Political Institutions: Legislatures eJournal最新文献

{"title":"Upper House Reform in Germany: The Commission for the Modernization of the Federal System","authors":"G. Taylor","doi":"10.21991/C9P955","DOIUrl":"https://doi.org/10.21991/C9P955","url":null,"abstract":"As the debate on a possible new second leg- islative chamber proceeds both in the United Kingdom (U.K.) and Canada, it is useful to note recent amendments to the German Con- stitution (Basic Law) affecting the federal up- per house of Parliament ( Bundesrat ). Despite all the differences among the House of Lords, the Canadian Senate, 1 and the Bundesrat , there are some points on which a comparison is use- ful. Moreover, some of the impetus behind the German reforms — a conviction that there had been too much emphasis on cooperative feder- alism and too little on healthy competition — is reminiscent of debates about such matters in other federations in general, and Canada in particular.","PeriodicalId":125020,"journal":{"name":"Political Institutions: Legislatures eJournal","volume":"43 1","pages":"0"},"PeriodicalIF":0.0,"publicationDate":"2011-07-11","publicationTypes":"Journal Article","fieldsOfStudy":null,"isOpenAccess":false,"openAccessPdf":"","citationCount":null,"resultStr":null,"platform":"Semanticscholar","paperid":"125045442","PeriodicalName":null,"FirstCategoryId":null,"ListUrlMain":null,"RegionNum":0,"RegionCategory":"","ArticlePicture":[],"TitleCN":null,"AbstractTextCN":null,"PMCID":"","EPubDate":null,"PubModel":null,"JCR":null,"JCRName":null,"Score":null,"Total":0}

{"title":"Differences Matter: Partisan Heterogeneity and Cooperation in the European Union","authors":"C. Schneider, Johannes Urpelainen","doi":"10.2139/ssrn.1948804","DOIUrl":"https://doi.org/10.2139/ssrn.1948804","url":null,"abstract":"Partisanship is a fundamental feature of democratic politics, but the effect of states’ partisan preferences on international cooperation remains poorly understood. This paper analyzes the relationship between partisan heterogeneity and cooperation in the European Union (EU). We argue that partisan heterogeneity in the Council of Ministers increases distributional conflict between EU member states and worsens commitment problems, thereby decreasing the depth of cooperation. We test the theory against data on financial contributions to EU structural funds and development aid. The data indicate that partisan heterogeneity reduces member states’ incentives to contribute to European cooperation. More generally, we provide a new perspective on the role of domestic politics in international cooperation and offer an explanation for dynamic fluctuations in international cooperation.","PeriodicalId":125020,"journal":{"name":"Political Institutions: Legislatures eJournal","volume":"79 1","pages":"0"},"PeriodicalIF":0.0,"publicationDate":"2011-07-01","publicationTypes":"Journal Article","fieldsOfStudy":null,"isOpenAccess":false,"openAccessPdf":"","citationCount":null,"resultStr":null,"platform":"Semanticscholar","paperid":"127644127","PeriodicalName":null,"FirstCategoryId":null,"ListUrlMain":null,"RegionNum":0,"RegionCategory":"","ArticlePicture":[],"TitleCN":null,"AbstractTextCN":null,"PMCID":"","EPubDate":null,"PubModel":null,"JCR":null,"JCRName":null,"Score":null,"Total":0}

{"title":"The Role of Restrictive Abortion Legislation in Explaining Variation in Oral Contraceptive Use","authors":"Amanda J. Felkey, Kristina M.L. Acri née Lybecker","doi":"10.2139/ssrn.1864036","DOIUrl":"https://doi.org/10.2139/ssrn.1864036","url":null,"abstract":"Following the legalization of abortion in the United States, scholars have studied its impact on a wide variety of factors including women’s educational choices and labor force decisions, abortion rates, and most controversially, crime. Economists have also investigated the determinants of state abortion restrictions, exploring the importance of demographic characteristics, locational availability, and the strength of advocacy groups. Notably absent from the existing literature is an examination of the impact of legalized abortion and the restrictions of its use on the decision to use oral contraceptives. Earlier work established that states with more lenient laws regarding access to contraceptive services by minors have greater pill use, but the impact of the legal framework surrounding abortion restrictions remains unexamined. Using a linear regression model to analyze three cycles of the National Survey on Family Growth (NSFG) data we analyze the possibility that variation in state abortion availability, proxied by legislation restricting a woman’s reproductive rights, may generate variation in the use of birth control pills. It is reasonable to expect that without the option of terminating a pregnancy (or in states where the cost of doing so is higher), that oral contraceptives would be more widely utilized. Our findings reveal that restrictions on abortion funding have a significant and positive impact on a woman’s decision to use the pill. These results indicate that women are forward thinking when making their contraceptive decisions, at least relative to abortion legislation, which suggests that there are important policy implications for increasing health outcomes.","PeriodicalId":125020,"journal":{"name":"Political Institutions: Legislatures eJournal","volume":"17 1","pages":"0"},"PeriodicalIF":0.0,"publicationDate":"2011-05-13","publicationTypes":"Journal Article","fieldsOfStudy":null,"isOpenAccess":false,"openAccessPdf":"","citationCount":null,"resultStr":null,"platform":"Semanticscholar","paperid":"125360574","PeriodicalName":null,"FirstCategoryId":null,"ListUrlMain":null,"RegionNum":0,"RegionCategory":"","ArticlePicture":[],"TitleCN":null,"AbstractTextCN":null,"PMCID":"","EPubDate":null,"PubModel":null,"JCR":null,"JCRName":null,"Score":null,"Total":0}

