This article explores whether differential time horizons in legislative chambers that result from staggered membership renewal affect legislative behaviour. The analysis focuses on patterns of bill initiation and the introduction of amendments in the upper chambers of Australia, France, Germany and Japan – all four of which contain two or more classes of members that face re‐election at different times. Drawing on original comparative data, clear evidence is found of over‐time variation in legislative activity levels in the upper chambers. Approaching elections lead to increased activity levels, with increases in the introduction of bills, but also, to a lesser extent, amending activity. Such variation is found not only for those members facing the most proximate election, but for all members of the chamber. Importantly, there are no significant differences in legislative behaviour between those members up for re‐election and those not facing the electorate in the most proximate election. These patterns are interpreted tentatively as evidence of the paramount importance of political parties in parliamentary systems.

Legislative debates are a thriving field in comparative politics. They make representation work by offering legislators the opportunity to take the floor and represent their constituents. In this paper, we review the key theoretical concepts and empirical findings in a maturing field. We begin by addressing what legislative debates are and why we should study them to learn about inter‐ and intra‐party politics. Next, we look at the contributions springing from Proksch and Slapin's ground‐breaking model. In so doing, our review suggests that recent work extends the original model to include further dimensions of legislative debates. Third, we examine the role of legislative debates as mechanisms of representation, focusing on gender. Four, we examine the challenges of the comparative analysis of legislative debates. Finally, we map the road ahead by discussing four avenues of future research and some key questions that remain unanswered.

Party institutionalisation is a central problem in political science. The literature tends to understand it as a syndrome and therefore has difficulty explaining variations. This article suggests a new approach based on the transaction between a legislative party and its deputies, the failure of which is observable in party switching. Three routes to institutionalisation are identified by appealing to the vote‐seeking, office‐seeking or policy‐seeking motivations of deputies. Poland has had a large volume of party switching, along with wide variation in the incentives facing differently‐motivated deputies. Survival analyses of switching in four Polish parliaments find that vote‐seeking is the most likely route to institutionalisation for Polish parties. Moreover, in this article a concrete hypothesis is established for comparative testing: legislative parties can survive as long as their popular support exceeds 40 per cent of their share in the previous election.

Steffen Ganghof’s Beyond Presidentialism and Parliamentarism: Democratic Design and the Separation of Powers (Oxford University Press, 2021) posits that “in a democracy, a constitutional separation of powers between the executive and the assembly may be desirable, but the constitutional concentration of executive power in a single human being is not” (Ganghof, 2021). To consider, examine and theorise about this, Ganghof urges engagement with semi-parliamentarism. As explained by Ganghof, legislative power is shared between two democratically legitimate sections of parliament in a semi-parliamentary system, but only one of those sections selects the government and can remove it in a no-confidence vote. Consequently, power is dispersed and not concentrated in the hands of any one person, which, Ganghof argues, can lead to an enhanced form of parliamentary democracy. In this book review symposium, George Tsebelis, Michael Thies, José Antonio Cheibub, Rosalind Dixon and Daniel Bogéa review Steffen Ganghof’s book and engage with the author about aspects of research design, case selection and theoretical argument. This symposium arose from an engaging and constructive discussion of the book at a seminar hosted by Texas A&M University in 2022. We thank Prof José Cheibub (Texas A&M) for organising that seminar and Dr Anna Fruhstorfer (University of Potsdam) for initiating this book review symposium.

Scholars debate whether the presence of multiple parties in the legislature stabilizes dictatorships or promotes their demise. We show that authoritarian regimes face a dilemma: allowing for multipartism reduces the risk of bottom-up revolt, but facilitates protracted top-down democratization. Concessions to the opposition diminish the long-term benefits of authoritarian rule and empower regime soft-liners. We test our theory in Latin America—a region with a broad range of autocracies —using survival models, instrumental variables, random forests, and two case studies. Our theory explains why rational autocrats accept multipartism, even though this concession may ultimately undermine the regime. It also accounts for democratic transitions that occur when the opposition is fragmented and without a stunning authoritarian defeat.

This paper explores diversifying legislatures within a context of ethnonationalism, populism, and democratic erosion. Although diversity and inclusion are often viewed as symbols of democratization, research increasingly challenges this. In fact, diversity and inclusion can occur in tandem with democratic erosion—how so? How do minorities navigate hostile environments? To answer this question, I analyze how women politicians with intersecting identities strategically use their gendered and racialized identities. I conduct a qualitative study of four different women politicians in the Israeli Knesset—Miri Regev of Jewish Mizrahi [Moroccan] descent, Pnina Tamano-Shata of Jewish Ethiopian descent, Merav Michaeli of Jewish Ashkenazi [European] descent, and Aida Touma-Suleiman, a Palestinian-Israeli. I find that women will highlight the aspects of their identities that they believe will benefit them the most, resulting in their promotion of ethnonational divisions and reducing opportunities for solidarity among minority populations.

