Government survival the Italian way: The core and the advantages of policy immobilism during the First Republic

During its nearly fifty years of history, the First Italian Republic has been characterised by the highest rate of cabinet turnover in Western Europe. There are several convincing explanations for this exceptional feature; nevertheless, merely looking at the average figure risks overlooking the variety in the Italian government experience. Focusing on the spatial determinants of Italian cabinet duration shows that the presence of a core party has a positive, albeit conditional, impact on government duration, largely depending on the degree of intra‐cabinet conflict. Moreover, whenever the core is absent, the inability of cabinets to change the status quo appears to lengthen, rather than shorten, their duration. This outcome appears in line with works stressing the substantial policy immobilism of Italian governments throughout most of the postwar period. The analysis relies on a new dataset based on a coding of the investiture debates of all the Italian cabinets. This allows one to track the evolution of parties’ preferences in a policy space that can change between (rather than only across) elections. The results show the importance of in‐depth case studies to better analyse some puzzles within the cabinet duration literature that might otherwise be averaged out in large‐N comparative analysis.     

Constitutional courts as veto players: Lessons from the United States,France and Germany

The number of constitutional courts and supreme courts with constitutional review rights has strongly increased with the third wave of democratisation across the world as an important element of the new constitutionalism. These courts play an important role in day‐to‐day politics as they can nullify acts of parliament and thus prevent or reverse a change in the status quo. In macro‐concepts of comparative politics, their role is unclear. Either they are integrated as counter‐majoritarian institutional features of a political system or they are entirely ignored: some authors do not discuss their potential impact at all, while others dismiss them because they believe their preferences as veto players are entirely absorbed by other actors in the political system. However, we know little about the conditions and variables that determine them as being counter‐majoritarian or veto players. This article employs the concept of Tsebelis’ veto player theory to analyse the question. It focuses on the spatial configuration of veto players in the legislative process and then adds the court as an additional player to find out if it is absorbed in the pareto‐efficient set of the existing players or not. A court which is absorbed by other veto players should not in theory veto new legislation. It is argued in this article that courts are conditional veto players. Their veto is dependent on three variables: the ideological composition of the court; the pattern of government control; and the legislative procedures. To empirically support the analysis, data from the United States, France and Germany from 1974 to 2009 is used. This case selection increases variance with regard to system types and court types. The main finding is that courts are not always absorbed as veto players: during the period of analysis, absorption varies between 11 and 71 per cent in the three systems. Furthermore, the pattern of absorption is specific in each country due to government control, court majority and legislative procedure. Therefore, it can be concluded that they are conditional veto players. The findings have at least two implications. First, constitutional courts and supreme courts with judicial review rights should be systematically included in veto player analysis of political systems and not left aside. Any concept ignoring such courts may lead to invalid results, and any concept that counts such courts merely as an institutional feature may lead to distorted results that over‐ or under‐estimate their impact. Second, the findings also have implications for the study of judicial politics. The main bulk of literature in this area is concerned with auto‐limitation, the so‐called ‘self‐restraint’ of the government to avoid defeat at the court. This auto‐limitation, however, should only occur if a court is not absorbed. However, vetoes observed when the court is absorbed might be explained by strategic behaviour among judges engaging in selective defection.     

Does anybody notice? How policy positions of coalition parties are perceived by voters

Does governing in coalitions affect how coalition parties’ policy positions are perceived by voters? In this article, the authors seek to understand the relationship between parties’ participation in coalition governments and their perception by voters. Policy positions are an important instrument through which parties compete for the support of voters. However, it is unclear to what extent voters can correctly perceive the positions of parties when they govern together with other coalition partners. It is argued here that because of the blurred lines of responsibility in multiparty cabinets, it is difficult for voters to correctly perceive the positions of coalition parties. What is more, it is expected that the internal functioning of coalition cabinets affects the extent to which coalition parties struggle to get their message out to voters. It is hypothesized in the article that intra‐cabinet conflict is negatively related to misperception. To test their theoretical expectations, the authors combine data on the left‐right policy positions of political parties from the Comparative Manifestos Project with data on how these positions are perceived by voters gathered from the Comparative Study of Electoral Systems from 1996 to 2011. The findings shed light on the relationship between party competition and coalition governments, and its implications for political representation.     

Does Cohabitation Matter? French European Policy-Making in the Context of Divided Government

This article analyses French European policy-making in the context of divided government, arguing that in the area of European policy-making cohabitation increases the number of veto players, as compared with unified government. The increase of veto players, in turn, reduces France's acceptance-sets at the European table and thereby introduces a status quo bias. In order to test this theory, use is made of a comparative case study design. Process-tracing and counterfactual analyses reveal that veto player theory can, indeed, be applied to the interactions of a split-executive government.     

