When do you follow the (national) leader? Party switching by subnational legislators in Japan

In 1993, after 38 years of single-party control, more than 20% of Japan’s ruling Liberal Democratic Party (LDP) House of Representatives members left the party to form new alternatives and create an anti-LDP coalition government. However, despite substantial popular support, the new parties attracted few subnational politicians. The effect of this lack of subnational party switching was substantial since the relatively small pool of subnational defectors meant that the new parties had difficulty forming the strong subnational bases of support that would help them to compete with the LDP in the future. In this paper, we consider why so few subnational politicians were willing to switch to these new party alternatives. Using case studies and conditional logit analysis of party affiliation pattern among prefectural assembly members in Japan, we find that party switching was most common among subnational politicians who had powerful patrons who had also left the LDP and had maintained especially good access to central government largesse. We also find that subnational politicians from urban areas, which depend less upon central government pork, were considerably less likely to switch parties, than their rural counterparts.     

Coalition politics and accountability

The paper introduces the possibility of coalition government into the theoretical study of political accountability and analyzes the accountability of coalitions as a problem of team production. It is shown that coalition governments can be held accountable in the presence of an electoral alternative. Accountability becomes problematic if it is certain that at least one of the coalition parties stays in power after the elections. Such a coalition (sometimes called a ‘unity government’) can not be given appropriate collective incentives. To incentivate government performance, voters make one coalition party responsible for the outcome. This, however, makes the other coalition party interested in sabotage. The paper analyzes the resulting conflict and characterizes optimal voter strategy.     

Legislative influences in Japanese budgetary politics

Following World War II (W.W.II), Japan adopted a democratic parliamentary system. Since its formation in 1955 the Liberal Democratic Party (LDP) had monopolized Japanese legislature (Diet) for over 35 years. However, it is said that at the center of the budgetary process was the Ministry of Finance (MOF). Elite bureaucrats rather than politicians are typically seen as the agenda-setter. The action of politicians, in particular members of the LDP, to influence the budgetary resource allocation has been largely unexamined. This paper empirically examines the influence of the LDP on the supplementary budget formation and on the revenue-sharing. We find that the LDP had a significant impact on the budget formation. Further, we find that the LDP manipulated transfers from the central government to local governments presumably to maintain its electoral positions.     

Party Government and the "Cohesive Power of Public Plunder"

We argue that party government in the U.S. House of Representatives rests on two pillars: the pursuit of policy goals and the disbursement of particularistic benefits. Existing theories of party government argue that the majority party in the House is often successful in biasing policy outcomes in its favor. In the process, it creates "policy losers" among its own members who nevertheless support their party on procedural votes. We posit that the majority party creates an incentive for even the policy losers to support a procedural coalition through judicious distribution of particularistic benefits that compensates policy losers at a rate commensurate with the policy losses that they suffer. We evaluate our theory empirically using the concept of "roll rates" in conjunction with federal domestic outlays data for the period 1983–96. We find that, within the majority party, policy losers are favored in the distribution of "pork barrel" spending throughout this period.     

Expected utility or learned familiarity? The formation of voters' coalition preferences

In most modern parliamentary democracies, it is unlikely that single party governments will be formed, meaning that a voter's preferred party presumably has to share cabinet offices and negotiate policy compromises in a coalition government. This raises the question of how voters evaluate potential (coalition) governments, especially since recent studies have shown that coalition preferences influence voting behaviour. In this paper, we combine theories of voting behaviour, government formation and political learning to derive expectations regarding the factors that may impact voters' coalition preferences. We test our hypotheses by analysing survey data from the German federal and state levels. The results of a mixed logit regression analysis support our arguments: Voters' coalition preferences not only depend on the perceived policy distance between the positions of voters and the most distant party within combinations of parties, but also on predominant patterns of government formation.     

Legislator Success in Committee: Gatekeeping Authority and the Loss of Majority Control

In multiparty legislatures, the largest party or coalition may fall short of controlling a majority of plenary seats. However, plurality‐led congresses generally endow the largest parties with extensive agenda‐setting prerogatives, even when plenary majorities are lacking. In this article, we present a model and compelling evidence describing changes in the strategic behavior of committee chairs when majority control is lost. Using a dataset that includes all the bills proposed to the Argentine House in the last 25 years, we estimate success in committee in majority‐ and plurality‐led congresses. We provide extensive evidence that the loss of majority control reduces the importance of the median voter of the plurality party while improving the success of the median committee voter.     

A Case of a Surplus Majority Government: The Finnish Rainbow Coalition

Surplus majority government is the most frequent type of cabinet in postwar Finland. The case study investigates the explicative power of two groups of theories of surplus majority government on the Finnish rainbow coalition formed in 1995. Firstly, theories that model surplus size as instrumental for government capability, i.e. surplus size as critical to decision-making capability. Secondly, theories that model the surplus size as a possibility or where the size is the result of the expected utility of government being higher than that of opposition for the political parties in terms of goal realisation. The main materials studied are internal party documentation and interviews with key people. The result of the study is that parties' strategic features best explain the surplus size of the rainbow coalition, since participation in government offers greater opportunities for the realisation of party goals, such as policy, votes and future office.     

