Institutional listening in deliberative democracy: Towards a deliberative logic of transmission

This article explores the role of institutional listening in deliberative democracy, focusing particularly on its contribution to the transmission process between the public sphere and formal institutions. We critique existing accounts of transmission for prioritizing voice over listening and for remaining constrained by an ‘aggregative logic’ of the flow of ideas and voices in a democracy. We argue that formal institutions have a crucial role to play in ensuring transmission operates according to a more deliberative logic. To substantiate this argument, we focus on two recent examples of institutional listening in two different democracies: Australia’s Royal Commission into Institutional Responses to Child Sexual Abuse and the United States’ Senate Judiciary Committee’s confirmation hearing for Supreme Court nominee, Brett Kavanaugh. These cases show that institutional listening can take different forms; it can be purposefully designed or incidental, and it can contribute to the realization of deliberative democracy in various ways. Specifically, institutional listening can help enhance the credibility and visibility of minority groups and perspectives while also empowering these groups to better hold formal political institutions accountable. In these ways, institutional listening helps transmission operate according to a more deliberative logic.

The Electoral Impact of Military Experience: Evidence From U.S. Senate Elections (1982–2016)

The belief that a military veteran candidate receives an electoral benefit at the polls based on a history of military service remains a widely held assumption in American politics. However, this assumption of a veteran electoral bonus has rarely been studied by scholars and the limited literature displays mixed results. This article presents the findings of a new study that addresses the mixed results in the literature and presents evidence that demonstrates that certain types of military veteran candidates do gain a veteran bonus in congressional elections. This advantage over nonveterans is conditioned by party, the type of race, and the nature of military service. By analyzing general election races for the United States Senate over 34 years (1982–2016), the study uncovers support for Democratic candidates with military service receiving an electoral bonus at the polls. This electoral bonus is most widely enjoyed by Democratic veterans in open Senate races and with experience in deployed warzones. The key findings suggest that previous conclusions in the literature with respect to establishing a veteran bonus in congressional elections should be reexamined to expand the time period of analysis, restructure the characterization of military experience beyond a binary variable, and include both House and Senate elections.

US Senate talks continue over infrastructure package

Headline UNITED STATES: Senate infrastructure talks continue

Battling Procedural Windmills: Introductions of Proposals to Change U.S. Senate Procedure

Procedural change in Congress, especially in the United States Senate, has been studied quite extensively over the last thirty years. One of the most remarkable aspects of Senate procedural change is the extremely low likelihood that any proposals to change the way the Senate conducts its business will actually pass the relevant procedures and become part of either the Standing Rules of the Senate, or other sources of the procedural outlay. Being fully aware of this, however, senators continue to introduce scores of proposals that deal with many different aspects of the procedural environment, despite the negligible chance of any of them being accepted or even gaining attention from fellow lawmakers or the public. This paper looks at these ‘dead on arrival’ proposals, and tries to provide an explanation for the proposals, grounded in theories that deal with legislators’ building of their personal brands, aimed at helping their chances of re-election.

Ad referendum

The history of parliaments is not limited to their deliberations and acts. It must also embrace their procedure. Despite all differences, the Diet was the Hanse’s parliament. One of its salient procedures was ad referendum, by which the representatives of one or more towns declared themselves unable to say yea or nay to a particular proposal before consulting their town council. A number of scholars have viewed ad referendum as a means of delaying (and thus frustrating) a resolution which was unpalatable to them (commonly for selfish and parochial reasons), thus elevating ad referendum to the slightly disreputable status of a filibuster in the United States Senate, but with the difference that it was, in the end, disastrous for the Hanse. However, scholars have yet to reach a consensus on the precise meaning and significance of ad referendum. This paper analyzes ad referendum between the Peace of Stralsund (1370) and the beginning of the Thirteen Years’ War (1453) with particular regard to the Prussian Hanseatic towns. Four issues are addressed. 1) How was ad referendum designated in the sources? 2) What topics galvanized town representatives to employ ad referendum? 3) Were these matters in fact subsequently debated by the Prussian assemblies of towns and estates? 4) Does the analysis of two selected Diets (Lübeck 1383, Lüneburg 1412) and the corresponding Prussian assemblies shed more light on the procedure? The paper concludes that ad referendum allowed town representatives provisionally to approve a common resolution, but combine that with an appeal for understanding that one was unable to pass a resolution which affected the rights of third parties without consulting them and obtaining their approval. The interpretation of ad referendum by some scholars, namely that it was consciously employed to torpedo unpalatable resolutions and ultimately paralyzed the Diet, can therefore be ruled out of court.

Backbone: An R package for extracting the backbone of bipartite projections

Bipartite projections are used in a wide range of network contexts including politics (bill co-sponsorship), genetics (gene co-expression), economics (executive board co-membership), and innovation (patent co-authorship). However, because bipartite projections are always weighted graphs, which are inherently challenging to analyze and visualize, it is often useful to examine the ‘backbone,’ an unweighted subgraph containing only the most significant edges. In this paper, we introduce the R package backbone for extracting the backbone of weighted bipartite projections, and use bill sponsorship data from the 114th session of the United States Senate to demonstrate its functionality.

US Senate filibuster threshold looks set to stay

Headline UNITED STATES: Senate filibuster looks set to stay

US Senate’s COVID bill forces choices on Democrats

Headline UNITED STATES: Senate bill forces choices on Democrats

Hollywood Hates Hitler!

In September of 1941, a handful of isolationist senators set out to tarnish Hollywood for war-mongering. The United States was largely divided on the possibility of entering the European War, yet the immigrant moguls in Hollywood were acutely aware of the conditions in Europe. After Kristallnacht (the Night of Broken Glass), the gloves came off. Warner Bros. released the first directly anti-Nazi film in 1939 with Confessions of a Nazi Spy. Other studios followed with films such as The Mortal Storm (MGM), Man Hunt (Fox), The Man I Married (Fox), and The Great Dictator (United Artists). While these films represented a small percentage of Hollywood’s output, senators took aim at the Jews in Hollywood who were supposedly “agitating us for war” and launched an investigation that resulted in Senate Resolution 152. The resolution was aimed at both radio and movies that “have been extensively used for propaganda purposes designed to influence the public mind in the direction of participation in the European war.” When the Senate approved a subcommittee to investigate the intentions of these films, studio bosses were ready and willing to stand up against the government to defend their beloved industry. What followed was a complete embarrassment of the United States Senate and a large victory for Hollywood as well as freedom of speech.