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Cross-National Partisan Effects on Agenda Stability
Abstract
Studies of policy attention find only mixed support for a partisan impact, instead showing that policy attention reacts more to world events. Yet, a rigorous examination of the ways in which change in the partisan composition of government matters for the distribution of policies across issues has yet to be completed in a cross-national framework. Combining data on policy output from the Comparative Agendas Project, we present a detailed investigation of parties' effect on agenda stability in six advanced industrial democracies over time. We consider parties as dynamic organizations by arguing that parties' organizational characteristics and goals interact with their electoral context to determine their impact on policy attention. The results show that parties' influence on the policy agenda depends on economic conditions, the type of government, the government's seat share, and the number of parties in the governing cabinet, particularly following a major transition in government.
... The party-policy literature claims that government turnover is associated with the shift in the policy preferences of government parties (Bevan and Greene, 2018). The reason is that political parties are ideologically driven and pursue partisan policies when they are in office (Köksa and Çalışkan, 2012;Stravers, 2018). ...
... Similarly, observes that the likelihood of military conflict increases twofold when the right-wing parties come to power. In brief, the ideological divide leads to differences in the policy preferences of political parties (Bevan and Greene, 2018;Budge, Ezriw, and McDonald, 2010). ...
... While government turnover is associated with the shifts in the policy preferences of government parties (Bevan and Greene, 2018), the impacts of government turnover on the implementation of peace agreements are still poorly understood. Different types of government turnover -wholesale government turnovers in Guatemala, Indonesia, Mali, and Senegal, partial government turnovers in El Salvador, India, Macedonia, Nepal, Philippines, and South Africa, and non-alternation in the UK -occurred in this research universe within the first decade of the signing of peace agreements. ...
Why do peace agreements work in several democratic countries but not in several other democratic countries? This study addresses this puzzle by investigating the impacts of government turnover, measured by leader turnover and government ideological turnover, on the implementation of peace agreements in democratic countries. The idea is that the alternation of power - which political party comes to power - influences policy continuity. Generally, a completely new government, whose policy preferences differ from the preceding government, is less likely to implement inherited policies. The central theoretical framework of this study offers four explanations concerning the relationship between government turnover and the performance of peace agreements in democratic countries. First, insider leaders continue the incumbent governments' policy and facilitate the implementation of peace agreements. Second, outsider leaders come to power with the support of different electoral bases and impede the implementation of peace agreements which can force rebels to rearm themselves. Third, the left-wing government parties favor peaceful conflict resolution and facilitate the implementation of peace agreements. Fourth, the right-wing government parties prefer hawkish policies and hinder the performance of peace agreements. This study tests the assumptions of its central theoretical framework using a panel dataset and three illustrative cases: Colombia, Israel, and the Philippines. The findings of this investigation demonstrate the positive impacts of insider leader turnover and the adverse effects of outsider leader turnover on the implementation of peace agreements in the sampled countries. The performance of peace agreements becomes better following left-wing chief executives assume office. The sampled countries have witnessed an increase in the implementation of peace agreements following the largest left government parties taking office. These findings suggest that the performance of peace agreements in democratic countries largely relies on government turnover. Hence, this study contributes to the democratic civil peace thesis literature, which has overlooked why democracies differ themselves. Why do some democratic leaders negotiate peace agreements with rebels while other democratic leaders oppose peace agreements? The empirical evidence of this study might benefit international peacebuilding policy. A wide range of actors, from local NGOs and powerful states to intergovernmental organizations, including the United Nations, European Union, and African Union, administer international peacebuilding missions in conflict-affected countries. A debate remains on why international peacebuilding missions sometimes fail to achieve their core objectives and establish sustainable peace. This study suggests international peacebuilding actors conduct policy research on the government turnover trap - how to save peace agreements from severe failure when unlikely hawkish governments come to power in democratic countries.
... Which issues are subjects of legislation? Agenda scholars often refer to this as the political agenda (Baumgartner and Jones 1993;Bevan and Greene 2018;Cayton 2021;Green-Pedersen 2007). We rely on the common standards in previous agenda research (op. ...
... Legislative agendas vary in size(Baekgaard et al. 2018;Mortensen and Seeberg 2016), diversity(Baumgartner and Jones, 2015;Boydstun et al. 2014;Green-Pedersen 2007;Jennings et al. 2011), and stability(Bevan and Greene 2018; Mortensen et al. 2011). iii ...
While African legislatures have been receiving increasing academic attention in recent years, efforts to expand our understanding of these institutional bodies have been hampered by a dearth of reliable quantitative data regarding their activity and output. To rectify this issue, we have collected and issue‐classified data on the legislative agenda in 13 African countries. We leverage this new dataset to explore how democratic development affects the legislative agenda. We show that legislatures in more democratic countries have a larger, broader, and more dynamic agenda, and we propose an extensive future research agenda for legislative politics in Africa.
... Using data on primary legislation from Canada, Denmark, France, the Netherlands, Spain and the United Kingdom from 1960 (1945 in the case of UK) to 2008, Greene (2016, 2018) find out that party transitions in government are related to changes in the overall government agenda conditional on parties' characteristics, legislative majorities, and economic conditions. In response to the mixed results on party government and policy outcomes, this article embraces the party-politics perspectives and contributes to the existing literature by maintaining that such inconsistencies do not originate from a poor theoretical understandingan option that is denied by the rich body of literature summarized so farbut from limitations in the operationalization of the main dependent and independent variables (Bevan and Greene, 2018;Döring and Schwander, 2015). The next section discusses at length such limitations and suggests how to move forward. ...
... However, these classifications do not make much sense anymore (Baumgartner et al, 2009;Bevan and Greene, 2018;Döring and Schwander, 2015;Häusermann et al, 2013;John et al., 2014). Accordingly, this paper contributes to the existing literature by assessing to what extent shifts in government partisanship on a continuous left-right scale correspond to consistent social and labor market policy changes. ...
Are governing parties able to shape social and labor market policies according to their ideological positions or are they overwhelmed by socio-economic and institutional constraints? The paper answers this crucial question by developing a comparative study on 19 OECD countries from 1985 to 2011. It investigates whether the location of governments on a continuous left–right scale affects four measures of welfare state generosity: namely, public spending in social policies, in active and passive labor market policies and the level of unemployment insurance replacement rate. The results obtained through an error correction model show that governing parties are unable to affect social and labor market policies in the short-run, when economic dynamics prevail. However, in the long-run, partisanship gains relevance: when the government coalition moves to the right, there is a negative impact on all the measures of welfare state generosity.
... To achieve such goals and attract political support, they reflect their convictions and goals in party manifestos as policy pledges to voters (Budge et al., 2001). Parties seek to fulfill their pledges because a failure to do so will lead to the erosion of party credibility and political support (Bevan and Greene, 2017). Manifestos include not only domestic policy issues that directly determine voters' well-being but also foreign policy issues that increasingly affect their well-being in an interconnected world (Greene and Licht, 2018). ...
