Innovative ideas often need champions to advocate for them. The study of policy innovation, however, has often focused on enactments rather than earlier stages of the legislative process, in which ...the actions of a bill’s advocates may be especially crucial. In this paper, I ask who the champions of policy innovations are, focusing on two categories of legislators whose expertise makes them likely advocates: individuals with relevant professional backgrounds and individuals serving on relevant legislative committees. However, I also argue that the impact of expertise is conditional: as policies diffuse more widely, the role of expertise fades in importance, and champions can come from the broader legislative membership. To test these claims, I examine bill authorship and cosponsorship across 14 criminal justice policies between 1993 and 2004. I find that committee membership and professional background are indeed powerful predictors, but that their impact decreases as more states adopt the policy.
创新的想法通常需要支持者进行倡导。然而，有关政策创新的研究却时常聚焦于政策的颁布，而非早期的立法过程，但立法过程中法案倡导者所付出的行动可能尤为关键。本文中，我就政策创新的支持者是谁提出疑问，聚焦于立法者的两个分类，这些立法者因其专业而成为可能的倡导者：一类是具备相关专业背景的个人，另一类是供职于相关法律委员会的个人。然而我也主张，专业的影响是有条件的：当政策扩散程度越广，专业发挥的重要性会逐渐减少，并且支持者能产生于更广的立法成员。为测试这些主张，我检验了1993年至2004年间14个刑事司法政策的法案起草和联合赞助过程。我发现，委员会成员身份和专业背景确实是强有力的预测物，但其影响会随着政策被更多州所采纳而减少。
Las ideas innovadoras a menudo necesitan líderes para abogar por ellas. Sin embargo, el estudio de la innovación de políticas a menudo se ha centrado en las promulgaciones en lugar de las etapas anteriores del proceso legislativo, en las cuales las acciones de los defensores de un proyecto de ley pueden ser especialmente cruciales. En este documento, pregunto quiénes son los defensores de las innovaciones políticas, centrándome en dos categorías de legisladores cuya experiencia los hace posibles defensores: personas con antecedentes profesionales relevantes y personas que sirven en comités legislativos relevantes. Sin embargo, también sostengo que el impacto de la experiencia es condicional: a medida que las políticas se difunden más ampliamente, el papel de la experiencia se desvanece en importancia, y los defensores pueden provenir de una membresía legislativa más amplia. Para probar estas afirmaciones, examino la autoría y el copatrocinio de proyectos de ley en catorce políticas de justicia penal entre 1993 y 2004. Encuentro que la membresía del comité y los antecedentes profesionales son predictores poderosos, pero que su impacto disminuye a medida que más estados adoptan la política.
This article focuses on the link between the representation of lesbian, gay, bisexual, and transgender (LGBT) people in national legislatures and the existence of equality laws focused on sexual ...orientation. It addresses three interrelated questions: how many “out” LGBT legislators have served in national parliaments, what explains the cross-national variation in their legislative presence, and what is the relationship between the presence of gay legislators and the enactment of laws that treat gay and straight citizens equally? There is an established literature arguing that the representation of women and ethnic minorities “descriptively” in national legislatures improves the realization of their policy preferences and the position of the group within the society as a whole. This article draws on that literature and extends the analysis to LGBT communities. It finds that the presence of even a small number of openly gay legislators is associated significantly with the future passage of enhanced gay rights, even after including controls for social values, democracy, government ideology, and electoral system design. Once openly gay legislators are in office they have a transformative effect on the views and voting behavior of their straight colleagues. This “familiarity through presence” effect is echoed in studies of U.S. state legislatures and levels of social tolerance of homosexuality in the population at large.
