Party Personnel Strategies

Key party goals serve to advance a policy brand and maximize seats in the legislature. This book offers a theory of how political parties assign their elected members — their "personnel" — to specialized legislative committees to serve collective organizational goals, here known as "party personnel strategies". Individual party members vary in their personal attributes, such as prior occupation, gender, and local experience. Parties seek to harness the attributes of their members by assigning them to committees where their expertise is relevant, and where they may enhance the party's policy brand. However, under some electoral systems, parties may need to trade-off the harnessing of expertise against the pursuit of seats, instead matching legislators according to electoral situation (e.g. marginalityof seat) or characteristics of their constituency (e.g. population density). This book offers an analysis of the extent to which parties trade these goals by matching the attributes of their personnel and their electoral needs to the functions of the available committee seats. The analysis is basedon a dataset of around six thousand legislators across thirty-eight elections in six established parliamentary democracies with diverse electoral systems.

Large parliamentary parties use committee assignments strategically to enhance their distinctive brands, signalling commitment and expertise by matching legislator attributes to committee type. Electoral systems leverage votes, forcing committee trade-offs. Party Personnel Strategies develops, explores, and tests these theories in a major contribution to our comparative understanding of parliamentary linkages., Party Personnel Strategies provides an important new framework for understanding a key element of the internal organization of parliaments. By recognizing the poor fit of US Congress based models to fused powers systems the authors are able to present a new model of committee assignment., We know electoral systems help determine party systems but here we learn how they help determine the industrial organization of parliaments. A highly original and persuasive account: a must-own book for scholars of parliamentary politics.

Matthew S. Shugart is Distinguished Professor Emeritus in the Department of Political Science, University of California, Davis, and Affiliated Professor of the University of Haifa. He is a world renowned scholar of democratic institutions, and a two-time winner of the George H. Hallet Award, given annually by the Representation and Electoral Systems Section of the American Political Science Association for a book that has made a lasting contribution to the field.Matthew E. Bergman has lectured on the topics of comparative and international political economy, comparative European politics, quantitative methodologies, research design, public policy analysis, and legal reasoning. He was the founding director of the Krinsk-Houston Law & Politics Initiative at the University of California, San Diego, and is currently a post-doctoral researcher hosted at the University of Vienna.Cory L. Struthers is an Assistant Professor in the Department of Public Administration and Policy. Her research concerns how political institutions and rules shape the incentives and decisions of elected officials and bureaucrats, with a special focus on the politics of climate change and the environment in American and comparative contexts. Her work has been published in Political Science Research Methods, Research & Politics, Climate and Development, and the Journalof Forestry.Ellis S. Krauss is a Professor Emeritus at the School of Global Policy and Strategy, University of California, San Diego. He has published nine authored or edited books and over 70 articles on postwar Japanese politics, comparative politics, and on U.S.-Japan relations in political science and Asian studies journals. He was awarded the Order of the Rising Sun, 3rd Class with Gold Leaves and Neck Ribbon, from the Emperor and government of Japan for professional accomplishments.Robert J. Pekkanen is Professor at the Henry M. Jackson School of International Studies at the University of Washington. He has published articles in journals such as The American Political Science Review, The British Journal of Political Science, and Comparative Political Studies. He has published ten books on electoral systems, American nonprofit advocacy, Japanese civil society, and Japanese elections and political parties.