Conflict among legislators has been an ever-present component of the legislative process in the U.S. Congress. However, most political scientists have treated all dissension within the legislature as the result of partisan disagreement over various policy options. I propose in this thesis that a second dimension of conflict exists within Congress, one caused by personal rivalries unrelated to the discussion of issues. This category, which I have termed "personality conflict," or "incivility," can take the form of actions between legislators such as name-calling and fist-fights. In my research, I have created a measure of these incivilities and studied the movement in the levels of personality conflict within Congress from 1851 through 2004. In addition, I compare these trends to a conventional measure of party polarization or partisan conflict. The analysis suggests that the two types of conflict are distinct, but also that levels of one type of congressional conflict can have important effects on the absolute level of the other.

This dissertation builds on existing scholarship in political science and political sociology to explore the influence of interest groups in legislative action networks. The primary theoretical insight is that as the number of interest group affiliations between two members of Congress increases, so does the frequency with which they forge other sorts of social ties necessary to advance the interests of their interest group constituencies. In particular, the analysis looks at interest group donation strategies, legislative co-sponsorships, and roll-call votes during the 111th Congress (2009-2010). The analysis uses social network analysis methods to create network models of 19 different policy domains, as well as an aggregate model, for both the House and Senate. Legislator ideology, state, committee assignments, and experience have a generally significant impact on the number of interest group affiliations shared by each pair of legislators, whereas gender, race/ethnicity, office location and occupational history do not. The results show that interest groups do have consistent impact over co-sponsorships in the House, but somewhat more mixed influence in the Senate. In some instances, groups in the policy domain encourage policy change, and in other instances, status quo protection. The theory did not anticipate the latter effect, though it does make sense in context of other research findings. For roll-call votes, interest groups have a significant influence over some House policy domains but not many Senate policy domains. The increased polarization of the Senate, necessity of minority party discipline to maximize their leverage through use of the filibuster, and staggered nature of Senate elections makes interest group influence tougher to muster in the upper chamber of Congress.

This thesis presents a new approach to the long-standing question of how electoral rules influence the behaviour of legislators. It begins with the argument that fresh empirical advances can be made by moving beyond the pervasive but rigid assumption that all legislators want to be re-elected and, by extension, that every incumbent values this goal to the same degree. Rather, I propose that individual Members of Parliament (MPs) vary in the extent to which they personally desire or depend upon re-election. Following the principles of a difference-in-differences design, this observation allows me to devise a theoretical framework capable of testing whether MPs' vote-seeking behaviour differs within parliaments in a way that varies predictably across countries. Specifically, I propose that in electoral systems where party-centric behaviour increases re-election chances, MPs particularly invested in the goal of re-election should cater to the party to an even greater extent than their colleagues. Conversely, in systems where a personal vote can generate electoral gains, MPs most ambitious for re-election should engage in this type of vote-winning strategy to the greatest extent. I test this prediction across the UK House of Commons and the German Bundestag, and within Germany's mixed-member system. Newly-collected biographical data on over 1700 MPs is used to conduct the first systematic MP-level operationalisation of re-election ambition based on legislators' career backgrounds. Career politicians are thereby identified as those most ambitious for re-election. Using voting behaviour from 1.8 million vote choices in legislative roll-calls as a proxy for the degree to which an MP caters to the party or to his or her personal reputation, the quantitative multilevel analysis reveals strong evidence for the proposed behavioural pattern. The contribution made by this study is two-fold. First, it uncovers the interaction between electoral rules and individual re-election ambition as a new explanation for MP-level variation in legislative behaviour. Second, its research design overcomes shortcomings in previous empirical tests for the existing theory on how electoral rules impact MP behaviour (e.g. Carey and Shugart 1995), producing more robust evidence in support of this influential framework.

