Making Punches Count: The Individual Logic of Legislative Brawls

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.

Emily Beaulieu Bacchus is Professor of Political Science at the University of Kentucky. She received her PhD from the University of California, San Diego and has published books and articles on democracy and contentious politics.

Nathan F. Batto is Associate Research Fellow at the Institute of Political Science, Academia Sinica, and he holds a joint appointment at the Election Study Center, National Chengchi University. He previously taught at the University of the Pacific. He has published widely on electoral and legislative politics in Taiwan.