Doctoral Dissertation Research: Legislator Attention and Democratic Political Development

博士论文研究：立法者关注与民主政治发展

• 批准号: 1647512
• 负责人: Karen Ferree
• 金额: $ 1.69万
• 依托单位: University of California-San Diego
• 依托单位国家: 美国
• 项目类别: Standard Grant
• 财政年份: 2017
• 资助国家: 美国
• 起止时间: 2017-04-01 至 2019-03-31
• 项目状态: 已结题
• 来源: https://www.nsf.gov/awardsearch/showAward?AWD_ID=1647512&HistoricalAwards=false
• 关键词: Doctoral; Dissertation; Research; Legislator; Attention

General Summary This project investigates what factors motivate legislators in executive-dominated political systems in Africa to focus their attentions on national rather than local activities. Scholars and policymakers alike argue that legislators working in such executive-dominated political systems have little incentive to participate in national level politics. As a consequence, parliaments often tend to rubber-stamp the policies of the executive. This project challenges the conventional wisdom that views legislators as simply constituency servants. Instead, it seeks to establish that one sees significant variation in legislators' pursuits of national versus local political attention. In particular, this project will analyze these variations in national versus local attention to determine how individual-level incentives affect the types of activities legislators pursue. As such, the work will ultimately shed light on how this impacts the institutional development of democratic legislatures and contributes to our understanding of representation. The research has the potential to challenge the view that legislators are irrelevant by illustrating how individual incentives structure behavior and may also lead to a more effective allocation of the scarce resource to where they can bring about the most good. This project will also contribute a valuable set of data about legislative behavior in an understudied political system. Technical Summary This research project investigates what role, if any, legislators can play in executive-dominated political systems. Additionally, it will also assess the behavioral implications for legislators whose voters possess a strong preference for locally focused resource provision. The combination of these two factors would seem to suggest that legislators lack incentives to engage in policy activities with a national focus. This project hypothesizes that a legislator's electoral security, career ambition, and previous political experience combine to allow them to invest more effort in providing attention to national issues, not just local ones. The project derives a set of hypotheses from theory and models based on the assumption that politicians seek to remain in office, and then assesses the implications that result as the assumption is relaxed in a piecemeal manner. The researcher uses a mixed-methods design to test these hypotheses. In particular, the PI will conduct a series of semi-structured interviews and case studies which will be supplemented with the analysis of an original dataset comprised hundreds of thousands of parliamentary speeches, newspaper articles, and detailed legislator career history.

本项目调查是什么因素促使非洲行政主导的政治体系中的立法者将注意力集中在国家而不是地方活动上。 学者和政策制定者都认为，在这种行政主导的政治体系中工作的立法者几乎没有参与国家层面政治的动机。因此，议会往往对行政部门的政策采取橡皮图章的做法。 这个项目挑战了将立法者仅仅视为选区仆人的传统观念。相反，它试图建立一个看到立法者的追求国家与地方的政治关注的显着差异。特别是，本项目将分析这些变化在国家与地方的注意力，以确定如何个人层面的激励措施影响立法者追求的活动类型。 因此，这项工作将最终阐明这如何影响民主立法机构的制度发展，并有助于我们对代表性的理解。这项研究有可能挑战立法者无关紧要的观点，说明个人激励如何结构行为，也可能导致更有效地分配稀缺资源，使其能够带来最大的好处。这个项目还将提供一组关于在一个未充分研究的政治体系中立法行为的有价值的数据。技术摘要本研究项目调查立法者在行政主导的政治体系中可以发挥什么作用。 此外，它还将评估立法者的行为影响，其选民拥有强烈的偏好，以当地为重点的资源提供。 这两个因素的结合似乎表明，立法者缺乏参与以国家为重点的政策活动的动力。这个项目假设，立法者的选举安全，职业抱负，和以前的政治经验联合收割机相结合，使他们能够投入更多的精力，提供关注国家问题，而不仅仅是地方的。该项目基于政治家寻求留任的假设，从理论和模型中得出一系列假设，然后评估假设以零碎的方式放松时产生的影响。 研究者使用混合方法设计来检验这些假设。特别是，PI将进行一系列半结构化的访谈和案例研究，并辅以对原始数据集的分析，该数据集包括数十万份议会演讲，报纸文章和详细的立法者职业历史。