This study investigates populist radical right (PRR) influence on aid amid widespread concerns about a potential connection between its rise and the reduction of aid allocation. Previous studies failed to address these concerns owing to the disuse of immigrant inflows as an intervening variable and a bilateral framework capable of investigating properties in donor and recipient countries. By analyzing panel data on Western European parliamentary democracies, the study demonstrates the PRR’s reducing effect via a coalitional pathway on bilateral aid to the recipients, failing to stem emigration into the donor countries. Further, analysis shows that such reduction intensifies in conjunction with the donors’ weak pluralistic institutions and the recipients’ sociocultural characteristics different from the ordinary citizens represented by the PRR. The findings make a novel contribution to the expanding literature on the PRR to integrate insights on the aid–immigration nexus, strategies for policy influence, and ideational profiles.
... Others have focused on the constraints on partisan policy-making when a government is divided (Edwards et al., 1997;Binder et al., 1999;Baumgartner et al., 2014). A recent empirical account in six countries has confirmed that partisan effects on policy attention are shaped by the type of government, but also by the size of its parliamentary majority and the number of parties in the governing coalition (Bevan and Greene, 2018). ...
... Others have focused on the constraints on partisan policy-making when a government is divided (Edwards et al., 1997;Binder et al., 1999;Baumgartner et al., 2014). A recent empirical account in six countries has confirmed that partisan effects on policy attention are shaped by the type of government, but also by the size of its parliamentary majority and the number of parties in the governing coalition (Bevan and Greene, 2018). ...
This chapter presents a general theoretical framework to analyse party competition and its effects on policymaking. There are two perspectives: that parties still matter for policymaking despite signs of decline and that parties are driven by instrumental considerations and will do what it takes to get elected. This chapter adopts an intermediary perspective, arguing that campaign priorities not only reflect partisan preferences, but also respond to rival parties’ campaigns. This leads to an important common ground across different parties regarding their issue emphasis, i.e. the ‘tunnel’ of attention. Moving away from the heart of the tunnel is possible, but potentially costly. Post election, the victorious party will deliver on its programme priorities not least because of the pressure of junior coalition partners and the opposition. The tunnel of attention thus constrains party competition, but triggers mandate implementation.
... In a comparative study of six European democracies, they also found that the number of political parties in the coalition affects the stability of the policy agenda (Bevan & Greene, 2018). Following the same idea, this research argues that political parties have a role in the policy processes in authoritarian regimes. ...
This thesis considers how political liberalisation, as a dynamic process, affects policy processes in authoritarian regimes. Prior studies observed either the bargaining process or the information exchange process but not both. These studies consider them as two distinct and competing theoretical perspectives. First, the bargaining perspective asserts that the process of political liberalisation, with the introduction of more inclusive and competitive elections, increases the bargaining costs and make policymaking more difficult. Second, political liberalisation increases the social and political freedom and it enhances information exchange that facilitates policymaking. However, these two processes contradict with each other and create a theoretical puzzle that requires a systematic theoretical and empirical investigation.
Building on the punctuated equilibrium theory, this thesis offers a novel bargaining/information exchange hybrid theoretical model to explain policy processes during a period of political liberalisation. Rather than treating the two perspectives as competing explanations, this thesis integrates them by recognising the duality of the electoral system—it is a source of political bargaining as well as a source of information exchange. The liberalisation of the electoral system increases the likelihood of transforming the authoritarian regime from a one-party or one-party-dominant system to a multiparty system. An increased number of political parties in the policy processes intensifies the bargaining process but also increases the information exchange. As such, the changes in bargaining and information exchange processes happen simultaneously as regimes liberalise. The hybrid model contributes to advancement in the field with this refined way of thinking about policymaking during a period of political liberalisation. It captures the complexity and non-linearity of the social and political world.
Using a novel and original time-series dataset of legislative bills of the Hong Kong Legislative Council, the analysis adopts the policy content coding system of the Comparative Agendas Project (CAP) to measure legislative attention from 1975 to 2016. Policy processes are measured by legislative speed (i.e., the duration of the legislative process), distribution of policy change (i.e., changes in policy contents in the legislative bills) and issue diversity of the policy agenda (i.e., the concentration of policymakers’ attention across different policy issues). Political liberalisation is measured by the degree of inclusive and competitive elections, while the number of political parties is measured by the effective number of political parties. This thesis uses stochastic process methods to measure distributions of policy change, determining whether policymaking is characterised by a pattern of mostly stable and occasional periods of rapid and radical policy change. Further, it uses time-series analysis and event history analysis to estimate the impact of the number of political parties on policy processes.
This thesis has a number of important findings. First, an increase in the number of political parties brings in more information and greater bargaining costs. This effectively slows down the legislative process. Second, it finds that the distribution of policy change is punctuated—characterised by long periods of stasis but also a more frequent occurrence of radical changes—rather than incremental change in Hong Kong’s legislative agenda and it confirms the expectation of the punctuated equilibrium theory. However, as the regime liberalises, the distribution of policy change becomes less punctuated, meaning that there are more frequent and moderate policy adjustments. It suggests that a greater number of political parties facilitates policy change and can be explained by the information model. However, comparing Hong Kong’s distribution of policy change with other advanced democracies provides support for the bargaining model. These puzzling findings show a more inclusive bargaining/information exchange hybrid model is needed to explain policymaking in countries with different degrees of political liberalisation. Third, the study of issue diversity of the policy agenda shows an “inverted-U” curve as the number of political parties increases. It implies that autocrats pay more attention to a wider range of policy topics when the number of political parties increases from a low level whereas the attention to different policy topics shrinks when the number of political parties escalates to an extremely high number. The empirical evidence provides unambiguous support for the bargaining/information exchange hybrid model.
Overall, this thesis builds on the punctuated equilibrium theory by offering a novel bargaining/information exchange hybrid model to understand policymaking and tests it systematically with new empirical evidence. It contributes to the understanding of policymaking in authoritarian regimes. It also provides an important insight into the duality of political and other social processes in comparative politics.<br/
... where Y denotes the number of yea, N the number of nay, and A the number of abstentions for the ith vote. 5. Online: http://www.comparativecandidates.org/ 6. Online: https://sites.duke.edu/democracylinkage/data/ 7. Robustness checks including additional control variables such as the type of government, that is, coalition and majority status (see Bevan & Greene, 2018), as well as the timing of the legislative cycle (Döring, 2003) are shown in Tables 10 and 11 in the Supplemental Appendix. Furthermore, Table 9 in the Supplemental Appendix uses CCS data and analyzes at the party level the variance in selfreported left-right placements across parties' slates of candidates as a function of CEC. ...
Extant research suggests that candidate selection methods can be consequential for party unity in legislative voting. Yet thus far, only variations in the selectorate and the degree of centralization have been examined. This article argues that Candidacy Eligibility Criteria (CEC), too, have implications for party unity. I theorize that with stricter formal requirements, parties avoid adverse selection and ensure the nomination of committed candidates. By using roll-call vote data from 16 industrial democracies, candidate surveys and an original data set consisting of nearly 500 historical party constitutions, I show that parties demanding prior membership and nudging aspirants to maintain networks within the party tend to be more unified in parliamentary voting. Moreover, their candidates, too, express greater loyalty when compared with parties without formal CEC. Thus, this article contributes to the literatures on party unity and on candidate selection by showing how certain party rules, hitherto neglected, affect party unity.
... Therefore, the economy is also controlled in this model and it is measured by the GDP per capita released by Hong Kong's Census and Statistics Department. Hellwig (2012) and Bevan and Greene (2018) found that the effect of the economy is conditional on party transition. This study uses the number of years after the personnel change in LegCo to replace the party transition because there were no elections but only personnel change by appointment between 1975 and 1985. ...
