The Party Mandate and the Westminster Model: Election Programmes and Government Spending in Britain, 1948–85

Abstract

Do party manifestos matter to government policy? Does a genuine party mandate operate within the British political process? These questions are generally neglected in analyses of British politics, but they are crucial in assessing how far political parties transmit electoral preferences into government action. We try to answer them through a novel use of available data, using content analysis to code and classify policy emphases within the post-war election programmes of the Conservative, Labour and Liberal parties. Statistical analysis reveals that government party programmes are remarkably well reflected in post-election policy priorities, measured as percentages of central government spending in major policy areas. This gives strong support to traditional mandate theory within the context of the 'Westminster model' of party government. Anomalies, such as a strong relationship between Liberal emphases and expenditures in three key areas, and the more consistent relationship of expenditures with Conservative rather than Labour priorities, are also considered.British constitutional theory is simple: a government enjoying the confidence of parliament can do anything. Against this background the present article checks the validity of another model, that of the party mandate. The underlying research question is: how far do the pre-election policy priorities of the major political parties really anticipate what will happen to public policy after the election? The 'Westminster Model', which concentrates all responsibility and power in the government of the day, appears better suited than alternative democratic arrangements for translating election agendas into policy. ' This article does not purport to cover all the nuances of party programmes that might or might not be so translated. Rather, we seek to look at broad patterns linking the policy emphases of party election programmes to

Political Attention in a Coalition System: Analysing Queen's Speeches in the Netherlands 1945–2007

“…To what extent do coalition changes make a difference to the attention that governments pay to policy problems? Such a party effect would support mandate theory, which posits that parties may be expected to be responsive to their voters and fulfil electoral promises when in office (Hofferbert and Budge, 1992); or as a more recent version of this theory predicts, policy emphasizes may reflect the median mandate: a central party has disproportionate influence on the agenda (McDonald and Budge, 2005). If marked shifts in attention occur, are they episodic, as predicted by the theory of punctuated equilibrium (Jones and Baumgartner, 2005), or are developments in political agenda-setting by Dutch governments always extends to the institutional features of the executive.…”

“…To what extent, then, is the executive able to shift between issues and reset the agenda in such a consensusoriented political system? If such shifts occur particularly in the first year of new governments, this might support mandate theory, which posits that parties taking office begin to deliver electoral promises (Hofferbert and Budge, 1992). But if attention changes are small, this may indicate friction and, perhaps, dominance of a central party (McDonald and Budge, 2005).…”

“…9 Mandate theory similarly predicts that parties in government converse election pledges into policy choices (Hofferbert and Budge, 1992;McDonald and Budge, 2005). In this part of the analysis, we examine the possible effects of coalition composition of new governments and of government status on issue-attention.…”

“…We compared years in which a new government took office with years when the Queen's speech was produced by an incumbent government in its second or later year in office. Our expectation would be that changes in attention are larger if a new government coalition takes office -making its own fresh emphasis on policy topics (Bunce, 1980) and speaking to its new electoral mandate (Hofferbert and Budge, 1992). We examine this expectation in Figure 9, which presents the average year-to-year correlations, differentiating between governments continuing in office, new governments with similar parties, and new coalitions.…”

Words speak louder than actions: The impact of politics on economic performance

“…This issue has already been tackled by the very early contributions applying manifesto data. Budge and Hofferbert (1990) and Hofferbert and Budge (1992) show for the United States and the United Kingdom, respectively, that the emphasis of certain policy areas has a significant impact on related expenditure categories. Bräuninger (2005) studies the relationship between spending preferences and the public expenditure mix in a panel of OECD countries.…”