How and when do presidents influence the duration of coalition bargaining in semi‐presidential systems?

How and when do presidents influence the government formation process in semi‐presidential systems? Presidents have both a formal role and vested interest in the formation of the cabinet, yet their influence has been overlooked in studies of the duration of government formation. In this article, it is argued that the president's influence over government formation can be explained by his or her perceived legitimacy to act in the bargaining process and their partisanship. In this first case, it is argued that the legitimacy to act derives from a president's constitutional powers and more powerful presidents simplify cabinet bargaining, leading to shorter government formation periods. In the second case, it is proposed that presidents and their parties have overlapping preferences. Therefore, when the president's party holds greater bargaining power in government formation negotiations, the bargaining process is less uncertain and less complex. Thus, government formation processes will be shorter. Using survival models and data from 26 European democracies, both propositions are confirmed by the analysis. The results enhance our understanding of the dynamics of cabinet bargaining processes and contribute to the wider study of semi‐presidentialism and executive‐legislative relations. One broader implication of these results is that the president's party affiliation is an important motivation for them as political actors; this contrasts with some previous studies which conceive of presidents as non‐partisan actors.     

The Effects of Structures and Power on State Bargaining Strategies

When and why will states adopt more (or less) cooperative bargaining strategies? Standard answers to this question focus on the role of state power. Other scholars highlight socialization effects. I argue that in most international negotiations, the institutional bargaining structure will mitigate the effects of power and socialization, and drive state bargaining behavior. Factors highlighted by formal models of international bargaining should therefore best explain the variation in the strategies states adopt. I introduce empirical measures of these abstract concepts, and test their effects against those of power and socialization using an original dataset of state bargaining strategies in the European Union (EU). The results show that structural factors best explain variation in the EU states’ bargaining strategies. I conclude by highlighting the conditions under which these effects should explain state bargaining behavior in other international negotiations, and discuss the implications of this argument for the study of international bargaining.     

Parliamentary procedure: principal forms and political effects

A standard conclusion of theorists who model bargaining as a non-cooperative game is that the party designated to make the first move—the formateur party—will determine the bargaining outcome. Most empirical studies of parliamentary coalition formation have paid surprisingly little attention to the formation process. In this paper we model government formation as a two-stage unordered discrete choice problem that better reflects this process. The first step involves the selection of a formateur party, and the second involves the choice of partners by the predicted formateur. We evaluate several hypotheses for the two stages, using a data set of all cabinets formed in the Western European countries from 1970 to 2006. In our analyses of formateur selection, we find that party size is clearly the dominant feature. In the second stage, we show that when predicting government composition it is fruitful to add information drawn from a first stage analysis.     

The Logic of Gamson's Law: Pre-election Coalitions and Portfolio Allocations

Gamson's Law—the proposition that coalition governments will distribute portfolios in proportion to each member party's contribution of seats to the coalition—has been one of the most prominent landmarks in coalitional studies since the 1970s. However, standard bargaining models of government formation argue that Gamson's Law should not hold, once one controls for relevant indicators of bargaining power. In this article, we extend these bargaining models by allowing parties to form pre-election pacts. We argue that campaign investments by pact signatories depend on how they anticipate portfolios will be distributed and, thus, signatories have an incentive to precommit to portfolio allocation rules. We show that pacts will sometimes agree to allocate portfolios partly or wholly in proportion to members' contributions of seats to the coalition; this increases each signatory's investment in the campaign, thereby conferring external benefits (in the form of a larger probability of an alliance majority) on other coalition members. Empirical tests support the model's predictions.     

Budget-maximizing governmental agencies: An empirical test

Niskanen's theory of government budgeting, involving powerful agencies interested in maximizing their budgets through bargaining with a weak, poorly informed governmental ‘Sponsor’, has received wide recognition. This paper presents the first direct empirical tests of Niskanen's ideas. One implication of Niskanen's model of budgeting is that the demand for public services will appear to be elastic. Niskanen's model also implies restrictions on the elasticity of the derived demand for labor in the public sector. Neither set of predictions is supported by existing empirical research on government activity.     

