Bill Proposals Research Articles

Evidence-based policymaking in the legislatures: timeliness and politics of evidence in Finland

Scholarship on evidence-based policymaking (EBP) has long called for more a realistic understanding of how politicians use evidence, especially the ways that use of evidence is negotiated with political goals. This article offers a new perspective on this question by drawing from research on legislative organisations. It introduces a new framework for the study of evidence-based policy, developed by reviewing key insights from legislative studies and interpreting their relevance for the study of EBP. It then applies this framework in an interview-based case-study of the Parliament of Finland. Previous studies have identified timeliness and relevance as some of the key barriers to using evidence, and our data focus on how key actors in legislative organisations understand and manage timeliness. Our findings show that timeliness is dominated by short-term reactions to new bill proposals, but the window for timely evidence in the legislatures can vary from months to days. Our study identifies three strategies used in legislative organisations to overcome the problems of reactivity: programmatic work, specialisation and network building. Practices relating to these strategies are discussed across legislators, political parties and committees. Our findings suggest that it is important for research on EBP in a legislative context to go beyond the study of committees and individual legislators, to explore the role of political parties. This strategy allows researchers to discover the often non-linear and indirect ways that evidence can influence policy through political parties.

Influence of politicians’ ideology on their legislative activities: the case of South Korea

ABSTRACT The legislative bill is a critical factor in assessing whether a representative democracy is functioning well, and the politicians’ ideologies have a significant impact on legislative activities. By investigating complete legislative bills in Korea’s parliament from 2004 to 2016, classified using machine-learning techniques, and politicians’ ideology, measured by the W-NOMINATE method, this study systematically examines the relationship between lawmakers’ ideology and legislation. The results reveal that politicians with a strong conservative ideology propose more bills in general and a higher ratio of bills with an economic focus. The passing and processing rate of welfare-related bills sponsored by conservative lawmakers decrease, while the processing period lengthens. These results are aligned with common beliefs regarding the scope of the legislative agenda according to ideology. As ideological discrepancy increases between individuals and their party increases, the number of bill proposals decreases, and bills are less likely to be processed, reducing legislative productivity and efficiency. This study finds that lawmakers’ ideology has a notable influence on legislative productivity and efficiency. It also suggests that these effects are closely related to both the absolute intensity of a lawmakers’ political ideology and its relative position with respect to the affiliated party.

Politicians' Asset Allocation and Economic Bill Proposals

Politicians' Asset Allocation and Economic Bill Proposals

Legislative Behaviour of MPs in the Czech Republic in Times of Covid-19 Pandemic

COVID-19 (coronavirus disease 2019) pandemic has affected almost every aspect of our lives. While millions of people fought with the disease, economies, societies and institutions faced side-effects of government measures resisting the spread of the virus. This article describes the effects of the pandemic on the legislative behaviour of MPs in one of the worst-hit countries in the world, the Czech Republic. The results show that the number of bill proposals and roll calls substantially increased during the pandemic compared to pre-pandemic times. Since the start of the outbreak, a third of roll calls and a half of bill proposals concerned the pandemic. Nonetheless, the outbreak did not substantially affect the voting unity of parliamentary party groups nor the opposition became more supportive of the cabinet. Still, while the liberal Pirates became more cooperative during the pandemic than the pre-pandemic period, the rightist antisystem party Freedom and Direct Democracy receded from the rest of the parties on the pandemic issues.

Going in circles? The influence of the electoral cycle on the party behaviour in parliament

AbstractMost analyses dealing with the interaction of parties in parliament assume their interests to be fixed between elections. However, a rational perspective suggests that parties adapt their behaviour throughout the legislative term. I argue that this change is influenced by incentives and possibilities to shape legislation and the need to distinguish oneself from competitors. While for government parties it matters whether they have to share offices, for opposition parties the influence on policy-making is important. By examining the sentiment of all parliamentary speeches on bill proposals from six established democracies over more than twenty years, I analyse institutional and contextual effects. The results show that single-party governments tend to become more positive towards the end of the legislative cycle compared to coalition governments. On the other hand, opposition parties under minority governments, or with more institutionalised influence on government bills, show a more negative trend in comparison to their counterparts.

