Assessing President Obama's Appointment of Women to the Federal Appellate Courts

A major legacy of the Obama presidency was the mark he left on the federal courts with respect to increasing judicial diversity. In particular, President Obama's appointments of women to the federal judiciary exceeded all previous presidents in terms of both absolute numbers and as a share of all judges; he also appointed a record-setting number of women of color to the lower federal courts. In this Article, I take an intersectional approach to exploring variation in the professional backgrounds, qualifications, and Senate confirmation experiences of Obama's female appeals court appointees, comparing them with George W. Bush and Bill Clinton appointees. These data reveal that women of color appointed by Obama differ from both white women and minority men in terms of ABA ratings, the types of professional experiences they bring with them, and whether they were confirmed by a roll call vote.

When Does She Rebel? How Gender Affects Deviating Legislative Behaviour

It is common wisdom that the increase in the number of women in parliament brought along a new diversity of perspectives presented in legislatures. So far, however, we know little about the implications of women's presence on party cohesion. Moving towards a more complete understanding of how women affect political processes, this article addresses the question, does gender affect vote defection from party lines, and if so, under what circumstances? We argue that the actual and perceived risk associated with vote defection in roll-call votes is gendered and that this is constraining the leeway of women to rebel. Analysing roll-call vote data of the German Bundestag (1953–2013) provided by Bergmann et al. (2018), we show that gender exerts a consistent effect only if electoral safety and policy content are considered: it is in feminine policy areas and at high levels of electoral security that women are more likely than men to rebel. This finding implies that taking different incentive structures into account is key if we want to understand gendered legislative behaviour.

Revealing Issue Salience via Costly Protest: How Legislative Behavior Following Protest Advantages Low-Resource Groups

Collective action, particularly by low-resource groups, presents an opportunity for re-election-minded legislators to learn about (and subsequently represent) their constituents’ salient interests. In fact, legislators are more likely to support the preferences of protesters than non-protesters. Legislators are also more likely to support the preferences of racial and ethnic minority, low-income and grassroots protesting groups than they are to represent better-resourced protesters. This argument emerges from a formal theory and is empirically tested using legislative roll-call vote data from the 102nd through the 104th US Congresses and data on civil rights, minority issues and civil liberties issue area protests reported in the New York Times. This counterintuitive result enhances understanding of inequalities in representation. It demonstrates that under certain conditions, political representation favors disadvantaged populations.

Cooptation in Practice: Measuring Legislative Opposition in an Authoritarian Regime

Canonical theories of legislative institutions in authoritarian regimes highlight the role of oppositions in legitimizing non-democratic rule, shaping the autocrat's policy agenda, and extracting concessions. Despite recent advances in understanding how oppositions shape larger, macro-level outcomes, surprisingly little attention has been given to the question of how legislators behave in office and how the regime manages potential opposition. In this paper, we construct a novel dataset of roll call vote records spanning the entirety of Kuwaiti legislative history---more than 150,000 votes over 53 years. We use this to develop a new method for measuring legislative opposition to and cooperation with an authoritarian regime on substantive policy issues. We then test the effectiveness of regime strategies---rents and policy concessions---for coopting potential opposition and examine the circumstances under which these these strategies are used.

Roll-Call Vote Selection: Implications for the Study of Legislative Politics

Roll-call votes provide scholars with the opportunity to measure many quantities of interest. However, the usefulness of the roll-call sample depends on the population it is intended to represent. After laying out why understanding the sample properties of the roll-call record is important, we catalogue voting procedures for 145 legislative chambers, finding that roll calls are typically discretionary. We then consider two arguments for discounting the potential problem: (a) roll calls are ubiquitous, especially where the threshold for invoking them is low or (b) the strategic incentives behind requests are sufficiently benign so as to generate representative samples. We address the first defense with novel empirical evidence regarding roll-call prevalence and the second with an original formal model of the position-taking argument for roll-call vote requests. Both our empirical and theoretical results confirm that inattention to vote method selection should broadly be considered an issue for the study of legislative behavior.

Candidacy Eligibility Criteria and Party Unity

Extant research suggests that candidate selection methods can be consequential for party unity in legislative voting. Yet thus far, only variations in the selectorate and the degree of centralization have been examined. This article argues that Candidacy Eligibility Criteria (CEC), too, have implications for party unity. I theorize that with stricter formal requirements, parties avoid adverse selection and ensure the nomination of committed candidates. By using roll-call vote data from 16 industrial democracies, candidate surveys and an original data set consisting of nearly 500 historical party constitutions, I show that parties demanding prior membership and nudging aspirants to maintain networks within the party tend to be more unified in parliamentary voting. Moreover, their candidates, too, express greater loyalty when compared with parties without formal CEC. Thus, this article contributes to the literatures on party unity and on candidate selection by showing how certain party rules, hitherto neglected, affect party unity.

Conservative Politicians and Voting on Same-sex Marriage

We examine whether conservative politicians are less likely to support same-sex marriage when they run for office in safe rather than in contested districts using new data based on a roll-call vote in the national German parliament. The results show that the margin of the majority for the incumbent in the previous election was a strong predictor for supporting same-sex marriage. When the majority increased by a 1 percentage point, the likelihood of voting in favour of same-sex marriage decreased by around 1.3 percentage points. We conjecture that politicians are election-motivated - even when submitting roll-call votes on a matter of conscience.

What Motivates an Oligarchic Elite to Democratize? Evidence from the Roll Call Vote on the Great Reform Act of 1832

The Great Reform Act of 1832 was a watershed for democracy in Great Britain. We study the vote on 22 March 1831 in the House of Commons to test three competing theories of democratization: public opinion, political expedience, and threat of revolution. Peaceful agitation and mass-support for reform played an important role. Political expedience also motivated some members of Parliament to support the reform, especially if they were elected in constituencies located in counties that would gain seats. Violent unrest in urban but not in rural areas had some influence on the members of Parliament. Counterfactual scenarios suggest that the reform bill would not have obtained a majority in the House of Commons in the absence of these factors.