Is there a connection between legislating and media appearances? Mayhew (. Congress: The electoral connection. Yale University Press) argued that members of Congress sought re-election using techniques such as position taking and credit claiming, but how these mechanisms operate through media remains an ongoing question. Using data measuring House members' appearances across CNN, MSNBC, and Fox News from 2009-2020, negative binomial models show that introducing bills is associated with increased cable news appearances, while passing legislation is associated with decreased appearances among members with comparable rates of bill introduction. Coupled with prior evidence linking media appearances to fundraising advantages, the modern media environment creates incentives for what is deemed 'performative seriousness:' legislators may be inclined to elevate the comparatively simple act of bill introduction over the more challenging work of legislating.
This study examines whether and how political parties and pre-electoral coalitions structure legislative position-taking in a weak-party legislature, drawing on evidence from Kenya's 11th Parliament (2013-2017). We argue that where parties are weakly institutionalised, fragmented, and organised around ethno-regional constituencies, MPs align their legislative speech with coalition blocs rather than with individual parties. Coalitions provide more effective tools for political coordination - pooling resources, negotiating offices, and securing ministerial or legislative leadership - and thus create incentives for coordinated parliamentary behaviour. Using Hansard records from the Kenyan National Assembly and the Wordfish algorithm, we estimate speech positions for parties and coalitions across policy domains. The findings show that individual parties display limited differentiation, while coalitions consistently structure legislative speech and generate policy contrasts. The results clarify how coalition incentives shape legislative contestation in weak-party contexts, while also underscoring the need of comparative research on how party-based or coalition-based policy differentiation emerges across African legislatures.
Legislation should be appraised before and after adoption to test it against its intended objectives. Various actors should take part in these processes to ensure an inclusive and transparent assessment. This article focuses on national human rights institutions (NHRIs). Contrary to the role of NHRIs in conducting ex post or post-legislative scrutiny, which has received some attention from scholars, the so-called legislative advice of NHRIs and their actorness in ex ante review remain notably under-researched. This article demonstrates that applicable international standards provide solid grounds for NHRIs' active involvement in conducting ex ante review. It further shows that NHRIs invest efforts to contribute to it, even though these activities are not usually labelled as an ex ante review. By discussing the role of NHRIs in pre-legislative and legislative scrutiny, this article contributes to bringing closer together the literature on legislative studies, public policy, human rights and constitutional law.
This paper examines how the constitutional roles of European second chambers relate to the type of representation their members adopt. Focusing on four cases - the French S & eacute;nat, the German Bundesrat, the Polish Senat and the Irish Seanad - it analyses the extent to which members of these chambers fulfil their intended representational roles - or take on others. Using attitudinal data collected in a comparative survey of members of the second chambers, the paper finds that while constitutional mandates are broadly consistent with members' declared representational missions (e.g. territorial focus in France and Germany), these prescriptions alone are insufficient to fully explain their behaviour. The mode of (s)election, as well as general party incentives, also play an important role in explaining the kind of representation they believe in providing, and how this may differ from what the constitution originally intended.
The use of omnibus legislation is increasing all around the world. This paper looks at legislative data and cases of omnibus legislation from three countries at different stages of the democratic transition process: Turkey, Indonesia and Hungary. In these countries, omnibus legislation was a tool used by dominant executives to circumvent or weaken the parliament. Omnibus legislation is a flexible tool for compromised law reforms (legal approximation of EU integration), and frequently used also for political bargaining, in order to reach package deals within the legislature (Italy, Canada, the USA). On the other hand, omnibus laws make the legislative procedure less transparent. The possibility of constant amendment packages in (negative) omnibus laws erodes legal perfection and brings uncertainty and mistakes into laws, which then call for even more amendments for corrections, creating a vicious circle.
Legislative effectiveness is often measured in terms of the pass/failure rate of parliamentary bills, under-estimating the agenda-setting abilities of the opposition. This paper analyses such a capacity by considering the influence of private members' bills (PMBs) on governments' legislative agenda. Data comes from the Irish parliament from the 2011-2024 period. Using a unique dataset containing characteristics of over 1,000 PMBs and their sponsors, the primary finding is that a focus on the end goal for parliamentary bills under-estimates their effects and role in the legislative process. Private members' bills are four times more likely to influence government legislation than to be passed in parliament, demonstrating that unseen indirect effects can often be greater than the observed direct ones.
