Mihail Chiru
Dados Biográficos
| ID | 4049508 |
|---|---|
| NOME | Mihail Chiru |
| PRENOMES | Mihail |
| SOBRENOME | Chiru |
| ASSINATURA | CHIRU M |
| AFILIAÇÕES | University of Oxford |
| ORCID | 0000-0002-0811-5457 |
| VERIFICADO | Sim |
| TOTAL DE OBRAS | 45 |
| TOTAL DE CITAÇÕES | 351 |
| TOTAL COMO AUTOR | 45 |
| TOTAL COMO EDITOR | 0 |
| PRIMEIRO ANO DE PUBLICAÇÃO | 2010 |
| ANO MAIS RECENTE DE PUBLICAÇÃO | 2026 |
| ÍNDICE H | 12 |
Climate-related hazards and issue attention to climate policy in the European Parliament
The European Parliament is often portrayed as an environmental champion, but we still know little about what drives individual legislators’ attention to climate policy. This article examines whether MEPs are responsive to climate-related hazards in their constituency by matching climatological data from the subnational electoral districts of MEPs from five Member States with their issue attention to climate change during the 2004–2024 terms. It i…
Does ideology trump geography? Political divides and MEP responses to democratic backsliding
Multiple rounds of European Union (EU) enlargement and the rise of the populist radical right have affected the organisation of political competition in the European Parliament (EP). This study probes how the EU’s efforts to redress democratic backsliding in several EU member states crystallise deepening divides between European lawmakers. Our empirical analysis examines 17 roll-call votes on rule of law issues and well over 900 discursive statem…
Why didn’t the sirens wail on the roofs?”
While a burgeoning literature has investigated the effects of extreme weather events on citizens’ climate attitudes and voting behaviour, politicians’ reactions to such events mostly remain a black box. Our mixed-methods analysis of plenary debates following the 2021 floods in Germany focuses on the framing competition in the Bundestag and its relationship to legislators’ ideology and constituency linkages. While climate change as a cause of the …
Supranational responses to democratic backsliding
The European Parliament (EP) has repeatedly been criticised for its slow, insufficient response to democratic backsliding in several member states. At the same time, it is the arena where we find some of the most vigorous defences of the EU's fundamental values and appeals to safeguard the rule of law across the Union. Leveraging an original dataset of MEP statements from plenary debates over the last two EP terms (2009–2019), this article examin…
Do public attitudes on gender equality affect candidate selection in proportional representation systems? Evidence from European Parliament elections
A shift in public attitudes towards gender equality may explain improvements we have witnessed in women’s descriptive representation. However, existing studies rely on cross-sectional comparisons, likely beset with confounding problems. To examine the causal effect of public attitudes on candidate selection, we draw on data from more than 10,000 candidacies across four European Parliament elections (1999–2014). Using a difference-in-differences a…
The Electoral Returns of Party-Sponsored Citizen Legislative Initiatives
Clientelism, Party Organization and Intra-party Democracy
While scholars of clientelism have long recognized that party organization characteristics influence the capacity of parties to pursue clientelism, the consequences of clientelism for party organization remain underexplored. This article examines how clientelism influences one salient aspect of party organization in Central and Eastern Europe (CEE), internal democracy, arguing that in parties pursuing clientelism, selection processes are less com…
The resilience of parliamentary oversight during the Covid-19 pandemic
This review article takes stock of the research analysing the resilience of parliamentary oversight during the COVID-19 pandemic in 31 democracies. The extant research shows that parliaments were better able to fulfil their oversight roles in states with a higher quality of democracy and where constitutional and procedural rules provided more space for parliamentary scrutiny (e.g. incongruent bicameralism). Scholars have also argued that unified …
Seniority and Ideological Proximity? A Longitudinal Analysis of the Appointment of Party Group Coordinators in the European Parliament
Group coordinators have a key role in shaping coherent policy agendas in European Parliament (EP) committees and in building consensus about the party line among the group's specialists. They also yield considerable discretion and influence legislative outcomes through their selection of rapporteurs. This article builds and expands on previous research to analyse longitudinally the determinants of group coordinator selection. The EP's gradual emp…
Legislative performance and the electoral connection in European Parliament elections
The absence of an electoral connection is a widely held assumption in the scholarship on the European Parliament (EP) and a cause of serious normative concern about the functioning of the European Union. Weak individual legislator accountability is part of this assumption, even if we still know little about the extent to which legislative performance matters for citizens in EP elections that allow preferential voting. This study is the first to a…
