Party development in the early decades of the Australian parliament: a new perspective

This study offers a new perspective on the development of political parties in the Australian House of Representatives. We analyse a data set of 3060 legislative votes to estimate how parties influenced the behaviour of 287 legislators who served in the first 12 parliaments (1901-31). We show that the socialisation of members and cohort replacement effects, as well as a decline in private member business and committee votes, explain why partisanship increased over time. Our results challenge two widely held beliefs about the organisation of political parties in the legislative arena and the Australian party system. First, the analysis demonstrates that the government’s ability to increase party discipline through control of the legislative agenda is limited when parliament is engaged in nation-building projects. Second, our study suggests that introducing restrictive parliamentary procedures played a role in consolidating Australia’s unique two-party system, which opposes Labor to the Liberal–National coalition.     

The Changing Roles of House Party Leadership Organizations: The House Republican Policy Committee

More than 100 members in each of the two House party caucuses participate in the parties’ formal organizations—the extended party leadership. What purposes do these institutional components of the parties serve, and how and why have they changed over the last three decades? This article begins to answer these questions through a case study of the Republican Policy Committee based on primary documents as well as quantitative analysis. I show that the Republican leadership has used the committee for participation, coordination, and communication functions within the Conference, but that the roles of the committee have changed substantially in response to strengthening party government conditions, GOP majority status, heightened competition for control of the House, and the individual goals of key Republican leaders. Among other changes, the committee became more important for coordinating policy positions and strategy during the 1980s, but the strong, centralized majority leadership in the 1990s diminished this important coordination function and left the committee with an emphasis on partisan communication.     

Political Parties and Women’s Success in Municipal Elections in 2005 in Montérégie and Montréal (Québec,Canada)

ABSTRACT

We examine the impact of political parties on the success of women and men candidates in the 2005 municipal elections of Québec’s two most populous regions, Montérégie and Montréal. We built the dataset by requesting documentation from each municipality separately. This original dataset supports our two hypotheses. First, we demonstrate that the presence of political parties did not affect the difference in percentages of votes obtained by women and men candidates. No matter the gender, candidates affiliated with a political party obtained more votes than independent ones. Second, we find that gender did not affect contributions. No matter the gender, the presence of political parties and the candidates’ affiliation had a positive impact on their contributions. Québec conforms to findings in the U.S. literature: women and men candidates, under similar circumstances, are equally likely to obtain votes and contributions.     

Ideological Primary Competition and Congressional Behavior

Abstract

Primary challenges on an incumbent’s more extreme flank have become increasingly common in congressional elections. We explore the consequences on the legislative behavior of successful incumbents following these types of challenges. We propose that the effect of extreme ideological primary challenges is conditioned on whether the member belongs to the majority or the minority party. We test our expectations on primary elections from 2000 to 2012 and corresponding changes in voting behavior in the next Congress. We find that incumbents in the majority party who have defeated an extreme ideological primary challenge are less likely to support their party, especially on key votes. We expect this reaction is because they fear appearing too moderate and thereby encouraging another extreme ideological primary challenge. We find that incumbents in the minority party who face an extreme ideological challenge do not change their general voting behavior, but are more likely to vote with their party on key votes.     

Defining Debates from the Outside Looking In: How Presidents Affect the Decisions of the House Rules Committee

In this study I demonstrate how presidents influence the decisions of the House Rules Committee. I show that, since the late 1980s, this rise in presidential influence has not been at the expense, but rather at the behest, of Speakers intent on instilling greater partisan order over the House. Speakers direct the Rules Committee to protect through restrictive rules those bills expressly supported by co-partisan presidents. Moreover, they do the same for bills opposed by presidents from the competing party. Statistical analysis of rules granted to almost 1,800 bills between 1977 and 2004 shows that these exogenous partisan factors perform more robustly than prevailing committee-based spatial models in the explanation of Rules Committee decisions in the postreform era. I conclude that scholars must continue to develop and refine formal and statistical models that explain the role and influence of partisanship not just within institutions, but also across them.     

