editor's introduction

Editor's IntroductionAuthor(s): Malcolm E. JewellSource: Legislative Studies Quarterly, Vol. 1, No. 1 (Feb., 1976), pp. 1-9Published by: Comparative Legislative Research CenterStable URL: http://www.jstor.org/stable/439625 .

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MALCOLM E. JEWELL University of Kentucky

Editor's Introduction

The Status of Legislative Research

It may be useful, as we launch a journal on legislative studies, to make a few comments about the status of research on legislatures and some sugges- tions about areas and methods of research that deserve particular attention.

It has become commonplace among critics of legislative studies to argue that we need to pay more attention to the development of theory. I agree with this assessment. The question is: why are we suffering from theoretical deficiencies, and how can we overcome them? It is difficult to develop theories about legislative institutions by examining only one such insti- tution at one point in time. It seems obvious that we need more comparative analysis, that the same hypotheses need to be tested, using the same research methods, in several settings. In the United States the study of Congress and the study of state legislatures remain, with few exceptions, distinct speciali- ties that attract separate groups of scholars. Seldom do members of either group pay much attention to the hypotheses developed by the other, or attempt to make comparisons between the two types of American legislative bodies. Moreover, a large proportion of research projects at the state level deal with a single legislature, though they often test hypotheses developed in other states. Too many students of U.S. state legislatures have close familiari- ty with and expert knowledge about only a single legislature. The same problem applies to students of legislatures outside the United States. The research focus is thus bound by both time and space.

In recent years we have learned much about the U.S. Congress. Scholars have progressed from fascination with more sophisticated techniques of roll call measurement to more sensitive analyses of what these voting patterns mean. They have begun to combine roll call and interview data, with considerable success. We have learned more about the decline of party cohesion on certain types of issues, identified the limited number of issues on which congressmen are responsive to constituents, and gained a clearer picture of how members take voting cues on many other issues from members

LEGISLATIVE STUDIES QUARTERLY, I, 1, February 1976 1



Malcolm E. Jewell

and groups in Congress. There have been a number of excellent studies of congressional subgroups, such as committees and party delegations. There has been a proliferation of theories about the decision-making process in Con- gress, though apparently no consensus about which theory is most useful and closest to reality. Some aspects of Congress remain relatively obscure: the budgetary process, committee oversight of administrative relations, the role of staff, and interactions between lobbyists and congressmen, to name just a few.

The growing wealth of information and analysis about the U.S. Congress has not been matched by comparable studies of U.S. state legislatures. In most states, we lack even basic information about the operation of legislative structures such as caucuses and committees. While studies of congressional leadership are handicapped by the small number of individuals who have held such posts in recent years, there have been no efforts to study systematically the large number of leaders found in the ninety-nine state legislative bodies. The increasing pace of reform at both the national and state levels suggests the need to study the consequences of such reform, a task that presents methodological difficulties but offers both theoretical and practical payoffs. The changing patterns of partisanship at the state level offer another opportunity for comparative studies that needs to be exploited before non- partisan and one-party legislatures disappear from the scene. In recent years comparative state legislative research has been dominated by statistical studies of legislative outputs and the variables affecting them. It is time to find a middle ground between narrow studies of a few variables in a single legislature and efforts to reduce the legislative process in fifty states to a handful of correlation coefficients or a few simple models.

During the last ten or fifteen years some excellent studies, using modern techniques of analysis, have been published about the national legislative bodies in many other western countries. Particular attention has been paid to the background and recruitment of legislators (often with historical data), elections, cabinet making and coalition formation, the operation of legislative parties, and the roles of members. These studies about individual legislatures provide the basis for comparative analysis but such comparisons have seldom been undertaken. Comparative research is particularly timely because of a number of trends that are common to most western nations. One such trend is a decline in the cohesion and ideological distinctiveness of political parties, in Europe as well as the United States. In some western parliaments there is evidence that members are playing an increasingly important role in mediating between citizens and the bureaucracy. Research is needed to determine how extensive these trends are and what effects they are having on legislative systems. In some western parliaments, such as Canada

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and Britain, structural changes are occurring that enhance the activity and perhaps the power of the once obscure committees and that improve the staff facilities available to the individual representative.

