Too cool for school: Participatory shirking and U.S. House passage of proxy voting

IF 0.9 4区经济学 Q3 ECONOMICS

American Journal of Economics and Sociology Pub Date : 2024-06-14 DOI:10.1111/ajes.12594

Franklin G. Mixon Jr., Benno Torgler

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引用次数: 0

Abstract

A large portion of the American electorate holds contempt for elected representatives who skip floor votes. As a result, political challengers, and the national political media in the U.S., rarely miss a chance to inform the electorate of the shirking behavior of its representatives. New research suggests that, in 2020, the leadership of the U.S. House of Representatives may have developed protection, albeit temporary, to legislators who engage in shirking behavior. That protection came via passage of House Resolution 965, which authorized “remote voting by proxy” in the U.S. House of Representatives due to the COVID-19 pandemic. This study extends the literature on proxy voting by empirically examining the factors that influenced the tendency of members of the U.S. House of Representatives to either shirk (i.e., skip) the vote on proxy voting (i.e., HR 965) or to vote in favor of the resolution (i.e., HR 965) allowing for the proxy vote. Econometric results suggest that Representatives' gender, age, legislative tenure, and past penchant for participatory shirking worked to determine parliamentary participation, and the direction of one's vote, on HR 965.

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太酷了，不适合上学：参与式推卸与美国众议院通过代理投票制

大部分美国选民都蔑视逃票的民选代表。因此，政治挑战者和美国全国性政治媒体很少错过向选民宣传其代表逃避投票行为的机会。新的研究表明，2020 年，美国众议院的领导层可能已经为有推诿行为的议员提供了保护，尽管这种保护是暂时的。由于 COVID-19 大流行，众议院通过了第 965 号决议，授权在美国众议院进行 "代理远程投票"。本研究通过对影响美国众议院议员倾向于逃避（即跳过）代理投票（即 HR 965）或对允许代理投票的决议（即 HR 965）投赞成票的因素进行实证研究，扩展了代理投票方面的文献。计量经济学结果表明，众议员的性别、年龄、立法任期和过去对参与性推诿的偏好决定了对HR 965的议会参与和投票方向。

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来源期刊

American Journal of Economics and Sociology Multiple-

CiteScore

1.90

自引率

12.50%

发文量

期刊介绍： The American Journal of Economics and Sociology (AJES) was founded in 1941, with support from the Robert Schalkenbach Foundation, to encourage the development of transdisciplinary solutions to social problems. In the introduction to the first issue, John Dewey observed that “the hostile state of the world and the intellectual division that has been built up in so-called ‘social science,’ are … reflections and expressions of the same fundamental causes.” Dewey commended this journal for its intention to promote “synthesis in the social field.” Dewey wrote those words almost six decades after the social science associations split off from the American Historical Association in pursuit of value-free knowledge derived from specialized disciplines. Since he wrote them, academic or disciplinary specialization has become even more pronounced. Multi-disciplinary work is superficially extolled in major universities, but practices and incentives still favor highly specialized work. The result is that academia has become a bastion of analytic excellence, breaking phenomena into components for intensive investigation, but it contributes little synthetic or holistic understanding that can aid society in finding solutions to contemporary problems. Analytic work remains important, but in response to the current lop-sided emphasis on specialization, the board of AJES has decided to return to its roots by emphasizing a more integrated and practical approach to knowledge.