Legislative Success Research Articles

An Agent Dependent on the EU Member States? The Determinants of the European Commission’s Legislative Success in the European Union

For decades the European Commission’s possible legislative influence has interested scholars of EU studies, yet few empirical studies on the determinants of the Commission’s influence exist. This paper analyses quantitative data on 60 EU proposals to show to which degree rather endogenous resources of the Commission, external conditions determined by the EU member states or institutional constraints determine the Commission’s influence on EU legislation. Modeling the Commission as an agent having resources and strategic options, I demonstrate that the Commission’s ability to defend the content of its original proposals is to a large extent dependent on its principals, the member states. Endogenous resources of the Commission such as expertise and experience influence only to a small extent the legislative success of the Commission. Thus, this study allows gaining a deeper understanding on the factors influencing the European Commission’s influence on legislative affairs.

A Social Constructionist Perspective on the Diffusion of Innovative Fiscal Responsibility Legislation

Compared to competitive, coercive and learning models, social constructionist theory is particularly well-suited to explaining the diffusion of policy norms across cross-country networks. This paper augments this approach with a myth perspective that is applied to an analysis of the diffusion of the qualitative fiscal norms embedded in New Zealand's innovative Fiscal Responsibility Act of 1994. The ‘prime mover’, ‘innovative discontinuity’ and ‘unmodified legislative success’ components of the agent significance myth surrounding this fiscal responsibility law (FRL) are examined and the scope and limits of its subsequent diffusion are related to mutual identification and interaction across pre-established network linkages between actors who have learnt its usefulness. The relative durability of myths compared to fads lend an unpredictability to the diffusion process, the potential limits of which are shaped by cultural and institutional factors that influence the receptiveness of governments to such norm-based approaches to fiscal discipline.

Of Stasis and Movements: Climate Legislation in the 111th Congress

The 2008-2010 campaign to pass climate legislation was one of the largest efforts in the history of energy and environmental politics. Yet despite initial legislative success in the House of Representatives in early 2009 and the strong forces arrayed in support of a climate bill, the Senate dropped the issue from consideration in the summer of 2010. Such a high profile defeat might be expected to attract substantial academic attention. However, nearly three years out little analysis has been forthcoming. This paper addresses that gap in current scholarship, seeking to both inform academic understanding of climate politics and provide insights to practitioners and policymakers. The analysis is structured into two main sections. The first section examines four key barriers that protected the policy status quo: partisan polarization, political geography, energy interests and the recession. Through comparison with the Affordable Care Act and the history of U.S. environmental policymaking, the second section suggests three political forces that might have helped strength the climate campaign: public opinion, grassroots mobilization and presidential leadership. It further suggests that the failures of the climate campaign to pay sufficient attention to opinion and mobilization are symptomatic of broader challenges facing an increasingly professionalized and Washington-based environmental movement.

Ethnic Change, Concern over Immigration, and Approval of State Government

The popularity and approval of a governor among their state citizenry is a central form of political capital that animates the informal power key to their legislative success and bolsters their prospects for reelection. Within the extant literature exploring the sources of approval of state executives, the lion's share of the work focuses on the deleterious effects on approval of a poorly performing national and state economy. In the present article, we rely on the same logic underlying the economic-centered research—namely, that unhappy citizens blame governors and state governments for their discontent—but focus on the impact on approval of an entirely separate and relatively unexplored domain of life in a state: ethno-demographics. This article advances the hypothesis that citizen discontent over drastic ethnic change in their local environment is politicized as concern over immigration, which in turn serves as a concrete political issue through which personal discontent over increased ethnic diversity is translated into lower approval of state government. This hypothesis is tested within the context of the state of California using pooled statewide survey data. Our analyses demonstrate that growth in the Hispanic population within a respondent's county of residence significantly increases concern over immigration within the state, and that concern over immigration significantly decreases approval of state government across the board, including the governor, the state legislature, and one's local state representatives.

The Curious Case of School Prayer: Political Entrepreneurship and the Resilience of Legal Institutions

AbstractSchool prayer represents a curiosity of Reagan era politics. Reagan and the social conservative movement secured numerous successes in accommodating religious practice and faith in the public sphere. Yet, when it came to restoring voluntary school prayer, conservatives never succeeded in securing the judicial victory that they sought despite conditions that seemingly favored change. Herein, we attempt to reconcile Reagan era successes with Reagan era failures by exploring Reagan's entrepreneurial activity to affect both the demand (i.e., judges) and supply (i.e., litigants) side of legal change. Identifying Reagan's entrepreneurial activities in his attempt to alter national social policy reveals the resilience of legal institutions to presidential and partisan regimes. Reagan's efforts to change national school prayer policy gained some measure of legislative success by securing the Equal Access Act but it failed to garner a change in school prayer jurisprudence. We conclude by noting that the difficulty of influencing both the demand and supply side of legal change in a timely manner and its implication for reconstructing policy through the courts.

