Front cover image for Party personnel strategies : electoral systems and parliamentary committee assignments

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
eBook, English, 2021
First edition View all formats and editions
Oxford University Press, Oxford, 2021
1 online resource (xv, 306 pages ): illustrations.
9780192651266, 9780191919718, 0192651269, 0191919713
1266874158
Preface1: Introduction2: Committees Type and The Expertise Model of Party Personnel3: The Electoral-Constituency Model of Party Personnel4: How to Quantitatively Assess Party-Level Committee Placements5: Germany: Harnessing Expertise and Connecting to Constituencies under Mixed-Member Proportional Representation6: Japan: Decisive Districts in a Mixed-Member System and the Impact of Electoral Reform7: Israel: How Parties Harness Expertise in a Nationwide Proportional Representation System8: Portugal: Trading-off Expertise and Regional Representation under Districted Proportional Representation9: Britain: District Representation and Expertise under First-past-the-post10: New Zealand: The Removal of Decisive District Competition and Shifts of Personnel Strategies11: Conclusion: Assessing Party Personnel Practices under Varying Electoral SystemsAppendices