Democratic backsliding as a catalyst for polity-based contestation? Populist radical right cooperation in the European Parliament
The strengthening of the populist radical right poses an important challenge for European integration. This article explores whether democratic backsliding among member states has acted as a catalyst for broader PRR cooperation at the EU level. Studying the co-sponsorship and contents of parliamentary questions and roll-call vote cohesion of PRR representatives in the European Parliament from 2009 to 2019, we examine the extent and substance of t…
The Allocation of Committee Chairs and the Oversight of Coalition Cabinets in Belgium
The appointment of committee chairs to monitor the actions of ministers belonging to coalition partners has received considerably less attention than other mechanisms of policing the coalition agreement at executive or legislative level. We take a longitudinal perspective focusing on 11 Belgian cabinets (1980–2018) to study the determinants of such appointments and whether there is a substitution effect between shadow chairs, junior ministers and…
Introducing Comepelda
We introduce a new collection of data that consolidates information on European Parliament elections into one comprehensive source. It provides information on formal electoral rules as well as national-level and district-level election results for parties and individual politicians (including full candidate lists). The use of existing and new key variables makes it easy to link the data across the different units of observation (country, party, c…
Time is on my side? The temporal proximity between elections and parties’ salience strategies
The emphasis national parties put on European Union (EU) issues in their manifestos varies to a great extent between countries. A systematic explanation of this variation is, however, still lacking. We address this gap by exploring the effect of the temporal proximity between national and European Parliament (EP) elections within the national electoral cycle on national parties’ EU issue emphasis. Multilevel mixed-effects Tobit regressions on a s…
The Electoral Connection Revisited
Introduction to a symposium: ‘The electoral connection revisited: personal vote-seeking efforts’
Who wants technocrats? A comparative study of citizen attitudes in nine young and consolidated democracies
Technocratic cabinets and expert, non-political ministers appointed in otherwise partisan cabinets have become a common reality in recent decades in young and older democracies, but we know little about how citizens see this change and what values, perceptions and experiences drive their attitudes towards technocratic government. The article explores the latter topic by drawing on recent comparative survey data from nine countries, both young and…
Electoral incentives for territorial representation in the European Parliament
While many citizens are indifferent about the EU, most MEPs are invisible in national politics and European Parliament elections are not fought based on parliamentary activity records, some legislators still pursue territorial interests or foster constituency linkages. What explains such behavior? Drawing on written questions data from the 6th and the 7th terms of the European Parliament (EP) this article shows that despite the virtual absence of…
Political opportunity structures and the parliamentary entry of splinter, merger, and genuinely new parties
Drawing on an original sample of 351 elections held in new and consolidated democracies from 1960 to 2013, this article examines the likelihood that new parties gain parliamentary representation as a function of electoral system permissiveness and contextual factors that shape political entrepreneurs’ perception of political opportunity. We distinguish between the success of genuinely new parties and that achieved by splinters or parties formed t…
Does Electoral Reform Change MPs’ Behavior? Evidence from Romania
The article illustrates that legislators’ constituency orientation can be enhanced through electoral system personalization, even in political systems that have used the party-centered closed list proportional representation for several elections. Leveraging a quasi-natural experiment, created by the 2008 electoral reform in Romania, the study investigates the frequency and determinants of parliamentary questions dealing with constituency issues …
Loyal soldiers or seasoned leaders? The selection of committee chairs in the European Parliament
Although European Parliament committee chairs play a salient role in the legislative process of the EU, we know virtually nothing about their selection and whether policy specialization and the individual attributes of the MEPs matter in the process. This paper draws on a unique longitudinal dataset that includes all full committee members, information on their past committee experience and office in the first seven terms of the EP and data on th…
Electoral System Incentives for a Party-Serving Personal Vote
Candidate-centric campaigns are most likely to occur when electoral system incentives to personalize do not conflict with party-based incentives. Then it makes sense for candidates to use any campaign mean to improve their chances to win a seat while also helping the party win more seats and increasing their standing within the organization. The Romanian electoral system uniquely combined mechanisms that enabled all three motivations for almost a…
