{"title":"Talking to the Populist Radical Right: A Comparative Analysis of Parliamentary Debates","authors":"Jan Schwalbach","doi":"10.1111/lsq.12397","DOIUrl":"10.1111/lsq.12397","url":null,"abstract":"<p>In many Western European states, right-wing populist parties made it into national parliaments. This presents the established parties with the challenge of how to behave towards the new party. While the scholarly literature has focused more on the interaction with the populist radical right in the electoral arena, we know little about how it functions in an institutionally constrained arena such as parliament. This study asks in what way these structures affect the position taking and confrontation in speeches. Using different text-as-data approaches, I analyze parliamentary debates in four Western European parliaments after the entry of right-wing populist parties. The results show that government-opposition dynamics continue to structure parliamentary debates by and large, but right-wing populist parties succeed in polarizing debates on immigration. They also become the center of attention in these debates. These results have important implications for the analysis of strategic party interaction in the parliamentary context.</p>","PeriodicalId":47672,"journal":{"name":"Legislative Studies Quarterly","volume":"48 2","pages":"371-397"},"PeriodicalIF":1.5,"publicationDate":"2022-08-09","publicationTypes":"Journal Article","fieldsOfStudy":null,"isOpenAccess":false,"openAccessPdf":"https://onlinelibrary.wiley.com/doi/epdf/10.1111/lsq.12397","citationCount":null,"resultStr":null,"platform":"Semanticscholar","paperid":"45244845","PeriodicalName":null,"FirstCategoryId":null,"ListUrlMain":null,"RegionNum":3,"RegionCategory":"社会学","ArticlePicture":[],"TitleCN":null,"AbstractTextCN":null,"PMCID":"OA","EPubDate":null,"PubModel":null,"JCR":null,"JCRName":null,"Score":null,"Total":0}
{"title":"No Experience Required: Early Donations and Amateur Candidate Success in Primary Elections","authors":"Rachel Porter, Tyler S. Steelman","doi":"10.1111/lsq.12396","DOIUrl":"10.1111/lsq.12396","url":null,"abstract":"<p>The electoral dominance of “quality” candidates—political insiders with a history of holding office—is well-established. However, research on the recent rise in successful political neophytes is less studied. Despite longstanding trends in the predominance of experienced candidates in primary elections, nearly half of all quality candidates who ran in non-incumbent races lost to a candidate without prior electoral experience in 2018. In this article, we investigate the success of political newcomers in elections for the U.S. House of Representatives by examining a topic often overlooked in the growing literature on primaries: campaign finance. We show that, from 2016 to 2020, political newcomers saw (1) greater success in future fundraising, and (2) an increased likelihood of primary election victory when they garnered more early contributions from <i>outside</i> their district. This contrasts with prior elections, where early money from <i>inside</i> a candidate's own congressional district served as the strongest predictor of future fundraising and electoral success.</p>","PeriodicalId":47672,"journal":{"name":"Legislative Studies Quarterly","volume":"48 2","pages":"455-466"},"PeriodicalIF":1.5,"publicationDate":"2022-07-28","publicationTypes":"Journal Article","fieldsOfStudy":null,"isOpenAccess":false,"openAccessPdf":"","citationCount":null,"resultStr":null,"platform":"Semanticscholar","paperid":"47377796","PeriodicalName":null,"FirstCategoryId":null,"ListUrlMain":null,"RegionNum":3,"RegionCategory":"社会学","ArticlePicture":[],"TitleCN":null,"AbstractTextCN":null,"PMCID":"","EPubDate":null,"PubModel":null,"JCR":null,"JCRName":null,"Score":null,"Total":0}
{"title":"Are Subnational Policymakers' Policy Preferences Nationalized? Evidence from Surveys of Township, Municipal, County, and State Officials","authors":"Nathan Lee, Michelangelo Landgrave, Kirk Bansak","doi":"10.1111/lsq.12383","DOIUrl":"10.1111/lsq.12383","url":null,"abstract":"<p>An ongoing debate in American politics concerns the extent to which subnational politics has become “nationalized.” We advance this debate by collecting issue-position data on four distinct policy topics from unprecedented national surveys of public officials at both the local and state levels. We then combine this survey data with precinct-level presidential vote-share data that is tabulated to match the boundary of each survey respondent's government jurisdiction. In doing so, we demonstrate that national party sorting of subnational officials is substantively and statistically significant across a range of issues with national salience, that it is consistent across local and state levels of government and it cannot be explained by the party sorting of constituents. These findings have implications both for the scope of nationalization as well as its implications for substantive representation.