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Origen y desarrollo de los estudios legislativos: temas, escuelas y tendencias
Abstract
Los estudios legislativos conforman una subdisciplina de las ciencias sociales que, mediante diferentes estrategias metodológicas y enfoques, busca describir y explicar el comportamiento parlamentario. En este artículo se describe un panorama general de los orígenes, desarrollo y debates contemporáneos sobre el estudio de la representación política y el desempeño de las legislaturas, así como de los espacios de colaboración académica que han permitido la consolidación de la investigación legislativa especializada. Se advierten algunos de los principales retos para este campo de conocimiento frente a los propios desafíos de las ciencias sociales entre los que destacan las limitaciones teóricas y metodológicas, la estrechez de visiones disciplinarias, su escasa relevancia para la reforma institucional y utilidad para la toma de decisiones, las necesarias comparaciones entre casos y su visibilidad.
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¿Más mujeres en el poder significa más poder para las mujeres? Cuando las mujeres llegan a los escaños, ¿acceden realmente al poder? ¿obtienen las posiciones de liderazgo, controlan la agenda, impactan en las decisiones?
Los trabajos reunidos en este volumen pretenden responder a estas y otras interrogantes para poder explicar qué pasa en los Congresos nacionales de América Latina cuando hay cada vez más mujeres legisladoras. Las investigaciones demuestran que el incremento en el número de las legisladoras se traduce en un mayor acceso de las legisladoras a los órganos directivos, a las presidencias de los Congresos y a las Comisiones legislativas. Sin embargo, evidencian que este acceso es generizado, pues las mujeres siguen enfrentando mayores dificultades en el acceso a las posiciones de liderazgo que los varones, siguen siendo asignadas a las áreas y tareas que reproducen los roles de género estereotipados, enfrentan las estructuras patriarcales que dificulten su ejercicio de las funciones legislativas y altos niveles de violencia política en razón de género.
Representación simbólica de las mujeres en América Latina es un libro de vanguardia, donde un grupo internacional e interdisciplinar de colaboradores articulan, a partir de una propuesta teórica y metodológica novedosa, el análisis de la manera en la que las mujeres ejercen el poder político, en el sentido metafórico y en el sentido práctico, en los Congresos nacionales de la región.
El presente artículo busca examinar el ejercicio de la representación sustantiva por las legisladoras mexicanas y explorar la relación entre la representación descriptiva y la representación sustantiva de las mujeres en el ámbito político mexicano. El trabajo evidencia los patrones en la presentación y aprobación de las iniciativas feministas, evidenciando que, si bien las mujeres presentan la mayoría de las iniciativas de corte feminista y su presencia en los legislativos contribuye a la articulación de los intereses de las mujeres, esta articulación resulta limitada a solo ciertas agendas y no siempre corresponde a las perspectivas o soluciones progresistas.
Public engagement has become a noticeable activity for parliaments across the world. However, we lack understanding of its role despite considerable developments in scholarly work on public engagement in the sciences and on deliberative and participatory democracy by social scientists. This article provides a framework to understand the significance of parliamentary public engagement and to evaluate its effectiveness. It explains how parliamentary public engagement has emerged because of a representational shift in who is doing the representing in parliament and in what is represented, following key societal changes. We define parliamentary public engagement, showing the importance of differentiating between the activity, its effects and broader democratic ideals. We identify information and education as the types of engagement activity most developed by parliaments, with much still to do in consultation and participation activities. The article finishes with a discussion of seven key challenges in developing and implementing effective institutional parliamentary public engagement practices.
Representation of women in the field of legislative politics is remarkably small and the absence of women has wide-ranging ramifications. In Fall 2019, we surveyed 361 women that we identified as studying legislative politics within political science to understand why women’s representation in legislative studies is so low and what we can do about it. We found that many women study legislatures, but they do not always identify as scholars of legislative studies, often do not join the Legislative Studies Section, and tend to prioritize other journals over Legislative Studies Quarterly , the official journal of the section. In this article, we discuss several solutions to the problem of women’s underrepresentation in legislative studies, including the new Women in Legislative Studies initiative.