Examining the relationship between political spending and legislative activities

AbstractLawmakers’ political spending plays an essential role in the representation of the public through legislative activities. Based on a rich dataset from South Korea, this study examines the relationship between political spending and legislative activities in the National Assembly. We focus on lawmakers’ average legislative performance during the term rather than specific roll call votes by adopting novel measurements of legislative productivity and efficiency. We find that the total number of bill proposals increases when political spending increases, suggesting an improvement in lawmakers’ legislative productivity. The timeliness of legislation is enhanced by reducing the processing period. However, little evidence exists that the passing and processing rates of legislation requiring bipartisan collaboration and political compromise are improved. The effects are heterogeneous by legislation and expenditure types, affiliated party, and electoral term. The results indicate that political spending has positive effects on lawmakers’ individual productivity but restrictive effects on legislative efficiency.

State and scope of U.S. soil health legislation: A qualitative policy analysis

Links between soil health and public health are established and growing in the scientific literature, and soil health bills in the U.S. have increased since 2016, but the extent to which current soil health legislation addresses public health implications has not been examined. Does the scope of current legislation explicitly address links to public health? This question will grow more pressing as popula­tion growth places higher demands on soils. In this study, we examine the scope and content of recent soil health legislation and investigate the impor­tance of context, processes, and actors through semistructured interviews with soil health profes­sionals involved with identified bills. Twelve bills from 11 states were analyzed and 10 interviews were conducted. Legislation focused primarily on soils’ capacity to sequester carbon and improve water quality, while public health had minimal representation. Interviews illuminated themes such as climate change motivating bill proposals and recognition of soils as living ecosystems, yet also demonstrated structural and knowledge limitations to including public health in soil health policies. These findings provide a novel perspective on the scope and passage of soil health legislation and demonstrate the opportunity for broader collaboration with public health.

Partisan Dealignment and Personal Vote-Seeking in Parliamentary Behaviour

What shapes legislators’ incentives for personal vote-seeking in parliament? Recent work suggests that partisanship among voters deters personal vote-seeking, by limiting its effectiveness. This has potentially significant implications for policy-making, election results and patterns of accountability. However, empirical tests of this argument remain few in number and have several limitations. This article thus offers a new test of the relationship between partisanship and personal vote-seeking. Using legislators’ bill proposals as an indicator of their personal vote-seeking activity, I analyse legislative behaviour in the UK House of Commons between 1964 and 2017. I find that members of parliament make more legislative proposals when voters are less partisan. Moreover, partisanship appears to moderate the influence of other drivers of personal vote-seeking: electorally vulnerable legislators make more legislative proposals, but only at low levels of partisanship. These findings provide new evidence that voters’ relationships with political parties affect legislators’ electoral strategies and parliamentary behaviour.

Does partisanship explain spending patterns in congressional bill proposals?

We investigate the motivations driving members of the US Congress to introduce bills that require new federal spending, testing a classic “party matters” hypothesis that spending is motivated by partisanship with Democrats spending more on social programs and Republicans more on defense and social order. To test this hypothesis, we introduce a new dataset that codes Congressional Budget Office reports, allowing us to link cost estimates to over 7,000 congressional bills. Overall, we find very little evidence that partisanship or ideology can reliably predict the cost of bills. Bills introduced by Democrats call for similar levels of new spending as those introduced by Republicans, even on policy topics where partisan divisions are thought to be pronounced. These results raise the possibility that when it comes to spending rank-and-file members are less motivated by abstract partisan commitments than traditionally thought.

Criminalizing Violence against Women in Politics: Innovation, Diffusion, and Transformation

AbstractViolence against women politicians is increasingly recognized as an issue that undermines women's presence in politics. Latin America has been at the vanguard of this global discussion. In 2012, Bolivia became the only country in the world to criminalize “political violence and harassment against women.” Several other countries have similar legislation in the works. What explains the emergence of these bill proposals? This article argues that the creation of these bills is the result of three processes: activism at the local level used international norms to propose an innovative solution to a problem; women politicians and “femocrats” worked within the state apparatus to overcome resistance; and international actors worked to foster connections among activists and politicians across the region. In this process, international norms have been transformed, with important implications for women's political representation.

