Brian F Crisp
Biographic Data
| ID | 723647 |
|---|---|
| NAME | Brian F Crisp |
| GIVEN NAMES | Brian F |
| FAMILY NAME | Crisp |
| SIGNATURE | CRISP B F |
| AFFILIATIONS | Washington University in St. Louis |
| ORCID | 0000-0003-4773-3116 |
| VERIFIED | Yes |
| TOTAL WORKS | 48 |
| TOTAL CITATIONS | 909 |
| AUTHOR COUNT | 48 |
| EDITOR COUNT | 0 |
| FIRST PUBLICATION YEAR | 1994 |
| LATEST PUBLICATION YEAR | 2025 |
| H-INDEX | 17 |
Race, Gender, and Nascent Political Ambition
How do race and gender together shape Americans’ political ambition? Using original survey data with over-samples of black and Hispanic respondents, we analyze citizens’ nascent ambition for eight political offices across racial/ethnic groups and gender. We reveal that the primary gap in nascent political ambition is not between men and women but between white men and the majority of the polity. There is no consistent gender gap in ambition among…
The Role of District Magnitude in When Women Represent Women
Legislators are likely to substantively represent groups to which they belong or with which they have some particular affinity. However, there are electoral systems that diminish this tendency and systems that promote it. More precisely, as district magnitude increases, representatives will be freer to focus on issues that are not decisive of vote choice for most voters. In this letter, we use a case of electoral reform and the nature of the post…
The logic of campaign spending in mixed-member electoral systems
Ballot spoilage as a response to limitations on choice and influence
Electoral systems vary in terms of the choice and influence they offer voters. Beyond selecting between parties, preferential systems allow for choices within parties. More proportional systems make it likely that influence over who determines the assembly’s majority will be distributed across relatively more voters. In response to systems that limit choice and influence, we hypothesize that voters will cast more blank, null, or spoiled ballots o…
Unintended Institutional Interactions: Presidential Coattails and Gender Parity Quotas
Democratic institutions provide incentives for voters and candidates. When reformers tinker with multiple institutions, the likely effect of each individual change may be well understood, but their potential interaction may go unanticipated. Prior to elections in 2002, the French legislature adopted a gender parity candidate quota for parties participating in parliamentary elections. In addition, voters ratified a constitutional referendum making…
Capturing vote-seeking incentives and the cultivation of a personal and party vote
Strategic Entry and Strategic Voting in Majoritarian Systems
Electoral rules impact the need for and ability of voters to coordinate around a candidate or candidates. In this paper, we examine two commonly used majoritarian electoral systems—the multiple nontransferable votes (MNTV) and single-member districts decided by plurality (SMDP). We look at strategic entry by elites and strategic voting by citizens. Coordination failures at either stage could keep teams of candidates out of office who might have o…
The impact of cuing candidate quality on female candidates
Roll-Call Vote Selection: Implications for the Study of Legislative Politics
Roll-call votes provide scholars with the opportunity to measure many quantities of interest. However, the usefulness of the roll-call sample depends on the population it is intended to represent. After laying out why understanding the sample properties of the roll-call record is important, we catalogue voting procedures for 145 legislative chambers, finding that roll calls are typically discretionary. We then consider two arguments for discounti…
Valence, Elections, and Legislative Institutions
To the degree that voters care about competence, expertise, and other valence characteristics of their representatives and political parties care about winning elections, parties have an incentive to signal that their legislators have such characteristics. We construct a model of parties, motivated by both reelection and by policy, that attempt to signal individual incumbents' valences to voters through the assignment of these members to position…
Electoral Systems and Constituency Service
Constituency service, addressing the nonpolicy grievances of constituents or looking out for their nonpolicy interests, provides legislators an opportunity to enhance their personal reputations. Electoral incentives are the primary explanation suggested for the amount of constituency service carried out by representatives. Variation in electoral rules, such as ballot type and district magnitude, can increase personal vote-seeking incentives, incr…
The Role of Rules in Representation: Group Membership and Electoral Incentives
