Suchergebnisse

Efforts to study the dynamics of legislative and party politics in developing countries often confront a serious obstacle – lack of public data on legislative actions. This paper proposes a new feasible approach for obtaining legislative information indirectly – analyzing the perceptions and lobbying behaviors of business interest groups who are experienced, knowledgeable and highly invested in staying informed on policymaking processes. I build on extant literatures on political parties and lobbying to show how we can systematically exploit group insights to study legislative parties in data-scarce environments and complement existing approaches in data-rich cases. I then demonstrate and evaluate this approach by using original data from a 2006 survey of 158 groups in a data-rich case, Brazil, to mediate existing scholarly debates regarding the sources of legislative unity of Brazilian parties.

This article extends the research on institutional sources of corruption by investigating whether legislative institutions play a significant role in driving corruption in developing country democracies. The author argues that when legislative rules (a) give parties control over agenda setting and (b) allow parties to strip legislators who vote against the party line of their legislative mandates, parties can exercise valuable influence over the legislative policy process, which allows them to engage in practices leading to higher corruption. The author derives two testable hypotheses linking higher party influence over agenda setting and voting in the legislature to higher corruption and test them by using a new data set on legislative rules for 64 developing country democracies from 1984 to 2004. The empirical results corroborate the hypotheses and remain robust when controlling for alternative explanations, employing different estimation techniques, and using different measures of corruption. [Reprinted by permission of Sage Publications Inc., copyright holder.]

This article extends the research on institutional sources of corruption by investigating whether legislative institutions play a significant role in driving corruption in developing country democracies. The author argues that when legislative rules (a) give parties control over agenda setting and (b) allow parties to strip legislators who vote against the party line of their legislative mandates, parties can exercise valuable influence over the legislative policy process, which allows them to engage in practices leading to higher corruption. The author derives two testable hypotheses linking higher party influence over agenda setting and voting in the legislature to higher corruption and test them by using a new data set on legislative rules for 64 developing country democracies from 1984 to 2004. The empirical results corroborate the hypotheses and remain robust when controlling for alternative explanations, employing different estimation techniques, and using different measures of corruption.