Minutes of the 2008 Annual Business Meeting
Legislative
Studies Section
American
Political Science Association
August
29, 2008
Section
Chair Larry Dodd called the meeting to order at 6:15 p.m. and reminded
attendees of the section reception to follow the business meeting.
Bruce
Oppenheimer announced that he and David Rohde are organizing a two-part
conference on bicameralism, with the first part to take place at Duke from
March 26-29 and the second to take place at Vanderbilt in the fall. He
encouraged those who wished to participate to submit papers.
David Canon, co-editor of Legislative
Studies Quarterly, made a report on his first year as editor. He noted that
submissions are up, that the journal is rising in the rankings (in the latest
survey by Garand, it is ranked at number 12, making it the 2nd most highly
ranked subfield journal), and that the median turnaround time is two months. He
thanked reviewers for the journal.
Canon
and Jan Box-Steffensmeier then announced the launching of a new series on
legislative politics and public policy at the
The
final announcement related to the 2009 International Political Science
Association Meeting, which will take place in
Larry
Dodd read a report from the 2008 LSS Program Chair, Craig Volden, who was
unable to attend the meeting. Volden reported that based on past program size,
last year’s attendance at our panels, and last year’s proposal rejection rate,
the section was allocated 19 panels for the 2008 conference, the same as in
2007. By initiating and taking advantage
of co-sponsorship opportunities, that number was increased to 28 panels that
legislative studies solely sponsors or cosponsors at the current meetings. He
noted that based on feedback from last year's section meeting, most panels
included four papers, a chair and two discussants. He thanked the many section
members who volunteered to serve as chairs and discussants.
Patrick
Sellers, the 2009 LSS Program Chair, then encouraged section members to submit
papers for next year's conference. He also noted that he welcomed assistance
from specialists in state legislative politics and comparative legislatures in
assessing submissions in those areas.
Larry
Dodd reported on several APSA initiatives raised at the meeting for Section
Chairs. One relates to the new APSA Community Site, which will enable sections
and members to communicate on-line. The second relates to the
"renewal" of sections. Section memberships are at a steady state,
though membership in APSA is growing. The lack of growth in the former may be a
result of members belonging to fewer sections, particularly as more have become
connected to journals and thus have higher dues. Larry highlighted the collective
benefits of LSS membership, including panels, subsidizing LSQ and awards, and
social activities. He suggested holding an LSS reception at regional
conferences, beginning with MPSA in 2009. The section will also sponsor a
survey through the Carl Albert Center, seeking member input on possible
activities like receptions, further outreach to scholars of state and
comparative legislatures, providing selective incentives for members (i.e.,
priority for members in the selection of submissions for panel slots at the
annual meeting), waiving membership fees for graduate students, and developing
mentoring opportunities for graduate students and junior faculty. Several
section members contributed ideas about how to boost participation in the
section, including rethinking the timing of the business meeting and
considering the possibility of a legislative studies conference based on the PolMeth model.
The
meeting then continued with the presentation of awards.
CQ Press Award for the best paper on
legislative studies presented at the 2007 annual meeting (Selection Committee:
Bruce Oppenheimer, Jennifer Lawless, Josh Clinton)
Recipients:
Kathryn Pearson of the
" Pearson
and Schickler’s analysis of recently available data
on discharge petition signers from 1929-76, when signatures were not public,
and public data on signers since 1993 provides them with a valuable data base
for testing competing theories about majority party control, committee power
and deference, ideology, and the changing nature of parties in the House of
Representatives. Their careful analysis
allows them to make important refinements in what are largely unqualified
theoretical positions. Thus, instead of
finding support for a universal norm of committee deference, they find that the
signing of discharge petitions is inversely related to a member’s stake in the
committee system, and that the assumption that majority party members will be
less likely to support discharge petitions than minority party members is
largely dependent on the strength of party governance in the House. Thus, it is
only in recent years that minority party members predominate among discharge
petition signers while in the in earlier decades during the era of the
conservative coalition, northern Democrats were the most frequent signers.
Pearson and Schicker take great care to control for the independent
effects of a variety of indicators as a means of discriminating among a range
of competing arguments that the literature and competing theories make about
discharge petitions. In doing so they
effectively change the question from one of absolutes to one of asking under
what conditions are certain types of members more or less likely to use
alternative means to get legislation considered on the floor.
Finally, I
should note that reading this paper causes me to rethink what I’ve
traditionally taught students about discharge petitions and other alternative
methods of bringing legislation to the floor.
Instead of being a rules and procedures caveat, I now see the discharge
petition as valuable unobtrusive indicator of who is in control of the
House."
Alan Rosenthal
Prize
for the best book or article in legislative studies written by a junior scholar
that has potential value to legislative practitioners (Selection Committee:
James Thurber, Nancy Martorano, Michael
Minta)
Recipient:
David Primo,
"Although
there are many worthy recipients for this award, we present the 2008 Alan
Rosenthal Prize to David Primo for his excellent book Rules and Restraint: Government Spending and the Design of Institutions. Primo argues that budget rules,
requiring a balanced budget and spending limits, usually fail because these
rules are not properly designed and there is no real threat of credible
enforcement. Instead he finds legislators’ desire to honor budget commitments
is outweighed usually by their desire to provide benefits to politically
powerful constituents such as homeowners, seniors, and businesses. Primo’s
argument challenges the assumption in most studies that budget rules will be
credibly enforced by legislators."