Low-cost policy specialisation, district characteristics and gender. Patterns of committee assignment in Romania
Committee assignment can influence the efficiency of legislative work, the success of parties in reaching their policy goals and even the electoral fates of individual legislators. Nevertheless, little is known about this process in the legislatures established in the Central and Eastern European democracies. These legislatures faced severe informational, electoral and partisan challenges which raised the stakes of efficient committee-seat alloca…
Liberty
The European Parliament is an increasingly central actor in attempts to regulate surveillance and find the balance between safeguarding personal freedoms and ensuring EU citizens’ security. However, virtually nothing is known about what drives the positions of MEPs on this issue, or about how the cohesion of European parties is affected by these attempts. We explore this subject and propose a novel theoretical framework focusing on the interplay …
Committee chair selection under high informational and organizational constraints
This article draws on major theories of committee organization to explain committee chair selection in contexts with high informational and organizational constraints. We test our theoretical expectations through a series of fixed effects conditional logit models run on an original data set which includes all legislators who have served in the Romanian Chamber of Deputies from 1992 to 2012. The findings indicate that sector knowledge matters more…
Cheap Talk or Proper Signaling? Styles of Campaigning and Engagement in Constituency Service
Objectives Although a salient component of parliamentary delegation and accountability chains, the connection between individual campaigning and parliamentary behavior has not been measured systematically by empirical research. This study assesses the importance of campaign strategies and activities for constituency service. Methods We draw on an original data set combining the responses of 234 members of Parliament (MPs) participating at the 201…
Practice and payment
This article fills a gap in the literature by explaining list composition and placement of candidates in closed PR (proportional representation) settings. Focusing on the case of Romania in the European elections of June 2009, we rely on an original data set including the sociodemographics, career history and wealth of all 215 candidates from the Romanian parties’ parliamentary lists. The results of our rank-ordered logistic regression indicate t…
Who wants technocrats? A comparative study of citizen attitudes in nine young and consolidated democracies
Technocratic cabinets and expert, non-political ministers appointed in otherwise partisan cabinets have become a common reality in recent decades in young and older democracies, but we know little about how citizens see this change and what values, perceptions and experiences drive their attitudes towards technocratic government. The article explores the latter topic by drawing on recent comparative survey data from nine countries, both young and…
Early Marriages Last Longer
While the existence of pre-electoral coalitions fundamentally modifies the bargaining environment in which potential cabinet formulas are negotiated, the survival chances of cabinets that include them follow predictable yet different patterns to those of ‘regular’ coalition governments. This article combines original and existing data sets on Western and Central and Eastern European cabinets with information about pre-electoral coalitions (1944–2…
Democratic backsliding as a catalyst for polity-based contestation? Populist radical right cooperation in the European Parliament
The strengthening of the populist radical right poses an important challenge for European integration. This article explores whether democratic backsliding among member states has acted as a catalyst for broader PRR cooperation at the EU level. Studying the co-sponsorship and contents of parliamentary questions and roll-call vote cohesion of PRR representatives in the European Parliament from 2009 to 2019, we examine the extent and substance of t…
Loyal soldiers or seasoned leaders? The selection of committee chairs in the European Parliament
Although European Parliament committee chairs play a salient role in the legislative process of the EU, we know virtually nothing about their selection and whether policy specialization and the individual attributes of the MEPs matter in the process. This paper draws on a unique longitudinal dataset that includes all full committee members, information on their past committee experience and office in the first seven terms of the EP and data on th…
Determinants of legislative voting loyalty under different electoral systems
Previous research has found mixed evidence regarding the change of parliamentary voting behaviour following electoral reforms. But scholars have not analysed whether the mechanisms by which voting loyalty is elicited matter differently in such cases. Our article fills this gap by investigating the individual variation in voting loyalty across two legislative terms, using a sample of 26 high-stakes roll-call votes. Romania constitutes an ideal set…