For a long time, legislative institutions were ignored by most students of the developing, nonwestern nations. The revival of interest in and research about nonwestern legislatures has had several significant results. There is increasing recognition that legislatures may serve a number of functions in addition to that of policy-making, which is of limited importance in most nonwestern legislatures. One of the functions that has attracted increasing attention, and which appears to be widespread, is that of serving constituent needs and mediating between constituents and bureaucrats. Research suggests that most legislators consider this to be an important role, in part because they recognize that constituents demand such service. Studies of nonwestern legislatures have shed some light on the factors that lead to the creation of legislatures and those that erode their power or threaten their exis- tence. There have been efforts to explore the process by which legislatures become institutionalized and to examine their relationships to other political institutions. Some effort has been devoted to the difficult problem of measuring public support for legislatures and the connection between such support and legislative stability.

The research of the last few years has overcome both basic ignorance and a number of misconceptions about nonwestern legislatures. A number of case studies have had some cumulative effect. But there has not been much integration of the findings from a variety of countries, and the field of comparative legislative research, particularly regarding nonwestern legislatures, has been vulnerable to criticisms about theoretical weaknesses. The factual base for theory development is still very weak. The instability of legislatures in some nonwestern countries has handicapped research.

The initial findings about nonwestern legislatures are suggestive of some directions that further research and theory-building should take. Where the direct policy-making role of legislatures is minimal, we need to learn whether legislators have a more indirect, subtle influence on some policies. More use should be made of documentary data to determine the content and estimate the consequences of institutional devices such as debate and the question period. Now that the widespread importance of the legislators' service role has been recognized, we need much more specific information about what legislators actually do for constituents, how successful they are and why, and what are the consequences of these activities. This may often require gathering of data at the local level and not just in the national capital. In countries where the stability of the legislature cannot be assumed, it be- comes important to learn more about the relationships between legislatures and other political institutions. We need more data and more conceptual

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Malcolm E. Jewell

clarity regarding institutionalization: the specific steps or stages by which a legislature acquires institutional strength, autonomy, and stability. And what are the symptoms of institutional erosion? If we are to discover what effect public support has on the stability of legislatures and other political institutions, we need to solve some difficult problems of conceptual clarification and of measurement.

Anyone interested in comparative research recognizes that there are serious methodological problems involved. Those who have become interested in nonwestern legislatures are particularly aware of the pitfalls in trying to utilize concepts, definitions and techniques developed in the study of western and particularly American legislatures. But many research questions and problems in this field know no national boundaries. Roles may be defined differ- ently from one legislature to another, for example, but questions about roles and the informal norms governing legislative behavior are important in all settings. As another example, it has proven interesting to replicate research on the levels of public support for the Iowa legislature in other American states and in non-American settings, despite the methodological problems involved. Also, scholars have found many similarities in the techniques used by legislators to learn about their constituents' needs in countries as diverse as Malaysia, Kenya, Britain, and the United States. The problems of minority representation in India and Malaysia have much in common with those in American state and local legislatures.

The principal purpose of establishing a journal of legislative studies is to make legislative scholars more sensitive to the need for comparative analysis and more aware of research being done in countries unfamiliar to them--research that may pose hypotheses and provide insights that are pertinent to their own research.

The Objectives of a Journal on Legislative Research

We believe that the discipline of political science is ready for the kind of journal specialization that is found in other academic fields. In fact, a number of specialized political science journals have appeared in recent years. At the present time, scholarly work in the legislative field is scattered over a variety of general journals, several of which often have large backlogs. We believe that the amount of research being done in the legislative field, and the number of scholars interested in that field, make it appropriate to establish a journal of legislative studies. This will enable specialists in the field to publish their research findings in a journal that will be read by others who are particularly interested in legislatures.

For the purposes of this journal, we define the field of legislative studies in very broad terms. It includes representative assemblies, parliaments,

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legislatures at both the national and subnational level. It includes the American Congress and state legislatures, and legislative bodies in both the western and nonwestern world. There are no geographic or temporal limits on the field. Obviously many of those engaged in research and teaching about legislatures concentrate their interest and attention on certain countries. Even within the United States there are distinctions between those specializing in Congress and in state legislatures. But we believe that the legislative field, like others within political science, should be developed without geographic constraints. The findings of research in one country related to representation, decision- making, and the effects of structure on outputs, for example, must ultimately be tested by findings in other countries. Scholars specializing on the legislature of a single country can gain insights and develop new hypotheses from the research done elsewhere. In this sense all of us are, or should be, compara- tivists. We expect the authors of articles in this journal to be sensitive to the comparative implications of their findings. We are particularly interested in publishing articles on topics that are pertinent to more than a single legislature.

