Party personnel strategies : electoral systems and parliamentary committee assignments
Matthew Soberg Shugart (Author), Matthew E. Bergman (Author), Cory L. Struthers (Author), Ellis S. Krauss (Author), Robert Pekkanen (Author)
The book develops the notion of "party personnel strategies", which are the ways in which political parties assign their elected members - their "personnel" - to serve collective organizational goals. Key party goals are to advance a policy brand and maximize seats in the legislature. We offer a theory of how assignments of members to specialized legislative committees contribute to these goals. Individual 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 members' expertise is relevant; doing so may enhance the party's policy brand. 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). The book offers analysis of the extent to which parties trade of 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 6,000 legislators across thirty-eight elections in six established parliamentary democracies with diverse electoral systems. -- Provided by publisher
Print Book, English, 2021
First edition View all formats and editions
Oxford University Press, Oxford, United Kingdom, 2021
Instructional and educational works
xviii, 306 pages : illustrations ; 24 cm
9780192897053, 0192897055
1246526872
Party personnel strategies: How electoral systems shape individual, constituency, and party trade-offs
Committees type and the expertise model of party personnel
The electoral-constituency model of party personnel
How to assess quantitatively party-level committee placement
Germany: Harnessing expertise and connecting to constituencies under mixed-number proportional representation
Japan: Decisive districts in a mixed-member system and the impact of electoral reform
Israel: How parties harness expertise in a nationwide proportional representation system
Portugal: Trading off expertise and regional representation under district proportional representation
Britain: District representation and expertise under first-past-the-post
New Zealand: The removal of decisive district competition and shifts of personnel strategies
Conclusion: Assessing party personnel practices under varying electoral systems