This article considers how autocrats decide to expand or narrow the issue diversity of their policy agenda during a period of political liberalization. Prior studies have two competing perspectives. First, political liberalization increases the social and political freedom that enhances information exchange, and thus expands issue diversity. Second, political liberalization decreases government's control of the legislature and thus narrows the issue diversity. This article offers a novel theoretical perspective by combining these two countervailing theories. It predicts a diminishing marginal benefit of information exchange and an increasing marginal bargaining cost. As such, this article argues that issue diversity follows a negative quadratic (inverted‐U) relationship as the regimes liberalize. The analysis of a new and unique dataset of Hong Kong's legislative agenda (1975 to 2016) offers support for this theory. This study contributes to our knowledge of policymaking in authoritarian regimes and the theory of information processing.
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... We code an open veto point as 1 for a country-year where government parties do not have a majority in the first or second chamber of parliament (if the second chamber has de jure veto power) or if a president with veto power of another party is in office. 12 Second, we include a number of macroeconomic and demographic indicators that have been shown to affect party positioning and issue choice, as well as policy developments more generally (Ward et al. 2011;Greene 2016;Bevan & Greene 2017). All of these have been collected for the Comparative Welfare States database (Brady et al. 2014). ...
This article investigates the new party politics of welfare states with a particular focus on electoral competition. The argument is that welfare state politics are no longer just about more or less, but involve trade‐offs among ‘new’ versus ‘old’ social rights, and hence social investment versus social consumption. However, party priorities on these issues are highly dependent upon their electoral situation. As electoral competition becomes more intense, parties focus more on vote maximisation than on their traditional policy goals. For left parties, this means focusing more on social investment, which appeals to their growing constituency of progressive sociocultural professionals, and less on defending the traditional income maintenance programmes favoured by their core blue‐collar voters. Centre‐right parties, on the other hand, should hesitate to retrench old social rights when electoral competition intensifies because they need to prioritise their appeal to culturally conservative working‐class voters over their traditional fiscally conservative policy profiles. Using a new dataset and a recently published measure of electoral competitiveness, the article shows that as electoral competition intensifies, left governments are willing to prioritise social investment by reducing pension rights generosity in order to expand programmes for new social risks, while centre‐right governments by contrast avoid retrenchment of pension rights and pension expenditures. The findings demonstrate that this relationship is moderated by the presence of a credible radical right challenger, which increases the electoral risk of welfare state recalibration.
When exploring assessments of factionalism, there is the tendency to rely on quantitative assessments based upon an institutionalised and consciously organised group. However, to rely solely on the assessment of factionalism as such undermines and dismisses much of the intra-party dialogue which facilitates, encourages or could undermine party cohesion and unity. Quantitative analysis can rely on quite static understandings of the faction; however, this research understands factionalism as dynamic and changeable dependent on a range of internal and external variables. The fluidity of the faction is demonstrated in the ways in which the faction can adopt or drop ideological positions dependent on the appetite of intra-party groups and the electorate. Its dynamism is also reflected through the different typologies of factions that exist. The dynamic forms that the faction take are exemplified through the case study analysis of the Labour Party within the UK. The Labour Party also provides an interesting analysis in understanding the wide range of external factors that factions must negotiate. This includes, but is not limited to, the changing ways in which we understand party allegiance, identity and voting patterns. Factionalism is ultimately an interpersonal event, and to accurately capture this detail, qualitative assessments are necessary.
This study examines the "black box" of the policy process by evaluating the efficiency of "political attention and governance action" as a two-stage continuum and investigating the influencing factors in marine waste discharge governance. The results of empirical analysis in the 11 Chinese coastal provincial regions suggest that the overall efficiency fluctuated from 1999 to 2016 with a minor reduction. The developed provinces such as Jiangsu, Zhejiang, Shanghai and Guangdong have low efficiency in overall evaluation. In the first stage, the transferring efficiency from political attention to actions does not change considerably despite fluctuations in 2012-2016. The second-stage efficiency, or the efficiency of the governance actions, has been declining since 2008 except for a brief spike in 2014. There exists a feedback impact between the two stages. Economic competition, as measured by the average GDP of neighbouring provinces, has more negative impacts on the first-stage efficiency.
National executives in Western democracies are not unilateral deciders: they lead parties with long-term policy priorities and manage challenging multiparty coalitions. Leaders of donor states use foreign aid to pursue their goals, including enacting policy output consistent with party ideology. Because preferences for international engagement condition the effect of left–right ideology and coalition government incorporates actors with distinct preferences, we predict that left-pro-internationalist prime ministers and development ministers prefer aiding the neediest recipients while right-internationalists emphasize trade opportunities. Our statistical analysis of OECD donor–potential recipient dyads demonstrates the utility of unpacking democratic domestic politics’ effect on leader incentives and decisions.
This article analyses the legislative agenda in Ireland since 1922 using new data coded within the Comparative Agendas Project framework. The data, generated using the codebook of the Irish Policy Agendas Project (http://irishpolicyagendas.eu/), show clear evidence of long-term changes in the complexity, issue focus, and Europeanisation of the legislative agenda in Ireland. The study uses the Irish case to test some existing arguments concerning the influence on the policy agenda of governments’ political capacity and pressures generated by policy problems. Its findings suggest that government capacity influences the agenda, but not in the way theorised: greater capacity leads, on average, to higher stability; more specifically, this effect is evident in the absence of government turnover, as governments maintain a focus on ‘their own’ issues as they continue in office. There is no evidence that the pressure to solve policy problems, in the form of weak or negative economic growth, influences the stability of the legislative agenda. The article contributes to the study of agenda stability, the analysis of Irish politics and public policy, and it provides a basis for coding comparable data across other policy agendas in Ireland.
In this chapter, we summarize our main empirical findings and outline a set of explanatory models for different dimensions of policy agendas—size, complexity, and stability. The pluralistic approach to explanatory models reflects that these aspects of policy agendas can vary independently and so, in principle, require different models. The preceding chapters provide a set of new and compelling results. Although they do not amount to a complete explanation of local policy agendas, they are a key starting point for further developing explanatory models of policy agendas. This chapter closes with reflections on what this book shows us about local democracy and a discussion of the relevance of the results outside the empirical context of this book.
In this chapter, we examine the policy agenda effects of elections and of change in key local actors—both collective and individual actors. In addressing these effects, this chapter taps into broader discussions in the discipline about the role of elections in politics, the importance of individual policymakers, and the question of whether “parties matter.” In this chapter, these effects are evaluated for the first time in an integrated multivariate statistical analysis of policy agendas. Especially the possibility to investigate the effect of the replacement of high-level individual actors—both elected and appointed—across a large number of observations provides new insights about the general importance of individual policymakers in agenda setting. The analysis does, however, not indicate any systematic agenda effect from replacements of these individual and collective actors. In contrast, the analysis suggests that elections are important windows when new issues can enter the policy agenda and when political attention can be redistributed among old issues.
