Committee chair selection under high informational and organizational constraints

This article draws on major theories of committee organization to explain committee chair selection in contexts with high informational and organizational constraints. We test our theoretical expectations through a series of fixed effects conditional logit models ran on an original data set which includes all legislators who have served in the Romanian Chamber of Deputies from 1992 to 2012. The findings indicate that sector knowledge matters more for committee chair selection in the first post-communist terms, while chair seniority and party credentials acquire relevance later on. The effect of sector knowledge is stronger than that of chair seniority for the committees that the members of parliament perceive to be the most important, while party leaders have privileged access to the chair position irrespective of how salient the committee is

The 2009 European Election in Italy: National or European?

In June 2009, European citizens voted in the European Parliamentary elections. Despite the relevance of the election, turnout across countries was particularly low. In Italy, too, abstention is growing and this paper aims to explain why. Traditionally, low turnout in European Parliamentary elections is explained by the fact that they are considered second-order elections and, thus, less important than national elections. According to this perspective, national factors are the main cause of lower turnout as compared to national elections. Thus, it is generally considered that low turnout is not related to citizens’ support for the European Union or other European attitudes, such as European identity. In this article, this perspective is questioned and other individual factors are considered. In particular, a number of European attitudes are considered as independent variables together with national factors. The findings show that abstention in European Parliamentary elections in Italy is directly linked to citizens’ disaffection with politics, rather than disaffection with government performance. Furthermore, attitudes toward the European Union integration project play a role only when the level of political involvement is high. Thus, European questions matter and turnout in European Parliamentary elections is driven not only by national-level factors, but also by citizens’ satisfaction with the European Union and sense of European identity

Empirical analysis and agent-based modeling of Lithuanian parliamentary elections

In this contribution we analyze a parties' vote share distribution across the polling stations during the Lithuanian parliamentary elections of 1992, 2008 and 2012. We find that the distribution is rather well fitted by the Beta distribution. To reproduce this empirical observation we propose a simple multi-state agent-based model of the voting behavior. In the proposed model agents change the party they vote for either idiosyncratically or due to a linear recruitment mechanism. We use the model to reproduce the vote share distribution observed during the election of 1992. We discuss model extensions needed to reproduce the vote share distribution observed during the other elections.Comment: 19 pages, 11 figure

Modeling of the parties' vote share distributions

Competition between varying ideas, people and institutions fuels the dynamics of socio-economic systems. Numerous analyses of the empirical data extracted from different financial markets have established a consistent set of stylized facts describing statistical signatures of the competition in the financial markets. Having an established and consistent set of stylized facts helps to set clear goals for theoretical models to achieve. Despite similar abundance of empirical analyses in sociophysics, there is no consistent set of stylized facts describing the opinion dynamics. In this contribution we consider the parties' vote share distributions observed during the Lithuanian parliamentary elections. We show that most of the time empirical vote share distributions could be well fitted by numerous different distributions. While discussing this peculiarity we provide arguments, including a simple agent-based model, on why the beta distribution could be the best choice to fit the parties' vote share distributions.Comment: 12 pages, 7 figure

Parliamentary questions and the probability of reelection in the UK House of Commons

Members of worldwide parliaments partake in debates, where they have the opportunity to hold governments to account by asking pre-submitted questions. The UK House of Commons uses a ballot system to determine which members are selected to ask a question from those who expressed an interest in doing so. This paper is the first in the literature to exploit this randomization to show that the asking of such questions increases a member’s chances of being reelected by their constituents. It is shown that while the ordering of parliamentary questions is determined at random, the practicalities of conducting debates introduce a potentially endogenous element to the determination of which questions receive oral answers (particularly the speed at which questions are answered). This paper uses a matched sampling approach to cope with such non-random cases, but also includes alternative results, to show that the findings are not reliant on the use of this technique

Recall of MPs in the UK : 'if I were you I wouldn't start from here'

The publication of a White Paper, Recall of MPs, and a draft Bill for pre-legislative scrutiny, by the UK Government in December 2011 was greeted with almost universal antipathy. In bringing forward the draft Bill Cabinet Office ministers declared their intention to ‘trigger a debate on what would be the best model for a recall mechanism’ and they expressed a willingness ‘to consider alternative models’ or even to contemplate ‘adopting a completely different approach’. Yet, they made it clear any such proposals ‘must work within our unique constitutional framework’ and be ‘suitable for our system of representative democracy’. The objective of this article, therefore, is to do precisely what Cabinet Office ministers asked: to examine comparative experience and to apply lessons from that experience to the UK's ‘unique constitutional framework’. Three questions guide the analysis: first, what is the problem to be addressed in introducing recall?; secondly, what does comparative experience reveal about the operation of recall? and thirdly how unique is the UK's constitutional framework

The Allocation of Public Goods and National Elections in Ghana

The body of literature on purely democratic countries can sometimes fail to explain the behavior of government in semi-democratic African countries. Empirical and theoretical political economic papers find that public funds target ruling party supporters and swing districts. Our results, however, suggest that the opposite was true of Ghana. We observe that pro-government districts received less public investment when the NDC was in power. We posit that this finding is partially driven by the government's will to curry favor with opposition politicians. Indeed, in addition to pursuing its electoral objectives, the government of an emerging democracy may fear political instability and keep the lid on potential unrest by bargaining with opposition leaders. Our analysis also shows that, when controlling for votes and other covariates (including wealth, urbanization and density), public goods allocation is not driven by ethnic group targeting either

A Vocational Upper House?: Lessons from Ireland

The government has expressed a commitment to maintain an independent element in the reformed second chamber, and not to hand overall control to any one party. This raises the question of how independent members are selected for the house. Appointment is one solution, but others include ex-officio seats for defined vocational groups, or election from these groups. Ireland is the only country in the world where such a system is used for the bulk of second chamber members - through elections using vocational categories, with nominations from voluntary and professional organisations. This briefing looks at the Irish system and lessons to be learnt for the reformed House of Lords

Voice of the Diaspora: An Analysis of Migrant Voting Behavior

This paper utilizes a unique dataset on votes cast by Czech and Polish migrants in their recent national elections to investigate the impact of institutional, political and economic characteristics on migrants’ voting behavior. The political preferences of migrants are strikingly different from those of their domestic counterparts. In addition, there are also important differences among migrants living in different countries. This paper examines three alternative hypotheses to explain migrant voting behavior: adaptive learning; economic self-selection and political selfselection. The results of the analysis suggest that migrant voting behavior is affected by the institutional environment of the host countries, in particular the tradition of democracy and the extent of economic freedom. In contrast, there is little evidence that differences in migrants’ political attitudes are caused by self-selection based either on economic motives or political attitudes prior to migrating. These results are interpreted as indicating that migrants’ political preferences change in the wake of migration as they adapt to the norms and values prevailing in their surroundings.http://deepblue.lib.umich.edu/bitstream/2027.42/40100/3/wp714.pd