In 2010, Kenya adopted its second constitution in its post-independence history. Among the radical changes in the new dispensation was the system of government. It adopted a pure presidential system. This change fundamentally altered the structural relation between the executive and the legislature as it made the executive distinct from the legislature. The 2010 constitution, in keeping with the principle of separation of powers principle, in pure presidential systems assigns the legislature the mandate of making laws, while the executive's mandate is to implement the same laws. However, the constitution accords the president a residual role in the law-making process, through presidential veto powers. The exercise of the veto power has been contentious as evidenced by protestations by various actors. This article re-examines the architecture of 'checks and balances' between the aforesaid arms of government and explores the redesign options on the presidential veto that can redress the contentions raised.
Party system fragmentation often leads to the formation of unconventional coalition governments. Although such governments are fractionalised and ideologically diverse, their effect on legislative decision-making remains understudied. Focusing on the run-up to elections, this study hypothesises that unconventional coalitions face greater challenges in legislative decision-making compared to single-party or ideologically cohesive governments. The argument builds on research showing that coalition parties prioritise their own programmatic positions and avoid cross-party compromises as the final year of a term begins. This paper uses fixed effects linear probability models to analyse the timing of 11,065 laws enacted in all German state parliaments from 1990 to 2022. The findings confirm the expectations: fractionalised and ideologically diverse governments enact fewer laws before elections. In contrast, single-party governments and ideologically cohesive coalitions are able to enact more laws at the end of their terms. The results underscore the impact of party system fragmentation on governance effectiveness.
Prior research on legislative success emphasises institutional factors, often overlooking bill content. Drawing on 23,655 bills from South Korea's 21st National Assembly, this study integrates legislative text into models of bill passage by combining TF-IDF measures of issue emphasis with BERT-based representations of latent semantic structure. Legislative content adds explanatory leverage across aligned specifications. The findings indicate that legislative language operates as a strategic signal of administrative feasibility, fiscal exposure, and anticipated stakeholder conflict. BERT-based semantic dimensions are consistent with a competence-threat tradeoff: proposals framed in technocratic and administratively feasible terms are more likely to be enacted, whereas language associated with redistributive exposure or institutional conflict predicts lower passage probabilities. Once lexical and semantic text measures are jointly modelled, some conventional institutional predictors are attenuated, highlighting the explanatory contribution of strategic content structuring. The analysis shows that how a bill is worded can be as consequential as what it proposes.
How did governments respond to the COVID-19 pandemic? In governments, policymaking authority is delegated to ministers, who play a central role in policymaking. Consequently, assessing ministers' positions and interministerial policy conflicts during the pandemic is essential for understanding governments' responses. We conduct a text analysis of cabinet ministers' speeches in the Japanese Diet to identify individual ministers' policy positions on the health versus economy dimension. We find that ministers with jurisdiction over public health, immigration and border control, education, and the COVID-19 pandemic prioritised infection control, whereas ministers with jurisdiction over economic management, public finance, tourism, and the Olympic and Paralympic Games prioritised the economy. These findings shed new light on cabinet governments by showing that policy conflicts exist between ministers, as evidenced in their legislative speeches, and that ministers pursue the interests of policy areas under their jurisdiction, which may also serve their individual career ambitions.
What role might legislative effectiveness play in congressional leadership contests? Prior studies have found policy similarities can matter in individual contests, but this has yet to be analysed in a comprehensive manner in contemporary contests. Using Bayesian logistic regression, leadership contests from the 107th through 116th Congress are analysed. The results uncover important partisan and institutional differences: legislative effectiveness had a negative effect among Republicans on joining leadership but a positive effect for Democrats when they were in the majority. These findings have implications for our understanding of contemporary leadership challenges both within and across parties.
