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Coalition government, frustrated majorities, and minority rule
Abstract
Responsiveness to voters is key for democratic rule, yet often fails to occur. We argue that coalition government adds an additional hurdle to responsiveness. Multi-issue policy log-rolls between coalition parties in coalition agreement negotiations, none of which are individually supported by a parliamentary majority, can lead to policy change opposed by a majority, that is: Minority rule. Similarly, coalition agreements can block policy change supported by a parliamentary majority through a veto by one of the government parties, frustrating majority rule. Drawing on data from the Netherlands Bureau of Economic Analysis, we assess how often coalition agreements include policies supported by less than a parliamentary majority, and how often they exclude policies supported by parliamentary majorities. We show that two-thirds of policies included in coalition agreements are not supported by a floor majority, and that 30% of policies supported by a floor majority fail to be included in a coalition agreement.
A well‐established finding in the field of legislative behaviour is that parliamentary voting behaviour is nearly always strongly structured by the coalition‐opposition dynamic, even beyond the issues agreed on in the coalition agreement. Can parties break the mould of this coalition‐opposition division? Several Dutch municipal councils work with a councilwide agreement (raadsakkoord) with the specific goal that there is no demarcated coalition and opposition. This could open the political process up for more issue‐driven voting. We test whether council agreements change voting behaviour in the local council. By comparing voting in these municipalities before and after implementing councilwide agreements, we show that these agreements lower the extent to which voting is structured by the coalition‐opposition division. Coalition parties are less likely to vote the same when a councilwide agreement is present. The strength of the coalition‐opposition division depends upon the choices of political parties.
Auch wenn sie das Wort „Mehrheit“ im Namen führen, können Mehrheitskoalitionen den Willen einer Parlamentsmehrheit blockieren und Minderheiten begünstigen. Dies liegt daran, dass Koalitionsfraktionen immer große Kompromisspakete schnüren, darüber einheitlich abstimmen und die Opposition weitgehend
ausschließen. Dabei kann in einzelnen Themen politisch Gleichheit verletzt werden. Wechselnde Mehrheiten könnten dieses Problem lindern, würden aber wiederum andere Probleme aufwerfen.
Why are some parties more likely than others to keep the promises they made during previous election campaigns? This study provides the first comparative analysis that addresses this question with common definitions of pledges and fulfillment. We study the fulfillment of 18,743 pledges made in 54 election campaigns in 12 countries. We find high levels of pledge fulfillment for most parties that enter the government executive, and substantially lower levels for parties that do not. The findings challenge the common view of parties as promise breakers. The degree to which governing parties share power affects pledge fulfillment, with parties in single-party executives, both with and without legislative majorities, having the highest fulfillment rates. Within coalition governments, the likelihood of pledge fulfillment depends on whether the party receives the chief executive post and whether another governing party made a similar pledge, but not on the ideological range of the coalition.
Most studies of party competition consider the presentation of ambiguous positions a costly strategy. This literature, however, does not study party strategies in multiple issue dimensions. Yet multidimensionality may play an important role in parties’ strategic calculus. Although it may be rational for a party to emphasize a certain issue dimension, it may be equally rational to disguise its stance on other dimensions by blurring its position. This article argues that parties employ strategies of issue emphasis and position blurring in various dimensional contexts. Who emphasizes and who blurs thus depends on the actors’ relative stakes in different issue dimensions. The paper makes its case by performing cross-sectional analyses of 132 political parties in 14 West European party systems using Comparative Manifesto Project data, the 2006 Chapel Hill expert survey and the 2009 European Election Study.
Most analyses of policy outcomes from coalition-bargaining have hitherto been conducted within a spatial framework that requires the aggregation of coalition policy into a small number of point estimates. Such an approach, however, is limited in terms of the level of specificity at which it can operate. This article therefore draws on the methodology from the pledge fulfilment literature in order to provide a more in-depth examination of coalition-bargaining outcomes. We are thus able to take advantage of the fact that contemporary coalition agreements provide a wealth of detailed information on the government’s prospective course of policy action. Based on a quantitative text analysis of election manifestos, a dataset of over 1,000 election pledges is used to test a number of hypotheses on the adoption of policies in Austrian coalition agreements between 2002 and 2008. The multivariate models yield strong support for the hypotheses and suggest that the methodological approach has the potential to enhance our understanding of coalition-bargaining.
Coalition Governments in Western Europe is the most comprehensive empirical analysis to date of coalition politics. Based on a large cross-national data collection, covering the entire post-war period from 1945 to 1999, it is the first systematic study of the institutions of governance and conflict resolution in coalition governments. The book is also an unparalleled source of information on cabinet formation, membership, termination, and electoral performance of coalition parties. The volume also analyses the institutional frameworks in which coalition politics takes place in the individual countries and discusses which constraints for government formation, coalition governance, and coalition termination result from them. The information has been collected in standardized form by first rate country experts, and is presented in the form of standard tables.
