Ulrich Sieberer

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• Prof. Dr.
• Professor (Full) at University of Bamberg

In the government formation process, coalition partners make decisions about the inner workings of their future government. However, whether the initial allocation of competencies has the desired effects is uncertain, and deals may therefore be subject to change when the government is in office. This study analyses the frequency of changes in portf...

In multiparty governments, policymaking is a collaborative effort among the different incumbent parties. Often hidden by public debates about broader government policy, the necessary coordination routinely happens at the ministerial level, where ministries of different parties jointly devise viable and equitable policy solutions. However, since coo...

The article investigates roll‐call request and its effects on opposition‐voting behavior. It argues that parties use roll‐call votes (RCVs) as a position‐taking instrument to boost public attention for issues they care about. This argument implies that RCVs are requested strategically but opposition behavior should not differ systematically between...

The COVID-19 pandemic presents an exceptional crisis situation not only for governments, but also for politicians in opposition. This article analyses opposition party expressed sentiment vis-à-vis government actions and policies during the first six months of 2020. Based on an original content analysis of parliamentary debates in four established...

Research on mixed electoral systems provides inconclusive findings on the question whether members of parliament (MPs) elected in single-member districts are more likely to vote against the party line than MPs elected via closed party lists. This article rejects both the hypothesis of a general “mandate divide” and the competing claim that contamin...

Ein Parlament sollte nicht als Akteur, sondern als institutionelle Arena verstanden werden, in der politische Akteure wie Abgeordnete und Fraktionen ihre jeweiligen Ziele verfolgen. Der Bundestag bietet Mehrheits- wie Minderheitsakteuren vielfältige Möglichkeiten und ist daher institutionell mächtig. Gleichzeitig haben Regierungsparteien Anreize, i...

Governments often reallocate administrative units among ministries to meet parties’ office and policy demands or to increase political control over the bureaucracy. How do such reforms affect the work motivation and performance of ministerial bureaucrats? Based on self-determination theory, this paper expects detrimental effects on bureaucrats’ abi...

While party competition is generally dominated by the conflict between government and opposition parties, the analysis finds interesting variations between opposition parties . Over the last few electoral periods, a clear convergence in the voting behavior of the Greens and the Left Party can be observed, not between the Greens and the liberal FDP...

The article studies whether the party system characteristics fragmentation and ideological polarization increase the density of institutional regulation in parliaments. It introduces a comprehensive time-series-cross-sectional dataset of standing orders in 15 Western European parliaments that allows studying how densely various fields of legislativ...

This article argues that opposition veto power in institutional arenas such as second chambers can foster a more consensual relationship between government and opposition parties in parliament. This theoretical claim is supported in the article using data on legislative voting behaviour in the German Bundestag. The statistical analysis shows that o...

Electoral competition with opposition parties is a crucial aspect in most theories of representative democracy. Nevertheless, political science research has paid less attention to oppositions than to governments. This paper attempts to fill this gap by investigating the factors driving the strategy of opposition parties in parliamentary votes. Our...

When and why do parliamentary majorities in Europe suppress minority rights? We argue that such reforms are driven by substantive policy conflict in interaction with existing minority rights. Government parties curb minority rights if they fear minority obstruction due to increased policy conflict and a minority‐friendly institutional status quo. W...

The design of government portfolios – that is, the distribution of competencies among government ministries and office holders – has been largely ignored in the study of executive and coalition politics. This article argues that portfolio design is a substantively and theoretically relevant phenomenon that has major implications for the study of in...

This article argues that government parties can use parliamentary questions to monitor coalition partners in order to reduce agency loss through ministerial drift. According to this control logic, government parties have particular incentives to question ministers whose jurisdictions display high policy conflict and high electoral salience and thus...

The article shows that Germany established a short-lived but fully operative parliamentary system of government in its first democratically elected national parliament in 1848—some 70 years earlier than usually assumed. Qualitative evidence shows that the cabinet was responsible to the assembly and that parliamentary majorities forced cabinets to r...