Recent election surprises, regime changes, and political shocks indicate that political agendas have become more fast-moving and volatile. The ability to measure the complex dynamics of agenda change and capture the nature and extent of volatility in political systems is therefore more crucial than ever before. This study proposes a definition and operationalization of volatility that combines insights from political science, communications, information theory, and computational techniques. The proposed measures of fractionalization and agenda change encompass the shifting salience of issues in the agenda as a whole and allow the study of agendas across different domains. We evaluate these metrics and compare them to other measures such as issue-level survival rates and the Pedersen Index, which uses public-opinion poll data to measure public agendas, as well as traditional media content to measure media agendas in the UK and Germany. We show how these measures complement existing approaches and could be employed in future agenda-setting research.
How cross-nationally similar or different are political agendas when it comes to their issue content? Does one country discuss health care, another the environment, and a third one immigration? Though studies of issue competition and political agenda setting more broadly have flourished in recent years, this important question has gained surprisingly little attention. This chapter focuses on attention from political parties and argues that this is cross-nationally more similar than different. Theoretically, the chapter argues that party political agenda setting processes are national processes, but with a great deal of parallelism. Countries struggle with similar policy problems and the structure of party competition has important common characteristics. Converging issue contents are not a direct effect of globalization or cross-national learning.
This article highlights the electoral effects of holding salient portfolios within a coalition government. For voters, holding ministries can be seen as a symbol of a party’s success within the coalition. As a voting heuristic, parties not controlling the portfolios on issues important to their platforms signal their failure to achieve these goals. Following this perspective, we hypothesize that the difference between coalition parties that hold salient portfolios and those that do not partially predicts the extent of the electoral cost of coalition participation. Using a data set that covers 11 European parliamentary democracies between 1966 and 2002, we show that for junior coalition partners there is an electoral reward for holding their most salient portfolio. There is also an electoral benefit for a junior partner to hold a larger number of portfolios if they do not control their most salient portfolio. Conversely, holding their most salient portfolio and a larger number of additional ministries results in greater electoral losses in the subsequent parliamentary election. These results indicate that parties’ success at negotiating for their policy priorities in coalition governments holds consequences for their future electoral success.
Leaders and MPs serve as the party's public face. Their image casts a shadow in which observers interpret policy statements. We hypothesize that media cover and voters understand policy messages through the lens of prominent party members' characteristics. Easy-to-observe descriptive traits, such as gender or ethnicity, cue parties' policy priorities. Media are more likely to emphasize party messages on issues historically related to these groups when they are visible in the party's public image. We test hypotheses from our theory using data on prominent party members' descriptive characteristics, policy statements, and media coverage of statements from the European Election Studies. Data from the 1999, 2004 and 2009 European elections evidence support for our theory. Parties with more female representatives signal stronger emphasis on gendered issues in media reports. The results hold implications for our understanding of the ways in which parties deliver and voters receive campaign messages. This research offers an explanation for voters' limited knowledge of parties' policy positions; media reinforce existing gender stereotypes and voters' predispositions by selectively reporting policy statements.
Resources for foreign aid come under attack when parties that care little for international affairs come to power. Internationally focused parties of the left and right, however, prefer to use aid as a tool to pursue their foreign policy goals. Yet varying goals based on left-right ideology differentiate the way donors use foreign aid. We leverage sector aid to test hypotheses from our Partisan Theory of Aid Allocation and find support for the idea that domestic political preferences affect foreign aid behavior. Left-internationalist governments increase disaster aid, while parochial counterparts cut spending on budget assistance and aid that bolsters recipients' trade viability. Conservative governments favor trade-boosting aid. We find consistent, nuanced, evidence for our perspective from a series of Error Correction Models and extensive robustness checks. By connecting theories of foreign aid to domestic politics, our approach links prominent, but often disconnected, fields of political research and raises important questions for policymakers interested in furthering the efficacy of development aid.
One of the chief tasks facing political leaders is to build and maintain unity within their parties. This text examines the relationship between party leaders and Members of Parliament in Britain, Canada, Australia, and New Zealand, showing how the two sides interact and sometimes clash. Christopher J. Kam demonstrates how incentives for MPs to dissent from their parties have been amplified by a process of partisan dealignment that has created electorates of non-partisan voters who reward shows of political independence. Party leaders therefore rely on a mixture of strategies to offset these electoral pressures, from offering MPs advancement to threatening discipline, and ultimately relying on a long-run process of socialization to temper their MPs' dissension. Kam reveals the underlying structure of party unity in modern Westminster parliamentary politics, and drives home the point that social norms and socialization reinforce rather than displace appeals to MPs' self-interest. © Christopher J. Kam 2009 and Cambridge University Press, 2009.
Parties campaign on a range of topics to attract diverse support. Little research, however, looks at why parties narrow or expand the scope of their campaign or shift attention across issues. Focusing only on a single dimension or topic may lead scholars to miss-estimate the magnitude of the effect of parties’ experiences in government or economic context. I propose that electoral conditions influence the scope of parties' manifestos. I test hypotheses using a measure of issue diversity: the Effective Number of Manifesto Issues (ENMI). Based on analysis of 1662 manifestos in 24 OECD countries from 1951 to 2010, the results support the theory. Government parties have higher ENMI. Opposition parties and governments expecting a reward for the economy limit their issue appeals. Tests of the underlying mechanism using data on issue dimensions and policy data provide additional support. These findings have important implications for the study of election strategy and democratic accountability.
Political parties matter for government outcomes. Despite this general finding for political science research, recent work on public policy and agenda-setting has found just the opposite; parties generally do not matter when it comes to explaining government attention. While the common explanation for this finding is that issue attention is different than the location of policy, this explanation has never truly been tested. Through the use of data on nearly 65 years of UK Acts of Parliament this paper presents a detailed investigation of the effect parties have on issue attention in UK Acts of Parliament. It demonstrates that elections alone do not explain changes in in the distribution of policies across issues. Instead, the parties’ organizations, responses to economic conditions, and size of the parliamentary delegation influence the stability of issue attention following a party transition.
The key function of representative democracy is to provide a mechanism through which public opinion and public policy are regularly connected. On one hand, there should be policy representation; public preferences for policy should be reflected in policy itself. And on the other hand, there should be public responsiveness; public preferences should be informed and should react to public policy. Policy representation is important in everyday politics. Failure of adequate policy representation may result on disaffection of the public for the government. This article discusses the evidence of representation of public preferences in the Canadian federal policy. It discusses the substance of the preferences and determines whether these preferences adjust to the policy itself. The article also discusses thermostatic public responsiveness, whereby public preferences for policy change reflect changes in policy.
What motivates parties to change their positions? Earlier studies demonstrate that parties change their position in response to environmental incentives, such as voter shifts. Yet, this work also suggests that parties differ in their responses. What accounts for this variation? We argue and empirically substantiate that differences in party organization explain the divergent responses of parties to environmental incentives. By means of a pooled time-series analysis of 55 parties in 10 European democracies between 1977 and 2003, this study demonstrates how the party organizational balance-of-power between party activists and party leaders conditions the extent to which environmental incentives (mean voter change, party voter change, and office exclusion) drive party-position change. The study’s findings have important implications for our understanding of parties’ electoral strategies as well as for models of representation.
