J. M. Buchanan’s contractarian constitutionalism: political economy for democratic society

Public Choice - The purpose of this paper is to support three claims. Firstly, that it is Buchanan’s uncompromising commitment to a methodological and a normative individualism to which his...     

Sozialstaatsreform und die soziale Gerechtigkeit

Ohne Zusammenfassung     

Decision costs in legislative bargaining: an experimental analysis

We conduct an experiment to assess the effects of different decision rules on the costs of decision making in a multilateral bargaining situation. Specifically, we compare the amount of costly delay observed in an experimental bargaining game under majority and unanimity rule. Our main finding is that individual subjects are more likely to reject offers under unanimity rule. This higher rejection rate, as well as the requirement that all subjects agree, leads to more costly delay. This result provides empirical support for a classic argument in favor of less-than-unanimity decision rules put forth by Buchanan and Tullock (The calculus of consent: logical foundations of constitutional democracy, University of Michigan Press, Ann Arbor, 1962).     

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.     

William R. Keech: in Memoriam

Public Choice - We analyze the non-contributory health insurance program (“green cards”) in Turkey with RDD (Regression Discontinuity Design) and show that more citizens receive green...     

The Value of Vagueness: Delegation, Defiance, and Judicial Opinions

An established line of research demonstrates that vague judicial opinions are less likely to be implemented than clear opinions. Vague opinions thus present a puzzle. Why would judges craft opinions that risk noncompliance? We argue that the relationships between judges and other policy makers in separation‐of‐powers systems are central to understanding this puzzle. Opinion vagueness can reflect efforts to resolve core tradeoffs associated with judicial policymaking that bear some resemblance to standard accounts of political delegation. Vagueness offers judges the ability to manage their uncertainty over policy outcomes and to hide likely defiance from public view. At the same time, vagueness removes a central source of pressure for compliance that judges can place on other policy makers. Using a game‐theoretic model, we identify conditions under which judges use vagueness precisely as legislatures use statutory discretion. We also demonstrate conditions under which judges use vagueness in ways unanticipated by standard delegation accounts.     

A Robust Transformation Procedure for Interpreting Political Text

Georg Vanberg Department of Political Science, University of North Carolina, Chapel Hill, NC 27599-3265 e-mail: gvanberg{at}unc.edu (corresponding author) In a recent article in the American Political Science Review,Laver, Benoit, and Garry (2003, "Extracting policy positionsfrom political texts using words as data," 97:311–331)propose a new method for conducting content analysis. TheirWordscores approach, by automating text-coding procedures, representsan advance in content analysis that will potentially have alarge long-term impact on research across the discipline. Toallow substantive interpretation, the scores produced by theWordscores procedure require transformation. In this note, weaddress several shortcomings in the transformation procedureintroduced in the original program. We demonstrate that theoriginal transformation distorts the metric on which contentscores are placed—hindering the ability of scholars tomake meaningful comparisons across texts—and that it isvery sensitive to the texts that are scored—opening upthe possibility that researchers may generate, inadvertentlyor not, results that depend on the texts they choose to includein their analyses. We propose a transformation procedure thatsolves these problems. Authors' note: We would like to thank Ken Benoit, Michael Laver,three anonymous referees, and the editor for comments on earlierversions of this article.     

What are the best quorum rules? A laboratory investigation

Public Choice - Many political systems with direct democracy mechanisms have adopted rules preventing decisions from being made by simple majority rule. The device added most commonly to majority...