No abstract

In this paper we examine information exchange networks in legislative politics and challenge the idea that legislators seek objective information prior to voting on bills. We make the intuitive claim that legislators establish contacts with each other that stand to maximize the value of the information they trade. Additionally, we make the counterintuitive claim that legislators seek information from sources that are predictably biased for or against their preferred outcomes. We test the propositions derived from this argument in the context of the European Parliament, using tools from social network analysis and modeling the network dependence using a multilevel approach. This research makes two primary contributions to the field of legislative politics. First, we demonstrate both theoretically and empirically how legislators use social contacts to their strategic advantage in their pursuit of legislative information. Second, our analytical approach demonstrates how to appropriately account for interdependence of observations in network data. 3The process of lawmaking is an inherently social exercise and scholars have recently begun to use social network analysis to help explain some legislative behaviors (see for example, Fowler 2006). However, it is not yet clear how social networks among lawmakers contribute to legislative outcomes, policy formation, or pivotal activities such as voting. This paper seeks to begin to fill this gap by examining social networks in legislative politics as circuits of information exchange. Specifically, we are interested in examining if legislative offices establish connections amongst each other that maximize the value of the information they trade.We maintain that in an effort to make well-informed policy choices, legislators have incentives to pursue information from sources that are predictably biased; the social connections they establish to collect information about the legislation they enact reflect these incentives. Information provided by sources that are predictably biased allows legislators to compare the information they expect to receive, given the known bias of the source, to the information they actually receive. This is of great value to legislators as they seek to confirm the appropriateness of the policy positions they are predisposed to take toward a given policy proposal. If the information legislators expect matches the actual information they receive, their predispositions are confirmed; in contrast, if the source provides information that deviates from their expectations it is likely to trigger a re-evaluation of their initial policy positions.Prior authors have noted the value of "biased" information for legislators (see Kingdon 1981, 232;Calvert 1985); however, we offer that information has greater value to decision-makers if it is predictably biased. Such information is either in support of or in opposition to the position a legislator is predisposed to take, which means that legislators ought to seek information from both political allies and ...

On 1 May 2004, the European Union (EU) welcomed its new member states from Central and Eastern Europe. This paper considers to what extent one of the most widely tested and supported theories of voting behavior in Western Europe, the second-order election model, applies in the enlarged EU. We test the model using election data from the new member states and find that voters do not cast protest votes against their incumbent national governments in second-order elec tions, that is, elections where voters believe little to be at stake. This finding contradicts one of the model's basic propositions and runs counter to the empirical reality in the old member states, with potentially significant implications for inter and intra-institutional politics in the EU.

This article challenges the existing state-of-knowledge about legislative caucuses by arguing that the caucus system reflects and reinforces formal organizing institutions, such as parties and committees, rather than counterbalancing them. We argue that legislators engage in the caucus system to maximize the social utility of their relationships. Using a social network framework, we develop and test hypotheses that seek to ascertain the types of legislators that assume elevated positions in the caucus network. We collect data on the complete population of caucuses and their members from the first session of the 110th U.S. House of Representatives and conduct social network analyses to find evidence that the caucus system supports the hierarchical structure of existing formal institutions.

This dissertation introduces and tests a model of policy preference formation in legislative politics. Emphasizing a dynamic relationship between structure, agent, and decision-making process, it ties the question of policy choice to the dimensionality of the normative political space and the strategic actions of parliamentary agenda-setters. The model proposes that structural factors, such as ideology, shape policy preferences to the extent that legislative specialists successfully link them to specific policy proposals through the provision of informational focal points. These focal points shift attention toward particular aspects of a legislative proposal, thus shaping the dominant interpretation of its content and consequences and, in turn, individual-level policy preferences. The propositions of the focal point model are tested empirically with data from the European Parliament (EP), using both qualitative (interview data, content analyses of parliamentary debates) and quantitative methods (multinomial logit regression analyses of roll-call votes). The findings have implications for our understanding of politics and law-making in the European Union and for the study of legislative decision-making more generally.