In Search of Successful Reform: The Politics of Opposition and Consensus in OECD Parliamentary Democracies

Why are some governments able to undertake controversial policy reforms and others are not? Conventional wisdom argues that single-party majority governments are best able to implement reforms because there are fewer veto actors within the government that can block the reforms. However, these accounts fail to consider the veto power of societal actors and particularly of trade unions, which can stall reform even in the presence of a unified executive. This paper argues that controversial reforms require broad societal and, consequently, political consensus, which are easier to achieve under minority governments or governments of broad coalitions. Evidence from 22 OECD parliamentary democracies over 35 years shows that minority and large coalition governments have been more successful in reducing social security contributions and pensions than narrower majority governments. This is especially true in countries where trade unions are militant and often resort to industrial action.     

Partisan effects in morality policy making

Current comparative policy research gives no clear answer to the question of whether partisan politics in general or the partisan composition of governments in particular matter for different morality policy outputs across countries and over time. This article addresses this desideratum by employing a new encompassing dataset that captures the regulatory permissiveness in six morality policies that are homosexuality, same‐sex partnership, prostitution, pornography, abortion and euthanasia in 16 European countries over five decades from 1960 to 2010. Given the prevalent scepticism about a role for political parties for morality policies in existing research, this is a ‘hard’ test case for the ‘parties do matter’ argument. Starting from the basic theoretical assumption that different party families, if represented in national governments to varying degrees, ought to leave differing imprints on morality policy making, this research demonstrates that parties matter when accounting for the variation in morality policy outputs. This general statement needs to be qualified in three important ways. First, the nature of morality policy implies that party positions or preferences cannot be fully understood by merely focusing on one single cleavage alone. Instead, morality policy is located at the interface of different cleavages, including not only left‐right and secular‐religious dimensions, but also the conflicts between materialism and postmaterialism, green‐alternative‐libertarian and traditional‐authoritarian‐nationalist (GAL‐TAN) parties, and integration and demarcation. Second, it is argued in this article that the relevance of different cleavages for morality issues varies over time. Third, partisan effects can be found only if individual cabinets, rather than country‐years, are used as the unit of analysis in the research design. In particular, party families that tend to prioritise individual freedom over collective interests (i.e., left and liberal parties) are associated with significantly more liberal morality policies than party families that stress societal values and order (i.e., conservative/right and religious parties). While the latter are unlikely to overturn previous moves towards permissiveness, these results suggest that they might preserve the status quo at least. Curiously, no systematic effects of green parties are found, which may be because they have been represented in European governments at later periods when morality policy outputs were already quite permissive.     

The role of political partisanship during economic crises

Major economic crises may promote structural reforms, by increasing the cost of the status quo, or hinder them, by inducing more demand for protection. The ideology and political partisanship of the ruling government may be crucial in determining the prevailing course of action. In good times, conservative parties are typically pro-reform. However, do these parties try to exploit periods of crisis to carry out their reforms? Do social-democratic parties support even greater social protection? To answer these questions, this paper uses indicators of structural reforms in the labor, product, and financial markets for 25 OECD countries over the 1975–2008 period. The empirical analysis confirms the ambiguous effect of crises: product markets are liberalized, but financial markets become more regulated. Partisan politics also matters, as right parties are associated with more pro-market reforms. Yet, crises modify partisan politics: right-wing parties refrain from promoting privatizations, and oppose the introduction of greater financial market regulations. By contrast, center parties liberalize and trim unemployment benefits generosity, while left parties privatize. Furthermore, weak, fractionalized governments, which are associated with more regulated product markets, are also more likely to liberalize during a crisis.     

The Impact of Parties and Elections on Municipal Debt Policy in Mexico

Opportunistic electoral fiscal policy cycle theory suggests that all subnational officials will raise fiscal spending during elections. Ideological partisan fiscal policy cycle theory suggests that only left‐leaning governments will raise election year fiscal spending, with right‐leaning parties choosing the reverse. This article assesses which of these competing logics applies to debt policy choices. Cross‐sectional time‐series analysis of yearly loan acquisition across Mexican municipalities—on statistically matched municipal subsamples to balance creditworthiness across left‐ and right‐leaning governments—shows that all parties engage in electoral policy cycles but not in the way originally thought. It also shows that different parties favored different types of loans, although not always according to partisan predictions. Both electoral and partisan logics thus shape debt policy decisions—in contrast to fiscal policy where these logics are mutually exclusive—because debt policy involves decisions on multiple dimensions, about the total and type of loans.     