Jewell-Loewenberg Award for the best article in Legislative Studies Quarterly in 2007 (Selection
Committee: John Griffin, Sarah Binder, William Mishler)
Recipients:
James Snyder of Massachusetts Institute of Technology and Michiko Ueda of
California Institute of Technology, "Do Multimember Districts Lead to Free
Riding?" (LSQ 32:649-679)
"Although there were a number of
laudable pieces in Volume 32, we quickly agreed on “Do Multimember Districts
Lead to Free Riding?” by Jim Snyder and Michiko Ueda. This article asks whether the effectiveness
of legislators in securing appropriations for their constituents is related to
district magnitude. With theories
pointing in opposite directions, the authors leverage the change from
multimember to single member districts in many states in the 1970s and
1980s. They find that district magnitude
is positively associated with state distributions to local governments."
Carl Albert
Dissertation Award for the best doctoral dissertation in the area of
legislative studies (Selection Committee: Kathryn Pearson, Elizabeth Oldmixon, Kim Quaile
Hill)
Recipient:
Robert Salmond (
"We enthusiastically agreed to
give the Carl Albert Dissertation Award to Robert Salmond for his dissertation,
“Parliamentary
Question Times: How Legislative
Accountability Mechanisms Affect Citizens and Politics.” In his dissertation,
Salmond asks whether Question Time (QT) affects politics beyond the walls of
Parliament in advanced democracies, specifically citizens’ knowledge about
politics, their partisanship, and their propensity to turn out to vote.
The answer is a resounding yes, and in a variety of ways, but it matters how QT
is structured.
Salmond
constructs two measures of the differences in QTs
across countries. “QT openness” is based on the rules that govern QT
and taps the spontaneity of the questions and answers. “Speeches per
hour” measures politicians’ behavior.
He
finds that QTs featuring shorter speeches, surprise
questions, and more contentious debate are more likely to politically engage
citizens than are civil and formulaic QTs. This is because, and I quote from his
dissertation: “the more vitriolic, circus-like ‘open QTs’
provide more newsworthy material for the media and are more accessible and
enjoyable for citizens, who encounter QT on the evening news and in the
newspaper.”
Beyond
these institutional differences across legislatures, Salmond also finds
interesting differences across voters.
QT does not affect everybody equally.
For example, younger voters –those most likely to seek and comprehend ‘spectacular’
forms of information in other contexts – are more likely to be mobilized by a
spectacular QT institution. The
committee was particularly impressed by Salmond's
empirical work in chapter 5 on QT and turnout, partisan effects, and information
in the mass public, and the conceptual work that led up to this empirical
chapter.
Salmond’s dissertation
has many strengths: it bridges the study of
institutional rules, elite behavior, and mass behavior; it explores
institutional variation across western democracies; and it subjects
contemporary political events in the news to scientific inquiry. It started by thinking about how to take a
political phenomenon in the news and fit it into a larger puzzle. It is also
worth noting that this dissertation was an enjoyable read and a real learning
experience for all of us."
Richard F. Fenno, Jr. Prize for the best book in legislative
studies published in 2007 (Selection Committee: Gregory Wawro,
Bryan Jones, Barbara Sinclair)
Recipients:
Simon Hix, Abdul Noury, and
Gerard Roland, Democratic Politics in the
European Parliament,
"In this theoretically
and empirically innovative study, Simon Hix, Abdul G.
Noury, and Gerard Roland take advantage of the unique
opportunity provided by the European Parliament to observe and study in real
time the early development and evolution of a legislative institution.
This ambitious book clearly documents the emerging partisan organization
of the European legislature, and asks a key question: why have national
interests not fared better vis-á-vis transnational partisan interests in the organization
of conflict in the supranational legislature? To answer this and other
questions that are fundamental to the study of legislatures and to the discipline
in general, the authors have
collected and analyzed an extensive data set that focuses on roll call voting
in the EU parliament. Their analysis demonstrates how parties overcome
collective action problems to transcend national boundaries in order to
influence policy outputs from the EU. The result is a well-organized,
empirically convincing, and theoretically open-minded work of timely social
science that promises to spur significant interest in the EU parliament and
promote more and better research in comparative legislative studies."
LSS
Chair Larry Dodd congratulated the award winners and thanked the committees and
legislative studies section officers for their service.
Vincent
Moscardelli offered a last announcement about a
forthcoming special issue of Congress
& The Presidency on the theme "The State of Inter-Branch Relations at the End of the
Bush Presidency." He encouraged section members to submit
papers.
Adjourned.
Respectfully
submitted,
LSS
Secretary-Treasurer
|HOME | Welcome | Announcements | Newsletter
| Links | | APSA Home Page |