On sovereign bonds and marijuana: Comparing supremacy limits in the US and the EU

Against the background of the PSPP judgement, the article conducts an under-researched comparison of the German Court's recent judgement with incidents of defiance from American states’ legislatures. Particularly, it highlights the example of marijuana laws in the US where a handful of states managed to legislate de facto governing norms contrary to the federal ones. The article then examines the German Court's last decision on sovereign bonds to compare the underlying factors that facilitates European judicial defiance with those contributing to occasional state legislator resistance in the US. Comparison to the highly centralized US shows that defiance of supremacy cannot be eliminated, but its conducive factors can be controlled to ensure a functioning constitutional system. To do so, attention must be paid to popular, fiscal and political factors, rather than to exclusively legalistic ones.

“All Great Reforms Go Together”—Temperance and Abolitionism

This chapter begins with the starting point of conventional temperance narratives: Lyman Beecher’s Six Sermons on Intemperance (1826), and the American Temperance Society (ATS). Rather than being an admonishment against drinking, his sermons condemned the selling of drink, thus underscoring how the modern temperance movement always tilted against the profit motive of the liquor traffic rather than against booze itself. Understanding prohibitionism as a weapon of the weak, this chapter examines the overlooked role of black temperance at a time when abolitionism and temperance were virtually synonymous. In 1851 Maine rescinded all liquor-selling licenses, making it the first prohibition state: a move applauded by Frederick Douglass and black activists, who equated the bonds of addiction with the bonds of slavery. Even the great emancipator himself—the famously temperate Abraham Lincoln—was instrumental in passing Illinois’s “Maine Law” while a state legislator.

Black Women in Parliament and on Social Media: Link Visibility as an Intersectional and Solidarity-Building Tool

This article tackles the multiple facets of visibility, ranging from invisibility, a lack of recognition in society, to hypervisibility, when bodies are hyperexposed for commodification or criminalization purposes. We analyze the specific implications of achieving media visibility for one Black Brazilian woman in politics: Renata Souza, a Rio de Janeiro state legislator. Souza’s campaign and mandate have drawn inspiration from the legacy of Marielle Franco, a Black lesbian favela-born city councillor and human rights advocate who was murdered in March 2018. Our theoretical framework consists of three strands of research: visibility studies, intersectional feminism, and intersectional work on technologies and surveillance. We draw from autoethnographic approaches with the use of field notes, audio diaries, and interviews with members of Souza’s staff. We complement these with digital ethnographic observations of Souza’s and her allies’ social media profiles. We ask: If visibility is a goal for groups that are marginalized and silenced, what happens when they achieve it? When does visibility help to protect Black women? And when does visibility bring even greater vulnerability? In this article, we propose and define the concept of “link visibility” as a process led by women of color who need a high degree of social media publicness but are affected disproportionately by visibility-induced high levels of vulnerability. We argue that link visibility represents an intersectional feminist approach as well as a tool for solidarity building, and that both—intersectionality and link visibility—help bind oppressed realities in Brazil and elsewhere. Finally, we interrogate what can be done to protect women of color online, stopping the violence, threats, and fear.

Political Consequences of Economic Hardship: State Economic Activity and Polarization in American Legislatures

Previous literature has explored the effects of economic conditions on voting behavior. In this article, I analyze how the economy affects legislative polarization. Using recently available state legislator ideal point estimates, I find a strong negative relationship between state economic activity and political polarization. States that fared worse economically have experienced greater increases in legislative polarization. I show this relationship is causal by employing an instrumental variables strategy. The instrument isolates exogenous variation in state economic activity by exploiting time-series variation in oil prices, which differentially affects individual states according to their economic dependence on oil production. The estimated polarization effects are stronger for Republicans. The findings have implications for understanding the interaction between the economy and political outcomes. (JEL H7, H83).

