Assessing the Effects of Personal Characteristics and Context on U.S. House Speakers’ Leadership Styles, 1789-2006

Research on congressional leadership has been dominated in recent decades by contextual interpretations that see leaders’ behavior as best explained by the environment in which they seek to exercise leadership—particularly, the preference homogeneity and size of their party caucus. The role of agency is thus discounted, and leaders’ personal characteristics and leadership styles are underplayed. Focusing specifically on the speakers of the U.S. House of Representatives from the first to the 110th Congress, we construct measures of each speaker’s commitment to comity and leadership assertiveness. We find the scores reliable and then test the extent to which a speaker’s style is the product of both political context and personal characteristics. Regression estimates on speakers’ personal assertiveness scores provide robust support for a context-plus-personal characteristics explanation, whereas estimates of their comity scores show that speakers’ personal backgrounds trump context

Whom to represent? National parliamentary representation during the eurozone crisis

The eurozone crisis is commonly associated with a politicization of public debate along national lines. With money being redistributed between member states, national parliamentarians (MPs) seem likely to pit national interests against each other. There is, however, an overlooked second force. Interdependence between eurozone states may lead national MPs and their voters to take into account other European Union citizens. Looking at MPs’ parliamentary speeches, this article fills a gap by investigating if and under which conditions individual MPs claim to represent Europeanized constituencies during the crisis. The analysis based on original data from a representative claims analysis of plenary debates on the European Financial Stability Facility (EFSF) in Austria, Germany and Ireland reveals such Europeanized representation. Interestingly, being pro-European does not lead to Europeanized representation. Instead, we witness a ‘Eurosceptic Europeanization’ in that (left-wing) Eurosceptic MPs voice opposition to the crisis measures, but in the name of European citizens