Legislative Representation Research Articles

Thinking Apolitically about Gerrymandering

In popular opinion surveys, a majority of Americans express strong concerns about gerrymandering. These concerns are well founded insofar as gerrymandering undermines the perceived fairness of legislative representation and is expected to contribute to political polarization and “leapfrog” representation. Purported rem- edies for gerrymandering that aim to balance the interests of competing political parties are unlikely to be satisfactory or enduring. The US Supreme Court, in Rucho v. Common Cause, recently confirmed that the US Constitution protects individual voting rights against discrimination but does not guarantee or even suggest that political alliances are entitled to proportional representation. Moreover, reforms aiming to balance the effects of redistricting upon opposing political parties would fail to address potentially critical adverse consequences of gerrymandering, such as political self-segregation and polarization. In contrast to reform frameworks based on political balancing, much constitutional, legislative, and judicial history supports the simpler principle that legislative districts should be reasonably com- pact. Congress’s constitutional power to make or alter the rules for congressional elections is undisputed. Accordingly, enacting a federal law that limits the irregularity of legislative district shapes would represent a more promising and apolitical approach to gerrymandering reform, as well as one more likely to provide stability, predictability, and reduced risk of capricious judicial intervention, than an approach based on balancing the interests of political parties.

Descriptive and Substantive Representation in Congress: Evidence from 80,000 Congressional Inquiries

AbstractA vast literature debates the efficacy of descriptive representation in legislatures. Though studies argue it influences how communities are represented through constituency service, they are limited since legislators' service activities are unobserved. Using Freedom of Information Act (FOIA) requests, we collected 88,000 records of communication between members of the U.S. Congress and federal agencies during the 108th–113th Congresses. These legislative interventions allow us to examine members' “follow‐through” with policy implementation. We find that women, racial/ethnic minorities, and veterans are more likely to work on behalf of constituents with whom they share identities. Including veterans offers leverage in understanding the role of political cleavages and shared experiences. Our findings suggest that shared experiences operate as a critical mechanism for representation, that a lack of political consensus is not necessary for substantive representation, and that the causal relationships identified by experimental work have observable implications in the daily work of Congress.

Democratic Contradictions in European Settler Colonies

AbstractHow did political institutions emerge and evolve under colonial rule? This article studies a key colonial actor and establishes core democratic contradictions in European settler colonies. Although European settlers’ strong organizational position enabled them to demand representative political institutions, the first hypothesis qualifies their impulse for electoral representation by positing the importance of a metropole with a representative tradition. Analyzing new data on colonial legislatures in 144 colonies between the seventeenth and twentieth centuries shows that only British settler colonies—emanating from a metropole with representative institutions—systematically exhibited early elected legislative representation. The second hypothesis highlights a core democratic contradiction in colonies that established early representative institutions. Applying class-based democratization theories predicts perverse institutional evolution—resisted enfranchisement and contestation backsliding—because sizable European settler minorities usually composed an entrenched landed class. Evidence on voting restrictions and on legislature disbandment from Africa, the British Caribbean, and the US South supports these implications and rejects the Dahlian path from competitive oligarchy to full democracy.

Ethnicity, Institutions, and Female Representation

ABSTRACTWhat impact does the size of the ethnic minority population have on the representation of women in national legislatures? We examine this question by using provincial-level data from 32 Latin American and postcommunist countries. Our study finds that the size of the ethnic minority population shapes female legislative representation but only in candidate-centric electoral systems. In party-centric systems, any gender bias or resource disadvantage that female legislative candidates face in minority areas appears to be muted by electoral rules.

Economic Geography, Political Inequality, and Public Goods in the Original 13 U.S. States

A large and fruitful literature has focused on the impact of colonial legacies on long-term development. Yet the mechanisms through which these legacies get transmitted over time remain ambiguous. This article analyzes the choice and effects of legislative representation as one such mechanism, driven by elites interested in maximizing jointly economic prospects and political influence over time. We focus on malapportionment in the legislatures of the original 13 British North-American colonies. Their joint independence created a unique juncture in which postcolonial elites simultaneously chose the legislative and electoral institutions under which they would operate. We show that the initial choice of apportionment in the state legislatures is largely a function of economic geography, that such a choice generated persistent differences in representation patterns within states (political inequality), and that the latter shaped public goods provision in the long run.

