IngentaConnect Invisible Politics: Institutional Incentives and Legislative Alig...

Author: Bagashka, Tanya

Source: Legislative Studies Quarterly, Volume 33, Number 3, August 2008 , pp. 415-444(30)

Publisher: Comparative Legislative Research Center, The University of Iowa

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The Center's principal activity is publishing the Legislative Studies Quarterly, an international refereed journal devoted to research on representative assemblies. The Quarterly is the official journal of the Legislative Studies Section of the American Political Science Association. It was founded in 1976 by faculty members at The University of Iowa but today its editors and the members of its editorial board are drawn from major research universities throughout the United States and abroad.
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Abstract:

Previous analysis of legislative voting has focused on the behavior of nominal legislative parties, regardless of whether the country under examination was an established democracy or a newly democratized country. This approach is inadequate for countries with young party systems. To establish the extent to which legislative coalitions are party based, scholars must allow for the possibility that institutional incentives predominate over party influence. For this study, I applied a Bayesian discrete latent variable method to identify the legislative coalitions in the 1996-99 Duma. I found that legislative alignments cut across party lines: electoral incentives and support for the president contribute to divides within parties that lack coherent platforms. Here I present a novel methodological approach to the identification of intraparty divisions and the major determinants of legislative coalitions in many legislative settings. This approach allows a comparison of the importance of party influence relative to other institutional incentives. It is especially useful for analyzing legislative voting in young party systems and where constitutional frameworks and electoral systems subject legislators to competing pressures.

Invisible Politics: Institutional Incentives and Legislative Alignments in the Russian Duma, 1996-99