Cette thèse propose une analyse de l'incapacité du gouvernement des Etats-Unis à modifier en profondeur sa politique d'immigration. Elle montre que son principal facteur explicatif est institutionnel : la résilience du régime d'immigration, entendu comme mode de régulation de l'admission d'immigrants, s'explique par sa capacité à s'appuyer sur une structuration de l'économie politique de l'immigration favorable au blocage des réformes. Pour démontrer cette proposition, notre étude est donc articulée en deux blocs : les facteurs engendrant une crise du régime, et ceux permettant son statu quo. Dans un premier temps, les facteurs structurels et conjoncturels de la crise du régime sont étudiés. Une analyse empirique de la régulation de l'immigration met en évidence ses deux dysfonctionnements structurels : d'une part un déséquilibre croissant entre le nombre de candidats à l'immigration et l'offre de visas et, d'autre part, la formation d'un stock de résidents en situation irrégulière. Néanmoins, l'analyse des représentations de la population américaine concernant cette régulation démontre que la volonté de réformer les conditions d'admission de l'immigration relève aussi de facteurs subjectifs. Une conjoncture économique dégradée intensifie la perception d'une crise du régime, et la préférence pour sa fermeture. Dans un second temps, les facteurs explicatifs de l'absence de fermeture du régime sont analysés. La validité de deux hypothèses explicatives de sa résilience est démontrée par une analyse des épisodes de réforme de 1994 à 2010. En premier lieu, la mise en œuvre politique d'une réforme donne la primauté aux préférences des groupes d'intérêts organisés (communautés immigrées, employeurs, syndicats, nativistes) par rapport à celles de l'opinion publique. En second lieu, les préférences antagonistes de ces groupes d'intérêts les rendent incapables de coopérer : malgré sa non-optimalité, le régime d'immigration correspond donc à une issue stable des négociations législatives, car il limite les pertes de l'ensemble des acteurs en présence. / This PhD dissertation deals with the inability of the United States government to adopt an overhaul of its immigration policy. We show that the main factor accounting for this situation is institutional: the structure of the political economy of immigration explains why reforms attempts fail, and therefore helps to stabilize the regulation of immigrant admissions in the United States. To demonstrate this proposal, we firstly review the roots of the immigration crisis and then analyze why it is not overcome. The immigration crisis in the United States is produced by a set of trends. Some of them are structural. As a fact, the immigration system in the United States is deeply dysfunctional for two reasons. It is firstly very inefficient at properly organizing legal immigration by balancing an increasing demand for immigration visas with an offer bound through quotas. It is secondly unable to dissuade the settlement of a growing undocumented immigrant population. Still, the perception of this immigration crisis and the demand for reform are linked to cyclical factors. Nativist demands for a tightening of immigration legislation are notably greater during times of economic recession. We then explain the absence of immigration restriction in the United States through the demonstration of two complementary factors. Firstly, the political process through which immigration reform is defined give more influence to organized interest groups (such as immigrant communities, employers, unions and nativists) than to public opinion. Secondly, these groups are unable to cooperate for an immigration reform compromise, due to their competing preferences. In another words, the current statu quo prevailing in immigration reform may be suboptimal in terms of regulation of immigrant admissions. It is nevertheless stable, because it allows losses which would inevitably result from a successful immigration reform.

Orientador: Carlos Lenz César / Dissertação (mestrado) - Universidade Estadual de Campinas, Instituto de Física Gleb Wataghin / Made available in DSpace on 2018-09-01T14:53:04Z (GMT). No. of bitstreams: 1 Camacho_LudwingFerneyMarenco_M.pdf: 18964058 bytes, checksum: fa65aaa210a9f9f4dbd93261b64da143 (MD5) Previous issue date: 2017 / Resumo: Apresenta-se um novo método efetivo para analisar um sistema de Deputados usando o formalismo da teoria de redes. Construiu-se uma matriz com os resultados anuais da votação nominal da Câmara dos Deputados do Brasil desde 2007 até 2015. Através da medida do coeficiente de correlação entre os conjuntos anuais de votação nominal, calculou-se uma rede de Deputados. Encontrando a Árvore Geradora Mínima da rede de Deputados características generais do sistema podem visualiza-se. Especificamente, expõe-se a postura de concordância - oposição, as conexões individuais entre os Deputados, a fidelidade partidária e uma nova maneira de observar os projetos de lei aprovados ou rejeitados, assim como sua evolução no tempo. Devido ao bom comportamento de correlação observado entre os Deputados, prova-se que cinco ou seis partidos políticos são suficientes para capturar toda a diversidade política existente na Câmara dos Deputados do Brasil. Além disso, propõe-se que a distribuição de probabilidade dos valores de correlação da Câmara dos Deputados do Brasil é uma combinação de distribuições logísticas. Enuncia-se também, um novo método de ordenar matrizes de correlação baseado no resultado da Árvore Geradora Mínima / Abstract: A new effective method for analysing a Representatives¿ system from the network formalism is presented. A matrix with the annual results of roll - call vote of the Brazilian House of Representatives from 2007 to 2015 was constructed. By measuring the correlation coefficient between each pair of annual roll - call vote sets a Representatives¿ network was computed. For extracting the Minimal Spanning Tree of the Representatives' network general features of this system arises. Specifically, the concordance - opposition stance, the individual connections among Representatives, the partisan fidelity and a new way to identify the approved and disapproved draft bills, as well as, its time evolution are disclosed. A well-define correlation behaviour among Representatives is observed, in fact, we prove that five or six political parties are sufficient to encapsulate all political diversity in the Brazilian House of Representatives. In addition, we propose that the probability distribution of correlation values in the Brazilian House of Representatives is a combination of logistic distributions. Besides that, a new method for re-ordering correlation matrices based on the result of the Minimal Spanning Tree is enunciated / Mestrado / Física / Mestre em Física / 1490097/2015 / CAPES

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Following the historic election of Barack Obama, the largest overhaul of the nation's health care system since the Great Society, and with the country still reeling from the worst economic downturn since the Great Depression, a group of disenchanted conservative Republicans and elected leaders wary of government policy gave rise to a new political movement - the Tea Party. Since taking the American political system by storm in 2010, considerable research has focused on the electoral consequences of the Tea Party. Using an original dataset and the American National Election Study, I study the Tea Party Caucus at the elite level by analyzing roll call votes, incumbency, and endorsements, and at the mass level through an examination of congressional districts and constituencies. Findings show that members of the Tea Party Caucus and their Republican House colleagues are largely homogeneous. Exceptions to this include economic final passage votes, legislation receiving presidential support, district lean, census region, and presidential vote in congressional districts. Furthermore, evidence is seen that economic factors in members' districts affected the election of freshmen representatives in 2010, and that district variables strongly influence legislative voting behavior. Finally, discontinuity is discovered between the Tea Party movement at the mass level and the Tea Party Caucus at the elite level.