Israel

This chapter focuses on a case of nationwide proportional representation. In Israel, all members of the 120-seat Knesset are elected in a single nationwide district under closed party lists. Due to this electoral system design, the geographic location of votes does not matter for a party’s overall seat total, and candidates have almost no incentive to develop a personal vote. The chapter finds strong support for the expertise model in how the Labor Party assigns members to legislative committees, but relatively little support in the Likud Party. Both parties exhibit strong issue ownership tendencies.

How to Assess Quantitatively Party-Level Committee Placements

This chapter explains methodological choices. It offers greater detail about how the dependent variable is coded. Because of the three-outcome variable (high policy, public goods, or distributive committee type), the discrete choice method of multinomial logistic (MNL) regression is used. It permits assessing the extent to which parties make tradeoffs across both committee types and models of party personnel (expertise and electoral–constituency). The chapter explains the reasons why MNL is preferable to binomial logistic regression by a comparison of results on one of the book’s party cases (the German Christian Democratic Union) under either regression format and calculates predicted probabilities for Bundestag committee placement using some of our independent variables. It also explains that some parties (those in Israel and Japan) do not make tradeoffs across committee types to the same degree as parties in our others cases, and are therefore analyzed with binomial logistic regression instead. An index of overlap of committee types on which individual members serve is developed and shown for all parties covered in the book.

Committees Type and the Expertise Model of Party Personnel

This chapter introduces the typology of committee types: high policy, public goods, and distributive. It develops the theory of party personnel strategy, consisting of two models political parties may use: the expertise model and the electoral–constituency model. The chapter derives testable premises for the expertise model, which states that parties assign legislators according to individual attributes (e.g., occupation, gender, and local electoral experience) that signal a background relevant to the type of committee on which they serve. The chapter argues that parties of the left and right will tend to differ in which committee types they emphasize, even in the same electoral system, according to their issue ownership. It summarizes the thirteen parties on their tendencies to have legislators with each of the key individual attributes.

The Electoral–Constituency Model of Party Personnel

This chapter develops the electoral–constituency model of party personnel. Under this model, parties deploy their personnel according to their ability to draw votes within specific electoral districts or to specific competing candidates of the party. The chapter derives testable premises, grounded in a two-dimensional characterization of electoral systems: (1) the extent to which they shape a party’s seat maximization through dependence on the geographical location of votes; and (2) the extent of a party’s dependence on “personal votes” of individual candidates. Nationwide proportional representation (PR) versus systems with many electoral districts define the first dimension, while the second dimension is characterized by differences between systems with closed party lists and those employing a single nontransferable vote (SNTV). The chapter discusses how different single-tier and mixed-member systems generate different tradeoffs between parties’ use of the expertise and electoral–constituency models. In particular, the electoral–constituency model suggests that parties allocate members from safe districts differently from those elected in swing/marginal districts. The chapter presents data on the parties covered in the book according to variables such as the margin of electoral victory and population density of districts represented.

New Zealand

This chapter focuses on the impact of electoral reform in New Zealand, which changed from first-past-the post (FPTP) to mixed-member proportional (MMP). The chapter analyzes the National and Labour parties under both electoral systems. As expected, the expertise model becomes more important to parties’ allocation of legislators to House of Representatives committees after the electoral reform to MMP, due to the move to a system in which votes cast anywhere count toward seat maximization. Parties also change how they assign members under the electoral–constituency model, as the system moves from one in which winning districts is the exclusive way in which a party maximizes seats to one in which legislators representing districts may be leveraged to help the party win more votes from the party list. Both parties show strong issue ownership tendencies before and after electoral reform.

Party Personnel Strategies

The chapter introduces the notion of “party personnel strategies.” The concept refers to the process by which political parties allocate their elected members to legislative committees. The theory is grounded in the resource-based view (RBV) of the firm. The legislators are the pool of “personnel” from which the party draws when staffing specialized standing committees of the legislature. Party strategy is conditioned by both policy goals and the imperatives of the electoral system under which seats are won. Parties engage in a “personnel practice,” which is their observed pattern of assigning members with certain individual background characteristics to given committees. The chapter establishes the cases on which the book’s arguments are tested: Britain, Germany, Israel, Japan, New Zealand, and Portugal. The chapter lists the elections and the thirteen major political parties covered for each country.

Conclusion

This chapter summarizes the book’s contribution to understanding the role of individual legislators’ attributes in the collective goal pursuits of political parties. It assesses the performance of parties on the premises derived from our theory by calculating for each party a “batting average” describing the degree to which premises of the expertise model, electoral–constituency model, and issue ownership hold for each party. It graphically depicts the parties in the book’s two-dimensional space regarding how a country’s electoral system affects a party’s dependence on the geographic location of votes and the personal votes of individual legislators. In this manner, it reveals considerable support for the theory, which states that the less parties depend on these electoral factors to maximize seats, the more they tend to use the expertise model. The more dependence in either dimension, the more the electoral–constituency model tends to explain a party’s personnel strategy. The chapter expands on the role of electoral system variation—including electoral reform in Japan and New Zealand—on party personnel practices. It discusses how our results provide new evidence for the proposition that mixed-member proportional (MMP) systems may offer “the best of both worlds” in representation, and offers a discussion of further extensions of the theory and applications of the resource-based view (RBV) of the firm to competing political parties.

Portugal

This chapter focuses on Portugal and its districted, closed-list proportional representation system of elections to the Assembly of the Republic. The closed party lists imply that individual candidates have little to benefit from cultivating a personal vote. Parties control the order in which their members are elected and can be expected to be relatively free to deploy their personnel in a manner that enhances the collective reputation of the party. On the other hand, Portugal’s electoral system is one in which geographic location of votes matters to seat maximization, because instead of nationwide proportional representation, the country has several regional districts of varying, population density, and district magnitude. The results show some tendency of the major parties to use both the expertise and electoral–constituency models in assigning members to legislative committees, although stronger in the Socialist Party than in the Social Democratic Party.

Britain

In Britain’s first-past-the-post (FPTP) system—an exclusively single-seat-district system—every member of the House of Commons is elected in a unique geographically defined single-seat district. The FPTP system thus maximizes the importance of the geographic location of votes to party seat maximization. Yet as a single-tier system with no intraparty competition, it also promotes reliance on the expertise model, as the party seeks to emphasize its national policy reputation. Given the crucial role of districting in such a system, a party is expected to trade off reliance on the expertise model in order to deploy its personnel to Select Committees as a means to maximize the party’s chances of holding marginal (swing) districts. The findings show that the expertise model holds more strongly for the Conservative Party, and more weakly for the Labour Party, with the reverse pattern holding for the electoral–constituency model. Both parties show a high tendency toward issue ownership.

Germany

This chapter tests the book’s premises on a case of mixed-member proportional representation (MMP) representation, using the case of legislative committees in the Bundestag of Germany. Its results cover the two largest parties, the Christian Democratic Union and the Social Democratic Party. German parties should have a strong tendency to use the expertise model, because the MMP system means that votes cast anywhere in the country are of approximately equal value in maximizing seats. Thus, parties are able to emphasize their national reputation for policy, for which matching the expertise of their personnel to committee function is valuable. The MMP system also creates local single-seat districts in which nearly half of members are elected. Thus, aspects of the electoral–constituency model also should apply, as parties seek to develop connections to constituencies through local and personal vote of their legislators. The results offer strong support for the premises of the theory.