Party Personnel Strategies: Electoral Systems and Parliamentary Committee AssignmentsKey party goals serve to advance a policy brand and maximize seats in the legislature. This book offers a theory of how political parties assign their elected members -- their "personnel" -- to specialized legislative committees to serve collective organizational goals, here known as "party personnel strategies". Individual party members vary in their personal attributes, such as prior occupation, gender, and local experience. Parties seek to harness the attributes of their members by assigning them to committees where their expertise is relevant, and where they may enhance the party's policy brand. However, under some electoral systems, parties may need to trade-off the harnessing of expertise against the pursuit of seats, instead matching legislators according to electoral situation (e.g. marginality of seat) or characteristics of their constituency (e.g. population density). This book offers an analysis of the extent to which parties trade these goals by matching the attributes of their personnel and their electoral needs to the functions of the available committee seats. The analysis is based on a dataset of around six thousand legislators across thirty-eight elections in six established parliamentary democracies with diverse electoral systems. |
Contents
List of Illustrations | |
Committees Type and the Expertise Model of Party | |
The ElectoralConstituency Model of Party Personnel | |
How to Assess Quantitatively PartyLevel Committee | |
Harnessing Expertise and Connecting | |
Decisive Districts in a MixedMember System | |
How Parties Harness Expertise in a Nationwide | |
Trading Off Expertise and Regional | |
The Removal of Decisive District Competition | |
Assessing Party Personnel Practices under | |
Appendices | |
Regression Output | |
Seniority and Committee Assignments | |
References | |
Index | |
PastThePost | |
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Common terms and phrases
90 percent confidence allocation assignment to distributive assignment to high assignment to public batting averages Bundestag candidates center-left party Chapter closed-list committee assignments committee categories committee type constituency distributive committees district magnitude District margin electoral reform electoral system electoral-constituency model estimated probability expected Expertise and assignment expertise matching expertise model Figure FPTP geographic location high policy committees high policy expertise issue ownership premises Japan Labour Party legislature Likud location of votes logistic regression Matthew E maximize seats mixed-member systems MMP system mode of election nationwide nominal districts overlap parliamentary Partido Social Democrata parties tend party personnel practices party personnel strategies party’s pattern Pekkanen percent confidence intervals personal vote plot policy areas population density Portugal Premise EC.1 proportional representation public goods committees public goods experts relatively seat maximization Shugart single-seat districts SNTV tend to assign tradeoffs urban variable voters winners winning Zealand