The Electoral Value of Constituency-Oriented Parliamentary Questions in Hungary and Romania
Drawing on a unique data set that combines legislative behaviour data and electoral results at two elections in Romania (2008, 2012) and one in Hungary (2014), the study assesses the overall electoral value of parliamentary questions dealing with local issues. Our multivariate regression analyses illustrate that the effect of constituency questions is distinguishable from that of the overall parliamentary effort of the MPs. Constituency questions…
The Value of Legislative Versus Electoral Experience and Gender in Explaining Candidate List Placement in Closed-List PR
Candidates’ political qualities and personal characteristics reflect what priorities political parties have when they nominate for viable seats. The limited research on the link between candidate characteristics and ranking on closed lists is an important hiatus in understanding legislative recruitment since in closed list PR nomination to top positions on viable lists virtually guarantees election. We address the issue by analyzing longitudinall…
Choosing your own Boss
Members of parliament are privileged agents. They can choose who to regard as their principal: the entire nation, a particular electoral district or a political party. Focusing on two countries with mixed electoral systems, Romania and Hungary, the article documents the dominance of the electoral logic of role-formation over the constraints of legislative organisation and the influence of socialisation. The focus of representation is found to be …
Supranational responses to democratic backsliding
The European Parliament (EP) has repeatedly been criticised for its slow, insufficient response to democratic backsliding in several member states. At the same time, it is the arena where we find some of the most vigorous defences of the EU's fundamental values and appeals to safeguard the rule of law across the Union. Leveraging an original dataset of MEP statements from plenary debates over the last two EP terms (2009–2019), this article examin…
Introducing Comepelda
We introduce a new collection of data that consolidates information on European Parliament elections into one comprehensive source. It provides information on formal electoral rules as well as national-level and district-level election results for parties and individual politicians (including full candidate lists). The use of existing and new key variables makes it easy to link the data across the different units of observation (country, party, c…
When voter loyalty fails
This article identifies the determinants of party loyalty while making a distinction between government and opposition voters within an electoral cycle in the two most recent European Union members (Bulgaria and Romania). Both countries are characterized by the perception of widespread corruption and a general distrust of politicians that are likely to hinder the development of strong ties between citizens and parties. We test the explanatory pot…
Multiple Candidacies and the Role of the Lowest Electoral Tier for Individualized Campaigning
The effects of mixed electoral systems on politicians’ incentives and work in the legislature are most often studied in isolation from the possibly mediating role of campaign behavior. The tier in which a candidate runs might determine a particular style and content of campaigning, more or less party centered and more or less constituency oriented, which in turn could shape how the elected politician will perceive her mandate and act upon it. But…
Clientelism, Party Organization and Intra-party Democracy
While scholars of clientelism have long recognized that party organization characteristics influence the capacity of parties to pursue clientelism, the consequences of clientelism for party organization remain underexplored. This article examines how clientelism influences one salient aspect of party organization in Central and Eastern Europe (CEE), internal democracy, arguing that in parties pursuing clientelism, selection processes are less com…
Committee chair selection under high informational and organizational constraints
This article draws on major theories of committee organization to explain committee chair selection in contexts with high informational and organizational constraints. We test our theoretical expectations through a series of fixed effects conditional logit models run on an original data set which includes all legislators who have served in the Romanian Chamber of Deputies from 1992 to 2012. The findings indicate that sector knowledge matters more…
Time is on my side? The temporal proximity between elections and parties’ salience strategies
The emphasis national parties put on European Union (EU) issues in their manifestos varies to a great extent between countries. A systematic explanation of this variation is, however, still lacking. We address this gap by exploring the effect of the temporal proximity between national and European Parliament (EP) elections within the national electoral cycle on national parties’ EU issue emphasis. Multilevel mixed-effects Tobit regressions on a s…
Political opportunity structures and the parliamentary entry of splinter, merger, and genuinely new parties
