian and nonauthoritarian regimes, significantly impacted cross‐national corruption. In particular, a nation's stock of democracy and parliamentary systems lowered corruption, while executive tenure and dimensions of authoritarianism added to corruption. On the other hand, the size of the legislature did not matter when it came to corruption. However, the direct influences of these government structure variables are mitigated or reinforced when the intermediate role of government size is considered in a mediation analysis.
Conclusions
The breakdown into the direct and indirect effects on corruption is a novel insight of this work, with useful policy implications.
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