1. Introduction 2. A model of intra-party politics 3. Patterns of backbench dissent in four Westminster parliamentary systems, 1945-2005 4. Policy preferences and backbench dissent in Great Britain and Canada 5. Dissent, constituency service, and the personal vote in Great Britain and New Zealand 6. The cost of dissent to the party 7. Demotion and dissent in the Canadian Liberal Party, 1991-7 8. Discipline and dissent in the Australian Coalition, 1996-8 9. Career trajectories, socialization, and backbench dissent in the British House of Commons 10. Conclusion Appendix 1. Comparative statics and proofs Appendix 2. Content and construction of ideological scales Appendix 3. Sampling and coding of media dissent and discipline Appendix 4. Demotion and the parliamentary careers of Canadian MPs References Index.

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Party Discipline and Parliamentary Politics

The European Parliament (EP) can act as a democratic check on the European Commission. By relaxing the assumption of the EP as a unitary actor, this article examines factors determining the behaviour of individual members of the European Parliament (MEPs) in parliamentary scrutiny. It tests propositions based on the costs and benefits of each voting outcome in the context of the four EP roll-call votes cast in the period from 1995 to 2002 on the EP’s decision to grant budgetary discharge to the Commission. The main findings are: (i) ideology matters in the MEPs’ attitude toward the Commission; (ii) national parties influence the MEPs’ behaviour significantly in the discharge votes; and (iii) the ties between the Commissioners and the MEPs through national partisanship influence the MEPs’ attitude to the Commission when it is under threat.

Catching the Runaway Bureaucracy in Brussels: Euro-Parliamentarians in Budgetary Politics

This research demonstrates that a polarity paradox exists in the enactment of landmark laws by the U.S. Congress. Moderate conflict facilitates the production of landmark laws whereas movement to the polar extremes of conflict—toward low or high conflict—inhibits it. The number of landmark laws passed by a Congress is low when polarization between the parties is low, particularly if uncivil interpersonal conflict within the parties is low, and when polarization between the parties is high, particularly if uncivil interpersonal conflict between the parties is high. Movement away from these polar extremes toward moderate conflict yields increased landmark productivity.

Congress and the Polarity Paradox: Party Polarization, Member Incivility and Enactment of Landmark Legislation, 1891–1994

Scholars of both the presidency and the Congress require an accurate measure of legislators' underlying preferences. Whether one is interested in explaining policy outcomes, the politics of congressional committees or parties, or bargaining between the White House and Congress, one must know the preferences of the relevant actors. We cannot say anything about presidential influence, then, without controlling for the other determinants of legislators' actions, such as personal preferences and ideology or concerns induced on them by constituents and interest groups. Some research on legislative-executive relations has focused on improving measures of the extent to which Congress supports bills favored by the president (e.g., Edwards 1985; Fleisher and Bond 1983). These studies use data typically derived from congressional voting, preferring to filter (or censor) the information they obtain by selecting the "most appropriate" type of votes for their analysis. As an alternative approach, Poole and Rosenthal (1985, 1987, 1997) have developed a new approach to recovering the positions of legislators (ideal points) and of proposals in a policy space.(1) This article evaluates Poole and Rosenthal's approach, called NOMINATE, by assessing the degree to which it makes accurate predictions about the positions of members. It concludes that despite important advantages, the NOMINATE techniques seem to generate significant errors in identifying the positions of members. Section two of this article describes the NOMINATE approach emphasizing its advantages and assumptions. In section three, we describe our testing procedures. Section four summarizes our results suggesting that NOMINATE makes some serious errors. The final section suggests that NOMINATE's problems are generic to a class of approaches, including the use of Americans for Democratic Action (ADA) scores and most other voting scores. It also suggests two new approaches to analyzing member behavior to establish the baseline behavior necessary for judging presidential influence. NOMINATE in Practice Since their introduction to political scientists, NOMINATE scores have been used fairly regularly as measures of legislators' ideology. Using these scores has a number of advantages over previous approaches. First, unlike previous approaches, NOMINATE explicitly operationalizes a model of motivation. Its assumptions include (1) motivation consistent with the spatial model of voting, (2) the use of "error" information, and (3) the lack of agenda effects. Since they take the broadest set of data relating to legislator preferences--the complete set of roll-call votes from a Congress--NOMINATE scores provide a broad-based, non-time-specific measure of underlying legislator ideology. With NOMINATE, there is no need to specify in advance the coalition patterns or salient issues that structure summaries of voting behavior. With these data in hand, scholars could then arrange legislators in order of their ideology based on first-dimension NOMINATE scores and identify votes on which legislators appear to have abandoned their ideological predisposition.(2) Whether this departure is attributable to presidential intervention or something else obviously requires other controls, but such an endeavor would still be a major advance in understanding presidential-congressional relations and the nature of policy making in the federal government. Ordering legislators according to their ideology (or propensity to vote with one party or the other) could help identify a set of crucial moderates that one would expect the president to target on close votes. One could then use more refined statistical tests or perform descriptive analyses on this subset of legislators to ascertain the degree to which the president was able to influence their votes. Not only would this be more reliable than a case-by-case analysis of specific votes, it also would more accurately reflect the intuition that presidents might make long-term investments with certain moderate legislators rather than try to buy them off one vote at a time. …

Measuring Congressional Support for the President: Evaluating NOMINATE Scores

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Measuring Congressional Support for the President: Evaluating NOMINATE Scores