Doctoral Dissertation Research: Legislator Attention and Democratic Political Development

University Of California-San Diego, La Jolla CA

Investigators

Abstract

General Summary This project investigates what factors motivate legislators in executive-dominated political systems in Africa to focus their attentions on national rather than local activities. Scholars and policymakers alike argue that legislators working in such executive-dominated political systems have little incentive to participate in national level politics. As a consequence, parliaments often tend to rubber-stamp the policies of the executive. This project challenges the conventional wisdom that views legislators as simply constituency servants. Instead, it seeks to establish that one sees significant variation in legislators' pursuits of national versus local political attention. In particular, this project will analyze these variations in national versus local attention to determine how individual-level incentives affect the types of activities legislators pursue. As such, the work will ultimately shed light on how this impacts the institutional development of democratic legislatures and contributes to our understanding of representation. The research has the potential to challenge the view that legislators are irrelevant by illustrating how individual incentives structure behavior and may also lead to a more effective allocation of the scarce resource to where they can bring about the most good. This project will also contribute a valuable set of data about legislative behavior in an understudied political system. Technical Summary This research project investigates what role, if any, legislators can play in executive-dominated political systems. Additionally, it will also assess the behavioral implications for legislators whose voters possess a strong preference for locally focused resource provision. The combination of these two factors would seem to suggest that legislators lack incentives to engage in policy activities with a national focus. This project hypothesizes that a legislator's electoral security, career ambition, and previous political experience combine to allow them to invest more effort in providing attention to national issues, not just local ones. The project derives a set of hypotheses from theory and models based on the assumption that politicians seek to remain in office, and then assesses the implications that result as the assumption is relaxed in a piecemeal manner. The researcher uses a mixed-methods design to test these hypotheses. In particular, the PI will conduct a series of semi-structured interviews and case studies which will be supplemented with the analysis of an original dataset comprised hundreds of thousands of parliamentary speeches, newspaper articles, and detailed legislator career history.