This study examines postwar patterns in macroeconomic policies and outcomes associated with left-and right-wing governments in capitalist democracies. It argues that the objective economic interests as well as the subjective preferences of lower income and occupational status groups are best served by a relatively low unemployment-high inflation macroeconomic configuration, whereas a comparatively high unemployment-low inflation configuration is compatible with the interests and preferences of upper income and occupational status groups. Highly aggregated data on unemployment and inflation outcomes in relation to the political orientation of governments in 12 West European and North American nations are analyzed revealing a low unemployment-high inflation configuration in nations regularly governed by the Left and a high unemployment-low inflation pattern in political systems dominated by center and rightist parties. Finally, time-series analyses of quarterly postwar unemployment data for the United States and Great Britain suggests that the unemployment rate has been driven downward by Democratic and Labour administrations and upward by Republican and Conservative governments. The general conclusion is that governments pursue macroeconomic policies broadly in accordance with the objective economic interests and subjective preferences of their class-defined core political constituencies.
There is a discernible mood in macro-level public evaluations of party issue competence. This paper argues that voters use heuristics to transfer issue competence ratings of parties between issues, therefore issue competence ratings move in common. Events, economic shocks and the costs of governing reinforce these shared dynamics. These expectations are analysed using issue competence data in Britain 1950–2008, and using Stimson's dyad ratios algorithm to estimate ‘macro-competence’. Effects on macro-competence are found for events and economic shocks, time in government, leader ratings, economic evaluations and partisanship, but macro-competence also accounts for unique variance in a model of party choice. The article presents an aggregate-level time-series measure to capture the long-term dynamics of ‘valence’.
A positive relationship between economic performance and support for incumbents is routinely taken as evidence that elections work for accountability. Recent investigations into this relationship have examined just how signals from the economy translate into popular support. However, neither selection models nor sanctioning models explicitly incorporate the actions of political elites. This article advances a strategic parties model of economic voting. Political incumbents have incentives to adjust their policy positions in response to economic conditions. When parties advocate distinct positions on economic issues, elections can be understood in terms of economic conditions. But when party positions converge, the quality of economic information declines. Incumbents can thus improve their chances of avoiding blame for a poor economy—or of claiming credit for a good one—by adjusting positions in policy space. Analyses of party positions, economic conditions, and election outcomes in 17 democracies over 35 years support this prediction.
Economic conditions shape election outcomes in the world's democracies. Good times keep parties in office, bad times cast them out. This proposition is robust, as the voluminous body of research reviewed here demonstrates. The strong findings at the macro level are founded on the economic voter, who holds the government responsible for economic performance, rewarding or punishing it at the ballot box. Although voters do not look exclusively at economic issues, they generally weigh those more heavily than any others, regardless of the democracy they vote in.
This study examines postwar patterns in macroeconomic policies and outcomes associated with left-and right-wing governments in capitalist democracies. It argues that the objective economic interests as well as the subjective preferences of lower income and occupational status groups are best served by a relatively low unemployment-high inflation macroeconomic configuration, whereas a comparatively high unemployment-low inflation configuration is compatible with the interests and preferences of upper income and occupational status groups. Highly aggregated data on unemployment and inflation outcomes in relation to the political orientation of governments in 12 West European and North American nations are analyzed revealing a low unemployment-high inflation configuration in nations regularly governed by the Left and a high unemployment-low inflation pattern in political systems dominated by center and rightist parties. Finally, time-series analyses of quarterly postwar unemployment data for the United States and Great Britain suggests that the unemployment rate has been driven downward by Democratic and Labour administrations and upward by Republican and Conservative governments. The general conclusion is that governments pursue macroeconomic policies broadly in accordance with the objective economic interests and subjective preferences of their class-defined core political constituencies.
In the United Kingdom, the transmission between policy promises and statutes is assumed to be both rapid and efficient because of the tradition of party discipline, relative stability of government, absence of coalitions, and the limited powers of legislative revision in the second chamber. Even in the United Kingdom, the transmission is not perfect since legislative priorities and outputs are susceptible to changes in public opinion or media coverage, unanticipated events in the external world, backbench rebellions, changes in the political parties, and the practical constraints of administering policies or programmes. This paper investigates the strength of the connection between executive priorities and legislative outputs measured by the Speech from the Throne and Acts of Parliament from 1911 to 2008. These are categorized according to the policy content coding system of the UK Policy Agendas Project (www.policyagendas.org.uk). Time series cross-sectional analyses show that there is transmission of the policy agenda from the speech to acts. However, the relationship differs by party, strengthening over time for Conservative governments and declining over time for Labour and other governments.
The distribution of attention across issues is of fundamental importance to the political agenda and outputs of government. This article presents an issue-based theory of the diversity of governing agendas where the core functions of government—defense, international affairs, the economy, government operations, and the rule of law—are prioritized ahead of all other issues. It undertakes comparative analysis of issue diversity of the executive agenda of several European countries and the United States over the postwar period. The results offer strong evidence of the limiting effect of core issues—the economy, government operations, defense, and international affairs—on agenda diversity. This suggests not only that some issues receive more attention than others but also that some issues are attended to only at times when the agenda is more diverse. When core functions of government are high on the agenda, executives pursue a less diverse agenda—focusing the majority of their attention on fewer issues. Some issues are more equal than others in executive agenda setting.
This paper presents an original way of testing the 'partisan hypothesis'. Building on the substantial literature on the party-policy link, we test this link with respect to issue attention, rather than spending or macroeconomic outcomes. We examine the evolution of issue attention through the systematic analysis of agenda setting of three major French political institutions: the President, the government and the National Assembly. Although our results point to partisan differentiation on some issues, the overall conclusion is that partisan differentiation is at best one factor of variation among others.
This book describes the results of a quantitative investigation into one of the central questions of political science: what determines how long governments survive in parliamentary democracies? Government survival is important because it constitutes an essential component of the overall functioning of parliamentary democracies; it is also closely associated with the introduction to the discipline of event history analysis, a highly promising statistical methodology. The investigation utilizes this methodology on what is undoubtedly the most comprehensive data set yet assembled on governments, comprising hundreds of variables measured for governments in sixteen West European parliamentary democracies over the entire post-war period to 1989. The results fundamentally challenge the central thread of theorizing on government survival and point to an alternative conceptualization of the relationship among governments, parties and voters.
Issue salience and diversity direct a range of outcomes such as voting behavior and public policy. Studies, however, have yet to fully integrate theoretical or empirical expectations for the effect of issue salience on coalition stability. By focusing on the mechanism linking parties’ preferences to policy-making, I propose that parties with more diverse platforms provide coalitions greater room to negotiate, whereas parties focusing on a small number of issues exacerbate ideological tensions. Issue diversity becomes important once parties exhaust opportunities to make the initial, easy policy compromises. Using evidence from 299 coalitions in 24 European countries, I find that issue diversity in parties’ platforms moderates the effect of disagreement. Using a non-proportional hazard analysis, I find that the effect of issue diversity varies over the coalition’s lifecycle. Governments with parties willing to negotiate over a larger range of issues decrease the risk that disagreements will result in coalition termination.
This article investigates how the degree of electoral competition affects parties’ policy positions. It follows a growing body of research on party positioning in multiparty competition that regards elections as signals for parties that have to choose their positions and issue strategies. In this article we argue that previous elections provide information about the competitiveness of the upcoming election. The expected degree of electoral competition affects parties’ future policy positions since with increasing competitiveness of an election, parties have higher incentives to move toward a vote-maximizing position. However, what constitutes a vote-maximizing strategy varies between parties. While large mainstream parties have an incentive to moderate their positions, small and niche parties choose more extreme positions to distinguish themselves from their mainstream competitors. Applying a novel measure of electoral competitiveness, we find that the degree of electoral competition indeed determines parties’ policy shifts, but that this effect is moderated by party size.