A partir de dos posiciones históricas originarias en la ciencia social (una posición optimista y una
posición escéptica), se analiza la viabilidad de la ciencia política aplicada, partiendo de ejemplos
paradigmáticos de investigación. ¿Es posible una simil –ingeniería en la ciencia política? ¿Se trata
sólo de superar un estadio actual de inmadurez de la disciplina para llegar al conocimiento
aplicado? En este trabajo se argumenta sobre las razones del escepticismo respecto del desarrollo
de un conocimiento aplicado, y en consecuencia de una símil-ingeniería en los estudios de la
política. También se analizan las consecuencias entre las posiciones (optimista y escéptica) de la
ciencia política, para el orden político democrático.
Palabras clave: ciencia política, ingeniería, ciencia política aplicada, posición escéptica, posición
optimista.
While the Palace of Westminster, the home of the UK Parliament requires an extensive programme of repairs and action to implement (or even agree) this programme—known as Restoration and Renewal—has been hampered. This article explores the concept of custodianship and poses a question: who are the custodians of the Palace and for whom do they preserve the Palace? Drawing on two research projects, this article explores differing interpretations of custodianship in this context, and whether decisions made about the parliamentary building are made to preserve the history of the Palace, improve working conditions in the present, or with the future of the building (and institution) in mind.
Este trabajo se inserta en el estudio de la relación entre la presencia de las mujeres y la
aprobación de decretos de género en contextos de legislaturas paritarias de manera comparada de las unidades subnacionales (estados o entidades federativas) para entender cómo se representan los derechos de las mujeres en las democracias contemporáneas. El objetivo principal es analizar el efecto de la reforma constitucional de paridad de género de 2014 para las candidaturas a cargos legislativos sobre la representación descriptiva (presencia de mujeres en los cargos legislativos y de liderazgo en los órganos internos) y sustantiva de las mujeres (aprobación de legislación de género) durante el periodo de 2011 a 2019, esto es, una legislatura antes de la aprobación de la reforma (2014) y una legislatura después de la misma en las 32 unidades subnacionales de la federación mexicana.
Gender and politics scholars are increasingly making appeals to ethnographic methodology to bring important contributions to understand the reproduction of gender, gender hierarchies, gendered relations, and their redress in parliamentary settings. This article draws upon fieldwork conducted in the U.K. House of Commons and the European Parliament and finds distinctive gendered cultures and norms in debating and working parliaments. Focusing on one dimension of this distinction—the parliamentary debating chamber—the article argues that parliamentary ethnography provides novel empirical insights into this conceptual distinction and into empirical understandings of gendered debating and working parliaments. While parliamentary ethnography is a fruitful innovation, the article discusses the drawbacks of this methodology and provides feminist reflection on ways to make it more accessible.
We map the current state of parliamentary and legislative studies through a survey of 218 scholars and a bibliometric analysis of 25 years of publications in three prominent sub-field journals. We identify two groupings of researchers, a quantitative methods, rational choice-favouring grouping and a qualitative methods, interpretivism-favouring grouping with a UK focus. Upon closer examination, these groupings share similar views about the challenges and future of the sub-discipline. While the sub-discipline is becoming more diverse and international, US-focused literature remains dominant and distinct from UK-focused literature, although there are emerging sub-literatures which are well placed to link them together.
To what extent can presidents exert gatekeeping power in opposition-led legislatures? Drawing on a study of roll rates in the Mexican Chamber of Deputies, where presidents lack legislative majorities and often face a legislature controlled by the opposition, this article argues that gatekeeping power is divided among multiple actors. It finds that presidents exert weak gatekeeping power over the agenda. While presidents and their parties are rarely defeated in votes related to presidential initiatives, they generally create stable, informal coalitions with opposition parties to pass their bills. Moreover, the agenda-setting power of the president and the president's party is weaker with bills that originate in the legislative branch, where the party is occasionally rolled on legislative initiatives and during the amendment stage if it is not also the median party.
Research has shown that emotions matter in politics, but we know less about when and why politicians use emotive rhetoric in the legislative arena. This article argues that emotive rhetoric is one of the tools politicians can use strategically to appeal to voters. Consequently, we expect that legislators are more likely to use emotive rhetoric in debates that have a large general audience. Our analysis covers two million parliamentary speeches held in the UK House of Commons and the Irish Parliament. We use a dictionary-based method to measure emotive rhetoric, combining the Affective Norms for English Words dictionary with word-embedding techniques to create a domain-specific dictionary. We show that emotive rhetoric is more pronounced in high-profile legislative debates, such as Prime Minister’s Questions. These findings contribute to the study of legislative speech and political representation by suggesting that emotive rhetoric is used by legislators to appeal directly to voters.