</p>","PeriodicalId":47672,"journal":{"name":"Legislative Studies Quarterly","volume":"48 2","pages":"441-454"},"PeriodicalIF":1.5,"publicationDate":"2022-05-29","publicationTypes":"Journal Article","fieldsOfStudy":null,"isOpenAccess":false,"openAccessPdf":"https://onlinelibrary.wiley.com/doi/epdf/10.1111/lsq.12383","citationCount":null,"resultStr":null,"platform":"Semanticscholar","paperid":"45380475","PeriodicalName":null,"FirstCategoryId":null,"ListUrlMain":null,"RegionNum":3,"RegionCategory":"社会学","ArticlePicture":[],"TitleCN":null,"AbstractTextCN":null,"PMCID":"OA","EPubDate":null,"PubModel":null,"JCR":null,"JCRName":null,"Score":null,"Total":0}
{"title":"Interpersonal Relationships and Legislative Collaboration in Congress","authors":"James M. Curry, Jason M. Roberts","doi":"10.1111/lsq.12381","DOIUrl":"10.1111/lsq.12381","url":null,"abstract":"<p>Do interpersonal relationships among and between representatives and senators affect legislative collaboration in the contemporary Congress? The extant literature on Congress suggests interpersonal dimensions of life on Capitol Hill should play a minimal role in the legislative process. However, research in other fields, including psychology, finds that relationships are crucially important within organizations. In addition, many contemporary accounts of congressional deal-making highlight the role of personal relationships. Drawing on interviews with high-level congressional staff, and data on CODEL trips taken by members of Congress, we show that interpersonal relationships help promote collaboration across the aisle. These findings have implications for how we understand the contours of conflict and cooperation on Capitol Hill.</p>","PeriodicalId":47672,"journal":{"name":"Legislative Studies Quarterly","volume":"48 2","pages":"333-369"},"PeriodicalIF":1.5,"publicationDate":"2022-04-12","publicationTypes":"Journal Article","fieldsOfStudy":null,"isOpenAccess":false,"openAccessPdf":"","citationCount":null,"resultStr":null,"platform":"Semanticscholar","paperid":"42628916","PeriodicalName":null,"FirstCategoryId":null,"ListUrlMain":null,"RegionNum":3,"RegionCategory":"社会学","ArticlePicture":[],"TitleCN":null,"AbstractTextCN":null,"PMCID":"","EPubDate":null,"PubModel":null,"JCR":null,"JCRName":null,"Score":null,"Total":0}
{"title":"How Politicians Downplay Lower-Educated Citizens' Opinions","authors":"Julie Sevenans, Stefaan Walgrave","doi":"10.1111/lsq.12380","DOIUrl":"10.1111/lsq.12380","url":null,"abstract":"<p>An important challenge facing political decision making today is inequality in representation. Political scientists have shown that the preferences of certain groups—especially those who have higher incomes or are better educated—systematically preponderate in political decision making. Trying to elucidate the mechanisms behind these findings, this research note explores one specific possible driver of representational inequality: that politicians downplay the opinions of disadvantaged groups, and here specifically, of the lower-educated. By means of a survey experiment with politicians, we test the idea that politicians have a hard-wired inclination to assume that the opinions of citizens who have received lower (i.e., vocational) education are less thoughtful than the opinions of citizens who followed a higher (i.e., general) education. The findings are somewhat ambiguous but the expectation is at least partly corroborated by the evidence. The findings illustrate the psychological foundations that may ultimately make politicians disregard the preferences of the lower-educated.</p>","PeriodicalId":47672,"journal":{"name":"Legislative Studies Quarterly","volume":"48 2","pages":"425-439"},"PeriodicalIF":1.5,"publicationDate":"2022-03-16","publicationTypes":"Journal Article","fieldsOfStudy":null,"isOpenAccess":false,"openAccessPdf":"","citationCount":null,"resultStr":null,"platform":"Semanticscholar","paperid":"49292770","PeriodicalName":null,"FirstCategoryId":null,"ListUrlMain":null,"RegionNum":3,"RegionCategory":"社会学","ArticlePicture":[],"TitleCN":null,"AbstractTextCN":null,"PMCID":"","EPubDate":null,"PubModel":null,"JCR":null,"JCRName":null,"Score":null,"Total":0}