La La insoportable levedad de la regulación de las profesiones del deporte (The unbearable lightness of the regulation of the sports professions)

La contumaz inacción del Estado en la regulación de las profesiones del deporte, determinó la actuación legislativa de concretas Comunidades Autónomas en pro de configurar la misma en su ámbito territorial. Esto generó una problemática añadida a la ausencia de regulación estatal que incluso motivó que el legislador estatal reclamara la intervención del ejecutivo para corregir las disfunciones padecidas en este contexto. Sin embargo, ello ni ha traído la tan deseada intervención del Estado, ni tampoco ha frenado la iniciativa legislativa autonómica en este contexto, al que se han sumado cuatro nuevas leyes. Ello implica la progresiva consolidación de un modelo que, por las limitaciones competenciales autonómicas en materia de regulación profesional, no puede llevar a cabo una tarea crucial en el sistema, cual es la diferenciación en los niveles de intervención profesional a través de la necesaria coherencia entre la cualificación poseída y la actividad desempeñada. Asimismo, las normativas autonómicas existentes establecen regulaciones propias que difieren entre sí en la denominación y en los requisitos de acceso a las profesiones reguladas que ordenan, exacerban la configuración de un mercado fragmentado. Además, esta heterogeneidad regulatoria obstaculiza la vertebración de la negociación colectiva a nivel nacional en el sector, dado que formaciones exigidas por el vigente convenio colectivo para ejercer las funciones de sus categorías profesionales difieren con las que regulan estas diversas leyes autonómicas. Todo lo cual, como se justifica, solo puede solventarse con la intervención del Estado, vía del ejercicio de sus competencias exclusivas en la materia. Abstract: The persistent inactivity of the State on the regulation of the sports professions, prompted the legislative action of some specific Autonomous Community for drafting this at their territorial scope, which created some added problems to this absence of the state regulation that even caused the state legislator demanded the intervention of the goverment for correcting the malfunctions endured in this context. Nevertheless, it neither has brought the much-desired intervention of the State, nor has stopped the legislative Autonomous initiative in this context, to which four new laws have been joined. This involves the progressive consolidation of a model that, because the Autonomous competency limitations with respect to professional regulation, cannot accomplish a crucial task in the system. That is the differentiation at the levels of professional intervention through the necessary coherence among the obtained qualification and the performed activity. Moreover, the existing Autonomous regulations establish some own regulations which are different each other about denomination and requisites of access to the regulated professions that order and exacerbate the configuration of a fragmented market. What is more, this regulatory heterogeneity obstructs the realization of the collective bargaining of national level in the sector, since required occupational trainings by the current collective agreement in order to practice the roles of their professions differ with those that regulate these various Autonomous laws. All this, as justified, can be overcome only with the intervention of the State, via the practice of its exclusive powers over this matter.

Getting a High Heel in the Door: An Experiment on State Legislator Responsiveness to Women’s Issue Lobbying

Are women in office more likely to providvae access to women’s lobby groups than men in office? If so, how can women’s strategic lobbying increase the responsiveness of male legislators? This paper presents a field experiment examining how women and men in state legislatures respond differently to women’s organizational lobbying. My findings suggest that substantial gender gaps do exist; women are twice as likely to respond to a women’s issue group’s simple meeting request. That said, meeting requests signaling constituent mobilization have heterogeneous effects across legislator gender, doubling the likelihood that a male legislator will respond and effectively closing gender gaps in responsiveness. My results identify how women’s lobbying can employ distinct lobbying strategies on descriptive and nondescriptive representatives to successfully gain their attention. In distinguishing differing pathways toward maximizing opportunities for women’s organizational inclusion in policymaking, this paper importantly informs women’s groups lobbying in state legislatures, wherein low levels of descriptive representation often persist.

Three Validation Tests of the Shor–McCarty State Legislator Ideology Data

The Shor–McCarty state ideology data provide a valuable resource for students of state legislative politics, but, as with any important new measures, the properties of those data warrant independent examination. Toward that end, we report results from three validation tests, two tests of convergent validity and one test of construct validity, with all tests focused on Shor and McCarty’s legislator, or individual-level, data. Collectively, results of the validation exercises offer strong evidence the Shor–McCarty measures provide valid representations of state legislator ideology.

Same-Party Legislative Appointments and the Problem of Party-Switching

For half of the states and almost every territory in the United States, legislative vacancies are filled by some system of temporary appointments rather than by special elections. Most of these systems utilize “same-party” appointments to ensure continuity of representation. But few states have anticipated the problem of state legislators switching parties. Though party-switching is rare, it happens frequently enough that several state supreme courts have already interpreted same-party appointment statutes as applied to party-switchers. This Article argues for a uniform approach to the problem of party-switchers in same-party appointment systems. First, this Article reviews the current legislative appointment schemes as they operate today and analyzes each statute or constitutional provision to determine how each of them might treat a vacancy caused by a party-switching state legislator, as well as the four state supreme court decisions addressing this question of statutory interpretation. It then argues that the principles underlying same-party appointment systems support statutory amendments to clarify how party-switching state legislators are replaced.