This volume begins where the first Döring book of 1995 finished by considering what effects the rules had on legislative output during the same period. It addresses four distinct yet complementary research topics: - the connection between a number of veto players and law production in West European parliamentary democracies - the impact of closed versus open rules - the effects of committee structure and organization on the degree of conflict or consensus on the procedure of passing legislation - the importance of agenda setting and agenda control for the prevention of cycling across issues and the distribution of particular benefits of shifting and transient majorities. Fundamental to this volume is the ability of the project group to fashion an original data set. As a consequence, this volume is able to ascertain the extent to which parliamentary procedures contributed to shaping policy output in this field during the 1980s.
This volume begins where the first Döring book of 1995 finished by considering what effects the rules had on legislative output during the same period. Fundamental to this volume is the ability of the project group to fashion an original data set. As a
Legislatures are arguably the most important political institution in modern democracies. The Oxford Handbook of Legislative Studies, written by some of the most distinguished legislative scholars in political science, provides a comprehensive and up-to-date description and critical assessment of the state of the art in this key area.
The Oxford Handbooks of Political Science is a ten-volume set of reference books offering authoritative and engaging critical overviews of the state of political science. Each volume focuses on a particular part of the discipline, with volumes on Public Policy, Political Theory, Political Economy, Contextual Political Analysis, Comparative Politics, International Relations, Law and Politics, Political Behavior, Political Institutions, and Political Methodology. The project as a whole is under the General Editorship of Robert E. Goodin, with each volume being edited by a distinguished international group of specialists in their respective fields. The books set out not just to report on the discipline, but to shape it. The series will be an indispensable point of reference for anyone working in political science and adjacent disciplines. What does democracy expect of its citizens, and how do the citizenry match these expectations? This Oxford Handbook examines the role of the citizen in contemporary politics, based on essays from the world's leading scholars of political behavior research. The recent expansion of democracy has both given new rights and created new responsibilities for the citizenry. These political changes are paralleled by tremendous advances in our empirical knowledge of citizens and their behaviors through the institutionalization of systematic, comparative study of contemporary publics--ranging from the advanced industrial democracies to the emerging democracies of Central and Eastern Europe, to new survey research on the developing world. These essays describe how citizens think about politics, how their values shape their behavior, the patterns of participation, the sources of vote choice, and how public opinion impacts on governing and public policy. This is the most comprehensive review of the cross-national literature of citizen behavior and the relationship between citizens and their governments. It will become the first point of reference for scholars and students interested in these key issues.
Brings together empirical studies of the internal cohesiveness of political party groups in European parliaments and the leadership behavior that leads to disciplined parties in parliament, in sections on theories and definitions, the "Westminster Model," established continental European systems, newly emerging systems, and parliamentary discipline and coalition governments. Chapters originated as papers presented at a spring 1995 workshop held in Bordeaux, France. Annotation copyrighted by Book News, Inc., Portland, OR
Advocates of parliamentary rule have been highly critical of presidentialism for dividing powers and providing the opportunity for gridlock between branches. Fixed executive terms can saddle publics with ineffectual leaders who are not easily removed. Yet the great theorists of presidential rule, beginning with the Federalists, saw very different qualities in the same institutions: a desirable combination of strong leadership with checks on executive discretion. These diverse assessments arise because we have surprisingly little comparative work on how presidential democracies function. The introductory essays in this volume lay the theoretical groundwork for such comparative analysis. Drawing on detailed cases of economic policymaking in Asia, Latin America, and Central Europe, this book shows the diversity of presidential systems and isolates the effects of presidentialism from other factors that influence public policy, such as party systems. In doing so, it casts doubt on the critics of presidential rule and underscores the continuing vitality of this particular form of democratic rule.
This book presents a simple geometric model of voting as a tool to analyze parliamentary roll call data. Each legislator is represented by one point and each roll call is represented by two points that correspond to the policy consequences of voting Yea or Nay. On every roll call each legislator votes for the closer outcome point, at least probabilistically. These points form a spatial map that summarizes the roll calls. In this sense a spatial map is much like a road map because it visually depicts the political world of a legislature. The closeness of two legislators on the map shows how similar their voting records are, and the distribution of legislators shows what the dimensions are. These maps can be used to study a wide variety of topics including how political parties evolve over time, the existence of sophisticated voting and how an executive influences legislative outcomes.
