Yael Shomer

This study examines whether democratic candidate selection processes—such as primaries and other inclusive nomination methods—encourage higher levels of political engagement among citizens. Drawing on public opinion data from seven Israeli election cycles (1996–2015) and original data on party candidate selection processes, the authors assess how intra-party democratization shapes both electoral and partisan participation, as well as broader forms of political engagement like following campaign news and discussing politics. Contrary to widespread assumptions, the findings reveal that while democratic selection processes are associated with increased political engagement, they do not significantly affect actual voter turnout or participation in party activities. The study suggests that democratizing internal party procedures may enhance citizens’ attentiveness to politics and foster greater political interest, but these reforms alone do not necessarily translate into concrete political behavior. This structural disconnect between engagement and participation highlights the limits of procedural reforms in generating deeper civic involvement. The research contributes to the literature on intra-party democracy by emphasizing the importance of distinguishing between different forms of political involvement and by grounding the analysis in longitudinal data from a dynamic multiparty parliamentary system. 
  

Scholars disagree about the way candidate selection processes affect women’s representation. While some argue that primaries benefit women candidates, other claim the opposite. I test the effect of selection procedures on female representation and find primaries to benefit it. I caution, however, against concluding that democratic selections are beneficial. I argue that party leaders are aware of primaries’ negative effects and they offset them by adopting partisan protective mechanisms. Therefore, controlling for partisan protective mechanisms will unveil the negative effect of primaries on female representation. Using party level data from eight legislative terms of the Israeli Knesset I find support for my hypotheses.   
  

This study investigates how electoral and institutional reforms shape the behavior of legislators in parliamentary systems, using Israel as a case study. Focusing on a series of key institutional changes—including the adoption and later repeal of the direct election law for the prime minister—the paper examines how these reforms influenced legislative activism, party loyalty, and coalition dynamics. Drawing on an original dataset covering all Israeli legislators from 1992 to 2011, the study reveals that reforms intended to strengthen executive authority and voter-party linkages had unintended consequences, including increased legislative fragmentation and reduced party discipline. By analyzing variation in parliamentary behavior over nearly two decades of reform, the article contributes to the broader literature on institutional design and political behavior and accountability. It demonstrates that changes in electoral rules can recalibrate the incentives facing individual legislators, shifting their strategic behavior in ways that may undermine rather than enhance governability. The Israeli case highlights the complexity of institutional engineering in multiparty democracies and underscores the need for careful empirical evaluation of reform outcomes before drawing normative conclusions about their effectiveness.   
  

Roll-call votes are widely employed to infer the ideological proclivities of legislators. However, many roll-call matrices are characterized by high levels of nonresponse. Under many theoretical circumstances and political contexts, nonresponse cannot be assumed to be ignorable. Put it differently legislators “register” non-response (either by actively abstaining or by actively absenting themselves from the vote) strategically. In this innovative paper we examine the consequences of violating the ignorability assumption that underlies current prevalent methods of roll-call analysis. We first motivate our analysis by documenting the prevalence of item nonresponse in legislatures around the world. Second, we originally try to understand and document the severity of assuming strategic roll-call non-responses are ignorable. We then present a basic estimation framework to model nonresponse and vote choice concurrently and we build a model that captures the logic of competing principals that underlies accounts of nonresponse in many legislatures. We show that IRT models that assume random ignorable missingness generate biased inferences about ideal points compared to a model that incorporates assumptions from the competing principals logic. The MCMC simulations further show that this bias increases substantially with the rate of nonresponse. Lastly, we revisit two debates in international relations and American politics concerning abstentions in the United Nations General Assembly during the height of the Cold War, and the question of the “most liberal senator” that has come up in recent U.S. presidential elections. Indeed we show that modeling the process that ostensibly drives abstentions allows us to recover more consensual estimates of the distances that existed between the Soviet Union and some of its satellites and dispels the image of presidential hopefuls in the United States as ideological extremists. The simulations as well as real world data show that modeling presumed patterns of nonignorable nonresponse can yield important inferential payoffs over current models that assume random missingness. We, therefore, encourage scholars to think actively and carefully about potential processes that might generate strategic absences and abstentions in the legislatures they study. Before reaching conclusions about the ideological profiles of legislators, it is important to gauge the sensitivity of different legislator’s ideal points to nonignorable abstention-generating mechanisms deemed relevant in the legislature at hand. 
  

