Zebranie naukowe Katedry Filozofii Prawa i Nauki o Państwie “Committees, Lotteries and Institutional Reform: Evidence from the Netherlands, 1868-1888”
Katedra Filozofii Prawa i Nauki o Państwie zaprasza
na zebranie naukowe,
które rozpocznie się 18 lutego o godz. 18:00 w sali 15 (Krakowskie Przedmieście 1)
oraz online (link do transmisji spotkania: https://meet.google.com/skg-dnrc-uco)
Gościem będzie prof. Radosław Zubek z Uniwersytetu w Oksfordzie, który wygłosi referat zatytułowany:
“Committees, Lotteries and Institutional Reform: Evidence from the Netherlands, 1868-1888”
Abstrakt:
The decline of political lotteries during early democratization presents an important puzzle in European political development. We address this question by studying the reform of the lottery-based committee appointment in the Dutch Tweede Kamer between 1868 and 1888. Previous accounts have linked the decline of similar procedures in late 19th century Europe to the rise of political parties. The argument we advance emphasizes the need for strengthening the informational role of committees as a key driver for the Dutch reform. We support our argument with evidence from three empirical analyses. First, using an original dataset of committee appointments in the 19th century Tweede Kamer, we show that the lottery-based appointment returned committees that tended to be unrepresentative of the political preferences of the full chamber. Second, based on an analysis of the legislative history of more than 400 government bills, we demonstrate that this lack of representativeness undermined committee specialization during legislative review. Third, in a qualitative analysis of floor speeches on reform proposals, we find that MPs explicitly sought more representative committee appointment as a means to facilitate specialization. Our analysis offers a novel contribution to comparative research on partisan and informational determinants of legislative institutional development.
