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"Victor, Jennifer Nicoll"
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Bridging the Information Gap
Legislative member organizations (LMOs)-such as caucuses in the U.S. Congress and intergroups in the European Parliament-exist in lawmaking bodies around the world. Unlike parties and committees, LMOs play no obvious, predefined role in the legislative process. They provide legislators with opportunities to establish social networks with colleagues who share common interests. In turn, such networks offer valuable opportunities for the efficient exchange of policy-relevant-and sometimes otherwise unattainable-information between legislative offices. Building on classic insights from the study of social networks, the authors provide a comparative overview of LMOs across advanced, liberal democracies. In two nuanced case studies of LMOs in the European Parliament and the U.S. Congress, the authors rely on a mix of social network analysis, sophisticated statistical methods, and careful qualitative analysis of a large number of in-depth interviews.
eBook
Waiting to Vote in the 2016 Presidential Election: Evidence from a Multi-county Study
This paper is the result of a nationwide study of polling place dynamics in the 2016 presidential election. Research teams, recruited from local colleges and universities and located in twenty-eight election jurisdictions across the United States, observed and timed voters as they entered the queue at their respective polling places and then voted. We report results about four specific polling place operations and practices: the length of the check-in line, the number of voters leaving the check-in line once they have joined it, the time for a voter to check in to vote (i.e., verify voter’s identification and obtain a ballot), and the time to complete a ballot. Long lines, waiting times, and times to vote are closely related to time of day (mornings are busiest for polling places). We found the recent adoption of photographic voter identification (ID) requirements to have a disparate effect on the time to check in among white and nonwhite polling places. In majority-white polling places, scanning a voter’s driver’s license speeds up the check-in process. In majority nonwhite polling locations, the effect of strict voter ID requirements increases time to check in, albeit modestly.
Journal Article
Financing friends: How lobbyists create a web of relationships among members of Congress
In this article we seek to explain the nexus of legislators and the lobbyists who vie for their attention. Prior research finds that campaign contributions do not buy votes, but they can buy access to lawmakers. Rather than conceptualize donations as a single-shot exchange of money for time, we see campaign donations as both an investment in an ongoing relationship and an expression of common underlying characteristics between lobbyists and legislators. We use the personal campaign donations of individual lobbyists in the 109th Congress to test our account. We find that for legislators up for reelection, the more connected two legislators are by common lobbyist donors, the more likely they are to vote the same way, controlling for the influence of party, geography and constituency.
Journal Article
Keeping Your Friends Close and Your Enemies Closer? Information Networks in Legislative Politics
The authors contribute to the existing literature on the determinants of legislative voting by offering a social network-based theory about the ways that legislators’ social relationships affect floor voting behaviour. It is argued that legislators establish contacts with both political friends and enemies, and that they use the information they receive from these contacts to increase their confidence in their own policy positions. Social contacts between political allies have greater value the more the two allies agree on policy issues, while social contacts between political adversaries have greater value the more the two adversaries disagree on policy issues. To test these propositions, we use social network analysis tools and demonstrate how to account for network dependence using a multilevel modelling approach.
Journal Article
Polarized Agents: Campaign Contributions by Lobbyists
Are professional lobbyists loyal partisans? There are thousands of professional lobbyists in Washington, D.C., who work with members of Congress and their staffs, many of whom also make contributions to congressional candidates and political parties. Although many lobbyists have backgrounds in partisan politics, they may have incentives to give money to candidates from both parties. This article finds that professional lobbyists tend to make personal contributions to their preferred party exclusively.
Journal Article
The Institutional Effect on Majority Rule Instability: Bicameralism in Spatial Policy Decisions
The constitutional requirement that legislation must be approved by a majority of two chambers increases the likelihood that a core will exist, even in situations in which a core would not exist under a unicameral majority rule. Laboratory experiments were run on forty six-person groups, with constant induced preferences in a two-dimensional policy space. Groups were assigned to one of four treatments. In three treatments, members were assigned to two three-person chambers, and a majority of each chamber was required to make policy decisions. In two of these treatments, the assignment induced a bicameral core; in one it did not. The fourth, a control treatment, was a unicameral, simple majority-rule game with no core. The variance in each of the two cases with a bicameral core was significantly less than in the no-core bicameral or the unicameral treatments. In the cases with a bi-cameral core, the outcomes clustered closely around the predicted core outcomes. The results provide strong support for the stability-inducing properties of bicameralism and for the core as a predictor of this effect. Players received statistically greater rewards in those treatments in which their role was pivotal in achieving the core.
Journal Article