13:15 - 15:30
Thursday-Panel
Chair/s:
Sebastian Koehler
Discussant/s:
Despina Alexiadou
Meeting Room A

Jens Olav Dahlgaard, Nicolai Kristensen, Frederik Kjøller Larsen
Reward or Punishment? Estimating the Distribution of Long-Run Returns to Political Office

Frederik Kjøller Larsen
Returns to office among political amateurs

Jens Wäckerle, Bruno Castanho Silva, Danielle Pullan
Who Sits Where? The Parliamentary Power Index and Committee Membership in 19 Countries

Adam Scharpf, Christian Glaessel
Who Participates in Military Coups? Evidence from Argentina

 
Who Sits Where? The Parliamentary Power Index and Committee Membership in 19 Countries
Jens Wäckerle 1, Bruno Castanho Silva 1, Danielle Pullan 1, 2
1 Cologne Center for Comparative, University of Cologne
2 International Max Planck Research School on the Social and Political Constitution of the Economy?, University of Cologne

Recent advances in the availability of parliamentary data across countries, such as speeches or roll-call votes, have led legislative scholars to increase their focus on the attitudes and behavior of individual Members of Parliament (MPs). This allows us to have a better understanding of topics such as (re)selection, rebellion or compliance with the party line, leadership contests, and substantive representation of women. However, due to data restrictions, the distribution of power within parliamentary parties has often been restricted to a leadership-backbench dichotomy. We propose to go significantly beyond this definition. Parliamentary power is defined by both role and policy area: an MP who chairs the Budget and Taxes committee is certainly more prestigious within parliament and party than a backbencher who is member of the Sports committee. This has important implications for MPs' behavior in areas such as party loyalty, representation, and careers. By collecting original data on committee membership for 19 democracies between 1987 and 2020, and using a hierarchy across policy areas, we propose an index that captures the aggregate level of parliamentary power for each member of parliament in relation to their party: the Parliamentary Power Index. We show that this measure is cross-nationally comparable and demonstrate that the PPI is a valid and reliable measure, which correlates with other indicators of prestige. Moreover, by making available the original dataset with individual MPs' committee assignments across nineteen countries for more than three decades, we also provide researchers with an important tool to study legislators' behavior.