Existing research shows that the election of members of previously underrepresented groups can have significant consequences for policymaking. Yet, quotas, reserved seats, communal rolls, and race-conscious districting make it difficult to distinguish whether it is group membership, electoral incentives, or a combination of the two that matters. It is argued here that lawmakers who are members of underrepresented groups will stand out as defender…
And keep your enemies closer: Building reputations for facing electoral challenges
An Informed Forensics Approach to Detecting Vote Irregularities
Electoral forensics involves examining election results for anomalies to efficiently identify patterns indicative of electoral irregularities. However, there is disagreement about which, if any, forensics tool is most effective at identifying fraud, and there is no method for integrating multiple tools. Moreover, forensic efforts have failed to systematically take advantage of country-specific details that might aid in diagnosing fraud. We deploy…
Elections as instruments for punishing bad representatives and selecting good ones
Party-System Nationalization and the Scope of Public Policy: The Importance of Cross-District Constituency Similarity
Party-system nationalization is supposed to result in the provision of nationally focused policy, including spending priorities with widespread benefits. Conversely, democracies characterized by parties with geographically narrower patterns of support are suspected of parochial policies, including targetable spending. The authors show that party-system nationalization alone is not sufficient to generate national benefits. In addition, governing p…
Vote-earning strategies in flexible list systems: Seats at the price of unity
Entry and Coordination in Mixed-Member Systems: A Controlled Comparison Testing theContaminationHypothesis
Do the logics of entry and coordination that hold in pure single-member district plurality (SMDP) systems and in pure proportional representation (PR) systems hold in the SMDP tier and the PR tier of mixed-member systems? The fact that single-member districts are embedded in multimember districts means the logic of entry and coordination in either may be contaminated by the existence of the other. How can we establish the counterfactual of how ma…
The Strategic Use of Legislative Voting Procedures
Legislative votes can be taken by roll call—noting the position of each individual member—or by some form of indication (sitting or standing, shouting yea or nay, etc.)—noting only an aggregate outcome. Cameral rules define one method of voting as the standard operating procedure and how to invoke any alternative voting methods. We develop a series of hypotheses related to position taking to explain why, when procedures would typically lead to a …
Electoral contexts that impede voter coordination
Using Cosponsorship to Estimate Ideal Points
Ideal point estimates based on roll‐call vote results have provided leverage for a variety of theory testing efforts. Recently, scholars have suggested using cosponsorship data as a proxy for roll‐call votes. Conceptually similar to roll‐call votes, cosponsorship data are appealing for a variety of reasons. However, the data‐generating process for cosponsorship is untheorized and little studied. We examine the properties of ideal point estimates …
Candidate Gender and Electoral Success in Single Transferable Vote Systems
An abstract is not available for this content so a preview has been provided. Please use the Get access link above for information on how to access this content
Vote-seeking incentives and investment environments: The need for credit claiming and the provision of protectionism
Venezuela: Características, crisis y posible futuro democrático
El sistema democrático venezolano presenta luces y sombras. Las luces se apoyan en el hecho de que este sistema ha desarrollado, a lo largo de cuatro décadas de funcionamiento, una serie de rutinas y prácticas que hacen que resulte un sistema suficientemente enraizado entre la población y con bases sólidas como para no dudar de su continuación. Las sombras se derivan de la situación de crisis en que se encuentra durante la última década, consecue…
The Electoral Connection and Legislative Committees
This article examines whether the career needs of legislators – to be re-elected or to move on to another political post – allow us to explain the rules governing committee structures and the committee assignments individual legislators obtain. It uses the institutional variations provided by Argentina, Costa Rica, and Venezuela to test hypotheses about committee assignments and committee assignment mechanisms. It finds that incentives created by…
Vote-Seeking Incentives and Legislative Representation in Six Presidential Democracies
Through the use of an original data set of bill initiation activity in six presidential democracies, we advance scholarly understanding of how the institutional incentives faced by legislative candidates influence representation. We extend and adapt theory, derived primarily from the experience of the U.S. Congress, demonstrating its viability, once assumed constants from the U.S. case are explicitly modeled, in quite distinct institutional conte…
