What You See Is Not Always What You Get: Bargaining before an Audience under Multiparty Government

Abstract

Party elites in coalition governments are acutely aware that the deals they strike will be critically evaluated by their supporters, and that they risk losing support if they are perceived as ineffective negotiators. This has a powerful influence on the bargains parties strike. Because most supporters are unaware of the complex aspects of bargains and instead rely on simple heuristics to evaluate their most visible features, parties have incentives to meet supporter expectations primarily on easily observable outcomes. To do so, they make trade-offs on less observable outcomes. This implies that the more visible features of a bargain typically do not accurately reflect the relative success of parties in coalition negotiations. We evaluate our argument using original data on the office rewards and policy risks of portfolio allocation in 16 parliamentary democracies. Our findings support our argument, and they have important implications for the nature of representation under multiparty government.

Coalition inclusion probabilities: a party-strategic measure for predicting policy and politics

“…Later research, however, highlights the role of institutions in policing the coalition bargain (for a review, see Martin and Vanberg, 2015). Parties, in this approach-most recently articulated by Martin and Vanberg (2020) in the framework of bargaining along a contract curve-are able to reach policy compromises in which parties holding a portfolio agree to a policy position deviating from their ideal point. Policing by junior ministers (e.g., Thies, 2001), legislative review (Kim and Loewenberg, 2005;Martin and Vanberg, 2011) and coalition agreements (Klüver and Bäck, 2019) can ensure that legislative drafts coming from ministries adhere to the bargain despite the temptation of "ministerial drift.…”

Turning Away From the State: Trade Shocks and Informal Insurance in Brazil

“…Brazil has a highly fragmented and volatile party system (Zucco and Power, 2020). A way to measure electoral behavior changes when many parties are involved is to consider party characteristics (e.g., Martin and Vanberg 2020). More precisely, in volatile or fragmented party systems, we may assume that a voter did not change her voting behavior if in subsequent elections, she votes for different parties that highlight the same policy issues and stand for similar issue positions and ideology.…”

Agenda Control and Timing of Bill Initiation: A Temporal Perspective on Coalition Governance in Parliamentary Democracies

“…Parliamentary democracies, usually ruled by multiple parties under a coalition government, face two major challenges after government formation. In policy making, a dilemma arises when coalition parties pursue divergent policy positions for electoral purposes but can only implement one government bill jointly (Laver and Shepsle 1996;Martin and Vanberg 2005;2014;2020b;Müller and Strøm 1999). In addition to this dilemma, a temporal challenge exists for the passage of government bills within a term that may limit the implementation of the governmental policy agenda when coalition policy divergence increases the risk of gridlock (Bäck and Carroll 2018;Tsebelis 2002) with obstruction and delay (Bell 2018;Döring 1995;Martin 2004).…”