More Effective than We Thought: Accounting for Legislative Hitchhikers Reveals a More Inclusive and Productive Lawmaking Process

For more than half a century, scholars have been studying legislative effectiveness using a single metric -- whether the bills a member sponsors progress through the legislative process. We investigate a less orthodox form of effectiveness -- bill proposals that become law as provisions of other bills. Counting these bills as additional cases of bill sponsorship success reveals a more productive, less hierarchical and less partisan lawmaking process. We argue that agenda and procedural constraints are central to understanding why lawmakers pursue hitchhiker strategies. We also investigate the legislative vehicles that attract hitchhikers and find, among other things, that more Senate bills are enacted as hitchhikers on House laws than become law on their own.

More Effective Than We Thought: Accounting for Legislative Hitchhikers Reveals a More Inclusive and Productive Lawmaking Process

AbstractFor more than half a century, scholars have been studying legislative effectiveness using a single metric—whether the bills a member sponsors progress through the legislative process. We investigate a less orthodox form of effectiveness—bill proposals that become law as provisions of other bills. Counting these “hitchhiker” bills as additional cases of bill sponsorship success reveals a more productive, less hierarchical, and less partisan lawmaking process. We argue that agenda and procedural constraints are central to understanding why lawmakers pursue hitchhiker strategies. We also investigate the legislative vehicles that attract hitchhikers and find, among other things, that more Senate bills are enacted as hitchhikers on House laws than become law on their own.

Is There a Gender Wage Gap in Online Labor Markets? Evidence from Over 250,000 Projects and 2.5 Million Wage Bill Proposals

We explore whether there is a gender wage gap in one of the largest EU online labor markets, PeoplePerHour. Our unique dataset consists of 257,111 digitally tradeable tasks of 55,824 hiring employers from 188 countries and 65,010 workers from 173 countries that made more than 2.5 million wage bill proposals in the competition for contracts. Our data allows us to track the complete hiring process from the employers' design of proposed contracts to the competition among workers and the final agreement between employers and successful candidates. Using Heckman and OLS estimation methods we provide empirical evidence for a statistically significant 4% gender wage gap among workers, at the project level. We also find that female workers propose lower wage bills and are more likely to win the competition for contracts. Once we include workers' wage bill proposals in the regressions, the gender wage gap virtually disappears, i.e., it is statistically insignificant and very small in magnitude (0.3%). Our results also suggest that female workers' higher winning probabilities associated with lower wage bill proposals lead to higher expected revenues overall. We provide empirical evidence for heterogeneity of the gender wage gap in some of the job categories, all job difficulty levels and some of the worker countries. Finally, for some subsamples we find a statistically significant but very small reverse gender wage gap.

Is There a Gender Wage Gap in Online Labor Markets? Evidence from Over 250,000 Projects and 2.5 Million Wage Bill Proposals

Is There a Gender Wage Gap in Online Labor Markets? Evidence from Over 250,000 Projects and 2.5 Million Wage Bill Proposals

Economic crisis and lawmaking. The impact of crisis on legislative agenda in Italy

ABSTRACTMajor economic crises are focal events that often drive changes in various aspects of political systems. Although extensive work has been done to investigate the effect of exogenous shocks on political phenomena such as government termination, public opinion and policy outcomes, the impact of major crises on the process of policymaking has so far received scarce attention. Building on existing literature on policy agendas and legislative organization, this paper explores how the Eurozone crisis has affected the legislative agenda of the Italian parliament. The data used include information on the 1,110 bills submitted to parliament during Legislature XVI (2008–2013). Our analysis shows that, with the worsening of the crisis, bill proposals related to macroeconomic issues become increasingly more likely to enter the legislative agenda, displacing legislation dealing with other topics. Our argument is corroborated by a comparison between Legislature XVI and a pre-crisis legislature (2001–2006), as in the latter term the legislative agenda follows different patterns.