The Anthropology of Parliaments offers a fresh, comparative approach to analysing parliaments and democratic politics, drawing together rare ethnographic work by anthropologists and politics scholars from around the world. Crewe’s insights deepen our understanding of the complexity of political institutions. She reveals how elected politicians navigate relationships by forging alliances and thwarting opponents; how parliamentary buildings are constructed as sites of work, debate and the nation in miniature; and how politicians and officials engage with hierarchies, continuity and change. This book also proposes how to study parliaments through an anthropological lens while in conversation with other disciplines. The dive into ethnographies from across Africa, the Americas, Asia, Europe, the Middle East and the Pacific Region demolishes hackneyed geo-political categories and culminates in a new comparative theory about the contradictions in everyday political work.
What motivates legislators to respond to citizen-initiated contacts about policy positions in party-centred systems with limited re-election incentives? We argue legislators are more responsive to individual citizens when they are being contacted about high-profile, salient policy issues, and when they have the relevant experience and staff resources to attend to individual requests. Using a field experiment where we email Mexican senators about their policy positions before casting eight different floor votes across nine months, we find substantial support for our argument. The article challenges the notion of re-election-based responsiveness by arguing that issue-visibility, access to individual resources, and personal political experience explain variation in communicative responsiveness in party-centred legislatures. Such findings hold critical implications for theories of democratic representation, suggesting the incentive to establish significant communicative relations with constituents does not only stem from incentives to cultivate a personal vote.
When are women well represented, politically speaking? The popular consensus has been, for some time, when descriptive representatives put women’s issues and feminist interests on the political agenda. Today, such certainty has been well and truly shaken; differences among women—especially how they conceive of their “interests”—is said to fatally undermine the principle and practice of women’s group representation. There has been a serious loss of faith, too, in legislatures as the sites where political representation takes place. Feminist Democratic Representation responds by making a second-generation feminist design intervention; firmly grounded in feminist empirical political science, the authors’ design shows how women’s misrepresentation is best met procedurally, taking women’s differences as their starting point, adopting an indivisible conception of representation, and reclaiming the role of legislatures. This book introduces a new group of actors— the affected representatives of women —and two new parliamentary practices: group advocacy and account giving. Working with a series of vignettes—abortion, prostitution, Muslim women’s dress, and Marine Le Pen—the authors explore how these representational problematics might fare were a feminist democratic process of representation in place. The ideal representative effects are broad rather than simply descriptive or substantive: they include effects relating to affinity, trust, legitimacy, symbolism, and affect. They manifest in stronger representative relationships among women in society, and between women and their representatives, elected and affective; and greater support for the procedures, institutions, and substantive outputs of representative politics, and at a higher level, the idea of representative democracy. Against the more fashionable tide of post-representative politics, Feminist Democratic Representation argues for more and better representation.
It is well established that the race and gender of elected representatives influence the ways in which they legislate, but surprisingly little research exists on how race and gender interact to affect who is elected and how they behave once in office. How do race and gender affect who gets elected, as well as who is represented? What issues do elected representatives prioritize? Does diversity in representation make a difference? Race, Gender, and Political Representation takes up the call to think about representation in the United States as intersectional, and it measures the extent to which political representation is simultaneously gendered and raced.
Beth Reingold, Emory University
Kerry L. Haynie, Duke University
Kirsten Widner, University of Tennessee
Gender has always helped shape personal and family relationships, as well as governance processes, market structures, and religious practice. Political science, which is one of many academic disciplines in the world, is gendered and shaped by the social norms on sex and sexuality. This book aims to explain the gendered nature of political science and why it is important. It introduces the gender and politics scholarship, which is closely related to the practice of politics, particularly feminism, and discusses several key concepts, including some of the methods and methodologies that are currently available in the field. The book then shifts to a study of body politics, which involves the political importance of sexuality, reproduction, violence, and the body. From there, the focus turns to political economy, and the various forms and contexts of gendered organizing by men and women. The latter half of the book explores the relationship of gender to more traditional political institutions and the gendered nature of policy making, governance, and the state. Finally, the book addresses the arguments and puzzles surrounding equality, citizenship, multiculturalism, identity, security, and nations.
