Measuring portfolio salience in Eastern European parliamentary democracies

Abstract.  This article presents the results of an expert survey of 14 Eastern European countries on the subject of portfolio salience. Respondents provided ratings of the relative value of all ministerial portfolios in these countries over the years 1990–2002. The ratings are unique in the study of Eastern Europe and appear to possess the characteristics of comprehensiveness and reliability. Comparing the results with a similar survey of Western Europe indicates that individual portfolios are rated nearly identically in both regions. Some significant differences, however, emerge when we look separately at more advanced and less advanced Eastern European countries. Various suggestions are made for how scholars can use these new data in future work.     

Legislative agenda-setting in parliamentary democracies

Various strands of literature in comparative politics regard governments as the only noteworthy initiators and mainsprings of legislative policy making in parliamentary democracies. Opposition activity in policy making is more often associated with the intention to prevent, rather than to shape, policy. Does this perception reflect real‐life politics? To answer this question, this article discusses different arguments that link institutional and policy‐related characteristics to the incentives and constraints of different government and parliamentary actors to initiate or co‐sponsor legislative bills. More specifically, it relates policy‐, office‐ and vote‐related incentives, as well as institutional and resource constraints of legislative actors, to the likelihood that these actors will take the lead in legislative agenda‐setting. These arguments are confronted with original data on the universe of all legislative bills in four parliamentary systems over one and a half decades. The article concludes that opposition and, in particular, bipartisan agenda‐setting is indeed rare. Yet, in contrast to widely held maxims, it is neither absent nor spurious, but related to the allocation of power and the intensity of ideological conflict both within and between the (coalition) government and parliament.     

Delegation and accountability in parliamentary democracies

Abstract. Parliamentary democracy has been widely embraced by politicians and especially by the scholarly community but remains less widely understood. In this essay, I identify the institutional features that define parliamentary democracy and suggest how they can be understood as delegation relationships. I propose two definitions: one minimal and one maximal (or ideal–typical). In the latter sense, parliamentary democracy is a particular regime of delegation and accountability that can be understood with the help of agency theory, which allows us to identify the conditions under which democratic agency problems may occur. Parliamentarism is simple, indirect, and relies on lessons gradually acquired in the past. Compared to presidentialism, parliamentarism has certain advantages, such as decisional efficiency and the inducements it creates toward effort. On the other hand, parliamentarism also implies disadvantages such as ineffective accountability and a lack of transparency, which may cause informational inefficiencies. And whereas parliamentarism may be particularly suitable for problems of adverse selection, it is a less certain cure for moral hazard. In contemporary advanced societies, parliamentarism is facing the challenges of decaying screening devices and diverted accountabilities.     

Delegation to civil servants in parliamentary democracies

Abstract. This article reviews institutional arrangements that cabinet ministers and other political actors employ to influence civil servant behavior in parliamentary democracies. I then discuss how unlike other theories of bureaucratic structure, the principal–agent framework can be employed to generate testable hypotheses about systematic cross–national variation in delegation instruments. I also offer an empirical illustration of the approach, one that examines the relationship between cabinet turnover and delegation strategies on health policy. The analysis underlines the need to be cautious about making claims concerning the impact of political factors (like cabinet instability) and institutional factors (like cabinet decision–making rules) on delegation outcomes without first examining how these factors influence delegation strategies themselves.     

Measuring government duration and stability in Central Eastern European democracies

Existing studies of government duration in parliamentary democracies typically measure the length of a government's tenure in office without accounting for delays in the government formation process. By assuming that a cabinet leaves office on the day prior to the new cabinet taking office, these measures ignore periods during which a government has lost its mandate but is still legally in power as a caretaker government. A consequence is that governments that are actually stable and governments that only appear stable because replacement governments take a long time to form are observationally equivalent. This suggests that some existing studies of government stability are potentially flawed. It also means that a number of interesting research questions cannot be answered with existing data. Many of these questions address the various consequences of caretaker governments. The answers to these questions are relevant for scholars interested in representation and accountability. This article presents a new dataset collected on government duration in eleven Central Eastern European democracies from 1990 to 2008 that specifically takes account of caretaker periods and delays in the government formation process. These data will provide scholars with more flexibility to choose the measure that best reflects their underlying conception of government stability.     

Political parties in parliamentary democracies: Making delegation and accountability work

Abstract. In modern democracies political parties exist because (1) they reduce transaction costs in the electoral, parliamentary and governmental arenas and (2) help overcome the dilemma of collective action. In Western Europe political parties are the central mechanism to make the constitutional chain of political delegation and accountability work in practice. Party representatives in public office are ultimately the agents of the extra–parliamentary party organization. In order to contain agency loss parties rely on party–internal mechanisms and the institutionalisation of party rights in public rules and, in contrast to US parties, they apply the full range of ex ante and ex post mechanisms. Generally, the role of party is weaker the further down the chain of delegation.     

