The Effect of Dominant and Central Parties on Cabinet Composition and Durability

Roozendaal, Peter Van

doi:10.2307/440078

Cited by 94 publications

(20 citation statements)

References 24 publications

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“…Here the extent of overrepresentation almost doubles to +4.6. The finding that center parties generally receive more executive representation than left-wing or right-wing parties confirms the conventional wisdom that center parties often drive cabinet formation (Laver and Shepsle 1996;van Roosendaal 1992) and have been rewarded consistently with a greater percentage of government ministries. The ideological classification of the parties in this analysis also allows us to determine if certain countries have had disproportionate executive outcomes toward the left, the center, or the right.…”

Section: Discussionsupporting

confidence: 65%

Party Size, Ideology, and Executive‐Level Representation in Advanced Parliamentary Democracies

Forestiere

2009

Politics & Policy

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How do party size and ideology matter for executive‐level representation in parliamentary systems? This paper attempts to answer this question by providing and analyzing comparative data on 105 parties across 16 advanced parliamentary democracies. The electoral performance of each party is assessed, alongside the extent of each party's legislative and executive representation over time, from roughly 1945 to 1995. Two main conclusions are derived from the analysis. First, concerning party size, larger parties tend to be overrepresented in government‐level institutions while for smaller parties the evidence is mixed, since almost half of the smaller parties in the data set have never achieved executive‐level representation. Second, concerning party ideology, center parties have been largely overrepresented in executive institutions while left‐wing parties have been the most systematically underrepresented in the 16 countries. ¿Qué tanto importan el tamaño del partido y su ideología para la representación a nivel ejecutivo en los sistemas parlamentarios? Este articulo trata de responder esta pregunta al proveer y analizar información comparativa de 105 partidos a través de 16 democracias parlamentarias avanzadas. La actuación de cada partido es evaluada junto al grado de la representación legislativa y ejecutiva a través del tiempo, aproximadamente desde 1945 hasta 1995. Dos conclusiones principales se derivan del análisis. Primero, en relación al tamaño del partido, los partidos grandes tienden a ser sobre‐representados en las instituciones al nivel del gobierno mientras que para partidos más pequeños la evidencia es mixta, ya que casi la mitad de los pequeños partidos en el conjunto de datos nunca han logrado representación a nivel ejecutivo. Segundo, en relación a la ideología, los partidos de centro han sido mayormente sobre‐representados en las instituciones del ejecutivo mientras que los partidos de izquierda han sido los más sistemáticamente sub‐representados en los 16 países.

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Section: Discussionsupporting

confidence: 65%

Party Size, Ideology, and Executive‐Level Representation in Advanced Parliamentary Democracies

Forestiere

2009

Politics & Policy

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“…(This theoretical conclusion is supported by empirical findings reported by van Roozendaal, 1992.) Thus the most important thing about an election result, as far as a one-dimensional policy-seeking government formation process is concerned, is the identity and ideal policy position of the party controlling the median legislator.…”

Section: One-dimensional Policy-seeking Modelssupporting

confidence: 73%

“…(For a discussion of the concept of the dominant player see, for example, Peleg, 1981;Einy, 1985, van Deeman, 1989van Roozendaal, 1992. ) A dominant player is one who is pivotal in each of two or more rival coalitions that can be played off against each other.…”

Section: Office-seeking Modelsmentioning

confidence: 99%

Theories of Government Formation and the 1996 General Election in Japan

Katô

Laver²

1998

Party Politics

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This paper takes a number of theories that have been used to analyse government formation in West European parliamentary democracies and applies them to the government formation process in Japan after the 1996 general election. These models underline the continuing importance of the LDP in the government formation process, despite the loss of its overall majority. The application of government formation models to the Japanese case also highlights the weakness of the typical assumption that sees parties as unitary actors. The paper thus concludes with some speculations as to how this assumption might usefully be relaxed to incorporate party factions, splits and fusions and thereby generate more dynamic models of the making and breaking of governments.

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“…Particularly crucial is the result that only the largest party in the system can be dominant (Peleg 1981;Einy 1985;van Deemen 1989;van Roozendaal 1992). We can use the notion of the dominant party to set theoretical limits on the attractiveness of the largest party in an office-seeking party system that is evolving between elections.…”

Section: Role Of the Largest Partymentioning

confidence: 99%

The Evolution of Party Systems between Elections

Laver¹,

Benoit²

2003

American Journal of Political Science

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T he existing political science account of party competition pays little attention to the evolution of legislatures between elections, despite the fact that, in all real legislatures, there is a great deal of politics between elections. In particular, legislators may defect from one party and join another, parties may split and fuse, and the party system may thereby evolve into one quite different from that produced by the election result. This carries obvious analytical implications for modeling party competition and important normative implications for our appreciation of representative democracy. In supplying the link between the popular mandate and public policy in representative democracy, the forces that shape legislatures between elections are clearly very important.While there is a literature on party switching in the U.S. Congress (e.g., Nokken 2000), exploration of this in other contexts is very limited. Yet it is precisely in multiparty systems that the phenomenon is most prevalent and important. In the Italian legislature between 1996 and spring 2000, for instance, more than one in four deputies changed parties at least once (Heller and Mershon 2001, 2). Similar patterns of party switching can be seen in Japan (Laver and Kato, 2001) (Ágh 1999;Verzichelli 1999). Every defection from some party, however, implies that some other party is willing to accept the defector. Existing work on party switching focuses exclusively on the rationale of the switchers, while ignoring the incentives of the parties that the switchers are attempting to join. Finally, existing models have nothing to say as to which party switchers will wish to join when there are several possibilities.Absent from the literature on party switching is any consideration of the payoffs that politicians expect from affiliation to a given legislative party. Yet, in addition to the electoral benefits of a party label, membership of a legislative party is the key to many of the payoffs of "winning" the political game by getting into office and being associated with the incumbent government, as Cox (1987) pointed out in his analysis of the evolution of coherent political parties in Britain. Even in countries such as Britain or Ireland where the electoral system makes it possible to be returned to parliament as an "independent" without party affiliation, it is effectively impossible for an independent legislator to enter government.Here we model the party affiliation of legislators as a matter of choice that is continuously under review. We explore ways in which some parties attract potential defectors, some are willing to accept defectors, and some are both attractive and willing, allowing defections actually to take place. Rather than seeing the legislative party system as remaining static between elections, we treat the composition of legislative parties as the output of one cycle in the process of legislative politics, as well as an input into the next cycle. In this way, we explore the evolution of legislative party systems between election...

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The Effect of Dominant and Central Parties on Cabinet Composition and Durability

Cited by 94 publications

References 24 publications

Party Size, Ideology, and Executive‐Level Representation in Advanced Parliamentary Democracies

Party Size, Ideology, and Executive‐Level Representation in Advanced Parliamentary Democracies

Theories of Government Formation and the 1996 General Election in Japan

The Evolution of Party Systems between Elections

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