This article seeks to examine empirically what factors account for variation in candidate selection processes. After identifying the key assertions developed in the literature, I use an original cross-national dataset with data on the selection procedures of 512 parties in 46 countries (the largest comparative dataset to the best of my knowledge) to examine whether a party’s ideology, size, regime type, territorial organization and region affect the way parties select their legislative candidates. In the article I pay special and close attention to the hypothesized relationships between electoral systems and selection processes. This is because most of the literature on the effects of institutions on legislators’ behavior often amalgamated elections and selections. I argued that underlying this amalgamation is an assumption that electoral systems determine candidate selection processes. Only to the degree to which electoral systems determine parties’ selection processes can scholars amalgamate elections and selections into a single (and the same) institution, and study its effect on behavior. The results from the analysis empirically challenge the literature’s amalgamation. The article’s contribution to the study of candidate selection processes and legislators behavior is twofold. On the one hand, this is the largest cross-national analysis (to the best of my knowledge) of candidate selection processes’ determinants, in which the appropriate unity of analysis is used: a party prior to a given election. On the other hand, the results from the paper laid the ground for the my argument that literature should differentiate elections from selections and allow for the theoretical and empirical possibility that elections and selection might produce combined conflicting incentives for parties’ and legislators’ behavior. 
  

Though interparty movement has been documented in legislatures across a number of countries, and although party switching can significantly influence democratic representation and governance, there has been comparatively little systematic cross-national research on party switching. Thus, the prevalence of switching is unknown and the extent to which party- and system-level variation influences this behavior remains unclear. To address this lacuna, we have conducted the most comprehensive study of intra session party switching that has ever been undertaken. Using our original dataset, we begin by examining the prevalence of party switching across 239 party-level observations in 20 democratic regimes. To theoretically explain variation in the presence and prevalence of party switching both across and within legislatures, we draw on the theoretical literature on intraparty switching and legislators’ behavior. We specifically look at the relationship between legislators’ motivations, institutional determinants and party switching. This article makes two major contributions to the study of interparty movement. First, using the largest and most comprehensive cross-national dataset on party-level switching ever constructed, we illustrate that contrary to popularly held assumptions, party switching occurs much more frequently than previously asserted. Of the 239 parties included in the dataset, almost one-third (78) exhibited some switching. This is an important finding in and of itself, as it demonstrates that defection is not a rare phenomenon, but instead a serious issue facing parties in democratic states. This in turn calls for scholars of legislative politics to dedicate greater attention to the study of interparty movement. In addition to showing the prevalence of party switching, we offer new insights into the determinants of this behavior. The results from our varying-intercept random effects models demonstrate that motivational factors influence interparty movement, while the direct effect of institutional arrangements is minimal. We suggest that future research will have to amend our treatment of the motivational and institutional treatments as two distinct theoretical approaches and treat motivations and institutions as endogenous to one another. 
  

Tools dedicated to inferring the ideological leanings of legislators from observed votes–techniques such as Nominate (Poole and Rosenthal 1997) or the item-response theory model of Clinton, Jackman and Rivers (2004)–are based on the assumption that the political process that generates abstentions is ignorable, an assumption that is not always easy to justify. We extend the item-response theory model to analyze abstention and voting processes simultaneously in situations where abstentions are suspected to be non-random. We apply this expanded model to two assemblies where the existing literature gives us reasons to expect non-random abstentions, and suggest how our extensions yield nuanced analyses of legislative politics. We also acknowledge limits to our ability to decide on the adequacy of alternative assumptions about abstentions, since these are not readily verifiable. 
  

In one of the most frequently cited articles published in Electoral Studies, Carey and Shugart [Cary, J.M.Shugart, M.S. 1995. Incentives to cultivate a personal vote: a rank ordering of electoral formulas. Electoral Studies 14(4), 417-439] hypothesized that the number of copartisans faced relative to seats available had a differential effect on the incentive to cultivate a personal vote depending on whether electoral rules allowed for intra-party competition. Across a wide array of electoral systems, we show that the number of candidates fielded per party varies within districts and that the variation is not systematically related to the total number of seats available. Thus, the widespread use of magnitude as a proxy for ‘‘copartisan crowdedness’’ is systematically inaccurate.We argue that the observed number of copartisans faced makes clear that a ratio to capture vote seeking incentives needs a party-in-adistrict denominator to accompany the party-in-a-district numerator. That denominator is the expected number of seats to be won by each party in question.