Urban and Rural Representation and State Legislative Apportionment

The complexion of societies and civilizations change, often with amazing rapidity. A nation once primarily rural in character becomes predomi nantly urban. Representative schemes once fair and equitable become archaic and dated. (Chief Justice Warren, in Reynolds v. Sims.)Peer Reviewedhttp://deepblue.lib.umich.edu/bitstream/2027.42/68668/2/10.1177_106591296401700409.pd

A Three-Dimensional Voting System in Hong Kong

The voting system in the Legislative Council of Hong Kong (Legco) is sometimes unicameral and sometimes bicameral, depending on whether the bill is proposed by the Hong Kong government. Therefore, although without any representative within Legco, the Hong Kong government has certain degree of legislative power --- as if there is a virtual representative of the Hong Kong government within the Legco. By introducing such a virtual representative of the Hong Kong government, we show that Legco is a three-dimensional voting system. We also calculate two power indices of the Hong Kong government through this virtual representative and consider the $C$-dimension and the $W$-dimension of Legco. Finally, some implications of this Legco model to the current constitutional reform in Hong Kong will be given

Elected legislatures in sub-saharan Africa: Attitudes of citizens from 18 countries towards legislatures, with a particular focus on Mozambique, its assembly and parliamentarians

Elected multi-party assemblies have existed in Africa on average for no more than two decades. Consolidating democracy and improving the lives of ordinary citizens demands guardian parliaments. Parliaments are comprised predominantly of politicians and, interconnected with citizens and executives, are perceived as core institutions of representative democracies. This dissertation seeks to contribute to a better understanding of African multiparty parliaments and their role in consolidating democracy. The study seeks to comprehend the links between citizens and their elected parliaments in 18 African countries, in the process attempting to predict the prospects of these new democracies. It also focuses on the Assembly of Mozambique to attempt an understanding of the evolution, capacity and functioning of an emerging parliament. The study investigates the perceptions of Mozambican civil leaders toward their parliament, and it looks at the perceptions of Mozambican parliamentarians concerning their roles and their relations with the electorate, and concerning the Assembly’s capacity and powers. This is critical to understanding how democracy has been and will be exercised, since parliamentarians are at the forefront of the process. Each parliament has distinctive characteristics. However, there are common features based on their age and origin. The development of the Mozambican Assembly since the monoparty regime illustrates the challenges and achievements that African parliaments have undergone in the transition to democracy. The findings reveal that African citizens distinguish between presidents and parliaments, which is important given the legacy in Africa of strong executives led by dominant presidents. They also reveal that citizens value the gains made by the multiparty regimes and that parliaments as lawmakers are preferred to presidents. In most countries surveyed, citizens, on average, gave positive evaluations of their parliaments, especially concerning their trustworthiness. Political characteristics outweigh socio-economic status in influencing how citizens perceived parliaments. Party allegiance and perception of electoral fairness are the factors that most influenced how citizens perceived their parliaments. Interviews with Mozambican MPs revealed their frustration over the influence of the Assembly over the national budget. In the MPs’ opinions, direct foreign aid to the budget reduced parliament’s role to that of a rubber stamp, weakening the role of MPs. Mozambican civic leaders saw parliament as an indispensable and critical institution, and they expressed frustration with the extreme party-centricity of MPs, which is perceived as normal by MPs. Distrust between these groups reinforces the sentiment among ruling party members that the party deserves protection. In democracies, MPs from different parties are political opponents and not enemies. In Mozambique, the transition from enemy to adversary is not yet complete. While fragile, parliament has been the only space in Mozambican society where political parties can interact