The second edition of Legislative Leviathan provides an incisive new look at the inner workings of the House of Representatives in the post-World War II era. Re-evaluating the role of parties and committees, Gary W. Cox and Mathew D. McCubbins view parties in the House - especially majority parties - as a species of 'legislative cartel'. These cartels seize the power, theoretically resident in the House, to make rules governing the structure and process of legislation. Most of the cartel's efforts are focused on securing control of the legislative agenda for its members. The first edition of this book had significant influence on the study of American politics and is essential reading for students of Congress, the presidency, and the political party system.
The American Congress Reader provides a supplement to the popular and updated American Congress undergraduate textbook. By the same authors who drew upon Capitol Hill experience and nationally recognized scholarship to present a crisp introduction and analysis of Congress's inner mechanics, the Reader compiles the best relevant scholarship on party and committee systems, leadership, voting, and floor activity to broaden and illuminate the key features of the text.
The American Congress Reader provides a supplement to the popular and updated American Congress undergraduate textbook. By the same authors who drew upon Capitol Hill experience and nationally recognized scholarship to present a crisp introduction and analysis of Congress's inner mechanics, the Reader compiles the best relevant scholarship on party and committee systems, leadership, voting, and floor activity to broaden and illuminate the key features of the text.
The American Congress Reader provides a supplement to the popular and updated American Congress undergraduate textbook. By the same authors who drew upon Capitol Hill experience and nationally recognized scholarship to present a crisp introduction and analysis of Congress's inner mechanics, the Reader compiles the best relevant scholarship on party and committee systems, leadership, voting, and floor activity to broaden and illuminate the key features of the text.
Nowhere to Run: Race, Gender, and Immigration in American Elections advances an intersectional account for why the underrepresentation of women and racial minorities in elected office has proven so persistent. Using an original dataset encompassing nearly every state legislative general election from 1996 to 2015, and interview and survey data from 42 states, the book demonstrates that factors in candidate emergence that have long been treated as exclusively “racial” or “gendered” in political science are, in fact, shaped by race and gender simultaneously. Focusing on women and men from the two fastest-growing racial groups in the United States—Asian Americans and Latina/os—the book shows that prevailing conceptions of the utility of majority-minority districts and the importance of individual-level concerns like ambition in explaining representation on the ballot require revision. The intersectional model of electoral opportunity presented in the book argues that overlapping and simultaneous structural factors play a previously underappreciated role in shaping who runs for office—and who does not. At the national level, the distribution of majority-white populations across most districts sharply constrains the number of realistic opportunities for nonwhite women and men to get on the ballot. At the local level, within districts and communities of color, the scarcity of viable opportunities to run exacerbates informal processes and institutions that tend to push women of color further from the candidate pipeline. These interactive features of the landscape of electoral opportunities produce a systemic absence of competition for descriptive representation in most state legislative elections.
In recent years several scholars have argued that there has been a weakening of the power of national legislatures. This paper addresses two empirical questions: Has global legislative power indeed declined (as has been claimed)? And if so, what factors might explain where legislative power has declined and where it has not? Using data from the Varieties of Democracy (V-dem) project from 1990 to 2020 to measure changes in legislative power, I find that the decline of legislative power has not been monotonic globally, and that there is considerable variation by countries in the world. In this paper, I test a set of institutional, economic, cultural and global explanations for legislative decline that has been proposed by the literature and find that much of this literature is either not supported, or only partially supported.
Does protest influence political representation? If so, which groups are most likely to benefit from collective action? The Advantage of Disadvantage makes a provocative claim: protests are most effective for disadvantaged groups. According to author LaGina Gause, legislators are more responsive to protesters than non-protesters, and after protesting, racial and ethnic minorities, people with low incomes, and other low-resource groups are more likely than white and affluent protesters to gain representation. Gause also demonstrates that online protests are less effective than in-person protests. Drawing on literature from across the social sciences as well as formal theory, a survey of policymakers, quantitative data, and vivid examples of protests throughout U.S. history, The Advantage of Disadvantage provides invaluable insights for scholars and activists seeking to understand how groups gain representation through protesting.