Geography and Election Results: Disproportionality and Bias at the 1993–2004 Elections to the Australian House of Representatives

The Alternative Vote system used for elections to the Australian House of Representatives is generally believed to disadvantage the Australian Labor Party in contests with the Liberal and National parties. However, most analyses on which such conclusions are based over-simplify the situation by not separating out the translation of votes into seats according to whether the election outcome in a district is determined using the first-preference or two-party preferred (2PP) votes. Analyses of bias at five recent elections which recognise that separation find little bias against either party in the districts where the determination used the 2PP votes (i.e. no candidate received a majority of the first preferences), but considerable bias in those where the outcome was decided on first-preferences. Furthermore, that bias was not in one direction, but rather favoured the largest party in each of those contests. The reason for this is identified in the geography of support for the two parties, which produces the equivalent of a ‘cracked gerrymander’ in sufficient districts to have a significant impact on the outcome.     

Why Are Some Policy Agendas Larger than Others?

Most research on policy agendas is based on the assumption that space on the agenda is fixed and, hence, focuses on how problems compete for this limited agenda space. This article holds that policy agendas may be limited but not fixed, meaning that problems may not always be traded off but confronted through a larger policy agenda. Based on an extensive collection of local council agendas from 98 Danish municipalities over time, this article investigates variations in agenda size across local governments and examines the extent to which this reflects the local problem environment. The analysis reveals that a large council agenda arises in response to an unfriendly problem environment, particularly if there are many committees to channel problems onto the agenda and, to a lesser extent, if center‐left parties hold office.     

The Pendulum of Congressional Power: Agenda Change,Partisanship and the Demise of the Post-World War II Foreign Policy Consensus

Many scholars contend that Congress rarely matters in the realm of foreign policy. The source of this collective impotence is often explained by the weaknesses in congressional institutions vis-a-vis the president, as well as a general inability to respond effectively to a dynamic international political environment. We contend that the debate over congressional activism has not adequately addressed the role of agenda change. We analyze all roll call votes in the House of Representatives relating to the international affairs agenda between 1953 and 1998. We find that presidents have become significantly more likely to stake out positions on economic and trade issues as compared to other international issues. We also observe that presidential positions in the realm of foreign policy are increasingly characterized by interparty and interinstitutional conflict. While this increased conflict has dramatically decreased the president's ability to successfully pass executive priorities in foreign affairs more generally, presidential success on economic and trade issues has witnessed a significantly greater decline. We infer from these results that changes to the foreign policy issue agenda represent one important factor that has affected not only the incentives for political parties to participate actively, but also the willingness of Congress to challenge the president in the foreign policy debate.Asked one day whether it was true that the navy yard in his district was too small to accommodate the latest battleships. Henry Stimson (chair of the House Naval Affairs Committee early in the century) replied, 'That is true, and that is the reason I have always been in favor of small ships.'1Carriers have been, are and will be for the foreseeable future an absolutely essential part of our deterrence force…2John Warner, senator from Virginia, home state of Newport News Shipbuilding     

The Eisenhower Administration: Bridge to the Institutionalized Legislative Presidency

Eisenhower's contributions to the modern presidency are primarily institutional and to some extent, stylistic: his reliance on the professionalism of civil servants in the Bureau of the Budget, his continuation of the annual programming process as well as the procedures for coordinating the executive branch's legislative role, his creation of a White House office to represent him on Capitol Hill, and his respect for Congress as a legislative body. What Eisenhower did not do is equally significant: he did not reject the model of an activist presidency, reverse the New and Fair Deal policies of his Democratic predecessors, or pursue his centrist agenda in a blatantly partisan manner. The Eisenhower experience demonstrates that incivility, inhumanity, and inanity are not inevitable consequences of divided government.     

When Loyalty Is Tested: Do Party Leaders Use Committee Assignments as Rewards?

Theories of parties in Congress contend that one tool that party leaders possess to induce loyalty among rank-and-file members is control over committee assignments, but conventional tests of this linkage have failed to distinguish loyalty from simply voting one's preferences in accordance with party leaders. We characterize loyal legislators as having a higher propensity for voting with party leaders when it matters, even when their preferences diverge from the mainstream of their party. Testing this strong definition of loyalty on committee assignment data for 1991–2015, we show that majority party members who support their party on the subset of votes for which party leaders have taken positions in floor speeches are more likely to be rewarded with plum committee assignments, especially those members on the ideological extremes.     