이 연구는 한국에서 유권자들이 민주화 이후 지속적으로 입법부를 저신뢰 기관으로 평가하고 있는 원인과 결과를 분석한다. 거시적 차원에서 한국은 정치체제 효과성은 높지만 정치체제 대표성은 낮고, 행정부의 신뢰도는 높지만 입법부의 신뢰도는 낮은 선진산업민주 국가 가운데 예외적 사례이다. 미시적 차원에서 한국의 국회는 민주화 이후 ‘말하는 국회’를 ‘일하는 ...국회’로 전환하려는 국회법 개정을 시도했으나 제도 개혁의 실제 귀결은 다수파 의사운영권을 온존하는 가운데 소수파 의사운영권을 강화하는 ‘맞서는 국회’의 출현이었다. ‘맞서는 국회’ 시기 한국의 국회는 다수파의 신속한 법률 생산 혹은 소수파의 다양한 의견 반영 그 어느 쪽도 우선적으로 추구할 수 없는 입법교착의 국회 의사운영으로 귀결했다.
This article argues that neither the positive agenda control of majority nor the negative agenda control of minority has been established in getting out of the ‘legislative state of nature’ in the National Assembly of South Korea. What best characterizes the National Assembly is the properties of the ‘opposing legislature,’ rather than those of the ‘working legislature’ or the ‘talking legislature’ since its democratic transition. The institutional incongruity explains why the legislative performance has consistently declined, which in turn accounts for why most South Korean voters do not trust the National Assembly.
A one-third quota rule for women in local political leadership seats in India increases the number of female candidates who later contest seats in state and national legislatures. This arises from ...the candidacy of beneficiaries who gained political experience due to the quotas and career politicians who continue contesting in longer-exposed areas. The policy accounts for a substantial portion of the increase in female candidates for high office since the mid-1990s. Women have a higher probability of a top finish when running on major party tickets or contesting in areas that overlap with their local constituency.
The “question of reasonable compliance” concerns how business firms should comply with morally reasonable laws that have been democratically enacted. This article argues that, out of respect for the ...governing authority of democratic citizens, firms should comply with the law in accordance with legislators’ normative expectations of compliance. It defends this view against arguments from the legal, economic and business ethics literatures that focus on the
contentious nature of democracy
and the
competitive nature of the market
. In response this article argues that these adversarial features of democracy and capitalism do not limit the ability of democratic legislatures to set normative expectations of market actors, nor the duty of firms to comply with them.
Although the literature examining the relationship between ideological congruence and electoral rules is quite large, relatively little attention has been paid to how congruence should be ...conceptualized. As we demonstrate, empirical results regarding ideological congruence can depend on exactly how scholars conceptualize and measure it. In addition to clarifying various aspects of how scholars currently conceptualize congruence, we introduce a new conceptualization and measure of congruence that captures a long tradition in democratic theory emphasizing the ideal of having a legislature that accurately reflects the preferences of the citizenry as a whole. Our new measure is the direct counterpart for congruence of the vote-seat disproportionality measures so heavily used in comparative studies of representation. Using particularly appropriate data from the Comparative Study of Electoral Systems, we find that governments in proportional democracies are not substantively more congruent than those in majoritarian democracies. Proportional democracies are, however, characterized by more representative legislatures.
Many civil society organizations (CSOs) are fighting for survival as governments introduce legislation to curtail their activities. This article examines how domestic civil society campaigns can ...persuade parliamentarians to reject 'anti-CSO' legislation. We employ pairwise comparisons in two regions - East Africa and Central Asia - as well as process-tracing within four cases: two successful campaigns waged by CSO coalitions against repressive legislation in Kenya and Kyrgyzstan, and two unsuccessful campaigns in Uganda and Kazakhstan. We find that traditional structural explanations - most notably the degree of international linkage and leverage and the quality of democracy - play an important role in creating greater opportunities for domestic actors, but are not determinative. CSOs also need to take advantage of the more conducive environment to defend democracy. Doing so is more likely when campaigns: are pre-emptive and sustained, frame the issue in a manner that resonates with the electoral incentives facing parliamentarians, coordinate with influential international actors, and engage pragmatically with both the informal political rules that shape legislators' behaviour and the formal procedural 'mechanics' of legislatures. The article therefore demonstrates the significance of both political structure and agency, and of international actors using their influence to create space for domestic groups, 'leading from behind'.