Parties and institutions: empirical evidence on veto players and the growth of government

Does the effective number of veto players in a political system explain the rate of government growth? Panel data analyses are conducted in order to test several measures of veto players against each other, and these results are compared with similar analyses of government fractionalization. The analyses indicate that veto players and especially government fractionalization exert a constraining effect on changes in the size of government, but also that the effect is not consistent over time: neither veto players in general nor fractionalization of government in particular exerted any constraining effect during the decades of rapid government growth due to welfare state creation and expansion in the 1960s and 1970s. The strength of government fractionalization vis-a-vis the veto player measures in explaining changes in the size of government suggest that the constellation of partisan veto players within coalition governments matters, while the effect of institutional veto players remains uncertain.     

Institutions and coalition formation: The German election of 2005

The German election of 2005 creates three puzzles for the literature on coalition formation. First, the election led to a rare event in German politics and in parliamentary systems more generally, a ‘grand coalition’ between the two largest parties. Second, a minority government, something which has never occurred in postwar Germany (except briefly as the result of the breakdown of a government coalition), was in fact one of the two most likely governments to form. Third, the parties of the left retained a comfortable majority in the Bundestag; however they did not form a coalition. The election of 2005 appears unique in German politics, but we argue that its outcome is easily understood using existing institutional theories of coalition formation. We examine party positions in two dimensions (economic and social) using computer-based word scoring of party manifestos. We demonstrate that the conditions for a SPD minority government were present in Germany due to its central location in the policy space. While the configuration of policy positions would thus have allowed the SPD to form a minority government, the role of the Federal President as a veto player could have prevented it from forming, and the presence of an opposition-controlled upper house would have decreased its effectiveness. The mere possibility of forming a minority government gave the SPD a bargaining advantage in the coalition negotiations with the CDU/CSU. We show that in the final portfolio allocation, the SPD received ministries which control approximately two-thirds of the federal budget.     

Do parties matter in delegation? Partisan preferences and the creation of regulatory agencies in Europe

The ideological orientation of parties in government has not been prominently featured in explaining the rise of regulatory agencies. This paper argues that theories based on political uncertainty and credible commitment can yield meaningful predictions regarding the relationship between government preferences and the establishment of regulatory agencies, when ideological orientation is linked with notions of party competence and issue ownership. The empirical section tests three such hypotheses with data on the establishment of 110 regulatory agencies in 20 European democracies between 1980 and 2009, thus providing one of the most comprehensive cross‐national analyses of agency creation to date. The results show that ideologically extreme cabinets are more likely to establish regulatory agencies and that right‐wing governments create more agencies in the economic than in the social domain. These findings partly qualify the view on the scarce relevance of government preferences in explaining the rise of the agency model in regulation and that the emulation mechanism of the diffusion process is the dominant force behind agencification.     

The Italian state: no longer Catholic,no longer Christian

The constant appearance of highly detailed studies of parties in the different West European countries creates the need for a theory which summarises their major findings and relates them to each other. Such a theory needs to be general in form, but existing formulations (for example, minimal‐winning criteria for government formation) are limited to one aspect of government and are theoretically inadequate. A general theory covering all major aspects of democratic party government (formation, distribution of ministries, reshuffles, policy formation and termination) is proposed and its fit with existing findings illustrated.     

Ideological congruence over government mandates under majoritarian and proportional representation electoral systems

The existing literature on ideological congruence has typically looked at congruence immediately after elections when governments are formed. This article goes beyond that comparative static approach by examining changes in citizen-government ideological congruence between two fixed points in time, namely at the beginning and end of government mandates. Building on a veto player approach and dynamics of party competition under majoritarian and proportional representation (PR) electoral systems, the results indicate, first, that government positions are more stable in between elections, as the number of parties and their ideological distance increase in cabinet. Second, it appears that single-party and homogeneous coalition governments decrease ideological congruence between elections under low levels of polarisation, while they increase congruence under very high levels of polarisation. Third, it was found that governments under majoritarian systems slightly decrease congruence between elections while congruence stays stable on average under PR systems. The different levels of party system polarisation across majoritarian and PR electoral systems mostly explain this difference.     

Policy preferences and ministerial structures: Immigrant integration governance in Western Europe, 1997–2017

This article tests an often‐stated assumption in the “machinery of government” literature: that government parties’ issue and policy preferences affect the ministerial structure. Using a new Dataset on Immigrant Integration Governance (DIIG) that documents the ministerial structure of immigrant integration in 16 Western European countries during 1997–2017, the analysis finds that divergence and change characterize the ministerial structure. The analysis finds that right‐oriented governments are more inclined to couple integration with immigration and justice than are left‐oriented governments, indicating different policy preferences. However, it does not find that governments with radical parties are more inclined to signal “integration” in ministerial titles. The study's comparative approach challenges the generalizability of existing knowledge on drivers of ministerial changes. Additionally, it fills a gap in current immigrant integration literature: the study of the horizontal governance structure.     