Split ticket voting in Australia: Dealignment and inconsistent votes reconsidered

This article critically examines the traditional American assumption that split ticket voting represents an indicator of partisan dysfunction and dealignment. It is argued that this assumption ignores the impact of system‐specific voting structures on voting patterns. Thus, we propose alternatively to explore ticket spitting in Australia, where a system of preferential vote and proportional representation creates very different structural opportunities for voters to pursue tactical votes that need not engender dealignment. Aggregate and survey data from the 1987 and 1990 federal elections are analysed. Aggregate results show a general upturn in voting consistent with tactical voting, while survey results suggest Australian ticket splitters are a tactically aware, politically interested subset who, in the context of wavering, but not supplanted partisanship, utilise especially Senate minor party votes to put a brake on major party hegemony.     

The 2013 elections and the Italian political system

The February 2013 Italian general elections were characterized by the highest volatility to date. Although, thanks to the majority bonus, the Partito Democratico (Democratic Party) obtained the absolute majority of seats in the House of Deputies, it could not be considered the winner of the elections. Lacking a majority in the Senate, it was obliged to form a government with Silvio Berlusconi's party and with the rather small number of parliamentarians elected in former Prime Minister Mario Monti's list. In spite of his last-minute surge, Berlusconi was a clear loser, having lost almost six million votes in respect of his 2008 victory. Comedian Beppe Grillo's Movimento Cinque Stelle (Five Stars Movement) received the highest-ever number of votes for a new entry into any post-war European general election. Unwilling to play the coalitional game and made up of inexperienced and incompetent parliamentarians, Grillo's party has remained isolated and ineffective. The present Italian party system consists of three poles, the Movimento Cinque Stelle playing the role of anti-system party. Institutional reforms and especially reform of the electoral system, which has been struck down by the Constitutional Court, are again the focus of debate. Restructuring of the Italian political system is yet to come.     

Post-electoral politics in Italy: institutional problems and political perspectives

A dysfunctional electoral law and an obsolete bicameral Parliament contributed to the surprising results of the 24–25 February 2013 Italian elections, which have solved none of Italy's institutional and political problems. This article briefly analyses the distribution of votes, stressing especially that the success of the Five Stars Movement derives from the dissatisfaction and the protest of a significant sector of the electorate. Beppe Grillo, like Silvio Berlusconi, is a political entrepreneur, who through patience, hard work and commitment has constructed an organization with a wide geographical following. The presence in Parliament of the Five Stars Movement made the election of the President of the Republic very difficult. President Napolitano was obliged to accept an unprecedented second term and then led the Democratic Party, the People of Freedom and Civic Choice to form an unusual government, almost a sort of Grand Coalition. The government is here briefly assessed. The article ends underlining two critical aspects of the situation. Neither the Italian parties nor the party system have succeeded in reaching a satisfactory level of consolidation and stability. This means that the President of the Republic has been obliged to make good the shortcomings of the political parties. Even malgré soi, the President's behaviour has given rise to a situation in which his own position raises the urgent need for institutional reforms along the lines of the semi-presidential mould of the French Fifth Republic to bring to a close Italy's overlong political transition.     

From enemy to opponent: the politics of delegitimation in the Italian Christian Democratic Party (1945–1992)

Abstract

This article reconstructs the dynamics of delegitimation of political opponents in the Italian Christian Democratic Party (DC), which had a relative majority and almost uninterruptedly led Italy’s governments from 1945 to 1992. The DC built its strategy of delegitimation on two levels, an ideological-religious one and a systemic one, which were only partly interdependent and overlapping. In almost half a century, the DC aimed its rhetoric and politics of delegitimation mainly at those opposition parties it considered as anti-establishment, that is, the Italian Communist Party (PCI) and the neofascist Italian Social Movement (MSI), and the form of delegitimation changed a great deal over this period. However, it is possible to grasp a specific dynamic: from a rigid form of delegitimation, from time to time it became possible to legitimate (at least in part) the opposition parties at different times and in different ways, depending on the changes in the political sphere and in society. It was a process full of contradictions and ambiguities within which the political enemy gradually gave way to becoming a political opponent.     

The House Member as Teacher: An Analysis of the Newsletters of Barber B. Conable,Jr.

Scholars agree that postreform House majority leadership strategies distinguish contemporary leaders from their predecessors. One such strategy is leaders' use of media to fulfill personal and member goals. Commonly presented evidence of this strategy is the increase in the number of times leaders appear in national evening newscasts. Yet most studies do not investigate the kind of media coverage leaders receive over time. Hence they do not show whether leaders have been successful in generating the sort of television attention consistent with the incentives that the literature identifies as driving them to adopt a media-oriented strategy. This article begins to address this gap in our understanding. Conducting a content analysis of network news accounts, we find that while postreform leaders have received more attention than their predecessors, coverage of them declined and leveled off in the 1990s. We also find that despite the drop in levels of attention accorded House majority-party leaders, they have maintained a plateau of higher news visibility relative to their primary competitors in the House, committee chairs, though there have been some recent exceptions to this trend that are highly suggestive.     