The Representation of Micro-diverse Koreans

Abstract South Korea has changed from a culturally homogeneous to a heterogeneous country through international marriages and “multicultural families.” This produces a unique kind of diversity in the experiences of families and individual persons, which may require political representation. This phenomenon of multiplicitous identity can be called “micro-diversity.” Although Korea has multicultural policies in response, its difference blind legislative representation is problematised in the process. Existing research into “descriptive representation” has explained why existing groups should be represented by members for reasons of significant historical disadvantages. These theories remain inapplicable or opposed to representing micro-diversity in Korea, where group attachment amongst micro-diverse persons is currently unclear. The paper shows, however, that potential groups are always part of representative relationships and that these are never equivalent to current constituencies. Hence, compelling norms of descriptive representation for potential groups may be articulated, which justify descriptive representation for micro-diverse Koreans.

Do Parties and Voters Counteract Quota Regulations? The Impact of Legislative Gender Quotas on Ballot Ranking and Preference Voting in Poland

AbstractThis article investigates how the introduction of gender quotas affected female representation in an open-list proportional representation system. Based on the Polish parliamentary elections of 2005, 2007, 2011, and 2015, it attempts to explain the gap between the share of female candidates and the share of female legislators. The authors estimate changes in individual electoral chances using logistic regression. Subsequently, counterfactual reasoning is applied to display the results in the metrics of seat shares. The analyses of candidate-level data demonstrate that after the introduction of quotas, significantly more women ran for office, but parties and voters, on average, changed their preferences to the disadvantage of female candidates, even when incumbency and previous electoral experience were controlled. The article demonstrates that women benefited from the introduction of quotas, but not right away. The desired effect of gender quotas (an increase in female legislative representation) was mitigated mainly by the unequal distribution of “electoral capital” among candidates of both genders. The impact of this factor was moderated by ballot ranking patterns. Once women acquire more electoral capital, the role of party elites’ negative bias in ballot ranking becomes more visible.

Legislative representation and gender (bias)

ABSTRACTIn nearly all countries, women are underrepresented and men are overrepresented in national legislatures. This distortion in representation might occur for several reasons. One set of explanations suggests that parties, voters, or both, might discriminate against women. In this analysis we examine potential discrimination by parties and ask if elected officials discriminate against women who are thinking about a career in politics. Evaluating whether discrimination occurs is notoriously difficult with observational studies, so we conduct a field experiment to examine whether elected officials in New Zealand respond differently to potential political aspirants based on their perceived gender. Our results show that elected officials are equally willing to respond to both male and female political aspirants. These findings support the results from recent work conducted in other developed democracies and suggest that parties do not discriminate against female political aspirants at this stage of the recruitment process.

Personal votes, electoral competitiveness of parties, and legislative representation in Taiwan under SNTV

AbstractWe advance the literature on electoral institutions and legislative representation by investigating legislators’ position taking strategies in Taiwan under the single non-transferable voting period. Existing research largely assumes that representatives elected from the same electoral rule behave similarly. We challenge this conventional understanding by arguing that legislators in multi-member districts (MMDs) tend to move toward the extreme direction from the party line if they come from districts where their party is less competitive. This pattern of legislative representation allows them to appeal to partisan voters, as lowering one's partisan profile can be too costly in such districts. On the contrary, those who are elected from strong partisan districts are expected to deviate from the party toward the moderate direction. Given a solid partisan foundation in these districts, these legislators may target voters across party lines. Our analysis covering the entire period of MMD elections after Taiwan's democratization (1992–2008) provides robust empirical evidence to our theoretical claim. Our findings, therefore, shed lights for future studies on the intertwining nature between electoral systems, district level factors, and legislative representation.

Representative Legislatures, Grammars of Political Representation, and the Generality of Statutes

AbstractThis article explores the claim that representative legislatures should create general legal norms. After distinguishing the requirement that statutes be general from the broader rule‐of‐law idea that law be general, I concentrate on the French constitutional tradition to argue that the plausibility of the claim turns on the elucidation of a set of social norms and understandings about the proper role of representative legislatures mediating between abstract ideals of the common good and local practices. I call these norms grammars. The article then briefly compares the French “Sieyèsian” with the US “Madisonian” grammar of political representation regarding the issue of the generality of statutes and concludes with a plea for an in‐depth comparative investigation into different such grammars.