Feasibility of U.S. renewable portfolio standards under cost caps and case study for Illinois

Recently enacted state renewable portfolio standards (RPSs) collectively require that U.S. electricity generation by non-hydro renewables more than double by 2025. These goals are not certain to be met, however, because many RPSs apply cost caps that alter requirements if costs exceed targets. We analyze here the 2008 Illinois RPS, which is fairly typical, and find that at current electricity prices, complete implementation will require significant decreases in renewables costs even given the continuation of federal renewables subsidies. Full implementation is possible but not assured. The statutory design raises additional concerns about unintended potential consequences. The fact that windpower and solar carveouts fall under a single cost cap means that in failure mode, a less cost-effective technology can curtail deployment of a more cost-effective one. Adjacent-state provisions mean the bulk of the RPS can be met by existing wind facilities, and that new wind builds will likely occur in Iowa. The Illinois RPS, like that of many other states, appears to combine objectives inherently in conflict: preferences for local jobs, for specific technologies, for environmental benefits, and for low costs. Revisiting the legislation may be needed to make legislative success likely and to ensure that failure modes do not compromise goals.

Politics or Policy? How Rhetoric Matters to Presidential Leadership of Congress

In this article, we examine the linkage between presidential policy proposal messages and legislative success. Employing a data set on presidential legislative proposals that covers the years 1949‐2010, we find that politics matters less than policy. Purely political messages that reference the electoral logic of mandates or appeal to a sense of bipartisanship appear to have no impact on presidential legislative success, nor does policy signaling, though highlighting the role of agency‐based policy experts in crafting legislation does. From these results, we conclude that although the way presidents communicate their messages to Congress represents an important component of presidential‐legislative relations, it is instead the perceived quality of the legislation that more strongly shapes congressional support of presidential policy efforts.

Group Effort Yields Licensure Victory in South Dakota

Group Effort Yields Licensure Victory in South Dakota

Does Gender Matter? The Effect of Gender Representation of Public Bureaucracy on Governmental Performance

This article investigates gender representation in the public bureaucracy in the context of South Korea and its substantial effects on governmental performance. The past decades have seen a growing body of research on the theory of representative bureaucracy, yet the conceptual linkages remains unclear. This study, first, identifies three missing links existing in the theory of the representative bureaucracy. Second, we investigate whether the presence of women in the bureaucracy affects on the consequences of governmental activities. Using an unbalanced time-series data set for 25 years with gaps including 1978, 1983, 1986 to 2008, the investigation is conducted in terms of the media attention on women’s issues, social welfare budget, and the legislative success of the executive branch measured by the number of passed bills submitted to the National Assembly. The result of the autoregressive integrated moving average time series analysis (ARIMA) suggests that a representative bureaucracy influences substantive consequences on governmental performance.

Feasibility of U.S. Renewable Portfolio Standards Under Cost Caps and Case Study for Illinois

Recently enacted state Renewable Portfolio Standards (RPSs) collectively require that U.S. electricity generation by non-hydro renewables more than double by 2025. These goals are not certain to be met, however, because many RPSs apply cost caps that alter requirements if costs exceed targets. We analyze here the 2008 Illinois RPS, which is fairly typical, and find that at current electricity prices, complete implementation will require significant decreases in renewables costs even given the continuation of federal renewables subsidies. Full implementation is possible but not assured. The statutory design raises additional concerns about unintended potential consequences. The fact that windpower and solar carve-outs fall under a single cost cap means that in failure mode, a less cost-effective technology can curtail deployment of a more cost-effective one. Adjacent-state provisions mean the bulk of the RPS can be met by existing wind facilities and that new wind builds will likely occur in Iowa. The Illinois RPS, like that of many other states, appears to combine objectives inherently in conflict: preferences for local jobs, for specific technologies, for environmental benefits, and for low costs. Revisiting the legislation may be needed to make legislative success likely and to ensure that failure modes do not compromise goals.

What is the Best Strategy to Obtain Legislative Support?: Survey Evidence from Brazilian State Assemblies

The legislative success of governments in Latin America has been explained by two main theories. For some authors, the main explanation involves the proactive and reactive powers of the chief executive. Other scholars argue that negotiations with deputies for portfolios and pork are the most important factors behind success in approving legislation. This paper proposes an innovative methodological strategy to test the mechanisms behind each of these theories. Original survey data of 12 Brazilian state-level assemblies is examined to assess elites' attitudes in regard to governors' strategies to obtain legislative support. Results suggest that there is not a unique equilibrium to the problem of coalition formation in multiparty settings. Deputies with concentrated constituencies, from more decentralized parties, and from conservative parties, tend to believe that the most efficient way a governor can obtain legislative support is to negotiate amendments with deputies. On the other hand, the more scattered a legislator's constituency and the more liberal or centralized his or her party, the more likely a deputy is to think that governors achieve better legislative success when they negotiate cabinet positions.