Voters and their representatives: electoral institutions and delegation in parliamentary democracies

Abstract. Of all the links in the democratic delegation chain, the first link (from voters to legislators) may be fraught with the greatest potential for agency losses. Voters — the ultimate principals – may lack the information and resources to select the best legislators and subsequently ensure that they do the public's bidding. This paper uses some of the insights of the principal–agent approach to examine the Voter–MP relationship by focusing primarily on two sets of organisational and institutional rules: methods of candidate selection and electoral laws. Since the emphasis is on direct links between voters and legislators (rather than on the intermediary role of parties), we examine electoral laws in terms of the incentives they provide for candidates to seek a personal vote. Since agency losses are most likely when the MPs' careers do not directly depend on voters, electoral systems are arranged on a continuum from party–centred systems (little or no incentive to seek personal votes), to intermediate systems (limited effectiveness of personal voting) to candidate–centred systems (where personal voting is most effective). One of the arguments is that a trade–off often exists between the directness of the link between voter and agent and the choice of agents that is crucial to voters' abilities to sanction agents. If it is thought desirable that voters have the ability to directly sanction representatives, then an institutional design involving effective preferential voting in districts of moderate magnitude should be optimal.     

From parliamentary pay to party funding: The acceptability of informal institutions in advanced democracies

While direct state funding of political parties has been a prominent theme in cross‐national research over the last decade, we still know little about party strategies to access state resources that are not explicitly earmarked for partisan usage. This article looks at one widespread but often overlooked informal party practice: the ‘taxing’ of MP salaries – that is, the regular transfer of fixed salary shares to party coffers. Building on notions of informal institutions developed in work on new democracies, the theoretical approach specifies factors that shape the acceptability of this legally non‐enforceable intra‐organisational practice. It is tested through a selection model applied to a unique dataset covering 124 parties across 19 advanced democracies. Controlling for a range of party‐ and institutional‐level variables, it is found that the presence of a taxing rule and the collection of demanding tax shares are more common in leftist parties (high internal acceptability) and in systems in which the penetration of state institutions by political parties is intense (high external acceptability).     

Government survival in Western multi-party democracies

Abstract Based upon findings in other fields in the social sciences, it is proposed in this article that cooperation between government parties can be induced when parties in governments are able to exercise credible exit threats. As stability is more likely to be induced by cooperation than by defection, more durable governments can be expected. The possibility for credible exit threats in a government is operationalized via the presence of a dominant party in the government. The corresponding prediction is tested against a data set that contains 261 postwar governments in twelve western multiparty democracies. In the event history analyses of government survival, I control for variables pertaining to the bargaining environment, bargaining complexity, and the ideological diversity of the governments. It is found that the presence of dominant parties in governments does indeed enhance the survival time of governments.     

Policy horizons in West European parliamentary systems

Abstract This paper investigates the hypothesis that coalition behaviour in West European parliamentary systems is conditioned by the existence of 'policy horizons' that delimit the extent to which parties can compromise on policy positions in order to participate in government. The first part of the paper demonstrates that policy horizons are implied by certain conceptions of party utility and that their existence would entail important constraints on the coalition game; in particular, they would produce equilibrium outcomes in some situations where voting cycles would normally be expected and they would tend to confine possible outcomes to central locations in the policy space in the absence of equilibria. The paper then develops a method of estimating policy horizons empirically in order to show that they account to a substantial extent for both the size and party composition of governing coalitions in these systems.     

Valence and satisfaction with democracy: A cross‐national analysis of nine Western European democracies

In recent studies, scholars have highlighted factors that influence citizen satisfaction with democracy, with particular emphasis on the role played by the institutional features of political systems, and ideology. This article presents the first empirical study of whether changes in important party characteristics can affect individuals' satisfaction with democracy. Using a measure of parties' character‐valence derived from content analysis of news reports, evidence is presented that when governing parties' images decline with respect to important valence‐related attributes such as competence, unity and integrity, then citizen satisfaction with democracy similarly declines. However, this relationship is conditional on the performance of opposition parties. These findings are relevant to studies of regime support, political representation, democratic accountability and voter behaviour.     

Policy horizons in West European parliamentary systems

This paper investigates the hypothesis that coalition behaviour in West European parliamentary systems is conditioned by the existence of 'policy horizons' that delimit the extent to which parties can compromise on policy positions in order to participate in government. The first part of the paper demonstrates that policy horizons are implied by certain conceptions of party utility and that their existence would entail important constraints on the coalition game; in particular, they would produce equilibrium outcomes in some situations where voting cycles would normally be expected and they would tend to confine possible outcomes to central locations in the policy space in the absence of equilibria. The paper then develops a method of estimating policy horizons empirically in order to show that they account to a substantial extent for both the size and party composition of governing coalitions in these systems.     