The portfolio allocation paradox: An investigation into the nature of a very strong but puzzling relationship

Abstract.  Perhaps the strongest empirical finding in political science is 'Gamson's Law': the near-perfect relationship that exists in parliamentary systems between a coalition party's seat contribution to the government and its quantitative allocation of cabinet portfolios. Nevertheless, doubts remain. What would happen if the salience or importance of the various portfolios was also taken into account? Should it not be the case that payoffs correspond with bargaining power rather than seat contributions? And perhaps most significantly, would addressing these issues produce evidence that the parties designated to form governments extract disproportionately large payoffs for themselves, as predicted by 'proposer' models of bargaining? Utilizing the results of a new expert survey of portfolio salience in 14 Western European countries, the authors of this article explore each of these questions. Their basic finding is that salience-weighted portfolios payoffs overwhelmingly mirror seat contributions, contra proposer models and any other models based on bargaining power. The article concludes with a discussion of the implications for formal models of bargaining.     

A Model of Endogenous Government Formation

Political parties bargain over the allocation of cabinet portfolios when forming coalition governments. Noncooperative theories of legislative bargaining typically predict that the “formateur” enjoys a disproportionate share of government ministry positions. However, empirical evidence indicates that parties receive shares of portfolios proportional to their share of legislative seats that a government party contributes to the government coalition in support of Gamson's Law of portfolio allocation. This article examines government formation as a process in which both the government coalition and the formateur are determined endogenously. In equilibrium, if parties have similar preferences over cabinet portfolios, the share of seats they are allocated is proportional to the parties’ sizes.     

Intergovernmental councils in Spain: Challenges and opportunities in a changing political context

ABSTRACT

This paper reviews the most important characteristics and of the Spanish Intergovernmental Councils (IGCs) and theorizes about the effect of the increasing fragmentation of the party system on the nature and dynamics of multilateral bargaining in IGCs. The essential argument is that party system fragmentation may have an impact on IGCs through its effect on the formation of minority and coalition governments. These types of governments may put an end to the two-bloc confrontation, bring to the system higher levels of party congruence between levels of government and lower the costs of compromise, three factors that may help to grease the bargaining process and, in turn, enhance the achievement of intergovernmental cooperation agreements. The positive effect will be conditional on several factors, namely the ideological coherence of inter-party alliances, the predominant type of government in the system (coalition or single-party minority) and the duration of governments.     

Do party supporters accept policy compromises in coalition governments?

Government formation in multi-party systems often requires coalition negotiations and finding common ground among coalition partners. Supporters of parties involved in the government formation process face a trade-off when evaluating such bargaining processes: on the one hand, voters usually prefer seeing their party being in government rather than in opposition; on the other hand, negotiations require coalition compromises that they might dislike. In this paper, we study voters’ willingness to accept policy compromises during government formation processes. We argue that voters’ acceptance of policy compromises depends on both the strength of their party attachment and the importance they assign to the issue at stake during the coalition negotiations. Not giving in on important issues is key, especially for supporters of challenger parties, who hold strong policy preferences on a selected number of issues. To test these expectations, we collected original survey data immediately after the Spanish general election in November 2019. The results show support for the hypothesized effects, shed light on the pressure potential coalition partners face during government formation and help explain the failures of government formation attempts in increasingly polarized societies.     

Voting Weights and Formateur Advantages in the Formation of Coalition Governments

Over the last two decades a large and important literature has emerged that uses game theoretic models of bargaining to study legislative coalitions. To test key predictions of these models, we examine the composition of coalition governments from 1946 and 2001. These predictions are almost always expressed in terms of parties' minimal-integer voting weights. We calculate such weights for all parliamentary parties. In addition, we develop a statistical model that nests the predictions of many of these models of the distribution of posts. We find that for parties that join (but did not form) the government, there is a linear relationship between their share of the voting weight in parliament and their share of cabinet posts. The party that forms the government (the formateur) receives a substantial "bonus" relative to its voting weight. The latter finding is more consistent with proposal-based bargaining models of coalition formation and suggests that parties gain disproportionate power not because of their size but because of their proposal power.     

