National Party Politics and Supranational Politics in the European Union: New Evidence from the European Parliament

Political parties play an important role in structuring political competition at different levels of governance in the European Union (EU). The political parties that contest national elections also participate in the EU legislative institutions, with the governing parties at the national level participating in the Council of Ministers and a broad range of national parties represented in the European Parliament (EP). Recent research indicates that national parties in the EP have formed ideological coalitions -- party groups -- that represent transnational political interests. These party groups appear to manage legislative behavior such that national interests -- which dominate the Council of Ministers -- are subjugated to ideological conflict. In this paper, we demonstrate that the roll-call vote evidence for the impact of party groups in the EP is misleading. Because party groups have incentives to select votes for roll call so as to hide or feature particular voting patterns, the true character of political conflict is never revealed in roll calls.

Oversight or Representation? Public Opinion and Impeachment Resolutions in Argentina and Brazil

Why do legislators introduce impeachment resolutions against the president, even though most of these resolutions never succeed? We explore two possible answers to this puzzle, which are linked to the legislative functions of oversight and representation. First, legislators initiate impeachment procedures to expose (real or alleged) presidential misdeeds, an action that may weaken the president's approval rates, even if an impeachment process remains unlikely. Second, legislators introduce impeachment resolutions to express their constituents' outrage in the context of corruption scandals or poor economic performance- that is, in response to an exogenous decline in presidential approval. To test these hypotheses, we analyze 274 impeachment resolutions introduced against the presidents of Argentina and Brazil since the transition to democracy. We estimate models predicting presidential approval and impeachment resolutions using time-series and simultaneous equations estimators. Our results strongly support the representation hypothesis

Informal institutions and gendered candidate selection in Brazilian parties

Six electoral cycles since the implementation of Brazil’s gender quota, just 15% of the 513 members of the Chamber of Deputies are women. We ask how parties’ use of informal institutions mediates the effectiveness of the gender quota. Drawing on data from more than 4,000 state-level party organizations, we show that parties employ informal practices that intentionally and non-intentionally interact with gender equity rules to affect women’s political representation: the intentional nomination of phantom candidates (“laranjas”) allows parties to comply with the letter of the quota law, without effectively supporting women’s candidacies—to the detriment of women’s election; meanwhile, the extended use of provisional commissions to minimize oversight on candidate selection poses an obstacle to the quota and women’s candidacies and election more generally. Quota resistance characterizes an instance of both the likely inadvertent effects of informal institutions employed for non-gendered motivations and party leaders acting to preserve their own power

Political Factors and Health Outcomes: Insight from Argentina's Provinces

This paper explores whether political factors were associated with health outcomes across Argentina's 23 provinces and Federal Capital from 1983 to 2005, controlling for national trends, per capita economic output, and other provincial specificities. The introduction of a gender quota for the lower house of the provincial legislature is found to have a statistically significant and substantively strong association with lower infant mortality. Most other political factors are found to be unassociated with the health share of provincial spending, attendance at birth by trained personnel, or infant survival. This lack of association stands in contrast to the findings of the cross-national literature, in which political factors are often found to be associated with health care spending, health service utilization, and health status. Differences in level of analysis (national vs. subnational) and in statistical technique help to explain these contrasting findings. Still, the analysis suggests that relations between political factors and health outcomes may be weaker than is sometimes suggested. As Amartya Sen has noted, democratic freedoms (and other political factors) create opportunities to improve other dimensions of human development. Whether these opportunities are seized depends on the actions of citizens and governments.human development, democracy, mortality, health care, gender, subnational, Argentina.

Do Self-Reporting Regimes Matter? Evidence From the Convention Against Torture

International regulatory agreements depend largely on self-reporting for implementation, yet we know almost nothing about whether or how such mechanisms work. We theorize that self-reporting processes provide information for domestic constituencies, with the potential to create pressure for better compliance. Using original data on state reports submitted to the Committee Against Torture, we demonstrate the influence of this process on the pervasiveness of torture and inhumane treatment. We illustrate the power of self-reporting regimes to mobilize domestic politics through evidence of civil society participation in shadow reporting, media attention, and legislative activity around anti-torture law and practice. This is the first study to evaluate systematically the effects of self-reporting in the context of a treaty regime on human rights outcomes. Since many international agreements rely predominantly on self-reporting, the results have broad significance for compliance with international regulatory regimes globally

The Political-Economy of Argentina’s Debacle

In this paper I argue that political-economy considerations –and in particular the identity of the reformers- are central to understanding the Argentine crisis. During the 90´s the main political parties remained attached to populism, and no strong party emerged at the center of the political spectrum. This had two effects in the reform process. First, it severely deteriorated it (efficiency, corruption), reducing the support of the population. Second, when a series of shocks hit the economy the anti-reform camp tried to undo most reforms, and thus convey a message to the population about the “right” model of the world.http://deepblue.lib.umich.edu/bitstream/2027.42/39980/2/wp594.pd

Ideology Versus Clientelism: Modernization and Electoral Competition in Brazil

This study investigates how parties utilize the political dimensions of ideology (left-right) and clientelism (programmatic-patronage) to compete electorally in developing democracies. It proposes a combined utility theory, which suggests polarized competitive elections in modernizing national electoral markets compel programmatic parties to coalesce with clientelistic parties to gain access to regional private electoral markets. Methodologically, this study draws on a mixed-method approach focusing on Brazil as a crucial test case. It applies spatial voting models to assess the validity of ideological competition as well as geospatial voting distribution based on clustering and dispersion to devise a new quantitative measurement of clientelism based on subnational electoral market characteristics. Field research helps uncover how political elites form strategically combined ideological and clientelistic party coalitions to increase electoral success. The analysis suggests ideology and clientelism operate as independent factors explaining political linkages in developing democracies. The interaction of these dimensions through electoral coalitions, however, indicates the weakening of ideology over time and lack of discernible pattern on the clientelistic level. This study contributes to the literature by investigating party competition on the ideological and clientelistic levels. It also contributes to the analytical and methodological refinement of the concept of clientelism as a systematic political linkage

How Social Policy and Scandal Transformed Brazil's Partido dos Trabalhadores

Honors (Bachelor's)Political ScienceUniversity of Michiganhttp://deepblue.lib.umich.edu/bitstream/2027.42/91783/1/sethns.pd