Doctoral Dissertation Research: Legislator Attention and Democratic Political Development

概要 本项目调查了非洲行政主导政治体系中哪些因素促使立法者将注意力集中在国家活动而不是地方活动上。 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动力参与国家层面的政治。因此，议会往往倾向于对行政部门的政策加盖橡皮图章。 该项目挑战了将立法者视为简单选区仆人的传统观念。相反，它试图证明立法者对国家和地方政治关注的追求存在显着差异。特别是，该项目将分析国家与地方注意力的差异，以确定个人层面的激励措施如何影响立法者所追求的活动类型。 因此，这项工作最终将揭示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。这项研究有可能通过说明个人激励如何构建行为来挑战立法者无关紧要的观点，并且还可能导致更有效地将稀缺资源分配到能够带来最大利益的地方。该项目还将提供一组有关未充分研究的政治体系中立法行为的宝贵数据。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（如果有的话）。 此外，它还将评估选民对本地资源供应有强烈偏好的立法者的行为影响。 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。该项目假设立法者的选举安全、职业抱负和以前的政治经验相结合，使他们能够投入更多的精力来关注国家问题，而不仅仅是地方问题。该项目基于政客寻求留任的假设，从理论和模型中得出了一系列假设，然后评估逐步放松这一假设所产生的影响。 研究人员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访谈和案例研究，并辅以对包含数十万议会演讲、报纸文章和详细立法者职业历史的原始数据集的分析。

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.