Pre-electoral commitments and government formation

Recent studies show that pre-electoral commitments and the ideological distance between parties influence government formation. But do pre-electoral pacts or rejections of party combinations really have an independent impact on the outcome of the government formation game? Which policy areas matter when parties agree to build a coalition? This paper addresses these questions by applying a dataset that includes information on preferred/rejected coalition partners and the policy-area specific programmatic heterogeneity of all potential coalitions. The results show that pre-electoral commitments have a significant impact on government formation after controlling for endogeneity problems. There is also evidence that not only diversity in economic issues determines the partisan composition of governments.     

Negotiation in legislatures over government formation

We question results claiming to extend non-cooperative models of legislative bargaining to the theoretically general and substantively typical case with an arbitrary number of disciplined parties. We identify problems with both the derivation of formal results and empirical evaluation of these. No empirically robust formateur advantage is observed in field data on bargaining over government formation. Given this theoretical and empirical impasse, we reconsider the substantive premises that should form the foundation for any new attempt to model this fundamental political process, arguing that models should be grounded in binding constitutional constraints on the government formation process in parliamentary democracies.     

Theories of coalition formation: An empirical test using data from Danish local government

Abstract.  Theories of coalition formation represent a diverse set of arguments about why some government coalitions form while others do not. In this article, the authors present a systematic empirical test of the relative importance of the various arguments. The test is designed to avoid a circularity problem present in many coalition studies – namely that the theories are tested on data of national government coalitions in postwar Europe: the very data that gave rise to the theories in the first place. Instead, the authors focus on government coalitions at the municipal level. They base their analysis on an expert survey of almost 3,000 local councillors from all municipalities in Denmark. They use conditional logit analysis to model government formation as a discrete choice between all potential governments. The analysis confirms some, but far from all, traditional explanations such as those based on office and policy motives. At the same time, the analysis raises the question of whether actors really seek minimal coalitions.     

Dynamic approaches to government formation and the generic instability of decisive structures in Japan

This paper relaxes the “party as unitary actor” assumption that characterises much theoretical work on party competition and government formation. It first sketches some of the theoretical implications of assuming that legislators are free to defect from parties of which they are members, and to join other parties that might be willing to accept them. This leads to a dynamic legislative party system that is quite distinct from the type of party system assumed by most models, which remains essentially static between elections. Working from “office-seeking” assumptions about the motivations of legislators that seem very plausible in the Japanese case, it shows that such a dynamic party system is likely to be unstable, since there are generic gains to be derived from the fission and fusion of parties. The paper then moves on to explore the Japanese case in these terms. The Japanese party system is self-evidently dynamic and characterised by a high degree of flux, with legislative parties regularly splitting and fusing between elections. The evidence suggests that large parties that pass a certain size threshold can be attractors in the dynamic system, both offering benefits to and receiving them from defectors from other parties. In this way, a “near-majority” party can pass the majority threshold between elections, as happened with the Japanese LDP.     

The repercussions of the Iraqi Kurdistan independence referendum

Iraqi Kurdistan President Masoud Barzani appears to have overreached in holding a referendum on independence, although almost 93% voted for it. Major powers support Iraq's territorial integrity. The Iraqi government has asserted military control over the region with Iran's help. Facing political and economic isolation, the Kurdistan Regional Government's authority and cohesion has been weakened. Barzani's futility has likely hardened the Kurdistan Worker's Party (PKK)'s position in Turkey and increased its regional freedom of action.     

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.     

Neighborhood government

Advocacy of neighborhood government should be based on a careful assessment of possible dangers and deficiencies, as well as merits. The obstacles to increasing neighborhood power include the costs of community organizing in terms of time and effort, community conflict, city-neighborhood conflict, and general political conflict. To persuade individuals to engage in collective action, it is necessary that the rewards of such action be greater than the personal costs. Serious participation is likely to occur only when neighborhood government programs offer visible rewards and work to solve concrete problems. There is a specific awareness that many unions and politicians will fight neighborhood government and that they have the power to damage or destroy it. There is also the sense that, whereas there has been success in developing community structures, it has been difficult to move government toward decentralization, toward more flexible administrative procedures.To appear in a forthcoming book,The City in the Seventies (edited by Robert K. Yin), to be published by F. E. Peacock Publishers, Inc.     

政府职能转变从政府干预转向公共管理

随着社会主义市场经济体制的建立,我国政府的管理对象、体制环境与法治环境都发生了重大变化,行政环境的变化要求我国政府职能发生相应变化.我国政府应从当前对经济活动的直接干预转向对整个社会经济活动的公共管理,面向各种经济成分提供公平的、无差别的公共产品与公共服务.为此,我国要进一步深化行政改革,转变政府管理观念、管理方式与管理制度,完善公共管理的制度与法规,实现从政府干预向公共管理的转变.     

The size of government

Most research on the causes of growth in government expenditure has focused on the demand for government services. In this paper, we argue that in fact this growth may have occurred because of changes in supply. Changes in technology leading to increased specialization and thus increased opportunity costs of self-production have led to increased market production and increased record keeping. Also, female labor force participation has increased. Both of these factors serve to reduce the (efficiency) cost of collecting taxes; if the demand for government spending has not changed, this increase in supply would lead to a larger public sector. We estimate a system of simultaneous equations for the period 1929–1970 incorporating this hypothesis, and the results are consistent with the theory. We are able to explain virtually all of the growth of government; increases in female labor force participation seems to be a very important variable in this explanation.     

Sizing the government

Is there such a thing as an optimal government size? We investigate the so-called Armey curve, which claims an inverted U-shaped relationship between government size and economic performance, using non-parametric Data Envelopment Analysis (DEA). The DEA scores are linked to control variables, such as initial per capita income, openness, population density, urbanization, country size and family size. For 23 OECD-countries we estimate the country specific efficiency scores, which reveal the extent to which a country uses excess public resources to achieve the observed growth rate of GDP.