Does Staggered Membership in Legislatures Matter? Evidence from a Three-Country Comparison

In legislative studies, the effects of staggered membership renewal, found in more than twenty second chambers, have been neglected. Staggered terms imply, first, that the re-election time horizons of different groups (“classes”) of second chamber legislators differ, since the staggered nature of mandates means some legislators are always closer to a re-election campaign than others. Second, the incentives of second chamber legislators are influenced by the time horizons of their co-partisans in the lower chamber through the relative timing of lower chamber elections. The present paper compares the impact of staggering on legislative behaviour in the German Bundesrat and the senates of Australia and France. We analyse the timing of a range of discretionary legislative activities, including speeches, amendments, questions and resolutions over an extended period of time. We show that “temporal differentiation” has a significant impact on the parliamentary behaviour of (groups of) members and of upper chambers overall.