Vote-earning strategies in flexible list systems: Seats at the price of unity
Incentives in Mixed-Member Electoral Systems: General Election Laws, Candidate Selection Procedures, and Cameral Rules
Mixed-member systems have been characterized as encouraging politicians to balance the activities that enhance their personal reputations and those of their parties. Another literature challenges that legislators from one tier are not likely to behave differently from those of the other. After summarizing this debate, data from Venezuela are used to look for evidence supporting either side in a series of behaviors that span the entire legislative…
Constituency Building in Multimember Districts: Collusion or Conflict
The vast majority of what we know about building prospective electoral constituencies is confined to single-member district systems. However, most legislators are elected in multimember districts. Given that multiple incumbents represent the same voters, how do legislators decide whom they should target as prospective constituents? We build a general model of this decision and test it with travel data for 100 legislators elected in a single, nati…
Institutional Engineering and the Nature of Representation: Mapping the Effects of Electoral Reform in Colombia
Representation can vary depending on whether legislators view constitu? ents as best represented by aggregated, programmatic universal policies or by parochial, particularistic policies. In 1991 Colombia adopted a major institutional reform intended to change the connection between voters and senators, encouraging members of the upper chamber to adopt a more national, programmatic vision. We explain variations in geographic patterns of electoral …
Candidate Gender and Electoral Success in Single Transferable Vote Systems
An abstract is not available for this content so a preview has been provided. Please use the Get access link above for information on how to access this content
Magnitude and vote seeking
Mandates, Powers, and Policies
Elections provide a mandate to pursue a set of policies. Party label provides a concise ideological cue for voters to choose among candidates, and research on industrial democracies verifies a link between the parties voters elect and subsequent policy outcomes. The combination of inchoate party systems and economic vulnerability elsewhere may weaken the link between voter choice and policy. When examining economic policies in Latin America, ther…
Electoral contexts that impede voter coordination
Determinants of Home Style: The Many Incentives for Going Home in Colombia
A legislator's behavior in his or her electoral district, reveals much about awareness of constituents' wishes and the importance attributed to district matters. Legislators who frequently travel home represent their constituents differently than those who do not. In the Latin American country of Colombia, home style is a contentious issue. The country is plagued by violence and corruption, but the national legislature devotes much of its time to…
The Reputations Legislators Build: With Whom Should Representatives Collaborate
How do legislators build the reputations they use in bids for reelection? Do they use their personal reputations or associate with other legislators? And how do parties, coalitions, and institutions affect these decisions? Research on how electoral systems affect parties in legislatures frequently focuses on the extent to which electoral rules make legislators more or less ideologically convergent with respect to other members of the chamber-copa…
The Socioeconomic Impacts of Structural Adjustment
The 1980s were painful years of structural adjustment during which many developing countries abandoned statist economic models in favor of market-oriented paradigms. The proponents of structural adjustment, including international lending agencies such as the IMF and World Bank, argued that reforms were necessary to restore growth and curtail inflation. The opponents of adjustment claimed its macroeconomic results were not a foregone conclusion a…
The Electoral Connection and Legislative Committees
This article examines whether the career needs of legislators – to be re-elected or to move on to another political post – allow us to explain the rules governing committee structures and the committee assignments individual legislators obtain. It uses the institutional variations provided by Argentina, Costa Rica, and Venezuela to test hypotheses about committee assignments and committee assignment mechanisms. It finds that incentives created by…
The Role of Rules in Representation: Group Membership and Electoral Incentives
Existing research shows that the election of members of previously underrepresented groups can have significant consequences for policymaking. Yet, quotas, reserved seats, communal rolls, and race-conscious districting make it difficult to distinguish whether it is group membership, electoral incentives, or a combination of the two that matters. It is argued here that lawmakers who are members of underrepresented groups will stand out as defender…