Drawing on an original sample of 351 elections held in new and consolidated democracies from 1960 to 2013, this article examines the likelihood that new parties gain parliamentary representation as a function of electoral system permissiveness and contextual factors that shape political entrepreneurs’ perception of political opportunity. We distinguish between the success of genuinely new parties and that achieved by splinters or parties formed t…
Liberty
The European Parliament is an increasingly central actor in attempts to regulate surveillance and find the balance between safeguarding personal freedoms and ensuring EU citizens’ security. However, virtually nothing is known about what drives the positions of MEPs on this issue, or about how the cohesion of European parties is affected by these attempts. We explore this subject and propose a novel theoretical framework focusing on the interplay …
Legislative performance and the electoral connection in European Parliament elections
The absence of an electoral connection is a widely held assumption in the scholarship on the European Parliament (EP) and a cause of serious normative concern about the functioning of the European Union. Weak individual legislator accountability is part of this assumption, even if we still know little about the extent to which legislative performance matters for citizens in EP elections that allow preferential voting. This study is the first to a…
Electoral incentives for territorial representation in the European Parliament
While many citizens are indifferent about the EU, most MEPs are invisible in national politics and European Parliament elections are not fought based on parliamentary activity records, some legislators still pursue territorial interests or foster constituency linkages. What explains such behavior? Drawing on written questions data from the 6th and the 7th terms of the European Parliament (EP) this article shows that despite the virtual absence of…
Parliamentary Elites in Central and Eastern Europe
Parliamentary Elites in Central and Eastern Europe: Recruitment and Representation." West European Politics, 38(6), pp. 1357–1358
Keeping the Doors Closed
This article is the first systematic exploration of the leadership selection process in the Romanian party system. We use process-tracing and qualitative tools, using data from party statutes and documents of the national conventions. We focus on the parliamentary political parties throughout the entire post-communist period. The analysis shows that nothing has changed at the level of centralization of decision, and inclusiveness with the members…
Gerrymandering and Malapportionment, Romanian Style
Varieties of gerrymandering and malapportionment can appear not only in electoral systems where all legislative seats are allocated to plurality winners in single-member districts but also in proportional Single-Member District (SMD)–based electoral systems and in settings where multi-partisan committees draw the district boundaries. This article investigates such a case, in which the main parliamentary parties collaborated in order to minimize t…
Taking the Short Route
This article illustrates how the growing complexity of regulations regarding party funding in post-communist Romania is paralleled by practices employed by political parties in their attempt to gain increased access to state resources. Our document analysis indicate that political parties managed to exploit the weaknesses of the increasingly complex legislative framework. A cyclical process takes places: parties use the existing flaws in the legi…
The Allocation of Committee Chairs and the Oversight of Coalition Cabinets in Belgium
The appointment of committee chairs to monitor the actions of ministers belonging to coalition partners has received considerably less attention than other mechanisms of policing the coalition agreement at executive or legislative level. We take a longitudinal perspective focusing on 11 Belgian cabinets (1980–2018) to study the determinants of such appointments and whether there is a substitution effect between shadow chairs, junior ministers and…
Practice and payment
This article fills a gap in the literature by explaining list composition and placement of candidates in closed PR (proportional representation) settings. Focusing on the case of Romania in the European elections of June 2009, we rely on an original data set including the sociodemographics, career history and wealth of all 215 candidates from the Romanian parties’ parliamentary lists. The results of our rank-ordered logistic regression indicate t…
Keeping the Doors Closed
This article is the first systematic exploration of the leadership selection process in the Romanian party system. We use process-tracing and qualitative tools, using data from party statutes and documents of the national conventions. We focus on the parliamentary political parties throughout the entire post-communist period. The analysis shows that nothing has changed at the level of centralization of decision, and inclusiveness with the members…
The first casting happens at home
This article illustrates the importance of recruitment procedures for early representational role formation. Using data from elite interviews and socio-demographic characteristics of 34 Romanian candidates in the 2009 European parliamentary elections, our analysis fulfils two goals. Apart from substantiating the relationship between the degree of selection centralization and party-oriented roles, this study tests and validates new causal dimensio…