House Appropriations After the Republican Revolution

This article applies the theory of “conditional party government” (CPG) to the interaction between the majority party and the Appropriations Committee in the period following the Republican Revolution of 1995. We extend the analysis of Aldrich and Rohde (2000b) by examining how actions within the committee have changed over time and analyzing whether behavior and outcomes continue to match the expectations of CPG theory, particularly with respect to the times in which power in Congress switched from the Republicans to the Democrats and back. The conditions of the CPG theory continued to be met so that we can continue to test the theory's predictions. We show that following the Republican Revolution, the role of the party remained paramount and the party leadership maintained its influence over the direction of policy. While in the majority, both parties used the Appropriations Committee as a vehicle for policy change and the party leadership monitored committee actions, either by blocking policy shifts away from what the majority party wanted or facilitating changes in the desired direction.     

Cultural retaliation: the cultural policies of the ‘new’ Front National

This study examines the conception of culture and the cultural policies of the French Front National. Tracing the developments of the party’s cultural agenda before and after Marine Le Pen took over the leadership of the party from her father, I show how the Front National has adapted its discourse on cultural policy to its wider programmatic profile. In the context of a strategy of de-radicalisation promoted by Marine Le Pen, recent years have witnessed focussed efforts by the party leadership to professionalise and modernise the party’s cultural policy programme. However, the analysis of the party’s current cultural policy agenda reveals a remarkable continuity in the way the party leadership conceives of national culture and of what cultural policy should promote. This programmatic continuity becomes apparent in the analysis of the local cultural policies of municipalities won by the Front National in 2014. Exploring the cultural agendas of ten local governments with a Front National majority, I argue that the cultural policies of the Front National remain deeply rooted in a nativist understanding of culture and a dirigiste approach that wilfully excludes postcolonial minorities.     

Dilemmas of Party Leadership: Majority Whips in the U.S. House of Representatives, 1962-1982

This article examines party leadership in the context of personal ambition, institutional commitments and the representative's dilemma of choosing between a national vs. local perspective. The research focus is on the careers of five recent House Democratic party leaders and their tenure as appointed majority whips. From these case studies the whip, who occupies the third-ranking leadership post in the House, appears as an emerging leader who must develop strategies to enable him to balance a series of contradictory expectations: loyalty to leadership vs. self-promotion, service to the rank and file vs. policy impact, and support for national party positions vs. district preferences.     

Studying Rules Changes in the U.S. House: Evidence from an Alternative Empirical Model

Binder (1996) and Schickler (2000) define the current debate as to why the U.S. House has changed its standing rules regarding the majority rule and the minority rights. I revisit their empirical models—binary logit and ordered logit—and theoretically and statistically test the appropriateness of these models. I find that both of them are actually choosing inappropriate models. Their theoretical claims cannot be properly examined by utilizing their choices of models. In addition, the data do not satisfy the “parallel regression” assumption but do satisfy the “independence of irrelevant alternatives” assumption, which supports using an alternative multinomial logit model. I further extend the model, and find the dynamic nature of rules changes in the U.S. House. It appears there is no symmetry between the rules changes that promote the majority rule and the rules changes that enhance the minority rights.     

Presidential Influence Over the Systemic Agenda

One of the most widely accepted sources of presidential power is agenda setting. Being able to affect the media's agenda on key issues–influencing the systemic agenda and expanding the scope of conflict–has enormous consequences for the president's ability to govern effectively. Yet the literature to date has not conclusively determined the extent to which presidents consistently set agendas, especially over the media, because it has not explicitly considered variation in agenda setting influence by policy type. For these reasons, we test whether presidential public statements have increased the media's attention to three policy areas. Using Vector Autoregression (VAR) analysis, we demonstrate that presidents have some influence over the systemic agenda, at least in the short term, with policy type being an important predictor of presidential influence. Understanding when and why presidents may or may not be successful agenda setters is crucial to explaining the varying legislative impacts of presidential speech making.