Despite the centrality of legislative amendments in parliamentary politics, their systematic study is often hindered by data scarcity and methodological challenges, particularly in under-documented cases like the Israeli Knesset. This note introduces the Knesset Amendment Dataset (KAD) (2009-2022), specifically designed to overcome these obstacles. Through rigorous manual coding of official records for 1699 bills, the KAD provides the first comprehensive, longitudinal data on the presence, volume, and source of 29,511 Knesset amendments at the final legislative stage. Integrated with CAP policy codes and other bill-level variables, the KAD enables new empirical investigations of legislative behaviour, opposition strategy, coalition politics, and policy-conditional dynamics in Israel. This dataset represents a significant empirical contribution, facilitating more accessible and robust analyses within both Israeli and comparative legislative studies.
This study investigates whether women legislators are progressive by examining the electoral circumstances. Previous studies suggest that women legislators are more likely to support progressive policies and express progressive views. However, there are women legislators who make strongly conservative speeches. Using Japan as a case study, we hypothesise that women legislators in a conservative party are more likely to express conservative views than their male counterparts, and electoral conditions influence their conservative stance. We estimate legislators' ideological positions using Wordshoal, a text-scaling method based on parliamentary speech. Our findings suggest that women legislators with fewer terms and weaker electoral bases are more likely to adopt conservative positions. This study contributes to the understanding of how women legislators, often assumed to be 'progressive', strategically adopt conservative stances to enhance their electoral and career opportunities.
Studies of parliamentary politics in countries with programmatic parties have found that there is more executive oversight under coalition governments than under single-party, majority governments. Yet, we should not expect government type to impact executive oversight in the same manner in countries with clientelistic parties. In countries with clientelistic parties, regardless of government type, the ruling parties should centralise power within the executive and avoid oversight. In the data analysis, I use data from the Party Government in Europe dataset (Hellstr & ouml;m et al., 2023), from Martin and Vanberg (2020), and from the Varieties of Democracy dataset (Coppedge et al., 2023) to demonstrate that in countries with clientelistic parties, government type does not impact executive oversight the same way it does in countries with programmatic parties. Instead, coalition governments in countries with clientelistic parties are less likely to engage in executive oversight than coalition governments in countries with programmatic parties are.
While legislative speech is a key medium of political communication that is essential for the proper functioning of parliaments, it has been of limited interest to political scientists. Meanwhile, one form of legislative speech, the last or valedictory speech, has received no attention. This is a significant oversight because the valedictory speech is a cherished rite of passage for departing members, which marks a pivotal moment in their personal, political and professional lives. This article addresses this gap by analysing the valedictory speeches of members and senators who left the Australian Parliament in 1996 and 2022. We find that in terms of discursive form, valedictory speeches are characterised by autobiographical self-disclosure, which we argue constitutes an attempt by the speaker to navigate the often-fraught emotional departure from parliament. Valedictory speeches thus provide a ritualistic transition bridge that supports legislative rotation, which is fundamental to the effective functioning of representative democracy.
The COVID-19 pandemic presented an exceptional situation, opportunity, and challenge for the government and parliament as the quick and efficient reaction became prioritised over the proper procedure. The article analyses the impact of the COVID-19 crisis on parliamentary activity and the relationship between the government and parliament in the Czech and Slovak Republics. For parliaments in both countries, the pandemic was a new situation; neither governments nor parliaments were prepared for crises of this magnitude. The system of checks and balances was under great stress. The study contributes to a deeper understanding of the role of legislatures in the pandemic. The functioning of the parliament and the opposition during the COVID-19 pandemic is demonstrated by passing a state of emergency and fast-track legislation. The empirical-oriented study is based on an extensive analysis of parliamentary documents, the literature and media reports.
How does majority status moderate the relationship between legislative effectiveness and campaign fundraising in the House of Representatives? Using a framework that uses the investment model and cartel theory, it is hypothesised that donors will be strategic in the disbursement of their funds based on legislative effectiveness and majority status, but that this is contingent upon the strength of the cartel. Using data from the 97th through the 118th Congress, multilinear regression models find that legislative effectiveness leads to increased donations, but only for those in the majority. Furthermore, these findings are restricted to the post-1994 era, which saw reforms that strengthened the power of the majority. These findings suggest that donors are sophisticated political actors who adjust their contribution strategy based on the institutional constraints of Congress.
