Seminar: Competing and Competitive Legislatures and the Policy-Opinion Link - (opens in a new window)Miriam Sorace (University of Kent)

14:00-15:00 (IST) Wednesday, September 23.

Please register for this event (opens in a new window)here.

Abstract: Are public policies closer to public opinion when directly elected, independent legislatures are included in the decision-making process? The study exploits the European Union as a case, to examine whether the empowerment of the European Parliament decreased the incongruence of EU policies to European public opinion. Using a difference-in-differences approach and crowd-sourced ideological scaling of EU social and employment policies, the study aims to causally identify the impact of competitive and competing legislative branches on the nature of policy representation. The study finds that the inclusion of the European Parliament as a co-legislator has indeed reduced the distance of EU public policy to European public opinion. Competing and electorally competitive legislative chambers have indeed the potential to solve democratic deficits.

About the speaker: Miriam Sorace is a Lecturer in Quantitative Politics at the University of Kent and a Visiting Fellow at the LSE. She studies political representation and public opinion, and has an interest on gender, democratic attitudes, European Union politics and text analysis.