Spain

The Spanish political system limits individual MP participation in parliamentary debate favoring parties and parliamentary groups. Using data of the 7th to 10th legislative terms of Spain’s lower chamber (2000–2016) to explore the role of inter- and intra-party factors to MP floor participation, results show that parties and groups constrain MP behavior through three mechanisms. First, monitoring over MP activity ensures MP discipline and predicts very well how much MPs speak and for how long. Second, committee assignments help parliamentary groups regulate MP floor access reducing it to a few relevant MPs. Third, a strong executive minimizes dissent within the majority group in the chamber. Given these mechanisms and a set of rules that privilege party and group structure and restrain parliamentary fragmentation and individuation, legislative debate in Spain features just a few MPs within a model of representation that strongly favors central party-structure control over candidate-constituency bonding mechanisms.

Are popular and powerful committees more representative? Evidence from the ninth European Parliament

The standing committees of the European Parliament perform crucial policy-making functions and, accordingly, the question of how they are composed assumes great relevance. Unlike previous studies, which primarily looked at committee assignments from the perspective of individual MEPs, we assess the representativeness of entire committees by comparing their preference distributions with those we find in the plenary on the left/right and pro/anti EU dimension. For our analysis, we combine new data on committee memberships in the ninth European Parliament with data on policy preferences of national parties from the Chapel Hill Expert Survey. In order to assess committee representativeness, we calculate the extent to which the preference distributions of committees and the plenary overlap. We show that committee representativeness is a function of committee popularity and power. Committee popularity provides party groups with a larger pool of applicants to choose from and since popular committees are often also quite large, the formation of representative committees is facilitated. Moreover, the party groups of the European Parliament have stronger incentives to form balanced committee contingents for powerful committees, resulting in higher committee representativeness. However, this latter finding is qualified by two outliers and we only find the hypothesized relationship to hold on the pro/anti EU dimension.

Explaining Gender Gaps in Indonesian Legislative Committees

Parliamentary committees are central in most modern legislatures in the world as key decisions are often made at this level. Consequently, women’s substantial representation in parliament is frequently measured by the appointment of women in powerful and prestigious committees. However, there is relatively little knowledge about how the politics of committee assignment operates, especially in Asian democracies, home to the majority of the world’s women. In this article, the Indonesian case is used to explore two issues, which are the gendered division of committees and the impact of Islam as a party ideology in assigning women to committees. Using a quantitative approach, this article examines a unique dataset of committee assignments in Indonesia’s House of Representatives (DPR) from 2004 to 2014. Interviews with sitting parliamentarians are also used to complement the statistical analysis. The results show that gender bias is an enduring characteristic of Post-Suharto parliamentary politics and Islam as a party ideology is not solely accountable for this disparity in committee allocations.

The Legislative Matching Game: Committee Matching and Effective Legislating in the States

I argue that the value of a particular set of committee assignments for a legislator is dependent on that legislator’s policy interests. By this, I mean that “good” assignments will match committee policy jurisdictions with member policy priorities. I develop this concept of committee-agenda matching and present a measure of this match for legislators in 12 state lower chambers. After some brief measure validation, I present a substantive application, demonstrating that this match poses serious consequences for individual legislator’s ability to shepherd their bills through the legislative process.

Constituency Preferences and Committee Selection in the Mexican Cámara de Diputados

ABSTRACTPrevious research examining selection to legislative committees has assumed that the impact of constituency preferences on committee assignments is due to the incentives for individual legislators to use their committee seats to increase their personal chances of re-election. Examining the case of the Mexican Chamber of Deputies (where legislators were, until recently, barred from re-election), this study argues that the impact of constituency preferences on selection to committees also occurs because parties have incentives for their members to use committee assignments to increase the party’s chances of being re-elected. Analysis of assignments to 11 committees over 4 legislative terms provides support for the argument. These findings reinforce previous research arguing that concerns with constituency representation and its impact on re-election also apply to political parties and not solely to individual legislators.

Bridging the Gap: Lottery-Based Procedures in Early Parliamentarization

How is the use of political lotteries related to party development? This article discusses the effects of a lottery-based procedure used to distribute committee appointments that was once common across legislatures in nineteenth-century Europe. The authors analyze the effects of a political lottery in budget committee selection in the French Third Republic using a microlevel data set of French deputies from 1877 to 1914. They argue that the adoption and benefit of lottery-based procedures were to prevent the capture of early institutions by party factions or groups of self-interested political elites. The authors find that partial randomization of selection resulted in the appointment of young, skilled, middle-class deputies at the expense of influential elites. When parties gained control of committee assignments in 1910, selection once again favored elites and loyal party members. The authors link lottery-based procedures to party development by showing that cohesive parties were behind the institutional reform that ultimately dismantled this selection process. Lottery-based procedures thus played a sanitizing role during the transformation of emerging parliamentary groups into unified, cohesive political parties.

Who Gets What? The Interactive Effect of MPs’ Sex in Committee Assignments in Portugal

This article investigates the role of key individual-level factors, namely expertise, seniority and preferences in women’s assignments to legislative committees. It focuses on Portugal and draws on biographical data on MPs in five elections until 2009 and interviews with 20 legislators in 2014. The results show that female and male MPs have a similar probability of being appointed to powerful and economic issue committees, but female MPs are more likely to be appointed to social issue committees regardless of expertise and seniority. Although this outcome might be the product of their own preferences, it is influenced by embedded gender norms.

The Legislative Consequences of Congressional Scandals

We explore the consequences of involvement in scandal for members of Congress’ (MCs) success within the House of Representatives. Our analyses target all MCs who served in the 101st to 112th Congresses (1989–2012). Across this time period, we identify 253 discrete member-term observations of professional or personal scandal. Our results demonstrate that scandal stalls the upward trajectory of MCs’ careers in the chamber, affecting their levels of legislative effectiveness, their centrality to the congressional network, and their likelihood of gaining or losing prestigious committee assignments and leadership positions. Importantly, these effects can linger beyond the term following scandal, shaping MCs’ behavior into the future. Our findings demonstrate that in addition to negative electoral repercussions, scandals can have important legislative consequences for members.