Symbolic Equality: Law and National Symbols in Northern Ireland

The way in which the law regulates the display of national symbols has important consequences for minority national groups. If the majority is allowed to monopolise the official display of national symbols, members of the minority may be further alienated and discouraged from participating in public life. In contrast, a more even-handed approach to national symbols has the potential to foster an inclusive and pluri-national public culture. This article evaluates the regulation of national symbols in Northern Ireland. It contrasts the relative success of legislation regulating the display of symbols in the workplace with the latest equality litigation under Northern Ireland’s Good Friday Agreement of 1998 (‘the Agreement’). With respect to the latter, it is argued that the case-law suffers from a general failure to apreciate the implications of the Agreement for the display of national symbols. The article goes on to explain how equality with respect to the display of national symbols – or ‘symbolic equality’ – should be understood as an extension of the Agreement’s commitment to the more general principle of ‘parity of esteem’.

Legislative Activity in the Canadian House of Commons: Does Majority or Minority Government Matter?

This study assesses the impact of majority and minority governments on legislative activity in the Canadian House of Commons. The quantitative analysis spans the 22nd to the 40th Parliaments (1953–2009) and examines legislative productivity and success by government type. The analysis of descriptive data confirms that minority governments are somewhat less productive and successful than their majority counterparts. However, the analysis emphasizes significant variation for majority governments. Neither governing context guarantees success or failure as contextual factors largely condition legislative activity.

Red power rising: the National Indian Youth Council and the origins of Native activism

P revious treatments of “Red Power” and Native American activism in the 1960s and 1970s began their histories with the occupation of Alcatraz, lionized the male leadership of the American Indian Movement (AIM), or characterized Native activism as inspired by or derivative of the other “power” movements of the time period. Shreve challenges such portrayals by detailing the development of the National Indian Youth Council (NIYC), an organization of Native activists responsible for sparking two decades of grassroots and national activism in the mid-twentieth century. Using exhaustive archival sources and interviews with several key activists, he contextualizes the NIYC within a broader history of intertribal organizing, and traces its inception, development, key personalities, and controversies. In doing so, Shreve provides persuasive evidence that indigenous activism in the mid-century United States not only predates AIM and the Alcatraz occupation but also must be understood within the larger flow of 20th century Native American history. Doing so deepens and complicates our understandings of Native American activism at mid-century and prevents us from stereotyping “Red Power” as derivative of contemporaneous activist movements. After reviewing intertribal and Native youth organizing in the early twentieth century in the first two chapters, Shreve’s next two deal with the foundational years of the NIYC. His fifth chapter details NIYC’s successful involvement with the fish-ins of the Pacific Northwest, while chapters six and seven reveal an association of activists struggling to balance grassroots activism with their status as a national organization, and militancy with the need for institutionalization. The final chapter and epilogue follow the NIYC after the push for organization won out over militancy as the late 1970s saw legislative and legal successes for Native communities and the 1980s produced a sharp right turn in national politics. Shreve succeeds in asserting that the development of the NIYC is essential to understanding Native activism in the twentieth century. By Book Reviews 155

Women and Men's Legislative Success in the 21st Century Professional and Citizen State Legislatures

The bill-passage success of women and men legislators in professional and in citizen state legislatures is evaluated using a path analytical model. The model consists of exogenous personal, institutional, district, and state-level variables, an intervening variable of legislative leadership positions, and the direct and indirect effects of these variables on bill-passage success. With data from a 2004 survey of all fifty lower state houses compared to a similar 1992 nationwide survey of state legislators, women legislators display increased legislative positions and bill-passage in both professional and citizen state legislatures. The model predicts that institutional factors and, to a lesser extent, personal attributes are essential components for acquiring legislative positions as well as bill-passage success for women and men in both types of legislatures.

Assessing a Presidential Transition

A presidential administration transition is a crucial time for establishing an effective governance style and reflects the president’s own personality. Presidents are concerned with building a coherent, cohesive team as they move from their electoral victory to implementing their vision for the country through legislative successes. A successful president displays an entrepreneurial mind-set as he proceeds throughout his 1st year to achieve early legislative victories, which establish the president as an effective president. This entrepreneurial approach requires cold-blooded politics and eschews inordinate concern for individuals, issues, and policies, and, this entrepreneurial approach is predicated on nimble governance and shrewd implementation. Nimble governance is choosing among alternative priorities, avoiding blunders, and maneuvering in the face of opposition. Shrewd implementation results in a few, carefully selected initiatives that are announced early, lobbied energetically, enacted swiftly, and executed boldly. These criteria are applied to the inaugural year of the Clinton presidency.