This paper investigates how the degree of electoral competition affects parties'policy positions. It follows a growing body of research on party positioning in multi-party competition that regards elections as signals for parties that have to choose their positions and issue strategies. In this article we argue that previous elections provide information about the competitiveness of the upcoming election. The expected degree of electoral competition affects parties' future policy positions since with increasing competitiveness of an election, parties have higher incentives to move towards a votemaximizing position. However, what constitutes a vote-maximizing strategy varies between parties. While large mainstream parties have an incentive to moderate their positions, small and niche parties choose more extreme positions to distinguish themselves from their mainstream competitors. Applying a novel measure of electoral competitiveness, we find that the degree of electoral competition, indeed, determines parties' policy shifts, but that this effect is moderated by party size.
"Engagingly written and employing a fruitful mix of comparative research methods, this book explains how and why small parties, while they may not be entirely masters of their own fate, are more than simply corks tossed on the ocean. It adds significantly to our understanding, and deserves to be widely read." -Tim Bale, University of Sussex, UK "Spoon uses innovative methods for examining the effect of green party behavior on their electoral fortunes, electoral presence, and visibility to the public . . . This book makes an important contribution to the fields of niche party fortunes, party politics, and comparative politics in general." -Bonnie Meguid, University of Rochester "Political Survival of Small Parties in Europe offers the rare treat of a small-n comparison that engages with broad political science issues of small party flair, feat, and fate. Mixed methods means that the depth of knowledge about individual cases is balanced with a theoretical ambition. In contrast with many other approaches, Spoon demonstrates the agency of small parties in adapting and using the constraints of their political and institutional environments." -Florence Faucher, Sciences Po-Centre d'études européennes, France It is often thought that small party survival or failure is a result of institutional constraints, the behavior of large parties, and the choices of individual politicians. Jae-Jae Spoon, in contrast, argues that the decisions made by small parties themselves determine their ability to balance the dual goals of remaining true to their ideals while maximizing their vote and seat shares, thereby enabling them to survive even in adverse electoral systems. Spoon employs a mixed-methods approach in order to explore the policy, electoral, and communication strategies of West European green parties from 1980 to the present. She combines cross-national data on these parties with in-depth comparative case studies of two New Politics parties, the French and British green parties, that have survived in similar national-level plurality electoral systems. Both of these green parties have developed as organizations and now run candidates in elections at the local, national, and European levels in their respective countries. The parties' survival, Spoon asserts, results from their ability to balance their competing electoral, policy, and communication goals. Jacket design: Heidi Hobde Dailey.
Why do some political parties flourish, while others flounder? In this book, Meguid examines variation in the electoral trajectories of the new set of single-issue parties: green, radical right, and ethnoterritorial parties. Instead of being dictated by electoral institutions or the socioeconomic climate, as the dominant theories contend, the fortunes of these niche parties, she argues, are shaped by the strategic responses of mainstream parties. She advances a new theory of party competition in which mainstream parties facing unequal competitors have access to a wider and more effective set of strategies than posited by standard spatial models. Combining statistical analyzes with in-depth case studies from Western Europe, the book explores how and why established parties undermine niche parties or turn them into weapons against their mainstream party opponents. This study of competition between unequals thus provides broader insights into the nature and outcome of competition between political equals.
Coalition governments are the norm in most of the world's parliamentary democracies. Because these governments are comprised of multiple political parties, they are subject to tensions that are largely absent under single-party government. The pressures of electoral competition and the necessity of delegating substantial authority to ministers affiliated with specific parties threaten the compromise agreements that are at the heart of coalition governance. The central argument of this book is that strong legislative institutions play a critical role in allowing parties to deal with these tensions and to enforce coalition bargains. Based on an analysis of roughly 1,300 government bills across five democracies (Denmark, France, Germany, Ireland, and the Netherlands), the book paints a detailed picture of the treatment of government legislation in contemporary parliaments. Two central contributions emerge. First, the book forces a reconsideration of the common perception that legislatures are largely irrelevant institutions in European democracies. The data presented here make a compelling case that parliaments that feature strong committee systems play an influential role in shaping policy. Second, the book contributes to the field of coalition governance. While scholars have developed detailed accounts of the birth and death of coalitions, much less is known about the manner in which coalitions govern between these bookend events. This book contributes to a richer understanding of how multiparty governments make policy.
Legislatures are the core representative institutions in modern democracies. Citizens want legislatures to be decisive, and they want accountability, but they are frequently disillusioned with the representation legislators deliver. Political parties can provide decisiveness in legislatures, and they may provide collective accountability, but citizens and political reformers frequently demand another type of accountability from legislators – at the individual level. Can legislatures provide collective and individual accountability? This book considers what both kinds of accountability require and offers the most extensive crossnational analysis of legislative voting undertaken to date. It illustrates the balance between individualistic and collective representation in democracies and how party unity in legislative voting shapes that balance. In addition to quantitative analysis of voting patterns, the book draws on field and archival research to provide an extensive assessment of legislative transparency throughout the Americas.
Although a voluminous literature has shed light on the relationship between economic conditions and government accountability, most studies in this literature have implicitly assumed that the actions of competing political parties are either irrelevant or that they cancel each other out. In this paper, we take an important first step toward relaxing this strong assumption. We develop and test a set of theoretical propositions from the issue competition literature about the amount of emphasis that parties place on the economy during election campaigns. We test these propositions with an estimation technique that properly situates the motivations of rival elites within the context of spatial party competition using a spatial autoregressive model. On a sample of 22 advanced democracies from 1957 to 2006, we find strong support for the proposition that parties with a greater role in economic policymaking respond to worsening economic conditions by increasing their emphasis on the economy during election campaigns. We also find strong evidence of spatial contagion effects as parties respond positively to the campaign strategies of ideologically proximate parties. This finding reveals a fundamental link in the chain of economic accountability and has important implications for the study of party competition.
Sanctions and homogeneity of intra-party preferences are the two main pathways to party unity in roll-call votes. However, only a few works have managed to properly measure the degree of polarization within the party, and therefore the link between ideological preferences and parliamentary voting behaviour has not yet been fully tested. Looking at the internal debates held during party congresses and analysing motions presented by party factions through quantitative text analysis, the present article provides a new measure of intra-party polarization that is exogenous to the parliamentary arena. This measure is used to disentangle the effect of ideological heterogeneity on MPs voting behaviour, net of the party whip. Our results show that factional heterogeneity negatively affects party unity. This effect, however, is conditional on the strength of whipping resources available to the party leader. When the electoral system or the intra-party candidate selection process allows strong discipline to be enforced, the negative effect of heterogeneous preferences on party unity is lower or no longer significant. However, since absences can be a strategy by which to express dissent while avoiding sanctions, they should be considered as an additional voting option and this is crucial to understanding the impact of intra-party heterogeneity on party unity.