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.     

In Search of the Government in Local Government: Coalition Agreements and Office Payoffs in Norway

The politics of European local government is often assumed to take place in a rather depoliticised and non-partisan environment. This feature is especially apparent in Norway, where local government institutions are designed to create a high degree of consensus and accommodation. No local cabinet takes office, and therefore no formal roles of a majority government and an opposition are offered. This paper tells a different story, however. Following the 1999 elections many municipalities are now experiencing partisan cooperation based on binding political agreements. In these cases the common practice of proportional distribution of the important political positions is replaced with a 'winner takes all' principle, as only the majority constellation is rewarded with office payoffs. Given that this form of cooperation is the closest analogue to any cabinet formation at the local level, it is clearly of interest to uncover under which conditions it occurs. The empirical analysis therefore uses variation in structural, socioeconomic and political characteristics to predict the local coalition behaviour. The empirical model captures some important determinants in the variation of structural characteristics, and, as expected, explicit and binding coalition agreements are found in the large and central municipalities. Socioeconomic setting is furthermore important, since municipalities with a high degree of financial autonomy and poor policy performance experience this kind of formalised cooperation more frequently. Systematic effects are also found for political characteristics, with electoral volatility, party fragmentation and functional organisation models all increasing the probability of coalition agreements.     

Portfolio Allocation and Policy Compromises: How and Why the Conservatives and the Liberal Democrats Formed a Coalition Government

The question of ‘who gets what?’ is one of the most interesting issues in coalition politics. Research on portfolio allocation has thus far produced some clear‐cut empirical findings: coalition parties receive ministerial posts in close proportion to the number of parliamentary seats they win. This article poses two simple questions: Why did the Conservatives and Liberal Democrats agree to form a coalition government and, secondly, did the process of portfolio allocation in the United Kingdom in 2010 reflect standard patterns of cabinet composition in modern democracies? In order to answer these questions, a content analysis of election manifestos is applied in this article in order to estimate the policy positions of the parties represented in the House of Commons. The results show that a coalition between the Tories and Lib Dems was indeed the optimal solution in the British coalition game in 2010. When applying the portfolio allocation model, it turns out that the Conservatives fulfilled the criteria of a ‘strong party’, implying that the Tories occupied the key position in the coalition game. On account of this pivotal role, they were ultimately able to capture the most important ministries in the new coalition government.     

Washington’s Cold War Diplomacy in Italy in the 1970s

This article examines Washington’s cold war diplomacy in Italy as a case study of policy making. Italy caused concerns to US leaders throughout the cold war because of its strong and dynamic communist party (PCI). Worries became even more acute in the 1970s after the PCI spelled out its “historic compromise” strategy whose objective was to propel the communists into cabinet positions within a broad coalition government. How did the White House, Foggy Bottom, the Rome embassy, the CIA and Congress view such a development and who got the final word? How strong were domestic factors? This paper tries to analyze the differences in opinions and their influence in policy making.     

Norway: The 1981 election confirms trend to the right

The Storting election of 13 and 14 September 1981 resulted in a marked swing to the right, a trend which has been evident since the middle of the 1970s (Valen, 1976; Valen, 1978; Kristiansen & Holbæk Hansen, 1980). The socialist parties lost their majority in the Storting, and the Labour minority government which had been in power since 1973, resigned. After an unsuccessful attempt to form a coalition government between the three leading bourgeois parties, the Conservative party, the Agrarian Centre party and the Christian People's party, the Conservatives formed a minority government with parliamentary support from the two other parties.     

Policing the Bargain: Coalition Government and Parliamentary Scrutiny

Policymaking by coalition governments creates a classic principal‐agent problem. Coalitions are comprised of parties with divergent preferences who are forced to delegate important policymaking powers to individual cabinet ministers, thus raising the possibility that ministers will attempt to pursue policies favored by their own party at the expense of their coalition partners. What is going to keep ministers from attempting to move policy in directions they favor rather than sticking to the “coalition deal”? We argue that parties will make use of parliamentary scrutiny of “hostile” ministerial proposals to overcome the potential problems of delegation and enforce the coalition bargain. Statistical analysis of original data on government bills in Germany and the Netherlands supports this argument. Our findings suggest that parliaments play a central role in allowing multiparty governments to solve intracoalition conflicts.     

Portfolio Allocation as Leadership Strategy: Intraparty Bargaining in Japan

How do the dynamics of portfolio allocation work within parties? While much of the existing literature focuses on portfolio allocation among parties in coalition governments, bargaining over cabinet portfolios also takes place within parties because many parties have internal divisions or factions that influence these decisions. By analyzing data on portfolio allocation in the Liberal Democratic Party of Japan from 1960 through 2007, this study demonstrates that, contrary to the proportionality proposition (Gamson's Law), substantial variance exists in allocation outcomes over time because party leaders allocate cabinet portfolios among factions as a means of preventing defections and challenges from their party's members. The resulting portfolio allocation reflects the bargaining dynamics within the party: I find that party leaders surrender more portfolios as they become more vulnerable to challenges posed by internal rivals.     