Party-System Nationalization and the Scope of Public Policy: The Importance of Cross-District Constituency Similarity
Party-system nationalization is supposed to result in the provision of nationally focused policy, including spending priorities with widespread benefits. Conversely, democracies characterized by parties with geographically narrower patterns of support are suspected of parochial policies, including targetable spending. The authors show that party-system nationalization alone is not sufficient to generate national benefits. In addition, governing p…
Using Cosponsorship to Estimate Ideal Points
Ideal point estimates based on roll‐call vote results have provided leverage for a variety of theory testing efforts. Recently, scholars have suggested using cosponsorship data as a proxy for roll‐call votes. Conceptually similar to roll‐call votes, cosponsorship data are appealing for a variety of reasons. However, the data‐generating process for cosponsorship is untheorized and little studied. We examine the properties of ideal point estimates …
Elections as instruments for punishing bad representatives and selecting good ones
The Strategic Use of Legislative Voting Procedures
Legislative votes can be taken by roll call—noting the position of each individual member—or by some form of indication (sitting or standing, shouting yea or nay, etc.)—noting only an aggregate outcome. Cameral rules define one method of voting as the standard operating procedure and how to invoke any alternative voting methods. We develop a series of hypotheses related to position taking to explain why, when procedures would typically lead to a …
Roll-Call Vote Selection: Implications for the Study of Legislative Politics
Roll-call votes provide scholars with the opportunity to measure many quantities of interest. However, the usefulness of the roll-call sample depends on the population it is intended to represent. After laying out why understanding the sample properties of the roll-call record is important, we catalogue voting procedures for 145 legislative chambers, finding that roll calls are typically discretionary. We then consider two arguments for discounti…
An Informed Forensics Approach to Detecting Vote Irregularities
Electoral forensics involves examining election results for anomalies to efficiently identify patterns indicative of electoral irregularities. However, there is disagreement about which, if any, forensics tool is most effective at identifying fraud, and there is no method for integrating multiple tools. Moreover, forensic efforts have failed to systematically take advantage of country-specific details that might aid in diagnosing fraud. We deploy…
Vote-seeking incentives and investment environments: The need for credit claiming and the provision of protectionism
Entry and Coordination in Mixed-Member Systems: A Controlled Comparison Testing theContaminationHypothesis
Do the logics of entry and coordination that hold in pure single-member district plurality (SMDP) systems and in pure proportional representation (PR) systems hold in the SMDP tier and the PR tier of mixed-member systems? The fact that single-member districts are embedded in multimember districts means the logic of entry and coordination in either may be contaminated by the existence of the other. How can we establish the counterfactual of how ma…
Capturing vote-seeking incentives and the cultivation of a personal and party vote
Democratizing the Democracy? Crisis and Reform in Venezuela
Venezuelan politics presents a puzzle to students of Latin America, and to anyone concerned with the comparative analysis of democratization and democracy. As the major countries of Latin America (and the majority of scholars) worked their way from authoritarianism through "transitions"to democracy and hopefully toward democracy's consolidation, Venezuela moved in the opposite direction. After decades of political stability and social peace, begi…
Limitations to democracy in developing capitalist societies: The case of Venezuela
Limitations to democracy in developing capitalist societies: The case of Venezuela
The Rigidity of Democratic Institutions and the Current Legitimacy Crisis in Venezuela
Differential loyalty to democratic norms is the result of the capitalist context in which the political rules exist. A number of scholars concerned with the link between economics and politics, including Jturgen Habermas, Claus Offe, and James O'Connor, suggest that it is impossible to speak of a purely political crisis of the state because the state is contained within an economic system (Held and Krieger, 1983). Thus, one cannot study democrati…
Strong Parties and Lame Ducks: Presidential Partyarchy and Factionalism in Venezuela