The distribution of individual cabinet positions in coalition governments: A sequential approach

Multiparty government in parliamentary democracies entails bargaining over the payoffs of government participation, in particular the allocation of cabinet positions. While most of the literature deals with the numerical distribution of cabinet seats among government parties, this article explores the distribution of individual portfolios. It argues that coalition negotiations are sequential choice processes that begin with the allocation of those portfolios most important to the bargaining parties. This induces conditionality in the bargaining process as choices of individual cabinet positions are not independent of each other. Linking this sequential logic with party preferences for individual cabinet positions, the authors of the article study the allocation of individual portfolios for 146 coalition governments in Western and Central Eastern Europe. The results suggest that a sequential logic in the bargaining process results in better predictions than assuming mutual independence in the distribution of individual portfolios.     

Born Weak,Growing Strong: Anti‐Government Protests as a Signal of Rebel Strength in the Context of Civil Wars

All rebel organizations start weak, but how do they grow and achieve favorable conflict outcomes? We present a theoretical model that allows for rebel organizations to gain support beyond their “core” and build their bargaining power during fighting. We highlight that rebel organizations need to win over crucial parts of society to generate the necessary support that allows them to attain favorable civil conflict outcomes. We find empirical support for the argument that low‐income individuals who initially fight the government (rebel organizations) have to convince middle‐class individuals to turn out against the government to gain government concessions. Empirically, we demonstrate that government concessions in the form of peace agreements and the onset of negotiations become more likely when protest occurs in the context of civil conflicts.

Replication Materials

The data, code, and any additional materials required to replicate all analyses in this article are available on the American Journal of Political Science Dataverse within the Harvard Dataverse Network, at: http://doi.org/10.7910/DVN/MYDZNF .

     

The political legislation cycle

The economic theory of legislation holds that laws, even when they do not involve financial resources, redistribute property rights. Politicians supply legislation to groups with the highest political return. By the same logic, politicians should supply legislation when doing so has the highest political return. The dynamics of the supply of legislation should follow the pattern suggested by the political business cycle theory. We develop a model of government’s and voters’ behavior where a legislation cycle is the strategy to hold the government (coalition) together. Under certain assumptions, the model predicts that the approbation of laws should be concentrated at the end of the legislature and be positively related to the fragmentation of the government coalition. We test these restrictions on data about the supply of legislation by the Italian Parliament during legislatures from I to XIII (1948 to 2001). The empirical analysis provides strong support to the theory: a legislation cycle occurs when the conditioning phenomena that the model indicates are satisfied.     

People’s Mediation Committees: Bargaining Between Hospitals and Patients

The Chinese government is cautious when it comes to managing bottom-up compensation claims as many collective actions are triggered by failing to address such monetary requests. Thus, the government has delegated the responsibility of dispute resolution and compensation distribution to a bargaining channel called People’s Mediation Committees and its agents, the mediators. However, little systematic evidence exists to explain the rationale for compensation distribution led by the government or the regime’s strategic objectives in pursuing compensation distribution to settle social disputes, especially those disputes between citizens and the government or its agents. Using medical dispute data as a proxy, this article examines the processes and outcomes of mediation in compensation distribution. It finds that People’s Mediation Committees have effectively institutionalized the compensation distribution process, but the outcomes may still be influenced by patients’ tactics and the bargaining power held by hospitals.

     

Government termination in multilevel settings. How party congruence affects the survival of sub-national governments in Germany and Spain

ABSTRACT

Past studies on government survival in parliamentary democracies have been limited to national governments. However, most societies live in a multilevel polity where different policies are decided at distinct governmental layers. So far, the conditions triggering sub-national governments’ termination have remained unexplored. Our paper makes a twofold contribution to the literature. First, we explicitly focus our analysis on the sub-national government level. Second, we expand the analytical scope by assuming a multilevel setting, in which the survival of sub-national governments is dependent on both the party composition of the national government (vertical congruence) and their sub-national peers (horizontal congruence). We test the impact of both congruence measures on the early termination risk of regional governments. Our analysis is complemented by including “traditional” factors from national government termination literature, such as structural attributes of governments and their bargaining environment, into empirical modelling. Analysing a novel dataset on 494 regional governments in Germany and Spain we find that the risk of sub-national government termination is related to varying levels of vertical congruence. Furthermore, we find interesting explanatory variation between the two countries with regard to the effect size of economic performance, regional authority and congruence.     

