Legislative Politics

This chapter discusses the general characteristics of the South Korean National Assembly frequently observed since democratization in 1987. Among other things, the chapter primarily focuses on the two major actors in the South Korean parliamentary arena, standing committees and legislative parties. It starts by describing the evolution of the National Assembly, maintaining that the South Korean legislative process has been heavily dominated by the president and the executive branch in one way or another. This observation was never truer than during the authoritarian eras, but has also been the case since the start of the Sixth Republic. With respect to the major actors, political parties in the National Assembly can be said to play a predominant role, while the standing committees have atrophied despite their nominal centrality and positional importance. All the explanations in this chapter suggest that the so-called inter-party consultative system more often than not gives way to majoritarianism in the actual legislative process when the two modes collide.

Legislative Speech in Presidential Systems

This essay constitutes a sort of corrective to the considerable attention scholars of legislative speech have given to bodies in parliamentary regimes. I survey the study of legislative speech in presidential systems by categorizing it into two types. The first presents patterns of speech across memberships as indicative of other factors such as electoral institutions and the strength of legislative parties. Here, I use Proksch and Slapin’s theoretical framework for purchase and refer to a small but growing corpus of literature on Latin America. The subject of the second is the content of speech. The approach is normative and assumes words spoken are independent variables that can have important effects on policy, politics, and the health of the broader polity. I conclude by remarking upon the opportunities computer software and newly accessible data provide for researchers of speech in the legislatures of presidential systems. I also suggest avenues for future research.

Preference vote and intra-party competition in open list PR systems

Open list proportional representation (PR) systems require that candidates seek personal votes in order to be successful. This feature of the system is considered to lead to intense competition among co-partisans and, ultimately, to weak electoral and legislative parties, narrow public policies, localism, clientelism, and corruption. We examine the distribution of personal votes among candidates from the same party for seven elections to the Brazilian national chamber of deputies (1990–2014). These elections are widely seen as hyper-competitive, particularly among candidates from the same list. Yet, the patterns in the data are not compatible with such a view. We find that the level of overall competition is considerably lower than the absolute number of parties and candidates competing would suggest. More significantly, we find that the number of viable candidates within party lists is limited and that their votes are distributed in such a way that indicates a contained competition among co-partisans during the election. These findings add to recent work that builds a more nuanced view of ballot structure, competition, and personalism.

Fragmentation Without Cleavages? Endogenous Fractionalization in the Brazilian Party System

This article investigates the causes of party system hyperfragmentation in Brazil. We ask why hyperfragmentation—understood as extreme multipartism that continues to fractionalize—occurs despite significant changes to social cleavages or to electoral rules. Using survey data from federal legislators, we rule out the possibility of new issue-based multidimensionality. Using new estimates of the ideological position of legislative parties, we show that new party entry was not driven by polarization or convergence among traditional parties. We advance an alternative explanation of “fragmentation without cleavages,” arguing that changing dynamics of electoral list composition, federal party funding, and coalition management have changed the context of political ambition. For strategically minded elites, it is more attractive than ever before to be a dominant player in a small party.

The Embedded Costs of Power Sharing

This chapter covers the factors that shape the formation of coalitions in presidential systems. It distinguishes these factors from those that determine coalition formation in parliamentary systems. It focuses particular attention on the distal (legislative parties, institutional rules, electoral dynamics) and proximal (formateur party size and legislative fragmentation) factors. It also specifies how the size, fairness, and heterogeneity of coalitions on ‘Day One’ of a presidential term affect the subsequent task of coalition maintenance. It distinguishes between ‘Day One’ coalitions in terms of high, moderate, or low levels of maintenance, and introduces the fifty-one episodes of coalitional presidentialism that are the focus of discussion in the following chapters.

Conclusion

This chapter summarizes the key findings of the book, and puts them into the larger perspective of both party politics and representative government. It argues that we need to adjust our understanding of how the ‘party in the legislature’ in Europe functions, and understand it as a horizontal rather than hierarchical organization, where disciplinary tools are commitment mechanisms between rank-and-file legislators rather than a top-down tool for leaders to impose their policy preferences on their legislative parties. The chapter also suggests avenues for future research, pointing in particular to the need for regular, comparative, parliamentary surveys across countries to be conducted.

How Do Minority Presidents Manage Multiparty Coalitions? Identifying and Analyzing the Payoffs to Coalition Parties in Presidential Systems

The preponderance of minority presidents in modern democracies has concentrated the attention of researchers on the multiparty coalitions that presidents form to govern in legislative assemblies. This analysis of “coalitional presidentialism” has focused almost exclusively on presidential systems in Latin America, and Brazil in particular. It has understood multiparty presidential coalitions as cabinet-level constructs, which bind the support of parties in legislatures through portfolio payoffs. In this article, we explore this analysis in a non-Latin American context: post-Soviet Ukraine. Using original quantitative and qualitative data, we find that portfolio payoffs are an important tool for managing Ukrainian coalitions. But we also find that minority presidents have relied systematically on the support of legislative parties outside of the cabinet and have used different payoffs to manage their support. Given that this complexity also exists in other new democracies, we argue that there is a need to distinguish between cabinet-level and floor-level coalitions in minority presidential systems.

Parties Without Brands? Evidence from California's 1878–79 Constitutional Convention

Why do legislative parties emerge in democracies where elections are contested by individual candidates, rather than national party organizations? And can parties survive in the absence electoral pressure for their members to work on shared political goals? In this article, we examine the emergence and maintenance of party discipline in an atypical legislative context: California's 1878–79 constitutional convention. The unusual partisan alignments among the delegates at the California convention provide us with a unique empirical opportunity to test election- and policy-based explanations for legislative discipline. Our study combines a careful reading of the historical record with a statistical analysis of roll call votes cast at the convention to show how leaders of the “Nonpartisan” majority held together their disparate coalition of Democratic and Republican members in the face of conflicting preferences, ideological divisions, and well-organized political opponents. Our findings provide evidence that cohesive parties can exist even in the absence of broadly shared electoral pressures or policy goals.