Cohesion in Legislatures and the Vote of Confidence Procedure

Diermeier, Daniel; Feddersen, Timothy

doi:10.2307/2585484

Cited by 353 publications

(215 citation statements)

References 11 publications

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“…Huber 1996;Diermeier and Feddersen 1998;Dewan and Spirling 2011. There is, of course, much still to be done. Our cases are a small sample of all democracies and all possible variations in the institutional design of government.…”

Section: Governmentmentioning

confidence: 99%

Government-Opposition or Left-Right? The Institutional Determinants of Voting in Legislatures

Hix¹,

Noury²

2015

PSRM

103

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We use roll-call voting data from 16 legislatures to investigate how the institutional context of politics -such as whether a country is a parliamentary or presidential regime, or has a single-party, coalition or minority government -shapes coalition formation and voting behaviour in parliaments. We use a geometric scaling metric to estimate the 'revealed space' in each of these legislatures and a vote-by-vote statistical analysis to identify how much of this space can be explained by government-opposition dynamics as opposed to (leftright) policy positions of parties. We find that government-opposition interests rather than parties' policy positions are the main drivers of voting behaviour in most institutional contexts. In contrast, we find that issue-by-issue coalition-building along a single policy dimension only exists under restrictive institutional constraints; namely presidential regimes with coalition governments or parliamentary systems with minority governments. Put another way, voting in most legislatives is more like Westminster than Washington, DC.

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Section: Governmentmentioning

confidence: 99%

Government-Opposition or Left-Right? The Institutional Determinants of Voting in Legislatures

Hix¹,

Noury²

2015

PSRM

103

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“…The Taoiseach was always held by the largest party in the governments we examine. Models of coalition formation highlight the power of the largest party, which is usually the party that initiates the process of coalition formation (Baron, 1991;Diermeier & Feddersen, 1998;Austen-Smith & Banks, 1988; see Laver et al, 2011 for a critique of this approach). Some policy concessions must be offered to the junior coalition partner or partners, to make the offer more attractive than the reversion point (i.e.…”

Section: How Economic Conditions Affect Pledge Fulfilmentmentioning

confidence: 99%

Governing together in good and bad economic times: the fulfilment of election pledges in Ireland

Thomson

Costello

2016

Irish Political Studies

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The idea that parties make promises to voters during election campaigns and then attempt to fulfil those promises if elected to government is central to the theory and practice of democracy. This study examines how economic conditions affect the fulfilment of parties' election pledges in Ireland. We formulate and test propositions relating to two mechanisms relating to economic conditions that negatively affect the likelihood of pledge fulfilment. The first is that parties do not adjust pledges to prevailing economic conditions, and the second is that they do not accurately anticipate future economic conditions. We test these expectations with evidence on the fulfilment of 3,681 pledges made by Irish parties in the period 1977 and 2011, which is one of the largest country-specific datasets on pledge fulfilment currently available. Given the considerable variation in economic conditions faced by Irish governments in this time period, these cases offer a particularly powerful test of the impact of economic conditions on pledge fulfilment. Studies, 31:2 (2016), pp. 182-203 2 According mandate theory and the responsible party model, the fulfilment of election pledges by governing parties is central to democratic representation, providing a mechanism through which citizens exercise control over public policy (Downs, 1957;Klingemann et al., 1994). Parties offer competing policy platforms to voters and 'the party which attracts the most votes on this basis then forms the next government, but it is bound (both morally and by fears of retribution at the next election) to carry through the program on which on which it has been elected' (Budge & Hofferbert, 1990: 111). This is the author version of an article published in Irish PoliticalExisting research on pledge fulfilment has found considerable variation in the extent to which governing parties fulfil their election pledges and has identified a number of factors that help to explain this, such as the role of the party in government, the institutional division of power, and the nature of the pledges made (e.g. Pomper & Lederman, 1980;Rallings, 1987;Royed, 1996;Thomson, 2001;Artés & Bustos, 2008;Naurin, 2011;2014;Kostadinova, 2013). We contribute to this growing body of comparative research by examining how economic conditions influence pledge fulfilment.Our empirical analysis focuses on pledge fulfilment in Ireland over a 34-year period, 1977-2011. The eleven Irish governments that held office between 1977 and 2011 varied considerably from each other with respect to the economic conditions they faced, including the boom years of the Celtic tiger as well as the bust following the 2008 financial crisis. This means that our cases offer considerable variation in our key explanatory variables concerning economic conditions. Moreover, by examining variation in pledge fulfilment across these eleven governments, we hold constant important features of the political culture, party system and electoral system that may account for some of the variation in pledge fulfi...

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“…See http://www.cepr.net/err/nytimesarticles/call pork 11 29.htm 2 Theoretical extensions include (but are not limited to) Eraslan and Merlo (2002) who shows uniqueness of the stationary equilibrium; Banks and Duggan (2000) who generalize this model to multidimensional choice space; Diermeier and Merlo (2000) who study a dynamic model of government formation in Parliamentary democracies and Coate (2007, 2008) investigate the dynamic model of public spending; Diermeier and Feddersen (1998) who study cohesion in legislatures and the vote of confidence procedure; Tergiman (2013) who adds to that the possibility of offering a public good; Battaglini, Nunnari and Palfrey (2011) who study a version of the Baron-Ferejohn model in which the current decision becomes the status quo in the next period. 3 In most experiments, proposers do obtain higher shares than the coalition partners, but the difference is very far from what is predicted by the theory.…”

Section: Introductionmentioning

confidence: 99%

Communication in multilateral bargaining

Agranov

Tergiman

2014

Journal of Public Economics

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One of the most robust phenomena in the experimental literature on multilateral bargaining is the failure of proposers to extract equilibrium rents. However, all previous experiments have overlooked the fact that outside the lab committee members are allowed to -and do -engage in sometimes intense communication processes prior to voting on a proposal. We conduct an experimental test of the Baron-Ferejohn model in which we allow committee members to engage in unrestricted cheap-talk communication before a proposal is submitted. We find that proposers extract a significantly higher share of resources when communication is allowed. Communication increases proposer power through two channels. First, it mitigates the uncertainty surrounding the amount a coalition member is willing to accept. Second, it allows potential coalition members to compete for a place in the coalition by lowering this stated price.

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Cohesion in Legislatures and the Vote of Confidence Procedure

Cited by 353 publications

References 11 publications

Government-Opposition or Left-Right? The Institutional Determinants of Voting in Legislatures

Government-Opposition or Left-Right? The Institutional Determinants of Voting in Legislatures

Governing together in good and bad economic times: the fulfilment of election pledges in Ireland

Communication in multilateral bargaining

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