{"title":"The United States of the People of America","authors":"David Litvak","doi":"10.2139/ssrn.1787689","DOIUrl":"https://doi.org/10.2139/ssrn.1787689","url":null,"abstract":"A few authors have suggested re-introducing random selection in politics. In the United States, Callenbach and Phillips have proposed replacing the House of Representatives by a Representative House. In this article, the author suggests that perhaps, in the specific US context, it would be worthwhile considering replacing both Houses of Congress by randomly selected Houses.","PeriodicalId":125020,"journal":{"name":"Political Institutions: Legislatures eJournal","volume":"187 1","pages":"0"},"PeriodicalIF":0.0,"publicationDate":"2011-03-15","publicationTypes":"Journal Article","fieldsOfStudy":null,"isOpenAccess":false,"openAccessPdf":"","citationCount":null,"resultStr":null,"platform":"Semanticscholar","paperid":"116976828","PeriodicalName":null,"FirstCategoryId":null,"ListUrlMain":null,"RegionNum":0,"RegionCategory":"","ArticlePicture":[],"TitleCN":null,"AbstractTextCN":null,"PMCID":"","EPubDate":null,"PubModel":null,"JCR":null,"JCRName":null,"Score":null,"Total":0}

{"title":"The Senate Filibuster: The Politics of Destruction","authors":"E. Bondurant","doi":"10.2139/ssrn.1721821","DOIUrl":"https://doi.org/10.2139/ssrn.1721821","url":null,"abstract":"The notion that the Framers of the Constitution intended to allow a minority in the U.S. Senate to exercise a veto power over legislation and presidential appointments is not only profoundly undemocratic, it is also a myth. The overwhelming trend of law review articles have assumed that because the Constitution grants to each house the power to make its own rules, the Senate filibuster rule is immune from constitutional attack. This Article takes an opposite position based on the often overlooked history of the filibuster, the text of the Constitution and the relevant court precedents which demonstrate that the constitutionality of the Senate filibuster rule is not, as many have assumed, a political question that is beyond the jurisdiction of the federal courts.This Article proceeds in four parts. Part I traces the history of the filibuster, documents the recent surge in filibusters and explains why the rules of the Senate, including the filibuster rule, cannot be amended by a simple majority vote as can the rules of the House of Representatives. The Senate filibuster rule is responsible for much of the partisan gridlock in Congress, and has replaced majority rule with a tyranny of the minority. The Senate is incapable of reforming its rules for the same reasons that state legislatures and Congress refused to reform of the apportionment of state legislative and congressional districts. If reform is to come, it will not come from within the Senate, and can only come from the courts as occurred in the case of congressional and state legislative districts, the one-house veto, and the line-item veto cases.Part II examines the historical evidence that reveals that there was no “right” of unlimited debate at the time the Constitution was adopted and that the filibuster is nothing more than an unintended consequence of a decision by the Senate to delete the previous question motion from its rules in 1806. That decision was based on the naive assumption that the rule was unnecessary because Senators were gentlemen who would never attempt to obstruct the business of the Senate by abusing the privilege of debate. This Part examines the filibuster in the light of the debates at the Federal Convention, the Federalists Papers and the express language of Article I the Constitution all of which were premised on the democratic principle of majority rule. When the Framers of the Constitution intended to condition action on a vote or more than a simple majority of the House or Senate, they did so expressly in six carefully defined exceptions – and significantly rejected the only proposals at the Federal Convention that would have prohibited a simple majority from passing legislation prior to its presentation to the President. Although defenders of the filibuster argue that the Constitution gives each house the power to make its own rules, this power is not absolute. The Supreme Court ruled over a century ago that this rule-making power does not include the power t","PeriodicalId":125020,"journal":{"name":"Political Institutions: Legislatures eJournal","volume":"62 1","pages":"0"},"PeriodicalIF":0.0,"publicationDate":"2010-12-07","publicationTypes":"Journal Article","fieldsOfStudy":null,"isOpenAccess":false,"openAccessPdf":"","citationCount":null,"resultStr":null,"platform":"Semanticscholar","paperid":"115841124","PeriodicalName":null,"FirstCategoryId":null,"ListUrlMain":null,"RegionNum":0,"RegionCategory":"","ArticlePicture":[],"TitleCN":null,"AbstractTextCN":null,"PMCID":"","EPubDate":null,"PubModel":null,"JCR":null,"JCRName":null,"Score":null,"Total":0}

