Making Punches Count

The Individual Logic of Legislative Brawls

Nathan F. Batto, Emily Beaulieu (Autoren)

Buch | Softcover

224 Seiten

2024
Oxford University Press Inc (Verlag)
978-0-19-774443-7 (ISBN)

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In Making Punches Count, the first comprehensive account of legislative floor violence and its consequences, Nathan Batto and Emily Beaulieu focus on recent episodes from a wide variety of countries, including Turkey, South Korea, Taiwan, Ukraine, Mexico, Uganda, and others. What do cultures of legislative brawling tell us about the health of democracy in a given country? Are the brawls mere fits of passion, or is there a deeper logic at work? Bacchus and Batto argue that legislative brawls are, in fact, calculated acts that serve the interests of the legislators who engage in them. Beginning from the incentives driving lawmakers in different party systems and drawing on both signaling theory and theories of contentious politics, they develop a powerful explanation of why individual legislators choose to brawl. As they show, brawls are more common in younger democracies, particularly ones with high levels of corruption, but sometimes there are contextual factors that make violence an attractive strategy even to legislators in long-established democracies.

Ultimately, brawls should be seen as calculated acts of political violence initiated by legislators to advance their careers. Legislators can strategically use brawling to send costly signals to the actors--both opponents and allies--who will have the most influence over their political fortunes. A genuinely novel account of why conflict can reach such extreme levels in democracies, the book also sheds light on the structural mechanisms that drive politicians to violence in settings where we least expect it.

Nathan F. Batto is Associate Research Fellow at the Institute of Political Science, Academia Sinica, and he holds a joint appointment at the Election Study Center, National Chengchi University. He previously taught at the University of the Pacific. He has published widely on electoral and legislative politics in Taiwan. Emily Beaulieu is Professor of Political Science at the University of Kentucky. She received her PhD from the University of California, San Diego and has published books and articles on democracy and contentious politics.

Acknowledgments

Chapter 1: Introduction

Chapter 2: Brawls in Taiwan, Ukraine, and Around the World

Chapter 3: An Individual Theory of Parliamentary Brawls

Chapter 4: Who Brawls
Appendix 4.1: Legislative Behavior Coding for video coverage
of Taiwan's legislative Yuan

Chapter 5: Media and Signal Transmission
Appendix 5.1: Media coverage of Brawling in Taiwan-
Data Collection and analysis
Appendix 5.2: Media coverage of Brawling in Ukraine-
Data Collection and analysis

Chapter 6: The Audience for Brawls

Chapter 7: Brawling and Re-election

Chapter 8: Conclusions

Erscheinungsdatum	12.05.2024
Verlagsort	New York
Sprache	englisch
Maße	160 x 239 mm
Gewicht	318 g
Themenwelt	Sozialwissenschaften ► Politik / Verwaltung ► Vergleichende Politikwissenschaften
Themenwelt	Sozialwissenschaften ► Soziologie
ISBN-10	0-19-774443-5 / 0197744435
ISBN-13	978-0-19-774443-7 / 9780197744437
Zustand	Neuware