Political Ambition and Legislative Behavior in the European Parliament

Members of the European Parliament (MEP) typically follow one of two career paths, either advancing within the European Parliament itself or returning to higher office in their home states. We argue that these different ambitions condition legislative behavior. Specifically, MEPs seeking domestic careers defect from group-leadership votes more frequently and oppose legislation that expands the purview of supranational institutions. We show how individual, domestic-party, and national level variables shape the careers available to MEPs and, in turn, their voting choices. To test the argument, we analyze MEPs' roll-call voting behavior in the 5th session of the EP (1999-2004) using a random effects model that captures idiosyncrasies in voting behavior across both individual MEPs and specific roll-call votes.published or submitted for publicationnot peer reviewe

The political economy of health: death, disease and distribution

Death and disease exact a heavy toll on citizens in democracies. In response, citizens expect elected politicians to alleviate their suffering by providing public health funding to afflicted areas. I argue that the funding of health policy in democracies is subject to distributional incentives similar to other government policies. Patterns of government control, partisanship, strategic importance and quality of legislative representation condition the provision of public health funding within countries. In turn, public health spending conditions district mortality outcomes. I examine evidence from turn of the century France, United States and modern India to test this theory. First, I consider qualitative evidence of the distribution of health funds. I then assemble administrative district level electoral, budgetary and health information and predict levels of health funding and resulting mortality rates. Political importance, not just need, plays a prominent role in determining who lives and dies in democracies. This has profound implications for the plight of modern democracies facing disease threats

Political Ambition and Legislative Behavior in the European Parliament. University of Illinois EUC Working Paper, Volume 7, No. 1, 2007

Members of the European Parliament (MEP) typically follow one of two career paths, either advancing within the European Parliament itself or returning to higher office in their home states. We argue that these different ambitions condition legislative behavior. Specifically, MEPs seeking domestic careers defect from group-leadership votes more frequently and oppose legislation that expands the purview of supranational institutions. We show how individual, domestic-party, and national level variables shape the careers available to MEPs and, in turn, their voting choices. To test the argument, we analyze MEPs' roll-call voting behavior in the 5th session of the EP (1999-2004) using a random effects model that captures idiosyncrasies in voting behavior across both individual MEPs and specific roll-call votes

Democracy Promotion and Electoral Quality: A Disaggregated Analysis

The international community spends significant sums of money on democracy promotion and support, focusing especially on producing competitive and transparent electoral environments in the developing world. In theory, this aid empowers a variety of actors, increasing competition and government responsiveness. Most efforts to determine the effect of democracy aid, however, have focused on how aggregate measures of democracy, and broad concepts, such as electoral competition or media freedom, respond to aid efforts. We argue that to fully understand the effect of aid on democratization one must consider how democracy aid affects specific country institutions. Building on theory from the democratization and democracy promotion literature, we specify more precise causal linkages between democracy assistance and electoral quality. Specifically, we hypothesize about the effects of democracy aid on the implementation and quality of elections. We test these hypotheses using V-Dem's detailed elections measures, using Finkel, Perez-Linan & Seligson's (2007) data and modeling strategy, to examine the impact of democracy aid. Intriguingly, we find that there is no consistent relationship between democracy and governance aid and the improvement of specific micro-level indicators of democratic institutions or election quality, but that aggregate measures still capture a relationship between aid and democracy. We then investigate the possibility that empirical relationships between aid and democracy may not re aid-induced democratization, but may instead reflect investments countries make in regimes they observe democratizing.This research was supported, in part, by: National Science Foundation, Grant SES‐1423944; Riksbankens Jubileumsfond, Grant M13‐0559:1

Political Ambition and Legislative Behavior in the European Parliament

Members of the European Parliament (MEP) typically follow one of two career paths, either advancing within the European Parliament itself or returning to higher office in their home states. We argue that these different ambitions condition legislative behavior. Specifically, MEPs seeking domestic careers defect from group-leadership votes more frequently and oppose legislation that expands the purview of supranational institutions. We show how individual, domestic-party, and national level variables shape the careers available to MEPs and, in turn, their voting choices. To test the argument, we analyze MEPs' roll-call voting behavior in the 5th session of the EP (1999-2004) using a random effects model that captures idiosyncrasies in voting behavior across both individual MEPs and specific roll-call votes.published or submitted for publicationnot peer reviewe

Replication Data for: Google Politics: The Political Determinants of Internet Censorship in Democracies