This bold and comprehensive reassessment of democracy in Venezuela explains why one of the oldest and most admired democracies in Latin America became fragile after more than three decades of apparent stability
Presidential Decree Authority in Venezuela
Democratic rule has now lasted nearly forty years in Venezuela, although the system has recently been shaken by a mismanaged neoliberal, austerity package; public riots and military overreaction; two attempted coups; and presidential impeachment proceedings. It is the oldest extant democracy in South America, and as such, it has the longest historical record of currently existing regimes. Brewer-Carías' description of the Venezuelan system, throu…
Lessons from Economic Reform in the Venezuelan Democracy
The relationship between capitalism and democracy has been a focal question in political science for years. Compelling arguments have been advanced on all sides of the debate. Democracy promotes capitalism. Capitalism promotes democracy. The two are correlated but are caused by other variables, including everything from a given country's political culture to its position in the world economy. Now the recent turn toward neoliberal economic strateg…
Africa, Asia, and Latin America
Democratizing the Democracy? Crisis and Reform in Venezuela
Venezuelan politics presents a puzzle to students of Latin America, and to anyone concerned with the comparative analysis of democratization and democracy. As the major countries of Latin America (and the majority of scholars) worked their way from authoritarianism through "transitions"to democracy and hopefully toward democracy's consolidation, Venezuela moved in the opposite direction. After decades of political stability and social peace, begi…
Democracy in Developing Countries: Latin America, 2nd ed.
Extensively revised since the first edition was published in 1989, this analytically balanced and empirically rich volume thoroughly examines the historical, cultural, social, economic, political, and international factors that affect both the prospects for and the nature of political democracy in Latin America. The book reflects improvements in democratic trends in some countries, but also the erosion of democratic advances in others, with subst…
The Socioeconomic Impacts of Structural Adjustment
The 1980s were painful years of structural adjustment during which many developing countries abandoned statist economic models in favor of market-oriented paradigms. The proponents of structural adjustment, including international lending agencies such as the IMF and World Bank, argued that reforms were necessary to restore growth and curtail inflation. The opponents of adjustment claimed its macroeconomic results were not a foregone conclusion a…
Democracy in Latin America: Individuals in Institutional Contexts
The return of democracy to Latin America has been greeted with a wealth of new scholarship in which theoretical approaches and specific research questions have varied widely. Comparative political scientists recently have begun to think about democracy in terms of rational individuals operating in institutional contexts. From an institutional approach, democracy is more than a series of legal documents. Understanding how democracies work requires…
Determinants of Home Style: The Many Incentives for Going Home in Colombia
A legislator's behavior in his or her electoral district, reveals much about awareness of constituents' wishes and the importance attributed to district matters. Legislators who frequently travel home represent their constituents differently than those who do not. In the Latin American country of Colombia, home style is a contentious issue. The country is plagued by violence and corruption, but the national legislature devotes much of its time to…
Legislative Institutions and Ideology in Chile
Democratic Institutional Design: The Powers and Incentives of Venezuelan Politicians and Interest Groups
Institutional Engineering and the Nature of Representation: Mapping the Effects of Electoral Reform in Colombia
Representation can vary depending on whether legislators view constitu? ents as best represented by aggregated, programmatic universal policies or by parochial, particularistic policies. In 1991 Colombia adopted a major institutional reform intended to change the connection between voters and senators, encouraging members of the upper chamber to adopt a more national, programmatic vision. We explain variations in geographic patterns of electoral …
The Sources of Electoral Reform in Venezuela
Recent electoral reform in Venezuela, including the adoption of a mixed‐member proportional (MMP) system, has occurred in the context of crisis. Recounts the history leading from the situation of an extreme electoral system with a very dominant party leadership (a hyper‐centralized system) to the adoption of the MMP system in 1993—in which it was hoped that legislators would be more accountable to voters in the newly created single‐seat geographi…