Second chambers frequently form part of national institutional configurations, but their impact on policy making can vary from negligible to all-important veto players. The standard approach is to assess their importance via two dimensions: formal powers and compositional differences vis-à-vis the first chamber. In this paper, we conceptualise a third dimension: the legitimacy of second chambers. We subsequently measure the strength of second chambers in 14 countries and develop a new index of bicameralism. Running several quantitative analyses with a total sample of 29 OECD countries, we show how this index is significantly correlated to lower state intervention in the economy and greater regional autonomy.
If legislatures are to be effective rulemaking organisations, they require information and advice, usually provided by legislative staff. The levels of staffing varies markedly across countries, although most legislatures in European democracies have relatively small staffs. This article discusses the importance of different forms of staffing for assisting legislatures, and supporting democracy.
This book sheds new light on the often shadowy, but essential role of committees, which exist in modern parliaments around the globe, and it questions the conventional notion that the ‘real’ work of parliament happens in committees.
Renowned country specialists take a close look at what goes on in committees and how it matters for policy making. While committees are seen as the central place where policy is made, they often hold their sessions closed to the public and calls for transparency are growing. To understand this "black box" it is necessary to look within but also beyond the walls of the committee rooms and parliament buildings. Bringing together formal and informal aspects, rules and practices shows that committees are not a paradise of policy making. They have great relevance nonetheless: as crystallization points in the policy networks, as drivers for division of labor and for socialization and the integration of MPs.
The new insights presented in this book will be of interest to scholars, students and professionals in parliamentary affairs, legislative studies, government, and comparative politics. They are also relevant for political analysts, journalists, and policymakers.
This book explores the reproduction of gender ‘beneath the spectacle’ – that is, beneath ceremonial displays of power, in the UK House of Commons. Contributing to a fascinating literature on gender and parliaments, the book conceives of the House of Commons as a workplace, as well as a representative arena. It explores the everyday consequences for gendered power relations that this unique environment entails, as parliamentary actors perform their careers, citizenship, and public service.
The book firstly explores ways to conceive of and to study gender in parliaments. Parliamentary ethnography – that is, spending time observing and engaging with parliamentary actors, is presented as an unparalleled methodology to better understand gender, power, and agency. The chapters that follow provide in-depth portrayals of gender and the parliamentary workplace. The book connects multiple actors in the House of Commons: MPs, officials, parliamentary researchers, and the (in)formal rules that structure the relationships between them.
Dr. Cherry M. Miller is Postdoctoral Researcher at Tampere University, Finland. She was the winner of the 2019 European Consortium of Political Research, Joni Lovenduski PhD Prize in Gender and Politics. Her research is published in the European Journal of Politics and Gender, Parliamentary Affairs, and Political Studies Review.
This chapter focuses on the current challenges of the Grand National Assembly of Turkey (GNAT) in developing and maintaining its legislative capacity. This chapter analyzes recent data on the institutional decline in legislative capacity in Turkey. On the eve of full implementation of a new presidential model in Turkey, the availability of resources dedicated to the improvement of legislative capacity is crucial for an effective system of checks and balances. This chapter emphasizes the vital connection between the lack of resources available to individual legislators in their law-making and supervisory processes and the overall legislative capacity of the GNAT.
This comprehensive Handbook takes a multidisciplinary approach to the study of parliaments, offering novel insights into the key aspects of legislatures, legislative institutions and legislative politics. Connecting rich and diverse fields of inquiry, it illuminates how the study of parliaments has shaped a wider understanding surrounding politics and society over the past decades.Through 26 thematic chapters, expert contributors analyse parliamentary institutions from various disciplinary perspectives (history, law, political science, political economy, sociology and anthropology). A wide range of approaches is covered, including the sociological study of members of parliaments, gender studies and the mathematical conceptualisation of legislatures. Exploring the history of parliament, the concepts and theories of parliamentarism, constitutional law, and the linkages between parliaments and the administrative state or with populism, this incisive Handbook provides a panoramic view of this institution. Chapters also map the main trends, patterns of developments and controversies related to parliaments, assessing the strengths and weaknesses of current research and identifying a range of promising avenues for further study.Drawing together international and comparative approaches, the Handbook of Parliamentary Studies will be a critical resource for academics and students of parliamentary politics, political science, political economy, public law and political history. It also provides a vital foundation for researchers of legislative and political institutions.