{"title":"The Hazy New Dawn: Democracy, Women and Politics in Malaysia","authors":"Cecilia Ng","doi":"10.2139/ssrn.1716586","DOIUrl":"https://doi.org/10.2139/ssrn.1716586","url":null,"abstract":"Dubbed a political tsunami, Malaysia's 12th General Election, held in 2008 marked a critical turn in the politics of the nation. For the first time since Independence in 1957, the three main opposition parties took over power in five of the 13 states in the country, also denying the ruling coalition a two-thirds majority in the federal parliament. Several women and men, many of whom were associated with the women's movement and civil society, became involved, almost overnight in institutionalized politics when they stood under the opposition ticket. This paper takes stock of the experiences of these new women civil society activists turned politicians in addressing women's substantive representation in the 'opposition-controlled' states of Selangor and Penang. It argues that these contestations go beyond gendered power relations. In addition to institutional barriers made worse by the tense relations within an over centralised federal system, the article argues that women's other identities such as ethnicity, location and age, intersect with their gender identity. These competing identities are playing a big role in impacting how the ‘new’ politics of change are being negotiated. The future of Malaysian politics will see a pretty messy process unfolding as the stakes are high for opposition women contestants, who also want to retain their gender priorities in their struggle for political power.","PeriodicalId":125020,"journal":{"name":"Political Institutions: Legislatures eJournal","volume":"73 1","pages":"0"},"PeriodicalIF":0.0,"publicationDate":"2010-11-29","publicationTypes":"Journal Article","fieldsOfStudy":null,"isOpenAccess":false,"openAccessPdf":"","citationCount":null,"resultStr":null,"platform":"Semanticscholar","paperid":"122793254","PeriodicalName":null,"FirstCategoryId":null,"ListUrlMain":null,"RegionNum":0,"RegionCategory":"","ArticlePicture":[],"TitleCN":null,"AbstractTextCN":null,"PMCID":"","EPubDate":null,"PubModel":null,"JCR":null,"JCRName":null,"Score":null,"Total":0}

{"title":"The End of Mandatory Securities Arbitration?","authors":"Jill I. Gross","doi":"10.58948/2331-3528.1736","DOIUrl":"https://doi.org/10.58948/2331-3528.1736","url":null,"abstract":"In this essay, I examine recent Congressional efforts to ban pre-dispute arbitration clauses in securities brokerage account agreements and thus eliminate mandatory arbitration of customer-broker disputes. In the proposed Arbitration Fairness Act, Congress would ban such clauses in all consumer contracts, including in the securities industry. However, securities arbitration - whose fairness is regulated with substantial oversight by the Securities and Exchange Commission - does not suffer from the same features and flaws that critics of arbitration in other forums have excoriated as oppressively unfair. In the recently-enacted Dodd-Frank Act, Congress delegated to the SEC the authority to prohibit arbitration clauses in customer agreements through admininstrative rule-making. After examining these regulatory efforts, I argue that neither Congress nor the SEC should prohibit mandatory securities arbitration because it would have significant adverse consequences for investors and for the vitality of the dispute resolution mechanism. The essay concludes by asserting that regulators should not enact arbitration reform that needlessly and without foundation brands securities arbitration as the evil twin of adhesive consumer arbitration.","PeriodicalId":125020,"journal":{"name":"Political Institutions: Legislatures eJournal","volume":"1 1","pages":"0"},"PeriodicalIF":0.0,"publicationDate":"2010-08-31","publicationTypes":"Journal Article","fieldsOfStudy":null,"isOpenAccess":false,"openAccessPdf":"","citationCount":null,"resultStr":null,"platform":"Semanticscholar","paperid":"129060326","PeriodicalName":null,"FirstCategoryId":null,"ListUrlMain":null,"RegionNum":0,"RegionCategory":"","ArticlePicture":[],"TitleCN":null,"AbstractTextCN":null,"PMCID":"","EPubDate":null,"PubModel":null,"JCR":null,"JCRName":null,"Score":null,"Total":0}

