Field:
    Comparative Politics

Dissertation Title:
    Serving Multiple Masters: Candidate Selection, Electoral Rules, and Legislative Voting Behavior

Committee:
    Kathleen Bawn (Chair), Michael Thies, John Zaller, Miriam Golden, and John Agnew

Date of Completion: June 2010

Contact Information:
    Jessica Robinson Preece
    UCLA Political Science Department
    4289 Bunche Hall
    Los Angeles, California 90095-1472
    Phone: 781-264-3670
    Fax: 310-825-0778

 Curriculum Vitae:
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Dissertation Summary:
    Political parties play a crucial role in the democratic accountability process. However, the nature of this role varies widely, with parties serving as disciplined teams of partisan politicians in some cases and as loose affiliations of personal vote-seeking politicians in other cases. Leading explanations for this variation credit electoral rules with creating the incentives that encourage these divergent outcomes. However, I assert that the degree of central party control over candidate selection procedures is a neglected but important contributor to the incentives for legislative party cohesion and that candidate selection incentives can interact with electoral rules in surprising ways.

    I examine this claim in three empirical chapters that leverage the pseudo-natural experiment properties of mixed member electoral system countries. The first chapter is a cross-national meta-analysis of legislative voting in eight mixed member electoral system countries. It finds that the degree of central party control over candidate selection procedures predicts the degree of legislative party cohesion more accurately than electoral mandate. The second chapter analyzes roll call votes, election returns, campaign spending data, and media purchases surrounding the 2004 parliamentary election in Lithuania. It finds that the degree to which politicians engage in personal vote-seeking behaviors is negatively correlated with the degree of central party control over nominations. The final chapter follows the careers of members of the Italian Chamber of Deputies between 1994 and 2001 and finds that politicians who defected from the party line were punished by lower rankings on the party list and/or banishment to a less-safe district seat. These three studies provide evidence that the study of nominations ought to be integrated into the larger literature on the incentives created by political institutions.

Research Interests:
    Candidate selection and nominations, internal party politics, electoral incentives, democratic accountability, network analysis

Teaching Interests:
    Comparative political parties, comparative political institutions, electoral systems and political accountability, writing in political science