How do MPs in nascent legislatures choose a political party? We argue that MPs self‐select into groups of like‐minded colleagues to achieve favored policy outputs. MPs identify colleagues with similar preferences based on observed behavior and informative signals such as socioeconomic status, cultural background, and previous political experience....

The dataset contains characteristics of the all motions voted by roll call vote in the first 17 legislative periods of the German Bundestag (1949-2013). It can be linked to the other two BTVote datasets containing characteristics of members of parliament and individual voting behavior on roll calls. Information on linking these datasets is provided...

The dataset contains characteristics of the all members of parliament (MPs) participating in at least one roll call vote in the first 17 legislative periods of the German Bundestag (1949-2013). It can be linked to the other two BTVote datasets containing characteristics of the motions voted upon and individual voting behavior on roll calls. Informa...

The dataset contains individual voting behavior of MPs on all roll call votes in the first 17 legislative periods of the German Bundestag (1949-2013). It can be linked to the other two BTVote datasets containing characteristics of members of parliament and characteristics of the motions. Information on linking these datasets is provided in the code...

This research note introduces and describes new datasets covering all roll call votes (RCVs) taken in the German Bundestag from 1949 to 2013 and crucial contextual data on characteristics of the voting Members of the Bundestag (MPs) and the RCVs taken. The data cover almost 2,000 RCVs, more than 3,500 MPs and about 1,100,000 individual voting decis...

We examine whether there is a basic space in a parliament which grew out of a revolution and had no prior history of parliamentarism: the Frankfurt Assembly of 1848/49. We scale all 299 roll call votes to determine the dimensionality of voting as well as the positions of deputies and their party groups. We find two dimensions of disagreement and sh...

This research note presents a general approach for measuring the electoral safety of individual MPs across electoral systems that is based on predicted re-election probabilities estimated from multilevel logistic regression models. In contrast to existing measures, this method yields estimates on an intuitive and readily comparable probability scal...

The following pages contain: An example of a roll call vote from the parliamentary minutes; criteria for determining the minimum number of votes for inclusion of an MP in the analysis; further technical details on the estimation (priors, etc.); a political map of the Frankfurt Assembly based on a Bayesian scaling of all MPs who voted at least 20 ti...

Recent work on coalition governance claims that government parties use the chairs of parliamentary committees to ‘shadow’ ministers and thus to monitor coalition partners. This argument rests on the assumption that committee chairs enjoy special powers to extract information from ministries and to affect policy-making in committee. To test this ass...

We outline a comprehensive research program on institutional reforms in European parliaments. Original data show that parliamentary rules in Western European parliaments have been changed frequently and massively during the period from 1945 to 2010 suggesting that actors use institutional reforms as a distinct strategy to pursue their substantive g...

Roll call votes provide crucial data for the study of parliamentary behaviour. A novel dataset on all recorded votes in the Bundestag between 1949 and 2013 combines information on MPs’ individual voting behaviour with contextual information on the respective motions and individual characteristics of MPs. First analyses illustrate potential applicat...

How ambitious are MPs in European parliaments and how does progressive ambition affect their strategies? We argue that progressively ambitious members of parliament try to generate individual visibility and seek the support of party leaders who decide on promotion while at the same time ensuring reelection by adjusting to electoral system incentive...

How can we explain institutional reforms that redistribute institutional power between the parliamentary majority and minority? This paper proposes an informal theoretical model to explain such reforms in European parliaments based on congressional literature and inductive explanations from case studies. The article argues that political parties as...

Wer profitiert von Reformen des Zuschnitts von Bundesministerien? Dieser Artikel erklärt Veränderungen im Ressortzuschnitt als Ergebnis eines Verteilungskonflikts bei der Koalitionsbildung, der von der Koalitionsarithmetik und den thematischen Schwerpunkten der Koalitionspartner dominiert wird. Statistische Analysen sämtlicher Kompetenzverschiebung...

Who profits from the redesign of German government portfolios? The article explains jurisdictional changes as the outcome of a distributive conflict during coalition formation in which coalition arithmetic and the policy profiles of the coalition partners are decisive. Statistical analyses of all jurisdictional changes since 1957 show that portfoli...