Job security regulations in Western democracies: A fuzzy set analysis

This article uses fuzzy set qualitative comparative analysis (fsQCA) to examine the determinants of job security regulations – here understood as restrictions on hiring and firing – in Western democracies. Unlike previous studies, the analysis reveals three different paths to high levels of job security regulations. The first path covers the Southern European state capitalist countries. In these countries, conflicts between forces pushing for liberal democracy and groups alienated from modernisation have led to high levels of statism and crowded out other societal actors. Job security regulations were enacted relatively early in order to provide social security by means available to the state. Due to fragmented welfare states, job security regulations have remained one of the most important pillars of the social protection regime. The second path covers the Continental European managed capitalist countries and is also characterised by high levels of statism. In these countries, repressive governments employed a stick‐and‐carrot strategy to weaken the labour movement and tie the loyalties of the individual to the state. After the Second World War, these countries developed corporatist intermediation systems and encompassing and generous welfare states. Finally, the third path covers the Nordic managed capitalist countries. This path is characterised by a high degree of non‐market coordination, strong labour movements and few institutional veto points. In the Nordic managed capitalist countries, job security regulations traditionally have been subject to collective agreements. However, in the 1960s, labour movements succeeded in pushing through the public legislation of job security despite opposition from employers' associations. Methodologically, this article demonstrates that cross‐national differences in the level of job security regulations can only be explained if the methods used allow for complex causality. In contrast, methods which focus on ‘net effects’ do not offer satisfactory explanations for the cross‐national differences in the level of job security regulations.     

Rough days in democracies: Comparing protests in democracies

Abstract.  Democratic political institutions are generally designed to channel public opinion; yet citizens often take to the streets in protest. Why would citizens, provided with formal mechanisms to affect the policy process, resort to extraordinary means? This article argues that the strength of representative institutions influences the likelihood of protest. The democratic institution literature does not address the issue of protest and in the protest literature effects of the democratic governmental structure have been largely underestimated. However, the diversity in government formats across democratic states and the corresponding variation in amount of protests leads one to question the relationship between them. This article identifies the variation in the scale of protests among democratic regimes in Western European countries using the European Protest and Coercion Data and explains protest using variation in the forms of government. Protesters in democratic countries with a weak legislature find it difficult to deliver their demands to government due to the institutional environment. Therefore, they are more inclined to protest than citizens in countries with a strong legislature. This argument is tested along with other structural variables and supported by results from testing models using ordinary least squares with panel-corrected standard errors.     

The influence of presidential heads of state on government formation in European democracies: Empirical evidence

Theories of coalition politics have paid little attention to the role of presidential heads of state in the government-formation process. This article investigates the influence of presidents on the two most important features of government-formation outcomes: the identity of the party of the prime minister and the party composition of the coalition. Substantial evidence is found that presidents in European democracies have managed to induce their preferred governments from the potential alternatives. The results also suggest that parliament-selected presidents and popularly elected presidents have different mechanisms of influence on these outcomes. The investigation sheds new light on the government-formation process in semi-presidential as well as in pure parliamentary systems.     

Government partisanship in Western democracies, 1945–1998

Abstract. In this article, we put forward a continuous measure of government partisanship, which allows meaningful comparisons across countries and across time, for 17 Western democracies for the period of 1945 through 1998. Our measure is predicated upon a manifesto-based measure of party ideology recently developed by Kim and Fording (1998), along with yearly cabinet post data. After discussing the validity of our measure, we replicate one of the most cited works in comparative political economy over the last ten years – Alvarez, Garrett and Lange's (1991) analysis of economic performance – by utilizing our own measure of government partisanship. We conclude that comparativists need to exercise greater caution in interpreting and evaluating the past findings of a large number of multivariate studies in comparative politics.     

Government survival in Western multi–party democracies: The effect of credible exit threats via dominance

Based upon findings in other fields in the social sciences, it is proposed in this article that cooperation between government parties can be induced when parties in governments are able to exercise credible exit threats. As stability is more likely to be induced by cooperation than by defection, more durable governments can be expected. The possibility for credible exit threats in a government is operationalized via the presence of a dominant party in the government. The corresponding prediction is tested against a data set that contains 261 postwar governments in twelve western multiparty democracies. In the event history analyses of government survival, I control for variables pertaining to the bargaining environment, bargaining complexity, and the ideological diversity of the governments. It is found that the presence of dominant parties in governments does indeed enhance the survival time of governments.     

The parliamentary elite in transition

Abstract Only two years after the critical elections of 27 March 1994, the Italian parliamentary election of 1996 marks another important step in the transformation of the political class. The extent of turnover is declining, and the renewal of the parliamentary elite shows some signs of stabilization. This article inquires into the differences in the sociological configuration of the new elite, and whether this means that new consolidated pathways to the parliamentary elite now already exist. The article analyzes the distribution of freshmen in the political class, the return of old backbenchers in the new political parties, the social and occupational background of MPs and, finally, their local and political experiences. In the final section, the article discusses some hypotheses about the perspectives on the recruitment of Italian MPs, focusing in particular on the effects of the structural crisis of political parties and the introduction of the plurality system. An empirically–derived typology of professionalization patterns is also provided.