In this essay, I consider how a legislature's rules of procedure can affect both the process and the outcome of legislation. I begin by asking whether or not rules of procedure should have any effects at all, given that they can often be changed by simple majorities of legislators. The second part of the essay classifies the effects that rules have. Rules can change the set of bills that plenary sessions of the legislature consider; they can change the menu of amendments to any given bill considered in the plenary; they can affect how members vote; and - putting the first three effects together - they can affect which bills pass. I review evidence that rules do in fact have the suspected effects.
A large literature has demonstrated that such economic factors as growth, inflation, and unemployment affect the popularity of incumbents within many democratic countries. However, cross-national aggregate analyses of ''economic voting'' show only weak and inconsistent economic effects. We argue for the systematic incorporation of political factors that shape the electoral consequences of economic performance. Multivariate analyses of 102 elections in 19 industrialized democracies are used to estimate the cross-national impact of economic and political factors. The analyses show that considerations of the ideological image of the government, its electoral base, and the clarity of its political responsibility are essential to understanding the effects of economic conditions on voting for or against incumbents.
This article gives a comprehensive account of the rules and practices of agenda setting that were typically in force in the lower or single Houses of Western European (national) parliaments during the 1980s. From this account, comparative indices for control of both the budgetary agenda and the lawmaking agenda are developed. These indices are then used to check the empirical validity of hypotheses that expect, as legislative outcomes from agenda control, a reduction of budget deficits and legislative inflation. Finally, possible trade-offs between parliamentary agenda control and control by other decision-making structures outside parliament are explored.
Parties often tailor their campaign message differently to different groups of voters with the goal of appealing to a broader electorate with diverse preferences and thereby winning their votes. I argue that the strategy helps a party win votes if it can convince diverse groups of voters that the party is ideologically closer to their preferred positions. Using election data from nine Western European democracies, I first show that parties gain votes when they appeal broadly. Analysis of individual-level survey data suggests that voters perceive broadly appealing parties as ideologically closer to their own positions, a finding that identifies a plausible mechanism behind the aggregate positive effect of this strategy on party election performance. These findings not only help explain the behavior of some European parties, but they may also offer a potential recipe for electoral success in multiparty democracies.
Recent advances to the theory of issue ownership suggest that voters change their impressions of parties’ competencies in response to parties’ experiences in government. We add that parties’ evaluations depend on their success in fostering a cohesive image by managing diverse intra-party interests. We predict that voters’ impressions of parties’ internal discord negatively affect their assessments of parties’ policy competencies. Furthermore, voters’ choice of parties will also depend on perceptions of the parties’ coherence and competence. Using individual-level analysis of party evaluations in Germany, we test predictions from our theory using a new survey that contains questions on parties’ policy coherence and issue competence. The results hold important implications for the study of intra-party politics, issue competition and vote choice. Key Words: Public Opinion, Issue Competence, Issue Ownership, Party Politics, Electoral Behaviour
Though instances of party switching have been widely documented, there is little cross‐national research on this phenomenon. The prevalence of switching is therefore unknown, and the factors influencing this behavior remain unclear. Using the most comprehensive dataset on party switching ever constructed, we illustrate both that interparty movement is more common than previously assumed and that there are substantial differences in its prevalence across parties. To explain this variation, we examine the relationship between legislators' motivations, institutional arrangements, and switching. We find that motivational explanations are correlated with interparty movement and that institutional arrangements exhibit only limited direct influence on switching.
Studies of political attention often focus on attention to a single issue, such as front-page coverage of the economy. However, examining attention to a single issue without accounting for the agenda as a whole can lead to faulty assumptions. One solution is to consider the diversity of attention; that is, how narrowly or widely attention is distributed across items (e.g., issues on an agenda or, at a lower level, frames in an issue debate). Attention diversity is an important variable in its own right, offering insight into how agendas vary in their accessibility to policy problems and perspectives. Yet despite the importance of attention diversity, we lack a standard for how best to measure it. This paper focuses on the four most commonly used measures: the inverse Herfindahl Index, Shannon's H, and their normalized versions. We discuss the purposes of these measures and compare them through simulations and using three real-world datasets. We conclude that both Shannon's H and its normalized form are better measures, minimizing the danger of spurious findings that could result from the less sensitive Herfindahl measures. The choice between the Shannon's H measures should be made based on whether variance in the total number of possible items (e.g., issues) is meaningful.
Political scientists have long classified systems of government as parliamentary or presidential, two-party or multiparty, and so on. But such distinctions often fail to provide useful insights. For example, how are we to compare the United States, a presidential bicameral regime with two weak parties, to Denmark, a parliamentary unicameral regime with many strong parties? Veto Players advances an important, new understanding of how governments are structured. The real distinctions between political systems, contends George Tsebelis, are to be found in the extent to which they afford political actors veto power over policy choices. Drawing richly on game theory, he develops a scheme by which governments can thus be classified. He shows why an increase in the number of "veto players," or an increase in their ideological distance from each other, increases policy stability, impeding significant departures from the status quo. Policy stability affects a series of other key characteristics of polities, argues the author. For example, it leads to high judicial and bureaucratic independence, as well as high government instability (in parliamentary systems). The propositions derived from the theoretical framework Tsebelis develops in the first part of the book are tested in the second part with various data sets from advanced industrialized countries, as well as analysis of legislation in the European Union. Representing the first consistent and consequential theory of comparative politics, Veto Players will be welcomed by students and scholars as a defining text of the discipline.
Operationalized as a simulation and checked against 1,737 policy shifts in twenty-four post-war democracies, this theory of party position-taking offers both an explanation and specific postdictions of party behaviour, synthesizing some previous approaches and linking up with mandate theories of political representation. These wider implications are considered at the beginning and the end of the article.
This article develops the reward-punishment issue model of voting using a newly collated aggregate measure of issue competence in Britain between 1971 and 1997, revealing systematic differences between governing and opposition parties in the way citizens' evaluations of party competence are related to vote intention. Using monthly Gallup ‘best party to handle the most important problem’ and vote intention data, time series Granger-causation tests give support to a classic issue reward-punishment model for incumbents. However, for opposition parties this reward-punishment model does not hold: macro-issue competence evaluations are Granger-caused by changes in vote choice or governing party competence. An explanation is offered based upon the differentiating role of policy performance and informational asymmetries, and the implications are considered for comparative studies of voting, public opinion and for political party competition.
This paper contains supplemental materials for "What Moves Parties? The Role of Public Opinion and Global Economic Conditions in Western Europe" (hereafter Adams-Haupt-Stoll 2007). We initially discuss the substantive significance of the variables from the original Model 1 from Adams- Haupt-Stoll 2007 and provide the variance-covariance matrix of the coefficients for this model. We then both present and discuss additional results. With respect to the latter, most (but not all) build upon Model 1. Models 7-11 and 32-35 are alternative model specifications. Models 12-13 employ a different measure of the public opinion shift variable. (These models must be fit using reduced sets of cases relative to the original due to missing data on the alternative measure.) Models 14-16 re-code the Dutch D66 as a non-leftist (specifically, a liberal) party. Model 17 employs three year running averages of the global economy variables instead of election year values in Model 4. Finally, Models 18-31 are estimated using different sets of cases, including multiply imputed instead of list-wise deleted data sets. Country-election cycle clustered robust standard errors are reported in parentheses throughout unless otherwise noted. Two significant digits are always carried. Levels of significance are indicated in the tables as follows: significant at the � = 0.01 level, ***; significant at the � = 0.05 level, **; significant at the � = 0.10 level, *. All reported significance levels are for two-sided tests and were calculated prior to rounding. Note that a t-distribution with C 1 degrees of freedom was employed in hypothesis tests, where C is the number of clusters (country-election cycles).