Why do coalition parties settle some policy issues in great detail while other issues are hardly mentioned in coalition agreements? Coalition agreements are important policy platforms that determine policy-making during the legislative term. However, we know remarkably little about their content. We shed light on why issue attention in coalition agreements varies so extensively. We argue that intra-cabinet conflict positively affects issue attention as parties have stronger incentives to negotiate a detailed policy agenda that constrains their coalition partners. However, we expect that this effect is conditioned by preference tangentiality and the salience of an issue among coalition partners. Our theoretical expectations are tested drawing on a new dataset based on a comprehensive content analysis of 224 agreements negotiated by 181 parties between 1945 and 2015 in 24 West and East European countries. We find support for our hypotheses and conclude that parties draft agreements to limit “ministerial drift”.
In the debate that culminated in the November 2011 referendum, arguments for and against New Zealand’s mixed member proportional (MMP) electoral system focused on two values: governmental strength and representational fairness.
What is the ethical basis of democracy? And what reasons do we have to go along with democratic decisions even when we disagree with them? And when do we have reason to say that we may justly ignore democratic decisions? These questions must be answered if we are to have answers to some of the most important questions facing our global community, which include whether there is a human right to democracy and whether we must attempt to spread democracy throughout the globe. This book provides a philosophical account of the moral foundations of democracy and of liberalism. It shows how democracy and basic liberal rights are grounded in the principle of public equality, which tells us that in the establishment of law and policy we must treat persons as equals in ways that they can see as being treated as equals. The principle of public equality is shown to be the fundamental principle of social justice. This account enables us to understand the nature and roles of adversarial politics and public deliberation in political life. It gives an account of the grounds of the authority of democracy. It also shows when the authority of democracy runs out. It shows how the violations of democratic and liberal rights are beyond the legitimate authority of democracy and how the creation of persistent minorities in a democratic society, and the failure to ensure a basic minimum for all persons, weaken the legitimate authority of democracy.
Electoral systems are the central political institution in representative democracies. They convert votes into seats and structure the choices facing voters. They also affect the behaviour of political parties, individual MPs, and candidates. This book looks at three kinds of issues. First, it focuses on the 'political science of electoral systems', that is, it joins the canon of works that have attempted to explore various relationships between electoral systems on the one hand and 'outputs' such as government formation, the behaviour of political actors, the representativeness of parliaments, and the quality of governance. Second, while quite a lot is known about generic families of electoral systems, such as 'plurality rule' or 'proportional representation', much less is known about variation within these broad types and how exactly a given electoral system 'really works' in a particular country. Thus, the book includes detailed studies of the operation of electoral systems in 22 countries. Third, it studies the 'politics of electoral systems'. It treats each country's electoral system as, potentially at least, constituting a political issue in its own right. It establishes the reasons behind the initial adoption of an electoral system and discusses who supports the current electoral system and who opposes it, who benefits from it and who loses out, reviewing the current debate in each country on the question of electoral reform. This highlights issues relevant to normative debates about which electoral systems 'work well' and which do not, which ones operate uncontentiously, and which ones are a focus of division in the countries employing them. It reviews these questions by in-depth studies of 22 countries - chosen to represent a range of different electoral systems and located in all continents of the world - along with a number of chapters supplying comparative analysis.
Who decides policy in a coalition government? Specifically, does the party occupying a ministerial portfolio control policy in that jurisdiction? This question is central to the study of coalitions but is rarely tested because of the problems in identifying and measuring policy. This paper sidesteps these obstacles using an empirical strategy based on rational partisan theory. The theory establishes expectations of changes in monetary policy and macro-economic outcomes following changes in policy-maker. By testing for partisan effects following portfolio changes we can infer which changes are relevant and to what degree the Minister of Finance is the autonomous monetary policy-maker. The application of the test, looking at 16 parliamentary democracies in a period of volatile monetary policy and flexible exchange rates, indicates that policy-making is not consistent with full ministerial discretion. Rather, policy appears more responsive to changes in cabinet leadership and to the preferences of cabinet leaders.
The 1950 Report of the APSA Committee on Political Parties, “Toward a More Responsible Two-Party System,” is relevant today to current problems of public policy and party reform and to the efforts of political scientists, as political scientists, to contribute to the resolution of these problems. This essay examines the Report from a policy science perspective.
The Report was explicitly therapeutic in aim. It defined health, diagnosed ills, and prescribed remedies for the American party system; through the remedies prescribed, the whole American political system was to be restored to health. The healthy democratic system was asserted to be one in which the two national parties were cohesive, disciplined, programmatic, and responsible; internally responsible to their members through primaries, caucuses and conventions, and externally responsible to the whole electorate for carrying out their programs. The programs of the two parties were to be clearly differentiated so as to provide the electorate a real choice. The ills of the Ameican system were said to be due to the failure of parties to have these characteristics. The prescription was recommendation for comprehensive reform.
