Search

This article discusses some issues related to government formation. In most parliamentary democracies, governments must maintain the confidence of a single legislative chamber only. But in bicameral parliaments, upper chambers can affect the fortunes of government policy proposals. Legislatures are, by and large, majoritarian institutions. A majority is necessary to make law, and, in parliamentary systems, a majority of members must at least tolerate the formation and survival of a particular government. Over the last 40 years, political scientists have produced an impressive body of theoretical and empirical work designed to predict which coalitions will form and, relatedly, how long they will survive. Any theory that purports to explain government-formation decisions must be able to explain which potential governments would not form as well. Otherwise, one runs the risk of introducing bias into the analysis by selecting on values of the dependent variable, that is, the probability that a particular coalition will form.

Models of congressional approval have, in both theory and specification, often imitated models of presidential approval. Through their modeling decisions, researchers have implicitly assumed that the economic determinants of presidential and congressional approval are identical. Such assumptions have discouraged other researchers from testing competing hypotheses about the economic determinants of congressional approval. Using aggregate-level time-series analysis, this article investigates the question of whether or not the economic determinants of approval vary by the target of political judgment. The author finds that presidential approval is driven largely by sociotropic prospections, a result consistent with previous research.

Complete election returns are now available for the 1968-1986 period for 14 state legislatures that used single-member districts exclusively in both houses during that period. An analysis of incumbents shows that in most states there was only a modest increase over that period in the proportion who sought reelection or succeeded in getting re-elected; the reason is that in most states that percentage was already high in 1968. There was, however, a significant increase in most states in the margin by which incumbents won, though not an increase in winning margins for open seats. In many states this increase was largely accounted for by an increase in the proportion of uncontested elections. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

The "new American political historians" have made extensive use of a variety of standard quantitative methods to delineate and analyze the roll-call behavior of the U.S. Congress and the state legislatures since the late colonial period. There is now a very large published and unpublished literature that provides a broad chronological coverage of such behavior. It is presented here by Congress, state, and time period as a reference and resource for political scientists and others interested in similar and related problems. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

The article highlights the meeting of a group of political scientists interested in establishing a subfield on legislative processes, behavior and representation, which was held in New York in September 1978 at the Annual Meeting of the American Political Science Association. A series of by-laws have been adopted by the political scientists. Members have chosen a steering committee for the 1978-1979 year. Barbara Hinckley was elected Chairperson of the group. Abdo Baaklini was elected Secretary-Treasurer. Harrison Fox was elected Program Director.

Boards of education of public school districts are legislative bodies. As such, they can be analyzed using the same theoretical assumptions, empirical procedures, and evaluative criteria employed by political scientists to study other legislative bodies. This paper considers the responsiveness of school boards to their constituents. The authors argue that responsiveness is a complex multi-faceted concept, and present prototype empirical indices for eleven school boards. Comparative analysis indicates that school board responsiveness varies within and across indices, and that operational measures of responsiveness are independent within and across theoretical components. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Political scientists and politicians both talk in terms of "the relations between the executive and the legislature." But in fact it is seldom helpful to speak of "executive-legislative relations" tout court. If we wish to understand the phenomena generally subsumed under this heading, we need to identify and consider separately a number of quite distinct political relationships. Different patterns of such relationships are found in different countries. For example, in Great Britain the most important such relationship, or mode, is that which links the Government with backbench majority-party Members of Parliament. The same relationship is the most important in France. But in West Germany the relations both within and among parties are important, and so is a cross-party mode, operating within Bundestag committees, which has no real equivalent in either of the other countries. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]