Gift Travel in the U.S. House of Representatives

Members of Congress take more than 2,000 trips sponsored by private organizations and interest groups every congress. Using a new data set of gift travel from 2007 to 2019 and interviews with former members of Congress, current and former congressional staffers, and staffers from interest groups that fund trips, we attempt to answer two core questions about this increasingly frequent behavior. Why do members take privately sponsored trips and what types of groups are driving this behavior? We argue that members of Congress take trips because they believe it makes them more effective legislators by exposing them to real-world consequences of their policy decisions and forcing them to build relationships with their fellow members. Trip sponsors, alternatively, seek to persuade and build relationships with members of Congress that ultimately shape their legislative coalitions. We find that trip-taking is associated with greater legislative effectiveness, in particular for Democrats, and that the provision of policy-specific information is a valuable benefit from taking these trips.

Gender and Party Discipline: Evidence from Africa’s Emerging Party Systems

Are men and women legislators equally loyal to their parties? We theorize that parties select candidates based on gendered criteria, leading to the (s)election of more disciplined women. Moreover, we argue that gendered expectations about proper behavior limit women legislators’ ability to act independently from their parties. Using surveys from over 800 parliamentarians across 17 African legislatures, we find that women report significantly higher levels of party discipline than do their men copartisans. From this survey data and new legislative speech data, we also find support for our proposed causal mechanisms. Further, we find that among women parliamentarians, party discipline is negatively correlated with the prioritization of womens rights. A qualitative case study of the Namibian Parliament illustrates our findings. We discuss the implications of our results for women’s legislative effectiveness, for the substantive representation of women’s interests in policy making, and for the continued democratization of emerging party systems.

Ideological Boundaries of Status Advantages: Legislative Effectiveness in the United States House of Representatives

Prior research assumes that high-status actors have greater organizational influence than lower-status ones, that is, it is easier for the former to get their ideas and initiatives adopted by the organization than it is for the latter. Drawing from the literature on ideology, we posit that the status–influence link is contingent on actors’ ideological position. Specifically, status confers organizational influence to the degree that the focal actor is ideologically mainstream. The more an actor’s ideology deviates from the mainstream the less will her status translate into increased organizational influence. We find support for this hypothesis using data on the work of legislators in the House of Representatives in the United States Congress. By illuminating how and under what conditions status leads to increased influence, this study qualifies and extends current understandings of the role of status in organizations.

Gender Politics and Legislative Networks in Taiwan: An Analysis of Women-Bill Co-Sponsorship and Bill Success

This article examines how legislative networks can be utilised to further the interests of female voters. Specifically, I investigate how legislators’ gender and partisanship within co-sponsorship networks are related to the successful passage of women bills. For this goal, the article focusses on Taiwan—where both women’s descriptive and substantive representations have improved dramatically since democratisation and, at the same time, co-sponsoring bills have been a legislative process of the ongoing significance. The article utilises an original bill co-sponsorship dataset that consists of 232,734 co-sponsors related to all bills submitted between 2005 and 2016. By comparing women and non-women bills, the article demonstrates that the legislative effectiveness on women bills varied by legislator’s gender and affiliated party. That is, the proportion of male legislators in the co-sponsorship network did not effect on women bill success, while it turned out to be positively related to non-women bill success. Moreover, the proportion of right-leaning party legislators in the co-sponsorship network decreased the odds of women bill passage while increasing the chance of non-women bill ones. Despite the increasing participation of male legislators and right-leaning party legislators in co-sponsoring women’s issues in Taiwan, the results demonstrate that their role was limited on the success of women bills.

Hacia una clasificación socio-jurídica de las leyes que sea funcional al análisis de efectividad legislativa (To a functional socio-legal classification of the legal norms for the regulatory effectiveness analysis)

El artículo presenta una propuesta de clasificación de las leyes, que tomando en cuenta los postulados de la sociología del derecho busca ser funcional al análisis de efectividad legislativa. Partimos de la hipótesis de que la diversidad de normas y, específicamente, de las leyes que emite un Estado pueden sistematizarse bajo el marco teórico de la sociología del derecho con criterios funcionales de efectividad. Para ello, nuestra investigación parte del contexto actual del Estado y su capacidad regulatoria y termina en una propuesta de clasificación socio-legal de las leyes. En nuestro estudio presentamos y examinamos la utilidad de una clasificación funcional de las leyes, el enfoque socio jurídico como marco teórico para esta clasificación, los aspectos del proceso legislativo que son inherentes al análisis de efectividad, y las clasificaciones conocidas desde el derecho y las ciencias políticas sobre normas legales y efectividad regulatoria. Al final del trabajo presentamos una alternativa de clasificación. The article presents a proposal for the classification of laws, which taking into account the postulates of the sociology of law seeks to be functional to the analysis of legislative effectiveness. We start from the hypothesis establishes that the diversity of norms and, specifically, laws issued by a State can under the theoretical framework of the sociology of law be systematized under functional criteria of effectiveness. For this, our research starts from the current context of the State and its regulatory capacity and ends with a proposal of a socio-legal classification of laws. In our study we expose and examine the usefulness of a functional classification of the laws, the socio-legal approach as a theoretical framework for this classification, the aspects of the legislative process that are inherent to an effectiveness analysis, and the known classifications from law and political science on legal norms and regulatory effectiveness. In the end of the work we present an alternative classification.

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.

Congressional capacity and the abolition of legislative service organizations

I analyse the relative influence of lawmakers before and after a watershed moment in the development of faction institutions: the abolition of legislative service organizations. Blocs of lawmakers in the House of Representatives were afforded official resources to advance their policy agendas between 1979 and 1995. In the wake of the “Republican Revolution,” however, these groups were categorically dismantled. Using a difference-in-difference design, I estimate the individual-level effect of losing congressional resources on relative legislative effectiveness. The results inform our understanding of faction power, legislative bargaining and evolving congressional institutions.