Constituent Demand and District‐Focused Legislative Representation

Legislative responsiveness to constituent demands is integral to the concept of representation. Yet, research on district‐focused legislative behavior and priorities, such as allocating resources to districts, has largely ignored constituent demand as an explanatory variable. In this article, we propose a demand‐based theory of district‐targeted legislative resource allocation. The theoretical model suggests that district demand for legislative resources is determined by the district’s relative deprivation of such resources and that legislators have an electoral incentive to respond to district demand due to the credit‐claiming opportunities associated with doing so. These possibilities are tested with region‐wide mass and elite survey data from Latin America, and the results suggest that constituent demand is not only a normatively but also an empirically important predictor of district‐focused legislative behavior.

Sub-constituencies and Legislative Responsiveness: Evidence from the States

This article tests whether theories of congressional behavior that link legislative responsiveness to the preferences of sub-constituencies at the expense of party preferences apply to the state level. Using ten years of state-level data and roll-call data from nearly 4,000 individual votes on E-Verify legislation, I examine the competing influences of party and constituency preferences on legislative behavior. The results confirm that state legislatures/legislators are responsive to sub-constituencies, but find that responsiveness plays out in different ways depending on the level of analysis and the political party and constituents in question. These results have important implications for our understanding of legislative representation: because responsiveness to sub-constituencies can yield policy results that are antithetical to stated party goals, what appears to be collective irresponsibility from a party may actually be individual legislators striving to be responsive to those constituents that they anticipate will hold them accountable.

Assessing the impact of a didactic lecture for student pharmacists on legislative advocacy

Background and purposeAdvocacy has been defined as “the essential competence”. Literature describes and assesses the impact of elective, extracurricular, and co-curricular advocacy experiences, but there is a deficiency of literature that describes and assesses core curricular advocacy experiences. Educational activity and settingAn electronic pre- and post-survey was administered to second-year student pharmacists who attended a didactic lecture on advocacy within a pharmacy law course. All responses were anonymous and matched via self-generated code. Wilcoxon signed rank tests analyzed matched data. FindingsPharmacy students were generally unaware of their legislative representation and did not know what to expect when meeting with legislators. A small percentage (24%) had previously contacted their legislator regarding pharmacy topics. All three knowledge items and seven of eight attitudes showed statistically significant improvement after the lecture. Following the lecture, 85% of students agreed/strongly agreed they were more prepared to be an advocate for pharmacy, with 76% reporting increased commitment. DiscussionThis study shows that a brief didactic educational intervention may improve student pharmacists’ knowledge of and commitment to political advocacy, addressing previously noted limitations of models to prepare student pharmacists for advocacy efforts. The skill of advocating was not addressed by this intervention. SummaryA brief didactic lecture at one institution showed a short-term positive influence on pharmacy students’ knowledge and attitudes towards legislative advocacy. Introduction of advocacy within the core didactic curricula may provide a method to increase the prevalence of advocates within the profession of pharmacy, but this requires further assessment and identification of best practices.

“Which Men?” How an Intersectional Perspective on Men and Masculinities Helps Explain Women's Political Underrepresentation

Progress toward gender equality in politics is striking. With the help of electoral gender quotas in more than 130 countries, women's national legislative representation more than doubled in the last 20 years. Other historically marginalized groups—racial, ethnic, and religious minorities, immigrants, and indigenous peoples—are also increasingly making their way into our parliaments. Political institutions are, then, more inclusive today than they have ever been. Yet equal representation has not been fully realized: some marginalized groups have seen a decline, and men from dominant social and economic groups—hereafter “elite men”—remain numerically dominant. Globally, there are no known cases in which elite men do not hold a disproportionately high share of positions in national elective office (Hughes 2015).

Representative Budgeting: Women Mayors and the Composition of Spending in Local Governments

One potential consequence of increasing women’s numeric representation is that women elected officials will behave differently than their men counterparts and improve women’s substantive representation. This study examines whether electing women to local offices changes how local government expenditures are allocated in ways that benefit women. Using compositional expenditure data from more than 5,400 Brazilian municipalities over eight years, we find significant differences in the ways men and women mayors allocate government expenditures. Our findings indicate that women mayors spend more on traditionally feminine issues, and less on traditionally masculine issues, relative to men mayors. In regard to specific policy areas, we find that women spend more on women’s issues, including education, health care, and social assistance, and less on masculine issues, including transportation and urban development, relative to men mayors. We further find that women’s legislative representation significantly influences the allocation of expenditures as a larger percentage of women councilors increases spending on traditionally feminine issues, as well as education, health care, and social assistance, relative to other policy issues. These findings indicate that women local elected officials improve women’s substantive representation by allocating a larger percentage of expenditures to issues that have historically and continue to concern women in Brazil.