Institutional veto players and cabinet formation: The veto control hypothesis reconsidered

Are potential cabinets more likely to form when they control institutional veto players such as symmetric second chambers or minority vetoes? Existing evidence for a causal effect of veto control has been weak. This article presents evidence for this effect on the basis of conditional and mixed logit analyses of government formations in 21 parliamentary and semi‐presidential democracies between 1955 and 2012. It also shows that the size of the effect varies systematically across political‐institutional contexts. The estimated causal effect was greater in countries that eventually abolished the relevant veto institutions. It is suggested that the incidence of constitutional reform is a proxy for context‐specific factors that increased the incentives for veto control and simultaneously provided a stimulus for the weakening of institutional veto power.     

Dodging the bullet: How crises trigger technocrat‐led governments

Governments led by nonpartisan, ‘technocratic’ prime ministers are a rare phenomenon in parliamentary democracies, but have become more frequent since the late 1980s. This article focuses on the factors that lead to the formation of such cabinets. It posits that parliamentary parties with the chance to win the prime ministerial post will only relinquish it during political and economic crises that drastically increase the electoral costs of ruling and limit policy returns from governing. Statistical analyses of 469 government formations in 29 European democracies between 1977 and 2013 suggest that political scandals and economic recessions are major drivers of the occurrence of technocratic prime ministers. Meanwhile, neither presidential powers nor party system fragmentation and polarisation have any independent effect. The findings suggest that parties strategically choose technocrat‐led governments to shift blame and re‐establish their credibility and that of their policies in the face of crises that de‐legitimise their rule.     

The politics of government reorganization in Western Europe

The reorganization of governments is crucial for parties to express their policy preferences once they reach office. Yet these activities are not confined to the direct aftermath of general elections or to wide-ranging structural reforms. Instead, governments reorganize and adjust their machinery of government all the time. This paper aims to assess these structural choices with a particular focus at the core of the state, comparing four Western European democracies (Germany, France, the Netherlands, and United Kingdom) from 1980 to 2013. Our empirical analysis shows that stronger shifts in cabinets' ideological profiles in the short- and long-term as well as the units' proximity to political executives yield significant effects. In contrast, Conservative governments, commonly regarded as key promoters of reorganizing governments, are not significant for the likelihood of structural change. We discuss the effects of this politics of government reorganization for different research debates assessing the inner workings of governments.     

Determinants of cabinet size

A large literature examines the composition of cabinets in parliamentary systems, but very little attention has been paid to the size of those cabinets. Yet not only is the size of the cabinet related to the division of portfolios that may take place, cabinet size is also related to policy outcomes. In this article, a theory of party size is considered which examines how coalition bargaining considerations, intra‐party politics and efficiency concerns affect the size of cabinets. Hypotheses derived from the theory are examined using an extensive cross‐national dataset on coalition governments which allows us to track changes in cabinet size and membership both across and within cabinets.     

Perceptions of Partisan Ideologies: The Effect of Coalition Participation

Recent scholarship in comparative political behavior has begun to address how voters in coalitional systems manage the complexity of those environments. We contribute to this emerging literature by asking how voters update their perceptions of the policy positions of political parties that participate in coalition cabinets. In contrast to previous work on the sources of voter perceptions of party ideology in parliamentary systems, which has asked how voters respond to changes in party manifestos (i.e., promises), we argue that in updating their perceptions, voters will give more weight to observable actions than to promises. Further, coalition participation is an easily observed party action that voters use as a heuristic to infer the direction of policy change in the absence of detailed information about parties’ legislative records. Specifically, we propose that all voters should perceive parties in coalition cabinets as more ideologically similar, but that this tendency will be muted for more politically interested voters (who have greater access to countervailing messages from parties). Using an individual‐level data set constructed from 54 electoral surveys in 18 European countries, we find robust support for these propositions.     

Budget Deficits and Coalition Governments

This paper shows that compromise between different ideologicalmotivations within multiparty governments may result in a biastoward running budget deficits even if all parties in thecoalition prefer balanced budgets. The deficit bias increases withthe degree of ``polarization'' of the ideological motivations andgenerally decreases with the degree of concentration of powerwithin the government. Although the analysis is conducted assuminga proportional representation electoral system, the results willalso apply to majoritarian systems if the winning party comprisesideologically different constituencies. The relationship betweenbudget deficits and multiparty governments is investigated usingdata from a sample of eight European Union countries for the period1971–1990. Analysis on pooled data is partly in line with the theory.Time series within country analysis is less favorable: we findclear support to the theory only in the case of Italy.