Why do members of parliament (MPs) vote against the party line? Recent explanations of party unity focus on MPs crosspressured between the demands of competing principals such as their party and local constituencies. This article tests key claims of the Competing Principals Theory on the level of individual deputies. It relies on public statements...

Die Beschreibung und Erklärung von Institutionenwandel ist eine zentrale Herausforderung des neoinstitutionalistischen Forschungsprogramms. Dieser Aufsatz diskutiert zentrale konzeptionelle, methodische und forschungspraktische Probleme bei der Analyse des Wandels formaler Institutionen. Konzeptionell werden vier Analyseansätze diskutiert, die sich...

Parliaments often elect holders of important extra-parliamentary offices such as heads of state, constitutional judges, heads of audit institutions and ombudsmen. What drives the behaviour of parliamentary actors and the outcome of such elections? This article explains actor behaviour theoretically, drawing on spatial factors, principal-agent argum...

Under what conditions and to what extent do external officeholders in parliamentary democracies constrain the cabinet's freedom of action? The article argues that we must analyse both institutional powers and officeholders’ incentives to use them to obtain an unbiased estimate of the expected constraint. It measures the incentives dimension via the...

Questions of institutional change have recently received increased attention in comparative politics. Even though comparative legislative research has identified important effects of parliamentary rules on processes and outputs as well as large variation across countries, we know very little about changes in these rules. This article takes several...

Parliaments are more than legislative bodies. However, we lack an adequate understanding of the theoretical relationship between different facets of parliamentary activity or ‘parliamentary functions’. Relying on the principal–agent framework, this article argues theoretically that parliamentary power is a multidimensional concept comprising three...

1. Governments and Legislative Agenda Setting: An Introduction George Tsebelis and Bjorn Erik Rasch 2. Germany: Limited Government Agenda Control and Strong Minority Rights Christoph Honnige and Ulrich Sieberer 3. France: Systematic Institutional Advantage of Government Sylvain Brouard 4. Italy: Government Alternation and Legislative Agenda Setting...

Electoral rules should affect parliamentary behavior. In particular, deputies elected from single-member districts should be more likely to deviate from the party line than deputies elected under proportional representation. This paper suggests a framework for conceptualizing and modeling the effect of the type of mandate on deputies’ propensity to...

This article examines how party discipline and legislators' individual policy goals induced by electoral rules influence the likelihood of defections from the party line in the Bundestag. Using a new indicator based on legislators' explanations of their voting behaviour we find strong evidence that discipline, not policy cohesiveness alone, drives...

Parlamente sind in parlamentarischen Regierungssystemen zentrale Machtverteilungsorgane und als solche Prinzipale der Regierung und weiterer externer Amtsträger. Dieser Beitrag zeigt, dass parlamentarische Wahlbefugnisse im Rahmen eines delegationstheoretischen Modells erstens Delegationsverluste reduzieren und zweitens zu Abweichungen von der idea...

The decision as to which variables should be included in a quest for explanation is both a fundamental and a tricky decision in any research design. On the one hand, it is practically impossible to include all variables that could possibly have any explanatory value. On the other hand, it is equally problematic to focus completely on one variable c...

The level and causes of party unity are under-researched topics in parliamentary democracies, particularly in comparative perspective. This article presents a non-formal model explaining party unity in legislative voting as the result of individual legislators' decisions reacting to the incentives and constraints created by their respective institu...

Government agenda-setting rights in the Bundestag are weak. The theoretical part of this article discusses various aspects of agenda setting and their theoretical relevance in the context of the Bundestag. It will be argued that analyses of agenda setting should distinguish between two analytical foci, one concentrating on policy effects in the con...

Lijphart's spectrum of democracies - recently expanded by Jack Nagel to a sub-majoritarian sphere of pluralitarian systems which use disproportional electoral systems in order to manufacture majority governments from minorities in the electorate - is based on only one dimension: inclusion of preferences. Political scientists in the Lijphartian trad...

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