Speaker:
Heather Stoll, Associate Professor, Department of Political Science, UCSB

Please note that this talk has been cancelled. It will be rescheduled for Fall of 2014.

This paper explores the way in which the size of the legislative prize, and particularly the internal organization of legislatures, shapes the legislative party system. We argue that the incentives for aggregating across districts in a bid to create large national parties are strongest where the size of the legislative prize is large: that is, where the legislature’s internal rules and structure concentrate policy-making authority in the hands of the governing or majority party, and where there are few external constraints on the legislature. To test this argument, we draw on recent studies of legislative organization to develop a measure of our key independent variable, the internal concentration of legislative policy-making authority. Using a time series cross section of approximately 400 post-war elections in twenty-two advanced industrial democracies, we find support for our argument that the nationalization and fragmentation of the national legislative party system are related to the concentration of policy-making authority within the legislature, as well as to some external constraints on the legislature’s authority.

Presented as a part of the Department of Political Science's Faculty Lecture Series

PS 595 Credit