Policymaking in democratic governments requires compromise, yet polarized legislators face mixed incentives around compromise. These incentives also vary by gender and party, with women and Democrats....

As in many federal countries, subnational politics is the cornerstone of Argentine political careers, and the Congress is a central point for multilevel politics. Although existing literature shows t...

The 60-vote end-debate threshold is a key institution in the United States Senate. Most winning coalitions require 60 votes, effectively giving veto power to a minority of senators. But do supermajor...

The degree of party control of parliamentary debates influences which MPs take the floor. However, we do not know whether floor access rules matter also for the content of speeches. Drawing on a corp...

Congress relies heavily on congressional staff to function and, as such, members have raised alarms about staff departures and their impact on the institution's capacity. We examine patterns of congr....

Existing work documents how senators use their official communications to explain their Washington activities and build support in the district. However, relatively little remains known about how sen...

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We study how committees influence policy outcomes in the context of appropriations. Since the birth of modern political science, the power of the purse has been recognized as a primary institutional ...

We investigate whether the differing population sizes of legislative districts affect the ability to engage in partisan gerrymandering. We conjecture that larger populations facilitate partisan gerry...

Spatial models of legislative organization predict that elected leaders will be moderates with respect to their constituency, the party caucus. However, empirical studies of leader positioning in Con...

The working class are poorly represented in democratic institutions across the world, despite substantial evidence that the public do not discriminate against working-class candidates and view them m....

Research on lawmaking suggests enactments are constructed in various ways. Although multiple approaches are documented in the literature, political scientists do not know which are used more often. I...

Pre-electoral coalitions are common across diverse political contexts. In this letter, I examine their impact on one of the most consequential functions of political parties: the candidate selection ...

Legislators use parliamentary speeches to communicate with their relevant audiences. However, we know little about how they adapt their communication styles to public opinion dynamics and political c...

Despite Congress' Article I powers, challenges within and outside of Congress prevent lawmakers from influencing policy outcomes. Legislators confront obstacles when trying to pass bills, and legisla...

How do incumbents in the US Congress turn federally funded district projects into electoral gains? Clarifying the connection between federal spending and congressional elections is critical for under...

Does prior military experience affect the way members of Congress vote when authorizing the use of military force abroad? Some scholars argue that military experience increases hawkishness, while oth....

The power to veto legislation and return it to parliament is one of the most prominent presidential powers and a major source of presidential activism. Until now, research has mostly focused on the f...

Do the separation of powers dynamics in the United States affect policymaking outcomes? Scholars and observers of national politics have long expected that they do, but since there has been little me...

In bicameral legislatures, gender representation varies significantly between chambers. Historically, Japan's upper house has maintained a proportion of women twice that of the lower house. However, ...

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What drives politicians' support for high-skilled immigration policy? I argue that politicians support different types of high-skilled immigration policy by balancing business demand for skilled fore...

This research note introduces CanberraInbox, a new, regularly updated dataset comprising the full text of all e-newsletters from Australian members of Parliament. The dataset addresses a gap in study...

The gendered makeup of state legislatures has been in a constant state of change since women were first allowed to serve in office. Through certain periods, there have been accelerations in the rate ...

Members of parliament (MPs), and by extension, parliamentary party groups (PPGs), have to make decisions about all aspects of public policy. In many parliamentary systems, PPGs subdivide the workload...