In political representation research it is now generally recognised that in parliamentary systems political parties rather than individual members of parliament are the key actors in the process of political representation. However, this focus on political parties might have led to an underestimation of the role of individual members of parliament in this process, even in purely parliamentary systems. It tends to neglect the efforts of representatives to secure particular benefits for individuals or groups in their constituencies. In this paper we will address the question to what extent these forms of representation are part of the repertoire of activities of members of the Dutch parliament as compared to other European parliaments.This article was written when both authors were fellows at the Netherlands Institute for Advanced Study in the Humanities and Social Sciences (NIAS). The parliamentary study on which it is based was supported by the Netherlands Organization for Scientific Research.
Do Western European political parties adjust their ideological positions in response to shifts in public opinion and to changing global economic conditions? Based on a time-series, cross-sectional analysis of parties' ideological dynamics in eight Western European democracies from 1976-1998, the authors conclude that both factors influence parties' ideological positions but that this relationship is mediated by the type of party. Specifically, they find that parties of the center and right react to both public opinion and the global economy, whereas parties of the left display no discernible tendency to respond to public opinion and also appear less responsive to global economic conditions. The findings on leftist parties' distinctiveness support arguments about these parties' long-term policy orientations as well as about their organizational structures. The authors also find little support for neoliberal convergence arguments.
Rationalizing Parliament examines how institutional arrangements in the French Constitution shape the bargaining strategies of political parties. The book investigates the decision by French cities to include in the Constitution legislative procedures aimed to 'rationalize' the policy-making role of parliament and analyses the impact of these procedures on policy outcomes, cabinet stability and political accountability. Drawing on diverse methodological approaches, including formal models, multivariate statistics, historical analysis and qualitative case studies, Professor Huber contributes to general theoretical debates about the endogenous choice of institutions, and about the exogenous impact of institutional arrangements on political decision-making. Through its use of theories developed in the American politics literature, the study reveals important similarities between legislative politics in the United States and in parliamentary systems and shortcomings in conventional interpretations of French institutional arrangements.
The second edition of Legislative Leviathan provides an incisive new look at the inner workings of the House of Representatives in the post-World War II era. Re-evaluating the role of parties and committees, Gary W. Cox and Mathew D. McCubbins view parties in the House - especially majority parties - as a species of ‘legislative cartel’. These cartels seize the power, theoretically resident in the House, to make rules governing the structure and process of legislation. Most of the cartel's efforts are focused on securing control of the legislative agenda for its members. The first edition of this book had significant influence on the study of American politics and is essential reading for students of Congress, the presidency, and the political party system.
This book develops and tests a “thermostatic” model of public opinion and policy, in which preferences for policy both drive and adjust to changes in policy. The representation of opinion in policy is central to democratic theory and everyday politics. So too is the extent to which public preferences are informed and responsive to changes in policy. The coexistence of both “public responsiveness” and “policy representation” is thus a defining characteristic of successful democratic governance, and the subject of this book. The authors examine both responsiveness and representation across a range of policy domains in the United States, the United Kingdom, and Canada. The story that emerges is one in which representative democratic government functions surprisingly well, though there are important differences in the details. Variations in public responsiveness and policy representation responsiveness are found to reflect the “salience” of the different domains and governing institutions – specifically, presidentialism (versus parliamentarism) and federalism (versus unitary government).
1. Modeling party competition 2. How voters decide: the components of the unified theory of voting 3. Linking voter choice to party strategies: illustrating the role of non-policy factors 4. Factors influencing the link between party strategy and the variables 5. Policy competition under the unified theory: empirical applications to the 1988 French Presidential Election 6. Policy competition under the unified voting model: empirical applications to the 1989 Norwegian parliamentary election 7. The threat of abstention: candidate strategies and policy representation in US presidential elections 8. Candidate strategies with voter abstention in US presidential elections: 1980, 1984, 1988, 1996, and 2000 9. Policy competition in Britain: the 1997 general election 10. The consequences of voter projection: assimilation and contrast effects 11. Policy-seeking motivations of parties in two-party elections: theory 12. Policy-seeking motivations of parties in two-party elections: empirical analysis 13. Concluding remarks.
The U.S. phenomenon of divided government has its counterpart in a parliamentary system as a result of the politics of coalition. One legislative coalition may put the executive in place, a different legislative coalition may sustain it in a vote of confidence, while yet another legislative coalition enacts measures that thwart its day-to-day business. I explain such division between executive and legislature by relaxing the party-as-unitary-actor assumption and recognise that executive and legislative elements of the same party may pursue different strategies. Party leaders may enter into commitments to coalition partners that involve implicit or explicit obligations to impose intraparty discipline. Leaders may do this with greater or lesser enthusiasm, and the required discipline may or may not be forthcoming. Thus, governments may be defeated in legislative votes because the legislature fails to honour obligations entered into by the executive. This paper sets out a simple model of this process, begins to analyse it, and elaborates a recent real-world example of the phenomenon.
Series editors' preface Acknowledgements Part I. The Context: 1. Theory, institutions, and government formation 2. The social context of government formation 3. The government formation process Part II. The Model: 4. Government equilibrium 5. Strong parties Part III. Empirical Investigations: 6. Two cases: Germany, 1987 Ireland, 1992-3 7. Theoretical implications, data, and operationalization 8. Exploring the model: a comparative perspective 9. A multivariate investigation of portfolio allocation Part IV. Applications, Extensions, and Conclusions: 10. Party systems and cabinet stability 11. Making the model more realistic 12. Party politics and administrative reform 13. Governments and parliaments Bibliography.
Government imposition of restrictive rules is a fact of life in parliamentary democracies. In a novel data set for the study of the parliamentary passage of legislation (SPPL) in western Europe no less than 80 of 512 bills were enacted by some kind of restrictive rule across 17 parliamentary systems. These highly variegated restrictions consist of two distinct types: rules governing amendment control and restrictions on the timetable. Both types of restrictive rules are frequently employed to create party discipline by default' in incohesive parties. Referring to formalised rational-choice theories of parliamentary behaviour, seven empirically testable hypotheses are derived and subsequently subjected, with bills as units of analysis, to logistic regression of the likelihood of restrictions being imposed. Of the seven hypotheses, two are rejected and five confirmed.
Political parties in established democracies face a trade-off between changing their policy positions in pursuit of votes and adhering to their previous positions in order to reduce risks related to change. To reconcile this trade-off, parties seek information about public opinion. Past election performance is one such source of information. To date however, there is no consistent result on whether past elections affect party positioning. I highlight two factors that previous analysts have not considered: whether past election results affect the magnitude of parties’ policy shifts in the current election, and how the time elapsed since the last election moderates the relationship between past election results and party policy change. My analyses of 23 established democracies generate two conclusions with important implications for understanding party behavior and political representation: parties tend to shift their policies more when they have lost votes in the previous election than when they have gained votes; and the effect of past election results dissipates with the passage of time.