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Governments and Parliaments

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Governments and Parliaments Two important variables one has to examine in order to understand the power of the government as an agenda setter in parliamentary systems. – PowerPoint PPT presentation

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Title: Governments and Parliaments


1
Governments and Parliaments
  • Two important variables one has to examine in
    order to understand the power of the government
    as an agenda setter in parliamentary systems.
  • The first is positional, the relationship between
    the ideological position of the government and
    the rest of the parties in parliament.
  • The second is the institutional provisions
    enabling the government to introduce its
    legislative proposals and have them voted on the
    floor of the parliament -the rules of agenda
    setting.

2
Positional advantages
  • The government controls the agenda for
    non-financial legislation because it can
    associate a vote on a bill with the question of
    confidence. The parliament is forced to accept
    the government proposal or to replace the
    government.
  • Every government as long as it is in power is
    able to impose its will on parliament, it does
    not matter the kind of parliamentary government,
    whether or not it controls a majority of
    legislative votes. In more than 50 percent of all
    countries, governments introduce more than 90
    percent of the bills. Moreover, the probability
    of success of these bills is very high over 60
    percent of bills pass with probability greater
    than .9 and over 85 percent of bills pass with
    probability greater than .8.
  • Even if governments control the agenda, it may be
    that parliaments introduce significant
    constraints to their choices. Parliaments can
    amend government proposals so that the final
    outcome bears little resemblance to the original
    bill. Most of the time, neither of these
    scenarios is the case. Problems between
    government and parliament arise only when the
    government has a different political composition
    from a majority in parliament but such
    differences are either non-existent, or, if they
    do exist, the government is able to prevail
    because of positional or institutional weapons at
    its disposal
  • Three possible configurations of the relationship
    between government and parliament minimum
    winning coalition , oversized government and
    minority government

3
Minimum winning coalition
  • The most frequent (if we include single party
    governments in two party systems). The government
    coincides with the majority in parliament no
    disagreement between the two on important issues.
    The minimum winning coalition represented in
    government restricts the winset of the status quo
    from the whole shaded area of the figure to the
    area that makes the coalition partners better off
    than the status quo.
  • If the government parties are weak and include
    members with serious disagreements over a bill ?,
    only a marginal possibility because votes are
    public and party leaders possess serious coercive
    mechanisms that pre-empt public dissent

4
Minimum winning coalition of A, B and C W(SQ)
5
Oversized coalitions
  • Oversized majority governments are quite common
    in Western Europe. In such cases, some of the
    coalition partners can be disregarded and
    policies will still be passed by a majority in
    parliament. Should these parties be counted as
    veto players, or should they be ignored?
  • Ignoring coalition partners, while possible from
    a numerical point of view, imposes political
    costs if the disagreement is serious the small
    partner can resign and the government formation
    process must begin over again.
  • Simple arithmetic (Strom argument) disregards the
    fact that there are political factors that
    necessitate oversized coalitions. For the
    coalition to remain intact the will of the
    different partners must be respected a departure
    from the status quo must usually be approved by
    the government before it is introduced to
    parliament, and, at that stage, the participants
    in a government coalition are veto players.

6
Minority governments.
  • These governments are even more frequent than
    oversized coalitions. When there are minority
    governments there is a difference between a
    governmental and a legislative majority. However
    according to Tsebelis this difference has no
    major empirical significance
  • Governments (whether minority or not) posess
    agenda setting powers.
  • In particular, minority governments posess not
    only institutional advantages over their
    respective parliaments but also have positional
    advantages of agenda setting