{"title":"The Role of Congressional Polarization and Divided Government in the New Ideological Partisanship","authors":"Benjamin Woodson","doi":"10.2139/ssrn.1665420","DOIUrl":"https://doi.org/10.2139/ssrn.1665420","url":null,"abstract":"The level of mass partisanship has gone through three distinct phases since WWII. The period directly after WWII was a period of high mass partisanship and low elite polarization. The 1970’s was a period of low mass partisanship with many predicting the end of political parties. Since the 1970’s the level of partisanship has increased. The two periods of high mass partisanship are much different from each other with the first being an era of government performance based partisanship and the more recent an era of ideological issue based partisanship. This shift between a government performance based to an ideological issue based partisanship is driven by increasing polarization at the elite level and the increasing prevalence of divided government. Contrary to previous findings (Hetherington 2001), it is argued that elite polarization does not increase the amount of mass partisanship, but instead only changes the basis of partisanship from government performance to ideological issues.","PeriodicalId":125020,"journal":{"name":"Political Institutions: Legislatures eJournal","volume":"5 1","pages":"0"},"PeriodicalIF":0.0,"publicationDate":"2010-08-25","publicationTypes":"Journal Article","fieldsOfStudy":null,"isOpenAccess":false,"openAccessPdf":"","citationCount":null,"resultStr":null,"platform":"Semanticscholar","paperid":"131242060","PeriodicalName":null,"FirstCategoryId":null,"ListUrlMain":null,"RegionNum":0,"RegionCategory":"","ArticlePicture":[],"TitleCN":null,"AbstractTextCN":null,"PMCID":"","EPubDate":null,"PubModel":null,"JCR":null,"JCRName":null,"Score":null,"Total":0}

{"title":"Estimating the Incumbency Advantage in U.S. House Elections in the Presence of Strategic Retirement","authors":"B. Highton","doi":"10.2139/ssrn.1652313","DOIUrl":"https://doi.org/10.2139/ssrn.1652313","url":null,"abstract":"Failure to take into account “strategic retirement” - incumbents choosing to retire rather than face difficult reelection fights - leads to inflated estimates of the incumbency advantage. The one attempt to address this issue in the context of U.S. House elections implies that much of the supposed incumbency advantage and most of its presumed increase over time are illusory (Cox and Katz 2002). However, there are probably unaccounted for biases in Cox and Katz (2002) that leave open the question of the relationship between strategic retirement and the incumbency advantage in House elections. This paper develops a new approach based on simulating the counterfactual condition of incumbents standing for reelection rather than retiring. The results show that when the bias induced by strategic retirement is removed, much of the apparent incumbency advantage and its increase over time remain evident.","PeriodicalId":125020,"journal":{"name":"Political Institutions: Legislatures eJournal","volume":"47 4 1","pages":"0"},"PeriodicalIF":0.0,"publicationDate":"2010-08-01","publicationTypes":"Journal Article","fieldsOfStudy":null,"isOpenAccess":false,"openAccessPdf":"","citationCount":null,"resultStr":null,"platform":"Semanticscholar","paperid":"125723579","PeriodicalName":null,"FirstCategoryId":null,"ListUrlMain":null,"RegionNum":0,"RegionCategory":"","ArticlePicture":[],"TitleCN":null,"AbstractTextCN":null,"PMCID":"","EPubDate":null,"PubModel":null,"JCR":null,"JCRName":null,"Score":null,"Total":0}

{"title":"Balancing Competing Demands: Position-Taking and Election Proximity in the European Parliament","authors":"Rene Lindstaedt, Jonathan B. Slapin, Ryan J. Vander Wielen","doi":"10.2139/ssrn.1441899","DOIUrl":"https://doi.org/10.2139/ssrn.1441899","url":null,"abstract":"Parties value unity, yet members of parliament have incentives to deviate from the party line. This article examines how members of the European Parliament (EP) respond to competing demands from national parties and European party groups. We examine ideological shifts within a single parliamentary term to assess how election proximity affects party group cohesion. Our formal model of legislative behavior suggests that when EP elections are proximate, national party delegations shift toward national party positions, thus weakening EP party group cohesion. Our Bayesian item-response analysis of roll calls in the 5th EP supports our theoretical predictions.","PeriodicalId":125020,"journal":{"name":"Political Institutions: Legislatures eJournal","volume":"34 1 1","pages":"0"},"PeriodicalIF":0.0,"publicationDate":"2010-02-06","publicationTypes":"Journal Article","fieldsOfStudy":null,"isOpenAccess":false,"openAccessPdf":"","citationCount":null,"resultStr":null,"platform":"Semanticscholar","paperid":"127632304","PeriodicalName":null,"FirstCategoryId":null,"ListUrlMain":null,"RegionNum":0,"RegionCategory":"","ArticlePicture":[],"TitleCN":null,"AbstractTextCN":null,"PMCID":"","EPubDate":null,"PubModel":null,"JCR":null,"JCRName":null,"Score":null,"Total":0}