A theory of coalitions and clientelism: Coalition politics in Iceland, 1945–2000

Abstract.  This article serves a dual purpose. First, it provides detailed information about coalition formation and termination in Iceland from 1945 to 2000 following closely the format of Wolfgang Müller and Kaare Strøm (eds), Coalition Politics in Western Europe (New York: Oxford University Press, 2000), which considers the other Western European democracies. The political landscape of Iceland is surveyed, as is the institutional framework that structures the formation of coalitions, coalition governance and cabinet termination while providing complete data for each cabinet. Second, the effects clientelism has on coalition politics through the inflated importance of the executive office are considered. The patterns of coalition politics in the Nordic countries are compared to offer preliminary evidence supporting the theory.     

Reluctant Coalitionists: The Conservative Party and the Establishment of the Coalition Government in May 2010

The Conservative party has been the real awkward partner in the Conservative‐Liberal Democrat coalition government because its backbench MPs have rebelled more frequently than their Liberal Democrat counterparts since May 2010. This reflected the fact that the Conservatives were reluctant coalitionists to begin with: they would have preferred to see a minority Conservative government, they had made far too many concessions to the Liberal Democrats, they had been bounced into accepting a coalition deal by a controlling party leadership, and they had lost out on those ministerial positions now held by Liberal Democrats. There was thus no great enthusiasm for the establishment of a coalition government with the Liberal Democrats in the parliamentary Conservative party in May 2010. Conservatives merely resigned themselves to an outcome which they had been given little opportunity to influence and which David Cameron had made it very difficult for them to reject.     

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.     

Partisan Polarization and Congressional Accountability in House Elections

Early research led scholars to believe that institutional accountability in Congress is lacking because public evaluations of its collective performance do not affect the reelection of its members. However, a changed partisan environment along with new empirical evidence raises unanswered questions about the effect of congressional performance on incumbents' electoral outcomes over time. Analysis of House reelection races across the last several decades produces important findings: (1) low congressional approval ratings generally reduce the electoral margins of majority party incumbents and increase margins for minority party incumbents; (2) partisan polarization in the House increases the magnitude of this partisan differential, mainly through increased electoral accountability among majority party incumbents; (3) these electoral effects of congressional performance ratings hold largely irrespective of a member's individual party loyalty or seat safety. These findings carry significant implications for partisan theories of legislative organization and help explain salient features of recent Congresses.     

The devil we know and the angel that did not fly: An examination of devil/angel shift in twitter fracking “debates” in NY 2008–2018

Recent work has applied the Narrative Policy Framework (NPF) to examine narrative strategies in policy debates on social media platforms. We contribute to the literature by applying the NPF to fracking policy debates in New York using well-established Natural Language Processing tools, including sentiment analysis. We combine this computational approach with a qualitative hand-coding of pro- and antifracking Twitter influentials. This approach allows us to consider a much larger corpus of tweets over a much longer time frame than has been done thus far. We adapt and test NPF propositions related to the use of the devil/angel shift strategies before and after a major state-wide policy change, that is, a state-wide moratorium on high volume hydraulic fracturing or fracking. Overall, we find evidence for the use of the devil shift narrative strategy by the pro-fracking coalition aimed at the Governor prior to the moratorium. After the moratorium, the relative percentage of Tweets containing devil shift sentiments decreases as the pro-fracking coalition generally downshifts in its use of angel shift language without a corresponding increase in devil shift language, whereas, conversely, the anti-fracking coalition generally downshifts in its use of devil shift language without a general increase in angel shift language. When we shifted our analysis to Tweets containing fracking and the Governor, we found a similar postban decrease in devil shift language among anti-fracking users. Our findings offer lessons for using computational tools in the NPF as an approach to expand analytic ability and for the operationalization of concepts such as narrative strategies and policy entrepreneurs.     

The Recruitment of Women Cabinet Ministers in the Canadian Provinces

Although there have been several studies of women in legislatures in Canada, a cabinet position is a much stronger position from which to wield power in an executive-centered and party-disciplined parliamentary system. In the past decade, the increase of women's share of legislative seats, for majority parties as well as others, has led to more women being appointed to cabinet portfolios. This article utilizes data from the ten Canadian provinces over an 18-year period, from 1976 to 1994, to assess patterns of such appointments by province, party, percentage of women in the governing party, and percentage of women in the legislature. The proportion of women in the governing party far outweighs other variables in its impact on the percentage of women in the cabinet, in contrast to a previous study of West European cabinets which found that more women in the legislature was of greater importance. Although a high level of multicollinearity indicates caution in attempting to distinguish between the impact of these two variables, the differences in these studies may be due to Canadian provinces having single-party majority governments while West European cabinets are often coalitions.