{"title":"Who Represents the Constituency? Online Political Communication by Members of Parliament in the German Mixed-Member Electoral System","authors":"Lennart Schürmann, Sebastian Stier","doi":"10.1111/lsq.12379","DOIUrl":"10.1111/lsq.12379","url":null,"abstract":"<p>Members of parliament (MPs) are elected via two different tiers in mixed-member electoral systems—as winners of a seat in a constituency or as party candidates under proportional rules. While previous research has identified important consequences of this “mandate divide” in parliaments, questions remain how this institutional setup affects MPs' political behavior in other arenas. Analyzing more than one million social media posts, this article investigates regional representation in the online communication of German MPs. The results show that MPs elected under a direct mandate refer approximately twice as often to their constituencies by using regionalized wording and geographic references than MPs elected under the proportional tier. The substantive findings provide new evidence for the benefits of mixed-member electoral systems for political representation while the methodological approach demonstrates the added value of social media data for analyzing the political behavior of elites.</p>","PeriodicalId":47672,"journal":{"name":"Legislative Studies Quarterly","volume":"48 1","pages":"219-234"},"PeriodicalIF":1.5,"publicationDate":"2022-03-09","publicationTypes":"Journal Article","fieldsOfStudy":null,"isOpenAccess":false,"openAccessPdf":"https://onlinelibrary.wiley.com/doi/epdf/10.1111/lsq.12379","citationCount":null,"resultStr":null,"platform":"Semanticscholar","paperid":"48068872","PeriodicalName":null,"FirstCategoryId":null,"ListUrlMain":null,"RegionNum":3,"RegionCategory":"社会学","ArticlePicture":[],"TitleCN":null,"AbstractTextCN":null,"PMCID":"OA","EPubDate":null,"PubModel":null,"JCR":null,"JCRName":null,"Score":null,"Total":0}
{"title":"How to Cautiously Uncover the “Black Box” of Machine Learning Models for Legislative Scholars","authors":"Soren Jordan, Hannah L. Paul, Andrew Q. Philips","doi":"10.1111/lsq.12378","DOIUrl":"10.1111/lsq.12378","url":null,"abstract":"<p>Machine learning models, especially ensemble and tree-based approaches, offer great promise to legislative scholars. However, they are heavily underutilized outside of narrow applications to text and networks. We believe this is because they are difficult to interpret: while the models are extremely flexible, they have been criticized as “black box” techniques due to their difficulty in visualizing the effect of predictors on the outcome of interest. In order to make these models more useful for legislative scholars, we introduce a framework integrating machine learning models with traditional parametric approaches. We then review three interpretative plotting strategies that scholars can use to bring a substantive interpretation to their machine learning models. For each, we explain the plotting strategy, when to use it, and how to interpret it. We then put these plots in action by revisiting two recent articles from <i>Legislative Studies Quarterly</i>.</p>","PeriodicalId":47672,"journal":{"name":"Legislative Studies Quarterly","volume":"48 1","pages":"165-202"},"PeriodicalIF":1.5,"publicationDate":"2022-03-02","publicationTypes":"Journal Article","fieldsOfStudy":null,"isOpenAccess":false,"openAccessPdf":"","citationCount":null,"resultStr":null,"platform":"Semanticscholar","paperid":"49452399","PeriodicalName":null,"FirstCategoryId":null,"ListUrlMain":null,"RegionNum":3,"RegionCategory":"社会学","ArticlePicture":[],"TitleCN":null,"AbstractTextCN":null,"PMCID":"","EPubDate":null,"PubModel":null,"JCR":null,"JCRName":null,"Score":null,"Total":0}
{"title":"Politicians and Scandals that Damage the Party Brand","authors":"Nanna Lauritz Schönhage, Benny Geys","doi":"10.1111/lsq.12377","DOIUrl":"10.1111/lsq.12377","url":null,"abstract":"<p>Scandals can cause serious damage to political parties’ brand name and reputation, which may taint all members of the party—even those not implicated in the scandal. In this article, we therefore explore how (uninvolved) politicians are likely to react to the eruption of such events. Building on a survey among UK local councilors (<i>N</i> = 2133), we first document the prevalence of distinct response strategies (such as distancing oneself from the scandal-hit party or redirecting attention to similar events in other parties). Then, building on a between-subject survey-experimental design, we assess the moderating roles of partisanship and scandal type. We show that a scandal in one’s own party reduces the probability of distancing oneself from the scandal-hit party (particularly among men). We also find that scandal type matters: pointing out similar scandals in other parties is less likely for sex scandals compared to financial scandals (particularly among women).</p>","PeriodicalId":47672,"journal":{"name":"Legislative Studies Quarterly","volume":"48 2","pages":"305-331"},"PeriodicalIF":1.5,"publicationDate":"2022-02-23","publicationTypes":"Journal Article","fieldsOfStudy":null,"isOpenAccess":false,"openAccessPdf":"","citationCount":null,"resultStr":null,"platform":"Semanticscholar","paperid":"46085356","PeriodicalName":null,"FirstCategoryId":null,"ListUrlMain":null,"RegionNum":3,"RegionCategory":"社会学","ArticlePicture":[],"TitleCN":null,"AbstractTextCN":null,"PMCID":"","EPubDate":null,"PubModel":null,"JCR":null,"JCRName":null,"Score":null,"Total":0}