‘Going institutional’ to overcome obstruction: Explaining the suppression of minority rights in Western European parliaments, 1945−2010

Abstract

When and why do parliamentary majorities in Europe suppress parliamentary minority rights? This article argues that such reforms are driven by substantive policy conflict in interaction with existing minority rights. Government parties curb minority rights if they fear minority obstruction due to increased policy conflict and a minority-friendly institutional status quo. Empirical support is found for this claim using comparative data on all reforms in 13 Western European parliaments since 1945. A curbing of minority rights is significantly more likely under conditions of heightened policy conflict and these effects are stronger the more the institutional status quo favours opposition parties. Contrary to frequent claims of consensual rule changes from single-country studies in Europe, these findings demonstrate the importance of competitive strategies in explaining institutional reform in European parliaments. The conditional impact of the status quo provides interesting theoretical links to historical institutionalist arguments on path dependence.

Do party system parameters explain differences in legislative organization? Fragmentation, polarization, and the density of regulation in European parliaments, 1945–2009

“…First, most research focused either on cross-sectional variation between parliaments (André et al, 2016; Taylor, 2006) or on temporal variation within a single or very small number of countries (the research on the U.S. Congress and the British House of Commons cited above and for three European democracies Sieberer et al, 2011). The only comparative TSCS studies on the topic cover eight Central and Eastern European democracies over a period of 20 years to explain variation in committee power (Zubek, 2015) and 13 Western European from 1945 to 2010 with regard to minority rights in parliament (Sieberer et al, 2020). Second, existing studies refer to specific areas of legislative organization such as agenda setting rules, debating rules, committee powers, or minority rights.…”

“…they directly affect the balance of power between different actors. Most research on parliamentary rule changes refers to these (in the terminology of Tsebelis, 1990) “distributive reforms” (Binder, 1996; Carroll et al, 2006; Dion, 1997; Goet, 2019; Schickler, 2000; Sieberer et al, 2020; Sieberer and Müller, 2015). This focus is warranted if the research interest is to understand how political actors use institutional reforms as a competitive strategy to further their substantive interests.…”

“…The argument for ideological polarization focuses on the effect of substantive policy conflict: Higher polarization in the parliamentary party system leads to more conflict and thus gives minority actors incentives to exploit parliamentary rules that allow them to obstruct business. The majority, in turn, uses institutional reforms to counter or even pre-empt such obstruction (Binder, 1996; Sieberer et al, 2020; Wawro and Schickler, 2006). Furthermore, higher polarization increases the likelihood that some minority actors challenge informal rules and exploit existing loopholes, which, according to the argument advanced above in the context of fragmentation, should also lead to higher regulatory density.…”

“…Deliberate institutional design has been studied intensively in theoretical work (Diermeier and Krehbiel, 2003; Shepsle, 2006; Tsebelis, 1990) and in empirical studies of legislative organization in the U.S. Congress (Binder, 1996; Dion, 1997; Schickler, 2000; Wawro and Schickler, 2006). More recently, cross-national differences in legislative organization and specific reforms have gained attention in European legislatures as well (André et al, 2016; Goet, 2019; Goet et al, 2020; Sieberer et al, 2011, 2016, 2020; Sieberer and Müller, 2015; Taylor, 2006; Zubek, 2015). In line with rational choice institutionalist arguments, these studies find that parameters of political competition such as substantive conflict within the legislature, government format, and party system fragmentation provide explanations for when and how parliamentary rules are reformed.…”

“…Some focus on cross-national differences at a single point in time (André et al, 2016; Taylor, 2006), others cover only one or few countries in a longitudinal analysis (Goet, 2019; Goet et al, 2020; Sieberer et al, 2011; Sieberer and Müller, 2015), and yet others are limited to small (albeit important!) aspects of legislative organization such as the committee system (André et al, 2016; Zubek, 2015), the allocation of “mega-seats” (Carroll et al, 2006), floor access for speeches (Proksch and Slapin, 2015), or rights of legislative minorities (Sieberer et al, 2020; Sieberer and Müller, 2015). A time-series-cross-sectional (TSCS) study of changes in legislative organization in general across European parliaments is currently not available despite some descriptive evidence of growing regulation over time (Sieberer et al, 2016).…”