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.

总结总结该项目调查了哪些因素激发了非洲行政主管政治制度的立法者，将注意力集中在民族活动而不是地方活动上。 学者和政策制定者都认为，从事这种行政主导的政治制度的立法者几乎没有动力参与国家一级的政治。结果，议会通常倾向于橡皮图扫描行政部门的政策。 该项目挑战传统观点，即立法者将立法者视为选区仆人。取而代之的是，它试图确定人们对立法者对民族和地方政治关注的追求的差异很大。特别是，该项目将分析国家对国家和当地关注的这些变化，以确定个人级别的激励措施如何影响立法者追求的活动类型。 因此，这项工作最终将阐明这如何影响民主立法机关的制度发展，并有助于我们对代表的理解。这项研究有可能挑战以下观点：立法者通过说明个人激励措施的结构行为是无关紧要的，并且还可能导致将稀缺资源更有效地分配给他们可以带来最大利益的地方。该项目还将贡献一套有关研究研究的政治体系中立法行为的宝贵数据。技术摘要该研究项目调查了立法者可以在行政主导的政治制度中扮演什么角色。 此外，它还将评估对选民对本地资源提供的强烈偏爱的立法者的行为影响。 这两个因素的结合似乎表明，立法者缺乏以全国重点从事政策活动的动机。该项目假设立法者的选举安全，职业野心和以前的政治经验相结合，使他们能够投入更多的努力来对国家问题，而不仅仅是当地问题。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组假设，然后评估由于假设以零碎的方式放松的假设所产生的含义。 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，并通过对原始数据集进行分析，其中包括成千上万的议会演讲，报纸文章和详细的立法者职业历史。