Despite the special expertise of political scientists on such “constitutional” questions and the work of such distinguished predecessors as Wilson, Goodnow, Lowell, Ford, and Herring, the Report was both normatively and empirically deficient. Little attempt was made to clarify or justify norms or goals. Repeatedly, instrumental propositions linking proposed reforms to goals were based on inadequate evidence or no evidence at all. Even in 1950, evidence (not mentioned in the Report) was available that cast doubt on the Committee's description of the political world. Subsequent research has produced a rich body of literature making clear that much of the substance of the Report is simply mistaken.
The errors of the Report do not vitiate its goals; democratic potential is not revealed by democratic practices. But the errors drastically affect the utility of the Report as policy science. The failure of the Report as policy science is due, in part, to failures of the discipline to clarify the roles of political scientist as policy scientist, to explore adequately the problems of relating knowledge to goals, to pay appropriate attention to the development of political theory, and to develop intellectual tools more specifically suited to the tasks of policy science. The last half of the essay is devoted to an examination of these problems, concluding that the political scientist will succeed in being effective in the policy field just to the extent he succeeds at his own distinctive tasks, in sharpening his own tools, and in thoughtfully applying his special knowledge and skills.
The article critically reviews the conceptual ideas of G. Bingham Powell's Elections as Instruments of Democracy and explores ways to develop them further. Powell's conceptual alternative to the Westminster model – the "proportional" vision of democracy – comes in two variants, one focusing on proportional representation, the other on proportional legislative influence. If we focus on the former, we can systematically distinguish for visions of parliamentary democracy, based on the main stage at which majorities are formed. The four stages are (1) party, (2) alliance, (3) cabinet and (4) law formation. The corresponding normative visions can be placed on a conceptual continuum between "simple" and "complex" majoritarianism. The article discusses the goals and tradeoffs associated with them as well as their underlying institutional designs. It also re-emphasizes Powell's insight that the congruence between policymakers and the median voter in a uni-dimensional policy space is a more appropriate normative standard for some visions of democracy than for others.
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.
This essay reclaims a political proceduralist vision of democracy as the best normative defense of democracy in contemporary politics. We distinguish this vision from three main approaches that are representative in the current academic debate: the epistemic conception of democracy as a process of truth seeking; the populist defense of democracy as a mobilizing politics that defies procedures; and the classical minimalist or Schumpeterian definition of democracy as a competitive method for selecting leaders.
The purpose of this book is to expand knowledge of political representation in the EU and of the legitimacy of its political order. In this concluding chapter, a summary is given of what has been learned on these two subjects and what this says about the EU as a developing democratic political system. The hypothesis that a well-functioning system of political representation is a precondition for a legitimate democratic political system serves as the leading theme. The chapter, therefore, first tries to evaluate the quality of the system of political representation of the EU, and from there continues with what has been learned about the legitimacy of the Union.
There are two ‘institutionalist’ literatures that seek to explain legislative behaviour. Firstly, there is the macro ‘Patterns of Democracy’ literature that explains outcomes in terms of constitutional constraints. Secondly, there is a micro ‘industrial organisation of legislatures’ literature that explains outcomes in terms of internal legislative rules. I will argue that constitutional rules are powerful constraints on outcomes that can be bargained, while internal rules are endogenous. Neither of these literatures deals with the question of which legislatures are ‘strong’ in the law-making sense. This question, indeed, is misframed, as it makes little sense to treat a legislature as a unitary agent. In particular the common belief that the US Congress is a strong law-making legislature is mistaken.
In the article it is shown that if during an election each voter picks the party with which he agrees on a majority of issues, it is nevertheless possible that a majority of voters disagrees with the winning majority party on every issue. This ‘inverted majority decision’, here called the Ostrogorski-paradox, resembles the structure underlying the Condorcet paradox and Simpson's paradox. Each concerns a relation of pairwise decision or observation functioning in an n-wise world.
Our object here is to point out a possible paradox of parliamentary democracy, and to sketch some of its relationships to other paradoxes.
One way of making decisions is for political associates or their representatives to vote on each issue separately in accordance with the majority principle and then take the cumulative outcomes of such majority decision making to define the collective choice for public policy. We call such a system one of majorities rule. Thought of in spatial terms, majorities rule is equivalent to the principle of making decisions according to the issue-by-issue median of voter preferences. If popular control and political equality are core democratic values, they can be rendered as requirements on a collective choice rule, involving resoluteness, anonymity, strategy-proofness and responsiveness. These requirements entail that the collective decision rule be a percentile method. If we then add a requirement of impartiality, as exhibited in a collective choice rule which would be chosen behind a veil of ignorance, then the issue-by-issue median is uniquely identified as a fair rule. Hence, majorities rule is special. Some objections to this line of reasoning are considered.