7
Positional Advantages a memorys refreshment
8
Consider a five-party parliament in a two
dimensional space (A,B,C,D,G) and a minority
government G quite centrally located. (E is the
multidimensional median) Can government
preferences (G) have parliamentary approval ?
Any proposal presented on the parliament floor
will either be preferred by a majority over G, or
defeated by G.
9
A, C, D is a parliamentary majority that can
defeat G
10
Also B, C, D is a parliamentary majority that can
defeat G
11
The set of points that defeat G are located
within the lenses GG and GG. If the parliament
is interested in any other outcome and the
Government proposes its own ideal point, a
majority of MPs will side with the Government.
12
The situation would be tolerable for the
government if SQ were moved in the area of these
lenses that is close to G, but the hatched areas
called X are a serious defeat for the government.
13
However imagine that the SQ is in the the hatched
areas. The government G can propose something
(SQ1) better just simmetrically located. If the
government takes advantage of a closed rule SQ1
will be the final outcome.
14
Institutional Means Of Government Agenda Control
  • the rules to determine the agenda of the plenary
  • the degree of restrictions imposed on the
    legislature to propose money bills
  • the timing of committee versus plenary
    involvement in the decision-making process
  • the power of committees to rewrite government
    bills
  • the rules governing the timetable of committee
    proceedings
  • the rules curtailing the debate before the final
    vote in the plenary
  • the maximum lifespan of a bill pending approval
  • http//www.uni-potsdam.de/u/ls_vergleich/Publikati
    onen/PMR.htm
  • Chap 7, p.223-246

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16
Legislation
  • General hypothesis policy stability (defined as
    the impossibility of significant change of the
    status quo) will be the result of many veto
    players, particularly if they have significant
    ideological differences among them.
  • How to test this hypothesis ? Using a dataset of
    significant laws on issues of working time and
    working conditions.
  • The two issues are highly correlated with the
    Left-Right dimension that predominates party
    systems across Europe.
  • One dimension test of a multidimensional model.

17
  • All parties are located along the same dimension
    once you identify the two most extreme parties of
    a coalition, all the others are absorbed since
    they are located inside the core of the most
    extreme ones. Italian First Republic Example

PSI
PSDI
DC
PRI
PLI
18
Specific hypotheses to test
  • The number of significant laws is a declining
    function of the coalition range, namely the
    ideological distance of the two most extreme
    parties in a government coalition.
    (heteroskedastic relationship)
  • The number of significant laws will be an
    increasing function of the distance between the
    current government and the previous one the
    alternation
  • The number of significant laws will be an
    increasing function of the government duration

19
Heteroskedasticity
20
Operationalization of significant laws in the
selected policy area
  • Laws (1981-1991) that were in the intersection of
    both sources (NATLEX from ILO and Encyclopedia of
    Labor Law) are considered significant, while
    laws existing only in the NATLEX database were
    considered non-significant.

21
Operationalization of Governments
  • the variable that matters for the veto players
    theory is the partisan composition of government.
    Two successive governments with identical
    composition should be counted as a single
    government even if they are separated by an
    election, which changes the size of the different
    parties in parliament.
  • A dataset of merged governments, in which
    successive governments with the same composition
    were considered a single government regardless of
    whether they were separated by a resignation
    and/or an election. Obviously, merging affects
    the values of duration and the number of laws
    produced by a government.
  • Three different sources to calculate (after
    standardization) government range and alternation
    (Warwick, Castles-Mair, Laver-Hunt)

22
Operationalization of Governments
  • Three different sources to calculate (after
    standardization) government range and alternation
    (Warwick, Castles-Mair, Laver-Hunt)

23
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Veto Players and incremental legislation
  • Tsebelis Hypothesis Ceteris paribus,
    significant and nonsignificant laws should vary
    inversely, because of time constraints. The
    ceteris paribus clause assumes that the
    parliament has limited time and uses it to pass
    legislation (either significant or trivial).
  • Doering Hypothesis government control of the
    agenda increases the number of important bills
    and reduces legislative inflation (few small
    bills).

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28
  1. The correlation between all laws and significant
    laws is negative in two of the three versions of
    the table, most notably the one that excludes
    Sweden.
  2. Veto players correlated positively with the
    number of all laws, and negatively with the
    number of significant laws
  3. Agenda control by the government is negatively
    correlated with legislative inflation.
  4. The number of veto players is highly correlated
    with agenda control
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