The role of actors in the policy design process: introducing design coalitions to explain policy output

Policy Sciences - Despite a renaissance of policy design thinking in public policy literature and a renewed interest in agency in the policy process literature, agency in the policy design process...     

Pre-electoral coalitions in comparative perspective: A test of existing hypotheses

Despite the vast coalition literature, pre-electoral coalitions have never been at the center of any systematic, cross-national research. Given their prevalence and potential impact on government composition and policies, this represents a serious omission in our knowledge of coalitions. I begin to remedy this situation by testing two hypotheses found in the literature on party coalitions. The first is that pre-electoral coalitions are more likely to form in disproportional systems if there are a sufficiently large number of parties. The second is that pre-electoral coalitions are more likely to form if voters face high uncertainty about the identity of future governments. These hypotheses are tested using a new dataset comprising legislative elections in 22 advanced industrialized countries between 1946 and 1998. The results of the statistical analysis support the first hypothesis, but not the second.     

The stability of international coalitions in United Nations voting from 1946 to 1973

The stability of outcomes under democratic decision-making is a significant issue in public choice. Several factors might make U.N. voting blocs less stable than blocs in national legislatures. Nevertheless, the data suggest that from 1946 to 1973 United Nations voting blocs were relatively stable. Nations that leave their blocs tend to vote with nearby blocs rather than making large ideological shifts, and tend to return to their old blocs. There does not appear to be cycles in United Nations voting blocs. Furthermore, the blocs can be ranked on a stable single-dimensioned continuum, lending further evidence that United Nations voting blocs are stable.     

Explaining the formation of minimal coalitions: Anti-system parties and anti-pact rules

Abstract.  Recent theoretical arguments hold that the institutional setting of a political system influences coalition formation. Empirical analyses that confront these hypotheses have, however, been slow to emerge. We provide a first test of the relation between coalition formation and one element within this institutional setting: the existence of commitments not to join forces with certain 'pariah' parties (i.e., anti-pact rules). Specifically, we study the effect of the 'cordon sanitaire' around the Flemish extreme right-wing party Vlaams Blok over the period from 1976 to 2000. The results show that the refusal to coalesce with Vlaams Blok significantly affects the probability that 'minimal winning', 'minimal number' and 'minimal size' coalitions are formed.     

Policy making and collective action: Defining coalitions within the advocacy coalition framework

Research on policy communities, policy networks, and advocacy coalitions represents the most recent effort by policy scholars in North America and Europe to meaningfully describe and explain the complex, dynamic policy making processes of modern societies. While work in this tradition has been extraordinarily productive, issues of collective action have not been carefully addressed. Focusing on the advocacy coalitions (AC) framework developed by Sabatier (1988) and Sabatier and Jenkins-Smith (1993) as an example of a productive research program within the policy network tradition, this article (1) examines the potential of the AC framework, with its emphasis on beliefs, policy learning, and preference formation, to provide richer explanations of policy making processes than frameworks grounded exclusively in instrumental rationality; (2) suggests that paradoxically, however, the AC framework can more fully realize its potential by admitting the explanations of collective action from frameworks based on instrumental rationality; (3) incorporates within the AC framework accounts of how coalitions form and maintain themselves over time and of the types of strategies coalitions are likely to adopt to pursue their policy goals; and (4) derives falsifiable collective action hypotheses that can be empirically tested to determine whether incorporating theories of collective action within the AC framework represents a positive, rather than a degenerative, expansion of the AC framework.     

Coalition type and voter support for parties: Grand coalitions in German elections

While scholars have generally acknowledged that coalition governments are less accountable to voters than single party majorities, surprisingly little differentiation is made among different types of coalition governments. In this paper, we examine voter support for two very different types of coalition governments: those with a single large party and a junior partner and grand coalitions—governing coalitions between two large but ideologically dissimilar parties. We argue that grand coalitions differ from the more typical senior–junior partners in terms of the ability of individual parties to respond to their constituencies. We test this argument using survey data from four German Election Studies (GES), before and after each of the two German grand coalitions (1965, 1969, 2005, and 2009), which provide a unique opportunity to compare voter support for grand coalitions to those of the more typical senior–junior party model. We find evidence that voters responded to grand coalitions by moving away from their traditional voting patterns, and increasing their support for parties outside of the grand coalition, although this effect varies by the number of alternative parties.     