국회의원의 세법개정안 발의에 관한 정당간 차이 분석 : 이익집단 연계를 중심으로

국회의원의 세법개정안 발의에 관한 정당간 차이 분석 : 이익집단 연계를 중심으로

How Ordinary MPs Can Make it Into the News: A Factorial Survey Experiment with Political Journalists to Explain the Newsworthiness of MPs

Parliamentarians have to compete against each other to make it into the news, and some of them succeed more than others. Based upon news value theory, I consider MPs’ characteristics as news factors to explain their newsworthiness. I take an innovative approach by conducting a factorial survey experiment with political journalists. This allows me to study first which MPs are considered newsworthy and second whether journalists judge MPs’ newsworthiness regardless of their own personal background. In total, 73 Belgian journalists each judged 8 fictional press releases in which we carefully manipulated 4 characteristics of the MP sending it: party affiliation, issue specialization, media reactivity, and political action. Results show that parliamentarians from larger parties, those who react on mediatized issues, and those who communicate about their bill proposals are more newsworthy. Journalists’ judgments do not differ according to their gender, age, education, or political leaning.

Economic consequences of deregulation: Evidence from the removal of voting cap in Indian banks

Abstract We examine the effect of the 2005 Banking Regulation Amendment Bill and the 2011 Banking Laws Amendment Bill proposals for removal of the 10 percent voting rights cap in Indian Banks. The 2011 Banking Laws Bill was first introduced in 2005, but lapsed with the dissolution of the 14th Lok Sabha. The Bill was passed in December 2012 and raised the voting cap in private sector banks from 10 to 26 percent. We present evidence that the removal of the voting cap enhances the value of votes of bank stocks by reducing the wedge between cash-flow and control rights, thus increasing monitoring and the probability of takeover. Post-deregulation analysis reveals that the passage of the Bill was followed by increasing blockholders’ number and percentage of shares held in larger and government banks. Furthermore, a stronger negative relationship between banks’ profitability and size, as well as share of non-performing loans is observed. This study makes an important contribution to the growing literature on the valuation impact and efficiency gains of liberalization of ownership restrictions in emerging markets, as well as the rich literature on corporate governance and control relating to the value of voting privilege in companies with disparate voting rights.

Position, selective emphasis and framing

This Special Issue aims to (1) theorise party strategies in multi-dimensional policy spaces; and (2) apply the theory to party competition in multinational democracies characterised by a salient territorial dimension alongside a more established economic dimension. The introductory article brings together recent contributions treating spatial and salience theories as compatible and policy spaces as two-dimensional to propose four party strategies that can be ranked from one- to two-dimensional competitive behaviour: uni-dimensionality, blurring, subsuming, and two- dimensionality. The remaining contributions operationalise these strategies and draw on a variety of data sources ranging from manifestos to parliamentary bill proposals and expert surveys to describe when and explore why parties use these strategies in competition, focusing on patterns of party competition in multinational democracies, selected as typical cases of multi-dimensional competition.

Framing legislative bills in parliament

This article analyzes the strategies parties employ during the inter-electoral phase of party competition. It focuses on Spain’s multi-national democracy and how regional-nationalist parties frame their policy proposals in the statewide parliament (Congress of Deputies) for the period 1979–2011. Using the Catalan Convergence and Union (CiU) and the Basque Nationalist Party (PNV), it examines how frequently the parties rhetorically connect their bill proposals to the center-periphery dimension of party competition, and their justifications of these proposals in parliamentary debate. Challenging the niche party thesis, our findings indicate that the parties frame a small share of bills in center-periphery terms. They most frequently justify their center-periphery bills with reference to legal-constitutional compliance and administrative efficiency and less frequently with reference to culture, citizen rights, and economic performance. This can in part be explained by the fact that these parties are mainstream parties within their regions and operate in a clearly demarcated two-dimensional space in a multilevel state.