Gender and participation in Africa’s electoral regimes: an analysis of variation in the gender gap

ABSTRACT Across Africa, it has been found that women participate in politics less than men, undermining prospects for gender equality and shared development. Despite theoretical and practical reasons for concern over the “gender gap”, we lack insight into its variation across countries, particularly in Africa, where studies accept women’s lower rate of participation as a uniform background condition. I address this lacuna using four rounds of Afrobarometer data from 31 countries to identify predictors of country-level variation in the gender gap. Drawing from literature on gender gaps elsewhere, I identify institutional and structural variables thought to influence women’s political engagement relative to men’s and evaluate these hypotheses quantitatively at the cross-national level, finding that country-level gaps vary predictably based on the percentage of female legislative representatives, the duration of democracy, and French colonial history. Finally, I use the least-likely case of Senegal to explore how the process to increase women’s legislative representation coincided with a dramatic increase in women’s participation.

The legislative representation of public opinion policy priorities in Italy

Normative democratic theory requires political actors in parliament and government to represent not only the citizens’ policy preferences, but also their issue priorities. This article investigates Italian dynamic agenda representation – the transmission of public priorities into the policy priorities of the Italian political system. To assess the public’s policy priorities, data on the Most Important Problem from the Eurobarometer polls are used, while the legislative agendas of the members of parliament (MPs) and government are built following the rules of the Comparative Agendas Project. The results of longitudinal analyses across 10 policy areas and 20 semesters (2003–13) suggest a persistent link between the public’s agenda and the prioritization of legislation by the Italian parliament, majority MPs, and government. Contrary to expectations, the opposition does not seem to be responsive to public opinion policy problems when introducing bills.

The right type of legislator: A theory of taxation and representation

We develop a theory of taxation and the distribution of government spending in a citizen-candidate model of legislatures. Individuals are heterogeneous in two dimensions: productive ability in the private sector and negotiating ability in politics. When these are positively correlated, rich voters always prefer a rich legislator, but poor voters face a trade-off. A rich legislator will secure more pork for the district, but will also prefer lower taxation than the poor voter. Our theory organizes a number of stylized facts across countries about taxation and redistribution, parties, and class representation in legislatures. We demonstrate that spending does not necessarily increase when the number of legislators increases, as the standard common-pool intuition suggests, and that many policies aimed at increasing descriptive representation may have the opposite effect.

Ratchets and See-Saws: Divergent Institutional Patterns in Women’s Political Representation

Women’s representation in legislative and executive offices has increased in recent decades. We show, though, that while global legislative and executive trend lines have positive slopes, the two institutions experience distinctive temporal dynamics. When levels of women’s legislative representation rise, they tend not to slip back beyond their newly achieved level—women’s legislative representation tends to be characterized by a ratchet effect. This effect is relatively rare in cabinets, where increases in women’s representation are often followed by decreases. We call the latter phenomenon the see-saw effect: Countries experience one or more steps back for every step forward. These differences have normative and analytical implications. Normatively, we suggest that cabinet see-sawing is particularly problematic when domestic power balances are weighted toward executives. Analytically, we encourage researchers to use indicators of women’s empowerment that account for time and inter-institutional balances and identify factors that affect cross-country variation in temporal trends.

The Electoral System and Women's Legislative Underrepresentation in Post-Communist Ukraine

In comparison with the global average of democratic countries, Ukraine’s parliament, the Verkhovna Rada, remains well below average in terms of women’s legislative representation. This article attempts to explain why Ukraine’s record is so poor by examining the impact of different electoral systems. Since the first post-Communist election in 1994, Ukraine has used three different electoral systems‐majoritarian SMD, MMM, and closed-list PR. By examining the impact of these different systems on women’s representation, we can test for the effect of different institutions on representation while holding political culture constant. The empirical results find that PR systems consistently nominated more women and elected more women than did other, majoritarian systems did. In addition, there is little evidence of gender bias against female candidates in either PR or SMD elections.