Explaining and predicting coalition outcomes: Conclusions from studying data on local coalitions

Abstract. Because the importance of coalition formation has been long established, there is no shortage of ideas explaining and predicting coalition outcomes. However, one of the problems for contemporary coalition research is that most coalition theories have been thoroughly tested on the same data on national governments that have formed in the West European postwar democracies. This stresses the need for finding new data that can increase our ability to test and refine coalition theories. This article uses unique elite survey data from an investigation conducted among councilors in a large sample of local authorities in Sweden to test hypotheses on coalition formation.
Another problem in coalition research is that the large number of coalition hypotheses have not been tested extensively using multivariate models that provide sufficient controls. By using a methodological approach that models government formation as a discrete choice between potential governments, we can draw conclusions about the relative importance of different types of variables. The results found in this analysis indicate that we have to pay attention to both traditional variables, such as size and policy, and institutional variables if our aim is to explain and predict coalition formation.     

Interest groups and the regulation of pesticides: Congress,coalitions, and closure

This article is essentially a rejoinder to Christopher Bosso's piece, Transforming Adversaries Into Collaborators: Interest groups and the regulation of chemical pesticides, which appeared in this journal (21: 3–22). The case of pesticides regulation is re-examined and some new insights are offered. At the center of Bosso's argument is the contention that Congress is passive. John Kingdon's agenda/alternative distinction is utilized to arrive at an alternative way to think about the role of Congress in today's permeable pressure system.     

How crude: Advocacy coalitions,offshore oil,and the self-negating belief

Although the Advocacy Coalition Framework (ACF) offers a promising approach for the study of policy change, other social science perspectives – specifically including human ecology – point to competing expectations. The ACF proposes that external perturbations are a necessary precondition for policy change; by contrast, work in human ecology draws attention to the potential for autogenic succession– cases where people or organizations act in ways that bring about their own demise. This difference in perspectives is tested with respect to a policy subsystem that has been found to offer a valuable context for examining ACF expectations, namely the U.S. federal program for offshore oil leasing. Many developments within this program have been quite consistent with ACF expectations; the rise to power of a new governing coalition in 1981, for example, did lead to a decided shift in policies, and the National Academy of Sciences did play roughly the role predicted by ACF. In addition, however, key sources of policy change were set in motion by members of the governing coalition itself – based on actions that were quite consistent with the policy core beliefs of the governing coalition, but not consistent with the assessments by independent scientists. The experience suggests that what is needed is not so much a rejection of the ACF as its refinement. Even without external perturbations, members of the governing coalition have the potential to undercut their own interests, if only because of the potential power of the self-negating belief. Ironically, this potential may be the highest in precisely those cases where the governing coalition has the greatest apparent ability to impose its own beliefs, and the lowest level of apparent need to respond to alternative or competing views.     

Medicaid matters: children's health and Medicaid eligibility expansions.

In the late 1980s, a series of federal laws were enacted which expanded Medicaid eligibility to more of the nation's children. States had a great amount of discretion in how fast and how far these expansions were implemented. As a result, there was great variation among the states in defining who was eligible for the program. This variation provides a rare opportunity to disentangle the effect of Medicaid from a child's socioeconomic status. Using data from the National Health Interview Survey, we address whether the Medicaid expansions improved the health and functional status of children. Econometric models were developed using fixed-effects regressions, and were estimated separately for white, black, and Hispanic children. White children experienced statistically significant reductions in acute health conditions and functional limitations. Black and Hispanic children showed some evidence of improved health conditions and functional status, but this evidence is inconclusive in the study sample. This may be due to differences in their access to appropriate health services or to the smaller sample size of minorities in each geographic area. The findings are also relevant to the implementation of the Children' Health Insurance Program (CHIP), the latest federal effort to expand access to health care to poor and near poor children. In many states, CHIP is being implemented in whole or in part through further Medicaid expansions.