This book examines some fifty countries to ascertain how the chambers of bicameral legislatures interact when they produce legislation. An understanding of this interaction is essential because otherwise legislative behaviour in each chamber may be unintelligible or incorrectly interpreted. The book employs cooperative game theoretic models to establish that bicameral legislatures, when compared with unicameral legislatures, increase the stability of the status quo and reduce intercameral differences to one privileged dimension of conflict. Non-cooperative game theoretic models are used to investigate the significance of a series of insitutional devices used to resolve intercameral conflict where a bill is introduced, which chamber has the final word, how many times a bill can shuttle between chambers, and whether conference committees are called. Empirical evidence, mainly from the French Republic, is used to evaluate the arguments.
This article maps the state of political science since the turn of the millennium. It begins by reviewing the influential description of the discipline in Robert Goodin’s (2011 [2009]) introduction to the Oxford Handbook of Political Science. It then introduces an alternative approach, based on citation indexes, to generate a comparative list of influential authors for the same time period. After comparing Goodin’s list with our own, we use the same method to generate a list of the most influential books and articles of the 2009–2018 period and describe how the discipline has changed over the intervening decade. Two of the more interesting findings include the continued importance of books (in addition to articles) in political science citations and an apparent trend towards increased pluralism in recent years.
A Tale of Two Houses? Post-Legislative Scrutiny in the UK Parliament
In the last decade a more systematic approach to post-legislative scrutiny has been taken by both the UK Government and Parliament. Currently, owing to a lack of systematic analysis we do not know how both Houses of the UK Parliament are undertaking post-legislative scrutiny. The aim of the article is to determine the similarities and differences between the House of Commons and the House of Lords when undertaking post-legislative scrutiny. The article addresses this gap in knowledge through the use of four case studies, which address how legislation is selected for review, what recommendations are produced and how government responses are followed up. The article finds that there are a number of differences in the way legislation is selected by both Houses and also highlights the differences between them in terms of the output of their recommendations. Overall, this article contributes to our knowledge of the processes available to the UK Parliament for the undertaking of post-legislative scrutiny. This is important as post-legislative scrutiny, as a formalized activity, is relatively new, and there is a contribution to be made here in terms of how such procedures can be utilized in other legislatures.
Popular elections are at the heart of representative democracy. Thus, understanding the laws and practices that govern such elections is essential to understanding modern democracy. In this book, Cox views electoral laws as posing a variety of coordination problems that political forces must solve. Coordination problems - and with them the necessity of negotiating withdrawals, strategic voting, and other species of strategic coordination - arise in all electoral systems. This book employs a unified game-theoretic model to study strategic coordination worldwide and that relies primarily on constituency-level rather than national aggregate data in testing theoretical propositions about the effects of electoral laws. This book also considers not just what happens when political forces succeed in solving the coordination problems inherent in the electoral system they face but also what happens when they fail.
Nowadays legislatures are largely based on committee systems. This enables a division of work and specialisation, in the context of highly complex politics and policy development. It seems clear that MP specialisation in the field of the committee they serve on is an important political asset, both for MPs and their parliamentary party group. This paper presents the Committee Parliamentary Specialization Index. This index measures the degree an MP is specialised in the jurisdiction of the committee they serve on. In the second part of the paper, the index is applied to the Spanish Congreso de los Diputados, an interesting case for testing this multi-faceted index, to find institutional, political and individual factors that better explain the degree of MP specialisation.
Proving that legislative committees really matter is not simple. The assembled papers aim to demonstrate fruitful paths to analysing when committees influence policy, what they can and should do, and how to detect their importance to the political process.
Studies of legislatures focus on what happens in formal space, principally the chamber and committee rooms. Such studies are necessary, but not sufficient, for explaining behaviour within legislatures and its consequences. The use of space for members to interact informally with one another-informal space-can contribute to the institutionalisation of a legislature through facilitating autonomy. Such space provides an arena for socialisation, information exchange, lobbying and mobilising political support. This article examines the significance of informal space, drawing on the experience of the UK Parliament.