The Legislative Consequences of MMP Electoral Rules in Venezuela
The inaugural mixed‐member proportional (MMP) elections were held in Venezuela in 1993. According to the MMP electoral rules in Venezuela, approximately half of the Chamber of Deputies is elected from single‐seat districts in the nominal tier of the system, and half is elected from closed party lists in the list tier. Analyzes how electoral incentives associated with the two tiers affect campaigns, elections, legislative entrepreneurship, and rep…
Mandates, Powers, and Policies
Elections provide a mandate to pursue a set of policies. Party label provides a concise ideological cue for voters to choose among candidates, and research on industrial democracies verifies a link between the parties voters elect and subsequent policy outcomes. The combination of inchoate party systems and economic vulnerability elsewhere may weaken the link between voter choice and policy. When examining economic policies in Latin America, ther…
Multicountry Studies of Latin American Legislatures: A Review Article
Electoral Laws and the Survival of Presidential Democracies. By Mark P. Jones. (South Bend, IN: University of Notre Dame Press, 1995. Pp. 246). Legislative Politics in Latin America. Edited by Scott Morgenstern and Benito Nacif. (New York, NY: Cambridge University Press, 2002. Pp. 503). Partidos Políticos de América Latina: Centroamérica, Mexico, y República Dominicana. By Manuel Alcántara Sáez and Flavia Friedenberg. (Salamanca, Spain: Bibliotec…
Vote-Seeking Incentives and Legislative Representation in Six Presidential Democracies
Through the use of an original data set of bill initiation activity in six presidential democracies, we advance scholarly understanding of how the institutional incentives faced by legislative candidates influence representation. We extend and adapt theory, derived primarily from the experience of the U.S. Congress, demonstrating its viability, once assumed constants from the U.S. case are explicitly modeled, in quite distinct institutional conte…
Constituency Building in Multimember Districts: Collusion or Conflict
The vast majority of what we know about building prospective electoral constituencies is confined to single-member district systems. However, most legislators are elected in multimember districts. Given that multiple incumbents represent the same voters, how do legislators decide whom they should target as prospective constituents? We build a general model of this decision and test it with travel data for 100 legislators elected in a single, nati…
The Reputations Legislators Build: With Whom Should Representatives Collaborate
How do legislators build the reputations they use in bids for reelection? Do they use their personal reputations or associate with other legislators? And how do parties, coalitions, and institutions affect these decisions? Research on how electoral systems affect parties in legislatures frequently focuses on the extent to which electoral rules make legislators more or less ideologically convergent with respect to other members of the chamber-copa…
Incentives in Mixed-Member Electoral Systems: General Election Laws, Candidate Selection Procedures, and Cameral Rules
Mixed-member systems have been characterized as encouraging politicians to balance the activities that enhance their personal reputations and those of their parties. Another literature challenges that legislators from one tier are not likely to behave differently from those of the other. After summarizing this debate, data from Venezuela are used to look for evidence supporting either side in a series of behaviors that span the entire legislative…
Magnitude and vote seeking
Venezuela: Características, crisis y posible futuro democrático
El sistema democrático venezolano presenta luces y sombras. Las luces se apoyan en el hecho de que este sistema ha desarrollado, a lo largo de cuatro décadas de funcionamiento, una serie de rutinas y prácticas que hacen que resulte un sistema suficientemente enraizado entre la población y con bases sólidas como para no dudar de su continuación. Las sombras se derivan de la situación de crisis en que se encuentra durante la última década, consecue…
The Electoral Connection and Legislative Committees
This article examines whether the career needs of legislators – to be re-elected or to move on to another political post – allow us to explain the rules governing committee structures and the committee assignments individual legislators obtain. It uses the institutional variations provided by Argentina, Costa Rica, and Venezuela to test hypotheses about committee assignments and committee assignment mechanisms. It finds that incentives created by…
Political science (46 works) · Law (39 works) · Politics (37 works) · Economics (35 works) · Electoral Systems and Political Participation (33 works) · Law (27 works) · Political economy (19 works) · Public Administration (19 works) · Democracy (17 works) · Politics and Society in Latin America (17 works)