Agenda Control and Timing of Bill Initiation: A Temporal Perspective on Coalition Governance in Parliamentary Democracies

Although democratic governance imposes temporal constraints, the timing of government policy making activities such as bill initiation is still poorly understood. This holds especially under coalition governments, in which government bills need to find approval by a partner party in parliament. We propose a dynamic temporal perspective in which ministers do not know whether they face a cooperative or competitive partner at the beginning of a term, but they learn this over time and use their agenda control to time further bill initiation in response. A circular regression analysis using data on more than 25,000 government bills from 11 parliamentary democracies over 30 years supports this temporal perspective, showing that ministers initiate bills later in the term when their previous bills have experienced greater scrutiny. Ministers further delay bill initiation when coalition parties’ incentives to deviate from compromise increase and when they have less power to constrain their bills’ scrutiny.

Crossing Over: Majority Party Control Affects Legislator Behavior and the Agenda

Does majority party control cause changes in legislative policy making? We argue that majority party floor control affects legislator behavior and agenda control. Leveraging a natural experiment where nearly one tenth of a legislature’s members died within the same legislative session, we are able to identify the effect of majority party floor control on the legislative agenda and on legislator choices. Previous correlational work has found mixed evidence of party effects, especially in the mid-twentieth century. In contrast, we find that majority party control leads to (1) changes in the agenda and (2) changes in legislators’ revealed preferences. These effects are driven by changes in numerical party majorities on the legislative floor. The effects are strongest with Republican and nonsouthern Democratic legislators. The effects are also more pronounced on the first (economic) than the second (racial) dimension. Additional correlational evidence across 74 years adds external validity to our exogenous evidence.

Demos (a)kurios? Agenda power and democratic control in ancient Greece

Ancient Greek elite theorists and ordinary democratic practitioners shared a distinctive account of the institutional features of democracy: democracy requires both institutions that empower ordinary citizens to decide matters and the widespread diffusion of agenda-setting powers. In the Politics, Aristotle makes agenda control central to his understanding of what it is to be kurios in the city, to his distinction between oligarchy and democracy, and to his analysis of the preconditions for democratic control of the polis. For democratic citizens, isēgoria (the equal right to speak and make proposals in the assembly) was more than an expression of the democratic commitment to equality. It was also an institutional tool to resist oligarchic domination of the agenda. Institutionalizing isēgoria was part of the Athenian response to a crucial problem for democratic theory and practice: how to ensure that popular participation reliably translates into popular control.

Does Lobbying Affect Bill Advancement? Evidence from Three State Legislatures

Many studies consider the effect of lobbying on the behavior of individual legislators, but few studies demonstrate a relationship between lobbying and the ultimate dispositions of bills by the legislature. One challenge to establishing this latter relationship is data scarcity, as few legislatures systematically collect and publish information on organized interests’ lobbying activities on each bill. We provide new insights on lobbying by using data from Colorado, Nebraska, and Wisconsin that records the positions organized interests take on proposals in those states’ legislatures. We find that organized interests’ lobbying predicts outcomes, especially when lobbying is directed against a proposal. We also use our data to test whether lobbying succeeds by building support among legislators (i.e., vote buying) or by affecting a proposal’s advancement through the legislative process (i.e., agenda control). We find that lobbying does not buy the votes of legislators on the committees of jurisdiction for each bill, but lobbying does strongly predict what bills make it onto the agenda. Our findings contribute to ongoing discussions about money and politics, bias in representation, and legislator behavior.

Insincerely Yours

Every known voting method can be manipulated, hence the tactic of “strategic voting.” But some voting methods are harder to manipulate than others and therefore encourage “truthful revelation” of voters’ preferences. These interact with the problems that various voting systems have (following from Chapter 4) when voters are asked to choose between more than two options. Many organizations try to deal with the “problem” of many choices by breaking every decision down into a set of “yes/no” votes. The most famous of these “parliamentary process” procedures is Robert’s Rules of Order, widely used throughout the world. Controlling the sequence of “yes/no” votes can often manipulate the outcome, which is known in political science as “agenda control.” Other ways to manipulate outcomes includes how the choices are described (“framing” effects) and the biases (either explicit or implicit) of “decision facilitators.” This chapter discusses these issues and suggests ways to avoid their being used adversely in group decision-making.

Interest group lobbying and partisan polarization in the United States: 1999–2016

Abstact The lobbying activity of interest groups has been overlooked as a contributing factor to legislative party polarization in the United States. Using bill-level data from Congress and three state legislatures, I show floor votes on bills lobbied by more non-profit interest groups are more polarized by party. The state legislative data demonstrate the robustness of the relationship between lobbying and polarization, showing it is not an artifact of party agenda control, salience, or bill content. Increased lobbying from these groups in recent years helps explain high levels of partisan polarization in Congress and an uneven pattern across the state legislatures.

Parliamentary Procedure under Theresa May: Nothing Has Changed?

During the premiership of Theresa May, parliamentary procedure in the UK was scrutinised, criticised and challenged to an extent unprecedented in recent years. This put intense pressure on the ‘rules of the game’ governing parliamentary politics. This article thus aims to answer three questions. First, what were the pressures on parliamentary procedure in this period? Secondly, what were their consequences? Thirdly, how can these consequences be explained? The article addresses these questions by describing challenges to the House of Commons’ rules regarding agenda control, proxy voting and private members’ bills. It also describes the procedural changes resulting from these challenges and evaluates their significance. Finally, it considers how far these changes support the expectations of existing literature on parliamentary rule changes. Overall, the article shows that procedural reform during Theresa May’s premiership was minimal. Despite some temporary informal innovations, the formal rules of the Commons remained almost entirely unchanged. During this period, therefore, Britain’s parliamentary rules were challenged extensively but changed very little.

Political TV interviews in Austria 1981–2016 – Structures and strategies through times of substantial change in media and politics

In media-centered democracies, political TV interviews can reveal a lot about the relationship between journalists and politicians. However, knowledge about these formats during non-election times is lacking. Against this background, this study aims to generate insights about specific conversation strategies, the staging of politics, and agenda control in a long-term comparison, and to link them with media logic, which has been identified as a factor that shapes agenda-setting strategies in related contexts. Following a static-dynamic approach, a quantitative content analysis was conducted for all statements (N=19,108) from 125 episodes of a specific Austrian interview format in a one-on-one setting broadcast between 1981 and 2016. Regarding the number of statements in which a newly introduced topic is discussed as a measure for agenda control, specific conversation strategies were identified that contribute to a stronger position for journalists. Moreover, specific aspects of media logic help to introduce and anchor a new topic, although their success varies over the decades.