During the last decade there has been a growing interest in the study of legislative institutions outside the United States, and particularly in the nonwestern world, and the field of comparative legislative studies has begun to take shape. A series of conferences has been held, leading to several volumes of comparative legislative research. The Consortium for Comparative Legislative Studies, which has sponsored several of these conferences, has also developed a publication program, including a series of research papers published by Sage Publications and now including a series of volumes being published by Duke University Press.

The Comparative Legislative Research Center at the University of Iowa, a member of the Consortium, has recently been engaged in comparative legislative studies in both western and nonwestern countries, and for a number of years Iowa has been a center for research of the U.S. Congress and state legislatures. The decision to launch a journal of legislative studies was reached by the members of the Center during the spring of 1975, while I was spending a sab- batical year there. We decided that there was a need to bring together in one place the products of cross-national, non-American legislative research and research being done on the U.S. Congress and state legislatures. A journal appeared to be the best vehicle for the prompt and economical publication and the wide distribution of manuscripts, including some of the papers presented at conferences and panels. We decided that approximately one issue of the four published annually should be devoted to a single theme, providing an outlet for revised papers initially given at conferences on legislative topics.

The scope of this journal is broad, not only geographically but substantively. The list of topics that follows is intended to be suggestive

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Malcolm E. Jewell

and not comprehensive: --legislative elections and the recruitment process, the effect of electoral

structures on the selection process; --legislative careers and the characteristics of members; --the representative process and all aspects of legislator-constituent relations; --roles and norms of legislators and others in the legislative system; --the internal structure of the legislature, including parties, committees, leadership, rules and procedures;

--legislative decision-making, including studies of voting, coalition formation, and bargaining;

--all aspects of legislative-executive relations, and in parliamentary systems front bench-back bench relations;

--the relationships between the legislature and other political institutions, including party organizations, the bureaucracy, and the military;

--analyses of proposals for legislative reform, and their consequences; --analyses of policy outputs of legislative bodies, including laws, and appro-

priations, as well as the consequences of legislative oversight; --the effect of the legislature on political, social, and economic development in both "modern" and"developing" countries;

--studies of public support for legislative institutions, and the effect of the legislature on public support of political institutions in general;

--studies of factors leading to the creation, modification, and abolition of legislative institutions.

The Legislative Studies Quarterly will include various types of articles. We hope that most of the articles in the journal will be reports of empirical research, using techniques of analysis that are appropriate for the subject matter. Purely descriptive articles may be published if they supply information on legislatures about which little is known. Basically, however, we are looking for manuscripts that will contribute to the building of theories about legislative systems, processes, and behavior. However narrow the scope of the article and its data base, it should shed some light on questions of general interest to scholars studying other legislatures.

This is not primarily a journal of legislative methodology or quantita- tive techniques. Our primary goal is not to discover a dozen more techniques for roll call analysis, all of them more sophisticated than anything now in use. Nevertheless, we recognize that there is a legitimate place in this journal for articles that are primarily methodological, that will contribute significantly to the research efforts of other scholars.

We are also interested in the publication of "think pieces"--critiques of the research being done and of theories being advanced in some aspect of the field of legislative studies. My experience in reviewing such manuscripts for other journals suggests that it is difficult to write critiques that are both

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concise enough and innovative enough to justify publication. But we are very interested in attracting such manuscripts because we believe that there is a pressing need for thoughtful and imaginative criticism of the work being done in the field.

We will not run book reviews, as such, but we are interested in review essays dealing with recent books and articles in a particular field. (Scholars interested in preparing a review essay should consult the editor first.) We want the Quarterly to be a vehicle for communication among legislative scholars. Consequently we welcome, and may on occasion solicit, not only critiques of the literature but also critiques of articles appearing in the Quarterly. At the same time, we want to avoid turning this journal into an arena for personal clashes designed to enhance or reduce professional reputa- tions.

A word of advice to those who submit manuscripts: brevity. Most articles submitted to political science journals can be made more concise without serious loss, and tabular material can often be presented more briefly. The larger the number and the greater the variety of good articles this journal carries, the better it will have served its purposes. We strive for briefer presentation of research findings so that more articles may be printed. A word of encouragement to those submitting manuscripts: promptness. We will try to avoid delays in the evaluation of manuscripts, and, at least for the time being, we are free from the delays inherent in large backlogs of manuscripts.

