Doctoral Dissertation Research in Political Science: The Relational Nature of Legislating

大多数关于立法的研究都集中在立法者个人与他们投票的法案之间的关系上。虽然这产生了重要的见解，但它在很大程度上忽略了立法者之间潜在的人际影响。在每个国家的立法机关，法案必须由议院成员提出，因此，对法案的投票既是对立法本身的价值的投票，也是对支持或反对支持个人的投票。立法的第二个方面有可能向我们展示为什么这个国家的代表机构产生了我们所观察到的结果。在这个项目中，研究者试图揭示为什么立法者形成了我们所观察到的关系，为什么一些关系比其他关系更重要，以及一个议院中的哪些规则和约束会影响关系合作伙伴的选择。研究者在分析中采用了基于社会网络的方法。在Granovetter（1973）有影响力的工作的基础上，研究者观察到，在紧密联系的立法者群体之间微弱的桥接关系会产生相当大的立法影响力增加，而加强强关系对产生影响力没有任何作用。为了研究立法者之间关系的演变及其对立法的影响，研究者利用了州立法机构的制度差异。州立法机构存在着大量的组织差异，这影响了立法者如何合作以及何时合作最有效。通过围绕州议员之间的关系进行研究，研究者能够回答有关有意组织设计如何影响立法者合作的问题。这项研究在规范和立法行为文献的延伸方面都很重要。通过理解集体决策的反复互动创造了一个关系形成、发展和塑造后续行为的环境，该项目推动了立法文献的发展，建立了一个认真对待个体动机和相互依赖产生的系统影响的理论。合作和协作已经被经济学家和社会学家视为组织资产和强有力的个人生存策略，因此，开始研究这些行为是如何由负责领导的人表现出来的，可以揭示这些基本的社会行为是如何受到责任、雄心和成熟的制约的。从规范上讲，最近的立法会议的特点是两极分化的领导人不断阻挠和拖延完成立法任务的努力。人们早就注意到，公众对立法机构的信任取决于一个议院内斗的数量，新的证据表明，在制定重要立法方面，更合作的议院更成功。因此，了解哪些制度约束促进了立法合作，应该引起任何关心代议制民主和我们自己的政府效率的人的兴趣。

Most research on lawmaking focuses on relationship between individual legislators and bills upon which they vote. While this has produced important insights, it largely ignores the potential for interpersonal influence between legislators. In every legislature in the country, bills must be introduced by chamber members, thus, a vote on the bill is both a vote on the merits of the legislation itself and a vote supporting or denying support for an individual. This second dimension of legislating has the potential to show us a great deal about why the representative bodies of this country produce the outcomes we observe. In this project, the investigator seeks to uncover why legislators form the relationships we observe, why some relationships are more important than others, and what rules and constraints in a chamber influence the choice of relational, cooperative partners.The investigator employs a social networks based approach in the analysis. Building on influential work by Granovetter (1973), The investigator observes that weak, bridging ties between clusters of strongly tied legislators produce sizeable increases in legislative influence, while the reinforcement of strong ties does nothing to generate influence. To study the evolution and impact of relationships between legislators on legislation, the investigator takes advantage of institutional differences presented by state legislatures. State legislatures present a great deal of organizational variance which influences how legislators work together and when that cooperation is most effective. By orienting the study around relationships between state legislators, the investigator is able to answer questions about how intentional organizational design can actually influence how well legislators work together. This research is important both normatively and as an extension of the literature on legislative behavior. By understanding that repeated interactions on collective decisions create an environment where relationships form, evolve and shape subsequent behaviors, the project pushes the legislative literature forward building a theory that takes seriously both individual motivations and systematic effects that result from interdependence. Cooperation and collaboration have been recognized as organizational assets and strong individual survival strategies by both economists and sociologists, thus, beginning a study on how these behaviors are manifested by people charged with leadership can reveal how these basic social behaviors are conditioned by accountability, ambition, and sophistication.Normatively, recent legislative sessions have been characterized by polarized leaders consistently obstructing and delaying efforts to accomplish the task of legislating. It has long been noted that public confidence in legislatures is conditioned by the amount of infighting in a chamber, and new evidence indicates that more cooperative chambers are more successful in producing important legislation. Thus, understanding which institutional constraints promote legislative cooperation should interest anyone who cares about representative democracy and the efficiency of our own government.