Bridging the Information Gap: Legislative Member Organizations as Social Networks in the United States and the European Union

3. Where in the World Are LMOs?

50 chapter 3 Where in the World Are LMOs? Legislative member organizations (LMOs) exist in a great number of legislatures . They are a more widespread phenomenon than most people— including most legislative scholars—realize. In this chapter, we seek to answer two elementary but exceedingly important questions: First, where do LMOs exist, and second, what factors affect the likelihood that LMOs will emerge and flourish in a lawmaking body? These questions are not easily addressed, as we discovered during the year we spent attempting to gather comparative information on LMOs. There is no centralized database or other resource that provides information on the existence of LMOs, much less the rules that govern them, the legislators who join them, or the activities in which they engage. Disparate standards in the quantity and quality of information provided by parliamentary websites further complicate the search for information on LMOs. Finally, in some countries with LMOs, the groups are so informal that even experts on the relevant national legislatures can provide very little information on them. In an effort to overcome these difficulties, we used several techniques to compile comparative data on LMOs in a broad sample of advanced industrial democracies. At the heart of this effort is an expert survey that seeks to ascertain whether LMOs exist in a given national legislature. We also tried to gather as much information on LMOs in various countries as possible, relying on the responses to our survey as well as additional information gathered directly from legislatures and from a handful of academic and popular news sources. This chapter has three key purposes. First, we take the initial step of presenting basic descriptive information about the presence of LMOs across a broad sample of legislatures. Next, we describe the general conditions under which LMOs exist in various legislatures, using this information to set the stage for our case studies. Finally, this chapter provides a Where in the World Are LMOs? 51 springboard for scholars interested in expanding this research and pursuing more detailed information about LMOs in various countries. We begin by describing our data collection efforts and then present a quantitative analysis to identify what factors make it more or less likely that LMOs exist in a given national legislature. This analysis reveals the importance of three key variables: the electoral system, the size of the legislature, and the effective number of legislative parties. Specifically, majoritarian electoral institutions, a higher number of seats, and a greater number of parties increase the probability that LMOs exist. Finally, using these indicators as the basis for categorization, we provide descriptive information about LMOs in 25 legislatures. Our Sample of Countries To conduct our cross-national, broad-based examination of LMOs, we first had to collect information on the existence of LMOs in a sample of advanced industrialized, liberal democracies.1 We included in our sample countriesthataremembersoftheOrganisationforEconomicCo-Operation and Development (OECD), the European Union (EU), or the Group of 20 (G-20) and that have “institutionalized democracy” scores of 8, 9, or 10 in the 2009 Polity IV Dataset.2 These selection criteria result in a geographically and institutionally diverse sample of legislatures on six continents. The 45 countries in our analysis are listed in table 3.1. Data Collection and Classification LMOs are underresearched legislative institutions, which makes collecting systematic data on them from a large number of countries exceedingly difficult . Ours is also the first comparative examination of LMOs, which means that there is little previous research on which we can build. There exists no centralized or universal source that provides information on the existence, makeup, activities, or purposes of LMOs. Moreover, considerable variance exists across legislatures in the formality and quality of LMOs. We used a variety of methods to ascertain whether LMOs exist in various legislatures, including searching legislatures’ websites, calling legislative clerks, and asking academic specialists; however, we learned that 52 bridging the information gap no single source was sufficient for us to gain confidence that our findings were accurate. We therefore used multiple methods to gather the data we needed. We first sought to establish where LMOs exist and where they do not by conducting an email expert survey.3 Our initial list of contacts was drawn from The Handbook of National Legislatures (Fish and Kroenig 2009). We then used a snowballing technique, extending our initial sample following recommendations from our first-round respondents and other personal contacts. In total, we contacted...