The Italian legislative process in bicameral perspective

This thesis explores the functioning of the Italian legislative process at the bicameral level over the years 1996-2018, and it investigates how legislative dynamics changed following an electoral reform in 2005. The Italian bicameral system has long been considered highly “redundant” because of how similar the two chambers of parliament are. Nevertheless, the 2005 electoral reform brought about an important and yet under-investigated change by making their partisan composition considerably more incongruent than it previously was. Given the repeated failed attempts to reform the Italian bicameral system, most recently in 2016, and the lack of detailed studies looking at how it works in practice, evidence filling this gap is an important contribution both to the academic literature and to debates about institutional reform in Italy. The overarching research question informing this project is: “How do legislative dynamics in the Italian Parliament work at the bicameral level, and how, if at all, does variation in the level of bicameral incongruence affect them?”. The methodology used is a mixed-methods approach. A quantitative component uses two original datasets of government bills and amendments to carry out a set of exploratory regression analyses. This is a first step to reconstruct legislative trends and whether incongruence affects them. Secondly, a qualitative part relies on a total of four case study bills, using pairwise comparison and process tracing to reconstruct the effects of incongruence by comparing the parliamentary passage of two pairs of education bills during times of low and high incongruence. The results shed light on the performance of Italian bicameralism and inform policy recommendations for parliamentary and second chamber reform. By conceptualising the causal effects of bicameral incongruence, this study has implications for the wider comparative literature on bicameralism, coalition government and executive-legislative relations

Committee autonomy in parliamentary systems - coalition logic or congressional rationales?

The Institutions of Politics; Design, Workings, and implications ( do not use, ended 1-1-2020

The Crisis of Missouri’s Polity: How Privileged Interest Groups Influenced the Development of Missouri’s 2014 Tax Reform Law

Increasing wealth inequality has created a public discourse concerning its societal impact and the government’s role in its regulation. Should the government regulate and redistribute wealth through taxes and government programs, or should the market regulate it? To this end, one concern that has not been discussed is to what extent wealthy individuals have manipulated our government institutions to ensure their preference of market regulation of wealth distribution. Scholarly research has been conducted at the national level to determine the networks who are altering our political institutions to enable wealthy, minority interests’ access to our legislative process. Due to our federalist style of democracy, similar alterations are occurring at the state-level with little academic focus. This dissertation seeks to answer how strong are Missouri’s legislative institutions and to what extent have wealthy individuals gained points of access into Missouri’s legislative process to promote a market-based management of wealth distribution through its passage of the 2014 Tax Reform Act, SB 509. This dissertation uses a multi-method research design, while borrowing theories and models utilized at the national level, to illustrate to what degree interest groups representing the wealthy were engaged with SB 509’s development and enactment into law. This study finds that Missouri’s legislative institution has weakened over the last 40 years, and there is a regional and Republican party-bias favoring Missouri’s weakened legislative institution. This study also finds circumstantial evidence that wealthy individuals and interest groups who support a more market-based redistribution of wealth gained access to Missouri’s legislative process through campaign donations and lobbying to attempt to influence SB 509’s development. This research illustrates a link between weak political institutions and the ability of groups representing wealthy and conservative interests to gain access to these institutions to attempt to influence tax legislation that ensures a market-based management of wealth distribution

Female political participation and barriers that women face in politics: lessons from post-soviet Kazakstan and Belarus

Women’s participation in politics has increased across the globe in the last 50 years, and this trend is not limited to Western democracies. For example, post-Soviet Belarus and Kazakhstan, both presidential autocracies and signatories to the Convention on the Elimination of All Forms of Discrimination against Women (CEDAW), have seen women’s political participation increase in recent years. However, there are more women in politics in Belarus than in Kazakhstan. What can explain this variation? Comparing the number of women in the parliaments of Belarus and Kazakhstan over time, I find that the demand for domestic or international support, the extent to which a country is politically and socially linked with other states in the world, and presidential goals jointly influence female political participation. An increase in women in parliament are not evidence of promoting democratization and democratic representation, but rather deliberate authoritarian strategies to bolster regime resilience and presidential power. Importantly, these findings help advance our understanding of female political participation beyond the western world and beyond the democratization paradigm

Positive Constitutional Economics II—A Survey of Recent Developments

Analysis of the economic effects of constitutional rules has made substantial progress over the last decade. This survey provides an overview of this rapidly growing research area and also discusses a number of methodological issues and identifies underresearched areas. It argues that the next logical step of Positive Constitutional Economics is to endogenize constitutional rules.Positive Constitutional Economics, Constitutional Political Economy, Economic Effects of Constitutions, New Institutional Economics, Endogenous Constitutions