Governments,trade unions and the macroeconomy: An expository analysis of the political business cycle

We have briefly reviewed the state of the art of research on the political business cycle in the context of a simple textbook model of the macroeconomy. It has been demonstrated that the government-generated political business cycle vanishes as expectations turn rational. Even then, however, non-inflationary policies apparently are time inconsistent. Hence, democracies seem to be stuck with some sort of inflationary bias.Countries with fairly centralized wage bargaining and strong labor unions have to deal with a second political source of instability in the macroeconomy: if the labor union's program contains political items such as equal educational opportunities for working class children, extended co-determination, a more equal distribution of wealth, and the like, they will prefer to see those parties in power who show the best prospects of implementing those items. So the trade union's wage bargaining strategies take into account how bargaining results influence the state of the economy and, hence, the reelection prospects of the ruling government — and they will do so in different ways, depending on whether the union prefers the government to the opposition party or vice versa.     

Voters AS A Hard Budget Constraint: On the Determination of Intergovernmental Grants

Recent empirical literature has shown that the determination of intergovernmental grants is highly influenced by the political bargaining power of the recipient states. In these models federal politicians are assumed to buy the support of state voters, state politicians and state interest groups by providing grants. In this paper we provide evidence that the fiscal referendum reduces the reliance of states on matching grants received from the central government and thus the possibility of interest groups and state bureaucrats to obtain more grants. If referendums are available, voters serve as a hard budget constraint.     

Leviathan in the Crosshairs

Following in the spirit of the Leviathan hypothesis, this paper empirically examines how the degree of local government market power influences efficiency in the local public sector. Market power is measured by the number and relative size distribution of similar government units in the same market area. To avoid confusing market power with the comparative efficiency or superiority of larger sized organizations, the relative size distribution of the individual government unit is held constant in the empirical analysis. In the empirical test, aggregate property values serve as the measure of efficiency. The empirical results suggest that aggregate property values are lower and thus efficiency suffers, in more concentrated municipal market areas, ceteris paribus, thus providing some evidence for Leviathan-type governments in Connecticut.     

Transaction costs can encourage Coasean bargaining

When there are three parties, instability problems brought about by the emptiness of the core of the corresponding cooperative game may cause the Coase Theorem to fail, even when other more direct impediments to bargaining are low. We show that the standard Coasean bargaining game involving three parties is strategically equivalent to an asymmetric three-player majority game. Hence, when there are three parties, instability problems will cause the Coase Theorem to fail if and only if the core of the corresponding three-player majority game is empty. We use this equivalence result to derive all instances in which the Coase Theorem will and will not hold with three parties, and show that a priori, such instability problems are likely to be rare—the Coase Theorem will actually hold most (over 80 %) of the time. We also demonstrate that it is always possible to find a set of transaction costs which, when introduced into a frictionless bargaining situation, will cause an empty core to become non-empty. In other words, transaction costs can mitigate instability problems: situations exist in which the presence of transaction costs will cause the Coase Theorem to hold when, in the absence of those direct transaction costs, it would fail to hold. When there are three parties, rather than hindering agreements, the existence of direct transaction costs can sometimes—but not always—reduce instability and encourage Coasean bargaining.     

Managing for inclusion: balancing control and participation

Participation and control are both necessary in a democracy. In the two main models of public management, control trumps participation. The traditional model, Managing for Process, relies on centralized authority over process and emphasizes rules and regulations. The newer model, Managing for Results, permits decentralized control over process but relies on centralized control of results. We propose a third model, Managing for Inclusion, which has the potential to balance participation and control. Our model permits decentralized control over both process and results and requires centralized control over the implementation of participation. The tools of empowerment, teamwork, and continuous improvement take on new meanings in this model. We show how management tools such as training and rewarding can implement participation and control the process of inclusion.