For the last three years the Consortium for Comparative Legislative Studies has published a Newsletter, which has been edited by Michael L. Mezey at the University of Hawaii. This Newsletter will appear as a regular feature of the Legislative Studies Quarterly. Information for inclusion in the Newsletter should be sent directly to Professor Mezey. The Newsletter contains a number of features of interest to legislative scholars: reports on research in progress; summaries of papers presented at conferences; abstracts of articles appearing in journals; notices of forthcoming conferences and lists of papers presented at conferences. The purpose of including the Newsletter as a feature of the Legislative Studies Quarterly is to provide further distribution for this vehicle of communication that has already proved to be very helpful for scholars throughout the world who are interested in legislative studies.

Articles in This Issue

The articles in this first issue of the Legislative Studies Quarterly provide good illustrations of the range of questions that interest legislative scholars today.

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Malcolm E. Jewell

One of the major obstacles to comparative analysis is the ambiguity of terms and concepts employed in legislative studies. Anthony King's article, "Modes of Executive-Legislative Relations," seeks to clarify the meaning of executive-legislative relations in parliamentary systems. He suggests that it is important to focus attention on front bench-back bench relations within parties and on relations between parties in parliament. He shows how these relationships differ among Great Britain, France, and West Germany. The article not only succeeds in eliminating ambiguities but also calls attention to areas of study and comparison that have been neglected.

"Adaption and Integration: Structural Innovation in the House of Representatives" deals with one of the most important and difficult topics in the legislative field: how change occurs in legislative bodies. Roger Davidson and Walter Oleszek suggest that there are two primary modes of institutional change, one arising from stresses in the external environment and one from stresses in internal dynamics. Recent changes in the U.S. Congress, particularly the House of Representatives, provide political scientists with excellent opportunities to study the causes, tactics, and consequences of change. The authors utilize one aspect of these reforms--the partially successful proposals for committee reform--to illustrate their theses about why some reforms succeed and others fail.

The concept of role has been widely used in legislative research, providing us with a variety of insights into legislative behavior in a number of countries. The article on "The French Deputy and the Political System," by Cayrol, Parodi, and Ysmal (translated and reprinted from the Revue Francaise de Science Politique) deals with several dimensions of role that have been most frequently studied in other countries. The study shows that the deputies' views of their responsibilities toward party and constituency differ considerably from one party to another. It suggests that party cohesion is relatively fragile, except among Communist deputies. It would be useful to compare partisan roles of legislators from a number of European parliaments. The authors are also particularly interested in measuring the extent to which deputies have accepted both the parliamentary and the party systems of the Fifth Republic.

Michael Mezey's article on "Constituency Demands and Legislative Support" brings together two of the topics (given in the title) that have generated great interest among legislative students recently, topics that until now have been examined separately. He analyzes the demands made on legislatures and suggests that these are greater when citizens perceive the legislature to be relatively capable and accessible (compared to other institutions). He concludes that, at least in developing countries, support for the legislature may be closely related to the perceived ability of individual legislators to satisfy constituent demands. The article provides new measures of support

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and demonstrates the need for clarifying the concept of support. The data for testing the hypotheses comes from a small sample of Asian students.

Manuscripts Accepted for Future Publication

Chan Heng Chee, "The Role of Parliamentary Politicians in Singapore" Giuseppe Di Palma, "Institutional Rules and Legislative Outcomes in the

Italian Parliament" Ronald D. Hedlund and Keith E. Hamm, "Conflict and Perceived Group

Benefits from Legislative Rules Changes" Rounaq Jahan, "Members of Parliament in Bangladesh" Chong Lim Kim and Gerhard Loewenberg, "The Cultural Roots of a New

Legislature: Public Perceptions of the Korean National Assembly" M. C. Kumbhat and Y. M. Marican, "Constituent Orientation among Ma-

laysian State Legislators" Shriram Maheshwari, "Constituency Linkages of National Legislators in

India" M. K. Mohapatra, "Ombudsmanic Role of Legislators in an Indian State" W. H. Morris-Jones, "The Parliamentary Politician in Asia" Michael H. C. Ong, "The Member of Parliament and His Constituency: The

Malaysian Case"

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editor's introduction

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