Party Comrades and Constituency Buddies: Determinants of Private Initiative Cosponsor Networks in a Parliamentary Multiparty System
📝 Abstract
We study Members of Parliament (MP) private initiative (bill) cosponsor patterns from a European parliamentary multiparty perspective. By applying network detection algorithms, we set out to find the determinants of the cosponsorship patterns. The algorithms detect the initiative networks core communities, after which the variables characterizing the core communities can be analyzed. We found legislative network communities being best characterized by the MPs’ party affiliations. The budget motion networks, which constitute roughly half of the data, were found mostly characterized by the MPs’ home constituencies and only to a limited extent by the MPs’ party affiliations. In comparison to previous findings regarding certain presidential systems, MPs committee assignments or gender were found irrelevant.
💡 Analysis
We study Members of Parliament (MP) private initiative (bill) cosponsor patterns from a European parliamentary multiparty perspective. By applying network detection algorithms, we set out to find the determinants of the cosponsorship patterns. The algorithms detect the initiative networks core communities, after which the variables characterizing the core communities can be analyzed. We found legislative network communities being best characterized by the MPs’ party affiliations. The budget motion networks, which constitute roughly half of the data, were found mostly characterized by the MPs’ home constituencies and only to a limited extent by the MPs’ party affiliations. In comparison to previous findings regarding certain presidential systems, MPs committee assignments or gender were found irrelevant.
📄 Content
1
Party Comrades and Constituency Buddies: Determinants of Private Initiative Cosponsor Networks in a Parliamentary Multiparty System
AUTHORS: Antti Pajala (corresponding author) Doc. Pol. Sci., Adjunct Prof. / Department of Political Science, University of Turku, FI- 20014 Turun yliopisto, Finland. Tel. +35823335955 (office), Email: anpaja@utu.fi
Elena Puccio PhD Student / Dipartimento di Fisica e Chimica, Universita di Palermo, Viale delle Scienze, 90128 Palermo, Italy. Email: elena.puccio@unipa.it
Jyrki Piilo PhD, Adjunct prof. / Turku Centre for Quantum Physics, Department of Physics and Astronomy, University of Turku, FI-20014 Turun yliopisto, Finland. Email: jyrki.piilo@utu.fi
Michele Tumminello PhD, Assistant Prof. / Dipartimento di Scienze Economiche, Aziendali e Statistiche, Universita di Palermo, Viale delle Scienze, 90128 Palermo, Italy. Email: michele.tumminello@unipa.it
Acknowledgments: The authors wish to thank Tomi Kause, Timo Forstén and Sakari Nieminen with respect to the data collection.
2
Party Comrades and Constituency Buddies; Determinants of Private Initiative Cosponsor Networks in a Parliamentary Multiparty System
Abstract We study Members of Parliament (MP) private initiative (bill) cosponsor patterns from a European parliamentary multiparty perspective. By applying network detection algorithms, we set out to find the determinants of the cosponsorship patterns. The algorithms detect the initiative networks core communities, after which the variables characterizing the core communities can be analyzed. We found legislative network communities being best characterized by the MPs’ party affiliations. The budget motion networks, which constitute roughly half of the data, were found mostly characterized by the MPs’ home constituencies and only to a limited extent by the MPs’ party affiliations. In comparison to previous findings regarding certain presidential systems, MPs committee assignments or gender were found irrelevant.
3
Introduction The elected members of legislatures form many types of policy networks. In basic terms, the Members of Parliament (MPs) can be considered as the nodes of a network while relations among the MPs represent the network links. One such policy network is the MPs’ private initiatives (bills). When two or more MPs cooperate and co-sign a private initiative, a link is established among the cosponsors of the initiative. When the politicians collaborate an interesting question is who cooperates with whom and why? The main research problem we address here is to try to characterize the structures of private initiative cosponsor networks. In the terminology of Alemán and Calvo (2013) we ask what the determinants of the private initiative policy networks are. Such policy network analyses have previously been carried out regarding certain presidential systems (Alemán and Calvo 2013; Crisp et al. 2004; Zhang et al. 2008; Fowler 2006a; b; Tam Cho and Fowler 2010; Wilson and Young 1997; Koger 2003; Schiller 1995; Kessler and Krehbiel 1996). Here, however, we consider a typical European parliamentary multiparty system. As far as the authors are aware of, no previous studies on the subject exist with respect to parliamentary systems.
European legislatures have been considerably rarely studied in the field of private initiatives when compared with the U.S. that has a long history of scholarly literature analyzing private bills in the U.S. Congress from various points of view. This asymmetry is partly due to differences in approach to the study of MP behavior. In the U.S. the individualist approach highlights the importance of the individual congressman, however, according to the often prevailing party-collectivist approach with respect to (European) parliamentary legislatures the basic unit of research is the party group instead of individual MPs (Esaiasson 2000, 51- 52; see also Pajala 2014). Another related explanation refers to the political importance of the private initiatives. The European parliamentary systems mainly operate with government bills
4
thus leaving the private initiatives in a rather marginal role, while in presidential systems the private bills are much more important tools of policy making. The handful of the European studies have almost exclusively focused on analyzing the motivational side of this activity, i.e. why the MPs draft private initiatives in vast amounts knowing that the prospects of getting one passed are almost nil. To address this question on both sides of the Atlantic private bill or initiative drafting has been shown to be strongly tied with the electoral connection theory, according to which the purpose of the drafting is the cultivation of the representatives’ personal vote (Mayhew 1974; Koger 2003; Brauninger et al. 2012; Brunner 2013; Solvak 2013). In the European context it has been shown that nuances of the electoral systems
This content is AI-processed based on ArXiv data.