Comparative Politics in Central and Eastern Europe
This article offers a new empirical perspective on the state of Comparative Politics (CP) in Central and Eastern Europe (CEE). We present findings on the authors, methods, and epistemology of CP publications in the most relevant journals from eleven countries in the region. The major finding is that CP is rather marginal in CEE Political Science. Furthermore, CP articles predominantly focus on the authors’ country of origin, use off-the-shelf dat…
Voting after Watching
The November 2009 Romanian presidential elections illustrate the process through which media exposure to exit polls during the election day allows strategic voting in the least expected situations (i.e. in the first round of a two-ballot setting). Organized in a two-round system in which the first two competitors qualify for the second round, these elections display one unsolved dilemma. The difference registered in elections between the two chal…
Taking the Short Route
This article illustrates how the growing complexity of regulations regarding party funding in post-communist Romania is paralleled by practices employed by political parties in their attempt to gain increased access to state resources. Our document analysis indicate that political parties managed to exploit the weaknesses of the increasingly complex legislative framework. A cyclical process takes places: parties use the existing flaws in the legi…
When voter loyalty fails
This article identifies the determinants of party loyalty while making a distinction between government and opposition voters within an electoral cycle in the two most recent European Union members (Bulgaria and Romania). Both countries are characterized by the perception of widespread corruption and a general distrust of politicians that are likely to hinder the development of strong ties between citizens and parties. We test the explanatory pot…
We all agree that we disagree too much
What determines the preferences of members of parliament (MPs) for increased discipline in new democracies characterised by low levels of party unity? Using an original survey that includes half of the Romanian deputies, this study assesses through bivariate and multivariate analyses the impact of role perceptions, party career and experience, nomination-related views, and institutional preferences (electoral system) on the likelihood that an MP …
Christopher J. Kam, Party discipline and parliamentary politics, reviewed by Mihail Chiru
Standing for Reelection Under Different Rules
Perceptions of a political career and the importance given to the parliamentary office drive the desire to seek reelection, but the strength of these factors varies by type of electoral system
Electoral Reform –Cui Bono? Attitudes of Romanian MPs to the Electoral System Change
Drawing on an original parliamentary survey, an analysis is undertaken of what motivates MPs elected in a closed proportional representation (PR) setting to consider changing this electoral system. Moves in this direction are quite rare and for this reason a case study of Romanian parliamentarians is proposed. Bivariate and multivariate statistical techniques are used to assess the impact of both power maximisation incentives and values. The main…
Parliamentary sovereignty and international intervention
This article investigates the extent to which post-communist political elites favoured the intervention of external organisations in parliamentary work. It draws on data from a survey of parliamentary elites from the beginning of the transition towards democracy in the four Visegrad countries. The results show a much more complex picture than usually assumed, with important variation both between the four legislatures and within the same parliame…
Determinants of legislative voting loyalty under different electoral systems
Previous research has found mixed evidence regarding the change of parliamentary voting behaviour following electoral reforms. But scholars have not analysed whether the mechanisms by which voting loyalty is elicited matter differently in such cases. Our article fills this gap by investigating the individual variation in voting loyalty across two legislative terms, using a sample of 26 high-stakes roll-call votes. Romania constitutes an ideal set…
Multiple Candidacies and the Role of the Lowest Electoral Tier for Individualized Campaigning
The effects of mixed electoral systems on politicians’ incentives and work in the legislature are most often studied in isolation from the possibly mediating role of campaign behavior. The tier in which a candidate runs might determine a particular style and content of campaigning, more or less party centered and more or less constituency oriented, which in turn could shape how the elected politician will perceive her mandate and act upon it. But…
Parliamentary Elites in Central and Eastern Europe
Parliamentary Elites in Central and Eastern Europe: Recruitment and Representation." West European Politics, 38(6), pp. 1357–1358
Choosing your own Boss