This article seeks to compare the policy histories of the legislative term limits in France and the United States. Both nations debated, initially adopted, and then ultimately rejected imposing term limits during the foundational moments of their democracies. Reemerging in the 1990s in America, proposals to refresh government through such limits have been successful in the states and have failed at the national level. The idea regained prominence in France when Emmanuel Macron supported it during his 2017 presidential election. Although Macron eventually abandoned the proposal, the revival of this debate is an opportunity to draw broad parallels but identify critical differences between the two nations in the philosophical debates over term limits and the ways that leaders have embraced or abandoned them to fulfill their political goals. We show how the idea circulated between the two nations, without a parallel exchange of evidence about its effects.

This study analyzes direct lobbying in the Chilean Congress, contributing to the debate over which legislators are targeted by interest groups. Utilizing a comprehensive dataset constructed from legally mandated records of lobbying meetings, we test theoretical implications predominantly derived from the US context within a different presidential democracy. The focus is on the legislative targets of business and labor groups. The results reveal a marked preference for lobbying allies, aligning with recent theories of information transmission and legislative subsidies. This pattern holds true for both business and labor groups and highlights the significance of ideological alignment for legislative lobbying in Chile. Additionally, the study finds that legislators with influential positions, such as those on key committees or centrally located in the bill collaboration network, are more frequently targeted. This research provides key insights into the dynamics of legislative lobbying in a non-US context, underscoring the generalizability of established theoretical frameworks.

Responding to the need to make democratic governance more anticipatory, during recent decades parliaments have increasingly made efforts to involve elected legislators directly in addressing future risks and envisioning long-term developments. At the level of general democratic-institutional principles, engaging legislators in national-level foresight is expected to enhance the general legitimacy of future-regarding policymaking almost automatically by broadening the scope of democratic actors involved in policy work. However, even the basic mechanisms through which the impact of legislature-based foresight activities could traverse to policymaking remain largely uncharted and unknown. To develop a preliminary framework for detecting and comparing such mechanisms, we draw from the experiences of the most institutionalised and influential legislature-based foresight unit, the Committee for the Future in the Finnish Eduskunta. We extract three general mechanisms through which parliamentary future committees could make a valuable contribution to national-level strategic foresight: (1) they can improve the quality of future-regarding policymaking by broadening and consolidating national foresight “ecosystems”; (2) they can strengthen the transparency and accountability of the foresight work of political executives; and (3) they can enhance the legitimacy of anticipatory governance by connecting broader democratic publics to foresight work through more inclusive participatory processes.

This article offers an innovative way of understanding gender balance in parliaments. Motivated by research documenting how newcomers are disadvantaged during their first term in office, while senior members enjoy certain privileges, we want to find out how common women are among senior members of parliaments. We launch an institutional approach comprising three seniority measures to study gender gaps in political endurance to find out whether, where, and when men are more likely than women to be parliamentary seniors. Our analysis using data from seven countries in Western Europe and two countries in North America (1965–2020) shows very high gender gaps across the three measures. Thus, despite an increased level of female representation, women still constitute a small part of the exclusive group of senior members of parliament. Our findings extend the research documenting that women and men largely have equally long parliamentary careers, emphasizing the need to understand gender balance in multidimensional terms.

The literature on congressional decision-making has largely ignored the influence of the minority party in the legislative process. This follows from the widely held belief that the majority party dominates the agenda-setting process. Though the minority party rarely achieves major policy success in Congress, we argue that the minority has significantly more influence over the legislative agenda than is commonly believed. We posit that, under some conditions, the minority has enough bargaining leverage to get floor votes on their proposals, in the form of both amendments and bills. We test our theoretical expectations with a novel design utilizing whip count data from the House and show that when a whip count on a bill occurs, the likelihood of a minority amendment disappointment and a majority amendment roll increases, respectively. This suggests that the more leverage the minority party has, the more we see their legislative proposals on the floor.

Members of some legislatures enjoy long political careers, whereas elsewhere turnover is rampant. This variation is consequential since high-incumbency assemblies may facilitate legislative expertise at the expense of social representation. We explore cross-national differences in re-election (incumbency) rates by identifying ‘supply’ conditions such as legislative resources that benefit incumbents as well as ‘demand’ conditions such as political corruption that affect voters' willingness to re-elect incumbents. We hypothesize that legislative perquisites help incumbents win re-election, but only if there is relatively high public confidence in politics, as reflected in low corruption levels. We tested our argument using OLS and instrumental variable regression and new global data on sixty-eight democracies (2000–18) covering 288 elections and over 55,000 legislators. We found that legislative resources help incumbents get re-elected only under relatively low levels of political corruption. In contrast, under severe corruption, such resources can depress re-election rates.