Curriculum Vitae:
CrispCV6.15.09.pdf
Keywords:
Democratic Institutions, Representation, Legislatures, Executives, Elections, and Latin America
Biographical:
Brian F. Crisp received his Ph.D. in Political Science from the University of Michigan in 1992 and is currently Associate Professor in the Department of Political Science at Washington University in St. Louis. His work on the institutional mechanisms constructed to formalize state-civil society relations and their impact on interbranch relations, patterns of government spending, and development policy choices has been published in The American Journal of Political Science, The American Political Science Review, The British Journal of Political Science, The Journal of Politics, and elsewhere. His book Democratic Institutional Design: The Powers and Incentives of Venezuelan Politicians and Interest Groups was published by Stanford University Press (2000). He is currently completing several projects on democratic institutions and representation.
He is currently co-editor of Legislative Studies Quarterly.
Current Couses:
- 102B: Comparative Politics - syllabus
- 4331: Comparing Electoral Systems - syllabus
Working Papers:
- Potentially Dominant Presidents: The Combination of Decree Authority and a Strong Veto in Theory and Practice
with Kristin Kanthak, Jong Hee Park, and Oleh Protsyk
Several constitutions endow presidents with decree authority – the ability to make law without congressional consent. Presidents with constitutionally allocated decree authority have the ability to simply redefine the policy status quo. On the other hand, after the president chooses a policy by decree, if they are so inclined and capable of collective action, a majority of legislators has the authority to pass countervailing legislation. The existence of a strong veto may give opposition legislators pause even where they are in the majority – but not a supermajority. We develop a formal model of decree usage in presidential systems and then empirically test the implications of that model with data from six separation of power systems from Asia, Europe, and the Americas. We find that presidents are more aggressive and confrontational in their use of decree authority than a simple model of interbranch relations would suggest. The collective action issues confronting partisan blocs and multiparty coalitions in the legislature are apparently too great for legislators to check and balance effectively a president with decree powers.
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- Vote-Seeking Inentives and Investment Environments: Credit Claiming and Protectionism
with Nathan M. Jensen, Guillermo Rosas, and Thomas Zeitzoff
Incentives to cultivate a personal reputation require that legislators generate policy outcomes for which they can claim credit. We show that these incentives can even make themselves felt in international agreements – a domain typically considered to be within the purview of the executive branch. The United States offers a boilerplate bilateral investment treaty to all prospective signatories, but countries with electoral systems that encourage personal vote seeking are more likely to negotiate exceptions to the standard agreement. Legislators benefit by being able to claim credit for having protected their constituents from the competition an unrestricted agreement would entail.
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- Vote Seeking in a Flexible List System: Electoral Incentives and Legislative Politics in Slovakia
with Mike Malecki
Variations in electoral systems alter the incentives legislative candidates face for striking a balance between enhancing their own personal reputations or enhancing the shared reputations of their parties when seeking to further their careers. In a flexible list system, legislative candidates must calculate how many seats their party’s reputation is likely to garner and whether their personal reputation is sufficient to rank them among the group of copartisans elected to parliament. Due to barriers which diminish the prospects of a party’s list being reordered, most existing work assumes that personal reputations and preference votes are unimportant in flexible list systems. We test whether variations in legislators’ vote seeking attributes and activities influence the preference votes they receive when seeking reelection. In terms of attributes, we examine several basic biographical characteristics which may serve to enhance a candidate’s personal reputation, including age, education level, gender, and former occupation. Personal vote seeking actions include voting against the majority of one’s party, initiating private-member bills, and proposing amendments to pieces of legislation. We reason that these actions, not shared with all their copartisans, are opportunities for members of parliament to enhance their own individual reputations. We test our hypotheses with data from Slovakia for the period 2002–2006.
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- Using Cosponsorship to Estimate Ideal Points
with Scott W. Desposato and Matthew Kearney
Ideal point estimates based on roll-call votes have provided leverage for a wide variety of theory testing efforts. However, in many legislatures, roll-call procedures are not used at all or are used on only a biased sample of votes. What is more, they may reflect unmeasured levels of agenda control or other forms of leadership influence. One recently proposed alternative is cosponsorship data. Conceptually similar to roll-call votes, cosponsorship data are appealing for a variety of reasons, including the fact that they are usually more readily available. However, the data generating process for cosponsorship is undertheorized and little-studied. In this paper, we examine the properties of ideal point estimates from cosponsorship data. We find problems with the use of cosponsorship data in all but very exceptional circumstances.
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- Electoral Efficiency and Electoral Reform
with Yael Shomer
Electoral rules are widely recognized as incentive structures influencing the behavior of voters, individual politicians, and political parties. What explains the decision to reform these formal institutions? Shugart has hypothesized that electoral systems which are "extreme" in intraparty and/or interparty terms will be prone to provoke reform. We use a cross-national, time-serial dataset to explore the incidence of electoral reform. We seek to determine whether extremism predicts reform and the extent to which the specific reforms undertaken moderate the system on interparty and intraparty dimensions.
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- Electoral Mandates, Political Institutions, and Policy Change
with Santiago Olivella
We provide simple formal models of the budget-making process as it varies across presidential systems. We use these models to design simulations which produce predictions about where we should expect more or less expenditure and revenue stability – given some level of changing preferences among pivotal politicians. We capture the level of change in politicians preferences with data on electoral volatility, measured at individual, party, and ideological bloc levels. We test our predictions about how mandates are translated by budget-making institutions into budget stability with data from Latin America.
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