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Legislators face numerous trade-offs with regard to how to spend their time. One factor is, however, beyond their control: the distance between their constituency and the legislature. A more distant constituency implies increased travel, which decreases the time available for activities within the legislature itself, while also raising the possibility of centreperiphery dynamics in representation. Previous work has found that as distance between constituency and legislature increases, so does constituency focus, but it has not established why this is. This article explores the impact of geographical remoteness on representational activity, analysing a dataset of parliamentary activity in the British House of Commons (2005-2015), showing that the more remote an MPs constituency, the less likely that MP is to attend votes, while being more likely to sign Early Day Motions. The article further shows that this is most likely driven by a centreperiphery dynamic rather than simply being a response to longer travel time. ; (VLID)5205908 ; Version of record

The presence of cross-institutional partisan links between the Council and the European Parliament is a key feature of bicameral law-making in the European Union. However, assessing the conditions under which national parties can and do influence 'their' Members of the European Parliament is complicated by a lack of measurements of the national interest at stake. Analysing the Registration, Evaluation, Authorisation and Restriction of Chemicals regulation, this article shows that national parties represented in the Council only seek to influence 'their' Members of the European Parliament when the national interest at stake is sufficiently large and, more importantly, when a legislative deal has been struck. These findings have implications for our understanding of legislative politics in the European Union and the relationship between Members of the European Parliament, European Parliamentary Groups and the Council.

Responsiveness to voters is key for democratic rule, yet often fails to occur. We argue that coalition government adds an additional hurdle to responsiveness. Multi-issue policy log-rolls between coalition parties in coalition agreement negotiations, none of which are individually supported by a parliamentary majority, can lead to policy change opposed by a majority, that is: Minority rule. Similarly, coalition agreements can block policy change supported by a parliamentary majority through a veto by one of the government parties, frustrating majority rule. Drawing on data from the Netherlands Bureau of Economic Analysis, we assess how often coalition agreements include policies supported by less than a parliamentary majority, and how often they exclude policies supported by parliamentary majorities. We show that two-thirds of policies included in coalition agreements are not supported by a floor majority, and that 30% of policies supported by a floor majority fail to be included in a coalition agreement.

A crucial difference between political systems is the nature of government alternation: that is, whether when a government changes, all parties now in government were previously in opposition ('wholesale alternation') or whether just some parties were ('partial alternation') (Mair 1997). Bergman and Strom (2011) suggest that wholesale alternation gives voters a clear choice between alternative governments and allows them to hold the government accountable, while partial alternation is associated with one (centre) party becoming a (near-) permanent government party who can govern with either the parties to its right or to its left. However, this relationship has not been tested. We propose to examine the effect of partial and wholesale alternation on turnout in a large-N cross-country study, showing that there is an interaction effect between disproportionality and wholesale turn-out. Wholesale decreases turn-out but only when it when disproportionality is high.

AbstractThe staggered renewal of parliamentary mandates is widespread in upper chambers, yet little understood. Comparative work has found that all members of a chamber are affected by upcoming elections, not merely those whose terms are up for renewal. In this study, we explore for which activities, and under which conditions, staggered membership renewal is associated with class-specific parliamentary activity, defined as systematically differing behaviour across two or more classes of members. We examine these questions with data on the French Senate. Drawing on insights from the study of political business cycles, legislative cycles, and previous scholarship on staggering, the article shows that behaviour varies over the course of senators' mandates, and that class-specific behaviour exists. However, staggering produces a different pattern of parliamentary activity than might be expected: proximity to elections reduces parliamentary activity of the class of senators facing re-election; by contrast, senators 'not up next' become more active. This effect, we argue, reflects the electoral system under which senators are elected.