The expansion of digital interconnectivity has simultaneously increased individuals' access to media and presented governments with new opportunities to regulate information flows. As a result, even highly democratic countries now issue frequent censorship and user data requests to digital content providers. We argue that government internet censorship occurs, in part, for political reasons, and seek to identify the conditions under which states censor. We leverage new, cross-nationally comparable, censorship request data, provided by Google, to examine how country characteristics co-vary with governments’ digital censorship activity. Within democracies, we show that governments engage in more digital censorship when internal dissent is present and when their economies produce substantial intellectual property. But these demand mechanisms are modulated by the relative influence that democratic institutions provide to narrow and diffuse interests; in particular, states with proportional electoral institutions censor less

Democratic Compromise: A Latent Variable Analysis of Ten Measures of Regime Type

Using a Bayesian latent variable approach, we synthesize a new measure of democracy, the Unified Democracy Scores (UDS), from 10 extant scales. Our measure eschews the difficult—and often arbitrary—decision to use one existing democracy scale over another in favor of a cumulative approach that allows us to simultaneously leverage the measurement efforts of numerous scholars. The result of this cumulative approach is a measure of democracy that, for every country-year, is at least as reliable as the most reliable component measure and is accompanied by quantitative estimates of uncertainty in the level of democracy. Moreover, for those who wish to continue using previously existing scales or to evaluate research performed using those scales, we extract information from the new measure to perform heretofore impossible direct comparisons between component scales. Specifically, we estimate the relative reliability of the constituent indicators, compare the specific ordinal levels of each of the existing measures in relationship to one another and assess overall levels of disagreement across raters. We make the UDS and associated parameter estimates freely available online and provide a detailed tutorial that demonstrates how to best use the UDS in applied work

Replication data for: Democratic Compromise: A Latent Variable Analysis of Ten Measures of Regime Type

Using a Bayesian latent variable approach, we synthesize a new measure of democracy, the Unified Democracy Scores (UDS), from 10 extant scales. Our measure eschews the difficult—and often arbitrary—decision to use one existing democracy scale over another in favor of a cumulative approach that allows us to simultaneously leverage the measurement efforts of numerous scholars. The result of this cumulative approach is a measure of democracy that, for every country-year, is at least as reliable as the most reliable component measure and is accompanied by quantitative estimates of uncertainty in the level of democracy. Moreover, for those who wish to continue using previously existing scales or to evaluate research performed using those scales, we extract information from the new measure to perform heretofore impossible direct comparisons between component scales. Specifically, we estimate the relative reliability of the constituent indicators, compare the specific ordinal levels of each of the existing measures in relationship to one another and assess overall levels of disagreement across raters. This replication package contains a series of R scripts and a source package which contains code and data for replicating the analysis presented in the article. The R source package contains embedded C++ code, has only been tested on Linux and OS X, and is undocumented. This is not production-level software; use at your own risk. </p

Replication data for: Brussels Bound: Policy Experience and Candidate Selection in European Elections

Parties in list systems must select candidates to best accomplish their electoral, organizational, and policy goals. In particular, parties must balance nominees' policy making potential against other aspects of candidate quality, such as electoral viability. We exploit the unique variation in candidates and parties in European elections to study this trade-off. We develop a statistical ranking model to examine how parties facing varying strategic contexts construct electoral lists and apply it to a novel dataset chronicling the political backgrounds of candidates in the 2009 European parliamentary elections. Parties that place high salience on the target legislature, are well positioned to influence policy once in office, and that have less access to competing policy making venues place particular emphasis on institution-specific policy making experience relative to other types of candidate experience. This systematic variation in parties' candidate nomination strategies may fundamentally alter legislative output and partisan policy influence

Replication Data for: Gender, Incumbency, and Party List Nominations

We study how political parties’ candidate selection strategies influence women’s descriptive parliamentary representation. Focusing on proportional elections, we ask what determines whether parties place women candidates in viable list positions. Evaluating party rankings at the individual level, we directly examine a mechanism—party nomination—central to prevailing explanations of empirical patterns in women’s representation. Moreover, we jointly evaluate how incumbency and gender affect nomination. We use European Parliament elections to compare a plethora of parties, operating under numerous institutions, in the context of a single legislature. We find that gender differences in candidate selection are largely explained by incumbency bias, although party ideology and female labor force participation help to explain which parties prioritize the placement of novice women candidates