Legislative Process and the Mirroring Principle

Mathew D. McCubbins
Additional contact information
Mathew D. McCubbins: University of California

Chapter 6 in Handbook of New Institutional Economics, 2008, pp 123-147 from Springer

Abstract: At the center of all democratic governments are legislatures. In all legislatures, members compete for access to a variety of valuable resources, such as floor time and committee or cabinet positions. The internal distribution of these resources fundamentally shapes the legislative process, and by extension, determines which individuals or coalitions can influence legislative outcomes. In this paper, I argue that, within a given legislature, the distribution of legislative influence tends to mirror the external checks and balances in the polity as a whole. In other words, as Lijphart (1984) has argued, just as polities with little separation of purpose (i.e., with limited diversity of interests and factions) tend to have more unitary governmental institutions than do polities with greater separation of purpose (which tend toward institutions that create separation of powers), so too will internal legislative institutions reflect the separations of purpose and power within a polity. This law of organization is referred to as the mirroring principle.

Keywords: Liberal Democratic Party; American Political Science Review; Veto Player; Majority Party; Legislative Process (search for similar items in EconPapers)
Date: 2008
References: Add references at CitEc
Citations:

There are no downloads for this item, see the EconPapers FAQ for hints about obtaining it.

Related works:
This item may be available elsewhere in EconPapers: Search for items with the same title.

Export reference: BibTeX RIS (EndNote, ProCite, RefMan) HTML/Text

Persistent link: https://EconPapers.repec.org/RePEc:spr:sprchp:978-3-540-69305-5_7

Ordering information: This item can be ordered from
http://www.springer.com/9783540693055

DOI: 10.1007/978-3-540-69305-5_7

Access Statistics for this chapter

More chapters in Springer Books from Springer
Bibliographic data for series maintained by Sonal Shukla () and Springer Nature Abstracting and Indexing ().