This chapter develops the electoral–constituency model of party personnel. Under this model, parties deploy their personnel according to their ability to draw votes within specific electoral districts or to specific competing candidates of the party. The chapter derives testable premises, grounded in a two-dimensional characterization of electoral systems: (1) the extent to which they shape a party’s seat maximization through dependence on the geographical location of votes; and (2) the extent of a party’s dependence on “personal votes” of individual candidates. Nationwide proportional representation (PR) versus systems with many electoral districts define the first dimension, while the second dimension is characterized by differences between systems with closed party lists and those employing a single nontransferable vote (SNTV). The chapter discusses how different single-tier and mixed-member systems generate different tradeoffs between parties’ use of the expertise and electoral–constituency models. In particular, the electoral–constituency model suggests that parties allocate members from safe districts differently from those elected in swing/marginal districts. The chapter presents data on the parties covered in the book according to variables such as the margin of electoral victory and population density of districts represented.

The chapter introduces the notion of “party personnel strategies.” The concept refers to the process by which political parties allocate their elected members to legislative committees. The theory is grounded in the resource-based view (RBV) of the firm. The legislators are the pool of “personnel” from which the party draws when staffing specialized standing committees of the legislature. Party strategy is conditioned by both policy goals and the imperatives of the electoral system under which seats are won. Parties engage in a “personnel practice,” which is their observed pattern of assigning members with certain individual background characteristics to given committees. The chapter establishes the cases on which the book’s arguments are tested: Britain, Germany, Israel, Japan, New Zealand, and Portugal. The chapter lists the elections and the thirteen major political parties covered for each country.

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Abstract Abstract This paper draws on systematic data from the US Forest Service’s (USFS) Planning, Appeals and Litigation System to analyze how the agency conducts environmental impact assessments under the National Environmental Policy Act (NEPA). We find that only 1.9 percent of the 33,976 USFS decisions between 2005 and 2018 were processed as Environmental Impact Statements, the most rigorous and time-consuming level of analysis, whereas 82.3 percent of projects fit categorical exclusions. The median time to complete a NEPA analysis was 131 days. The number of new projects has declined dramatically in this period, with the USFS now initiating less than half as many projects per year as it did prior to 2010. We find substantial variation between USFS units in the number of projects completed and time to completion, with some units completing projects in half the time of others. These findings point toward avenues for improving the agency’s NEPA processes.

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.