Members of parliament are privileged agents. They can choose who to regard as their principal: the entire nation, a particular electoral district or a political party. Focusing on two countries with mixed electoral systems, Romania and Hungary, the article documents the dominance of the electoral logic of role-formation over the constraints of legislative organisation and the influence of socialisation. The focus of representation is found to be …
Early Marriages Last Longer
While the existence of pre-electoral coalitions fundamentally modifies the bargaining environment in which potential cabinet formulas are negotiated, the survival chances of cabinets that include them follow predictable yet different patterns to those of ‘regular’ coalition governments. This article combines original and existing data sets on Western and Central and Eastern European cabinets with information about pre-electoral coalitions (1944–2…
The Value of Legislative Versus Electoral Experience and Gender in Explaining Candidate List Placement in Closed-List PR
Candidates’ political qualities and personal characteristics reflect what priorities political parties have when they nominate for viable seats. The limited research on the link between candidate characteristics and ranking on closed lists is an important hiatus in understanding legislative recruitment since in closed list PR nomination to top positions on viable lists virtually guarantees election. We address the issue by analyzing longitudinall…
Gerrymandering and Malapportionment, Romanian Style
Varieties of gerrymandering and malapportionment can appear not only in electoral systems where all legislative seats are allocated to plurality winners in single-member districts but also in proportional Single-Member District (SMD)–based electoral systems and in settings where multi-partisan committees draw the district boundaries. This article investigates such a case, in which the main parliamentary parties collaborated in order to minimize t…
Cheap Talk or Proper Signaling? Styles of Campaigning and Engagement in Constituency Service
Objectives Although a salient component of parliamentary delegation and accountability chains, the connection between individual campaigning and parliamentary behavior has not been measured systematically by empirical research. This study assesses the importance of campaign strategies and activities for constituency service. Methods We draw on an original data set combining the responses of 234 members of Parliament (MPs) participating at the 201…
The Electoral Value of Constituency-Oriented Parliamentary Questions in Hungary and Romania
Drawing on a unique data set that combines legislative behaviour data and electoral results at two elections in Romania (2008, 2012) and one in Hungary (2014), the study assesses the overall electoral value of parliamentary questions dealing with local issues. Our multivariate regression analyses illustrate that the effect of constituency questions is distinguishable from that of the overall parliamentary effort of the MPs. Constituency questions…
Low-cost policy specialisation, district characteristics and gender. Patterns of committee assignment in Romania
Committee assignment can influence the efficiency of legislative work, the success of parties in reaching their policy goals and even the electoral fates of individual legislators. Nevertheless, little is known about this process in the legislatures established in the Central and Eastern European democracies. These legislatures faced severe informational, electoral and partisan challenges which raised the stakes of efficient committee-seat alloca…
Liberty
The European Parliament is an increasingly central actor in attempts to regulate surveillance and find the balance between safeguarding personal freedoms and ensuring EU citizens’ security. However, virtually nothing is known about what drives the positions of MEPs on this issue, or about how the cohesion of European parties is affected by these attempts. We explore this subject and propose a novel theoretical framework focusing on the interplay …
Committee chair selection under high informational and organizational constraints
This article draws on major theories of committee organization to explain committee chair selection in contexts with high informational and organizational constraints. We test our theoretical expectations through a series of fixed effects conditional logit models run on an original data set which includes all legislators who have served in the Romanian Chamber of Deputies from 1992 to 2012. The findings indicate that sector knowledge matters more…
Loyal soldiers or seasoned leaders? The selection of committee chairs in the European Parliament
Although European Parliament committee chairs play a salient role in the legislative process of the EU, we know virtually nothing about their selection and whether policy specialization and the individual attributes of the MEPs matter in the process. This paper draws on a unique longitudinal dataset that includes all full committee members, information on their past committee experience and office in the first seven terms of the EP and data on th…
Political science (42 obras) · Politics (41 obras) · Law (39 obras) · Electoral Systems and Political Participation (37 obras) · Law (34 obras) · Public Administration (26 obras) · Public Administration (24 obras) · Economics (22 obras) · Parliament (21 obras) · Political economy (21 obras)