Party Personnel Strategies: Electoral Systems and Parliamentary Committee Assignments

Front Cover
Key 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

Party Personnel Strategies How Electoral Systems Shape Individual Constituency and Party TradeOffs
1
2 Committees Type and the Expertise Model of Party Personnel
26
The ElectoralConstituency Model of Party Personnel
49
How to Assess Quantitatively PartyLevel Committee Placements
79
Germany Harnessing Expertise and Connecting to Constituencies under MixedMember Proportional Representation
98
Japan Decisive Districts in a MixedMember System and the Impact of Electoral Reform
123
Israel How Parties Harness Expertise in a Nationwide Proportional Representation System
157
Portugal Trading Off Expertise and Regional Representation under Districted Proportional Representation
173
New Zealand The Removal of Decisive District Competition and Shifts of Personnel Strategies
211
Conclusion Assessing Party Personnel Practices under Varying Electoral Systems
234
Descriptive Statistics
259
Regression Output
265
Seniority and Committee Assignments
280
References
289
Index
303
Copyright

Britain District Representation and Expertise under FirstPastThePost
197

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