Estimating the budget impact of orphan medicines in Europe: 2010 - 2020

BackgroundOrphan drugs are a growing issue of importance to European healthcare policy makers. The success of orphan drug legislation in Europe has resulted in an increasing number of licensed medicines for rare diseases, and many more yet unlicensed products have received orphan drug designation. Increasingly the concerns amongst policy makers relate to issues of patient access and affordability, yet few studies have sought to estimate the future budget impact of orphan drugs. The aim of this study was to predict the total cost of orphan medicines in Europe between 2010 and 2020 as a percentage of total European pharmaceutical expenditure.MethodsA disease-based epidemiological model was created based upon trends in the designation and approval of new orphan medicines, prevalence estimates for orphan diseases, and historical price and sales data for orphan drugs in Europe (defined as Eurozone + UK). The analysis incorporated two stages:1) Predicting the number of diseases for which new orphan drugs will be approved over the next decade, based on an analysis of trends from the EU registry of orphan medicines;2) Estimating the average ex-factory drug cost across an orphan disease life cycle, from the year in which the first orphan medicine is launched to the point where the first medicine loses marketing exclusivity.The two sets of information were combined to quantify the annual cost of orphan drugs from 2010 through 2020.ResultsThe results from the model predicted a steady increase in the cumulative number of diseases for which an orphan drug is approved, averaging just over 5 new diseases per year over the next 10 years. The annual per patient cost of existing orphan drugs was seen to vary between €1,251 and €407,631, with the median cost being €32,242 per year. The share of the total pharmaceutical market represented by orphan drugs is predicted to increase from 3.3% in 2010 to a peak of 4.6% in 2016 after which it is expected to level off through 2020, as growth falls into line with that in the wider pharmaceutical market. In sensitivity analysis peak-year orphan drug budget impact ranged between 3% - 6.6%.ConclusionsAlthough European orphan drug legislation has led to an increase in the number of approved orphan drugs, the growth in cost, as a proportion of total pharmaceutical expenditure, is likely to plateau over the next decade as orphan growth rates converge on those in the broader pharmaceutical market. Given the assumptions and simplifications inherent in such a projection, there is uncertainty around the base case forecast and further research is needed to monitor how trends develop. However, fears that growth in orphan drug expenditure will lead to unsustainable cost escalation do not appear to be justified. Furthermore, based on the results of this budget impact forecast, the European orphan drug legislation is not leading to a disproportionate impact on pharmaceutical expenditure.

EHDI Services: Who Pays for What?

EHDI Services: Who Pays for What?

Progressive Policy Making in a Conservative Age? Civil Rights and the Politics of Federal Education Standards, Testing, and Accountability

Recent research on the politics of contemporary policymaking has centered the contributions of diverse conservative forces. Conservatives are viewed as the chief proponents of marketizing reforms featuring retrenchment of social programs, privatization of social services, deregulation, and tax reduction, as well as of disciplining policies that impose more stringent behavioral requirements on beneficiaries, employ testing and reporting to monitor recipient performance, and impose sanctions for non-compliance. These developments are often viewed as fostering a less egalitarian politics, especially for historically disadvantaged groups.I examine the rise of standards, testing, accountability, and limited school choice policies in federal education policymaking, which are widely viewed as embodying the same conservative interests and ideologies that have shaped policymaking in other areas. Contrary to this conventional wisdom, I show that certain civil rights organizations, not conservative forces, provided much of the impetus for federal standards, testing, and accountability reforms, which they viewed as measures for raising the achievement of disadvantaged students. Tracing the origins and consequences of these policies, my research reveals that entrepreneurial progressives can achieve significant legislative successes that they believe will accomplish progressive objectives. However, these policy victories have yielded mixed substantive results, and they have also unleashed complex and unanticipated consequences.

Verbal Style, Gubernatorial Strategies, and Legislative Success

This article examines the relationship between a governor's verbal style and his success in achieving his legislative goals. We add a measure of verbal style developed by Roderick Hart to a traditional model used by scholars of political chief executives to explain legislative success. We apply this model to the State of the State addresses of six governors of Florida who served between 1966 and 2006. Our findings reflect the validity of the truism “words matter.” Governors who use words and phrases that connote enthusiasm, activity, and realism are more successful in the legislative arena than those who do not.