The United States has reached a moment in its constitutional history when the Supreme Court has asserted itself as not only one of, but the exclusive, audience to ask and answer questions of ...constitutional meaning and constitutional law. This "juricentric" or court-centered constitutionalism has relegated the other, so-called political branches to a second-class status with respect to the Constitution. Not only has the dominance of the Court dampened our constitutional culture writ large, it has also occluded the ways that Congress and the executive branch play distinctive and vital roles within constitutional lawmaking.
As we finally tamp out the last few embers of hope that the Supreme Court can alone sustain, preserve, and protect a robust constitutional culture within the United States, I offer here another world now in existence that could provide strategies and visions for a less juricentric future writ large-that is, the case study of federal Indian law and of American colonialism, and the Native advocacy that gave birth to this body of law.
The core theoretical contribution of the case study is that recognizing legislative constitutionalism as a legitimate and co-equal form of constitutionalism could support a distinctive and thus more varied constitutional culture than that offered by our current juricentric system. Scholars have long celebrated the unique form of participation in the lawmaking process offered to the public by the institutional structure of Congress and have highlighted the ways that Congress has fostered constitutional deliberation with "the people themselves." The case study of federal Indian law supports these earlier celebrations and allows us to build on them by also recognizing Congress's ability to offer distinctive constitutional reforms. As a legislature, Congress can engage with constitutional lawmaking as statecraft-an approach wholly absent from the courts. In the context of American colonialism, Congress has offered constitutional reforms in terms of "structure"-that is, the institutions of the U.S. government and their design; implementation and alteration of the structural aspects of the constitutional order; the contours of its federalist framework; and the distribution of power-including to subordinated communities-as an insufficient and imperfect, but innovative form of constitutional lawmaking.
For scholars of federal Indian law, recognizing the longstanding relationship between Congress and Native advocates as constitutionalism fosters a deeper understanding of the constitutional developments within the law over time-developments that place the philosophies and agency of Native people and Native Nations at the center of our constitutional law and history. Beyond reperiodization of our Native legal and constitutional histories, exploring legislative constitutionalism within the field of federal Indian law provides us with an illustration of Congress taking a central role in the identification and mitigation of constitutional failure-an illustration that illuminates the problems and promise of legislative constitutionalism.
What is the effect of legislature size on public spending? An answer to this question is provided by Weingast et al. (J Polit Econ 89(4):642–664, 1981), whose “law of 1/n” posits that an increase in ...the number of elected representatives always leads to an increase in public spending. Because elected politicians regard the tax base as a common pool from which they can finance specific projects for their constituencies, and these specific constituencies internalize the full benefits of the projects, but only bear a fraction of the costs (projects are financed from the common tax base), fiscal inefficiency will increase with the number of representatives. In this paper, I test the validity of the “law of 1/n” using a dataset of 9325 German municipalities between 2008 and 2010. Through the application of a regression discontinuity design, many of the methodological pitfalls of previous studies can be avoided and a valid estimation of the causal effect of legislature size on public spending for German municipalities can be determined. The results do not corroborate the positive findings of previous studies, which generally supported the implications of the “law of 1/n”. For the years 2008–2010, I find a negative effect of legislature size on public spending in German municipal councils.
This paper makes use of regression discontinuity designs to estimate the effect of the number of legislators on the size of government. The results indicate a negative effect, i.e., the larger the ...size of the legislature the smaller is the size of government. This runs counter to conventional wisdom. One potential explanation is that more legislators can better control a budget maximizing bureaucracy. I present evidence that is consistent with the proposed mechanism.
► Does legislature size affect government size? ► We use two regression-discontinuity approaches from Finland and Sweden. ► The empirical results suggest a negative relationship. ► This may be due to an agency problem between legislators and the bureaucracy.
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