Description
In Making Punches Count, the first comprehensive account of legislative floor violence and its consequences, Emily Bacchus and Nathan Batto 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.
Table of Contents
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
