Bjørn Erik Rasch

The role of governments in legislative agenda setting

1. Governments and Legislative Agenda Setting: An Introduction George Tsebelis and Bjorn Erik Rasch 2. Germany: Limited Government Agenda Control and Strong Minority Rights Christoph Honnige and Ulrich Sieberer 3. France: Systematic Institutional Advantage of Government Sylvain Brouard 4. Italy: Government Alternation and Legislative Agenda Setting Francesco Zucchini 5. United Kingdom: Extreme Dominance by the Executive... Most of the Time Mads Qvortrup 6. Hungary: Changing Government Advantages-Challenging a Dominant Executive Gabriella Ilonszki and Krisztina Jager 7. Netherlands: Legislative Agenda Setting and the Politics of Strategic Lock-Ins Arco Timmermans 8. Switzerland: Agenda-Setting Power of Government in a Separation-of-Powers Framework Daniel Schwarz, Andre Bachtiger and Georg Lutz 9. Greece: Government as the Dominant Player Aris Alexopoulos 10 Spain: Majoritarian Choices, Disciplined Party Government and Compliant Legislature Natalia Ajenjo and Ignatio Molina 11. Portugal: Active and Influential Parliament Eugenia da Conceicao-Heldt 12. Russia: The Executive in a Leading Role Iulia Shevchenko and Grigorii Golosov 13. Agenda Control and Veto Rights to Opposition Parties Robert Klemmensen 14. Norway: Institutionally Weak Governments and Parliamentary Voting on Bills Bjorn Erik Rasch 15. Japan: Decades of Partisan Advantages Impending Cabinets Agenda Setting Power Silke Riemann 16.Conclusion Bjorn Erik Rasch and George Tsebelis

Manipulation and strategic voting in the Norwegian parliament

The Norwegian parliament uses a sequential voting procedure. After some general remarks on how the legislature can avoid strategic voting by choosing an appropriate voting order, and an exposition of the rules whereby the agenda is determined in this particular parliament, voting order manipulation is examined. A manipulative actor tries to bring about voting sequences in accordance with his interests, but contrary to the putative will of other actors. An example illustrates how manipulation may take place in practice, but it is stressed that the realm of manipulation easily escapes empirical analysis. To grasp the different types of manipulation in legislative voting, models are needed that are rich in institutional detail.

Government Selection and Executive Powers: Constitutional Design in Parliamentary Democracies

Provisions for a parliamentary investiture vote have become increasingly common in parliamentary democracies. This article shows that investiture provisions were largely introduced when new constitutions were written or old ones fundamentally redesigned. It also shows that the constitutions that endowed executives with strong legislative agenda powers also endowed parliaments with strong mechanisms to select the executive. It is argued that constitution makers’ decisions can be seen in principal–agent terms: strong investiture rules constitute an ex ante mechanism of parliamentary control – that is, a mechanism to minimise adverse selection and reduce the risk of agency loss by parliament. The findings have two broad implications: from a constitutional point of view, parliamentary systems do not rely exclusively on ex post control mechanisms such as the no confidence vote to minimise agency loss; parliamentarism, at least today and as much as presidentialism, is the product of conscious constitutional design and not evolutionary adaptation.

Opposition Parties, Electoral Incentives and the Control of Government Ministers: Parliamentary Questioning in Norway

The Norwegian political system is parliamentary, meaning that the government is selected by the parliament (Storting) and that the government in its day-to-day proceedings needs to be tolerated by the majority of the legislators to remain in power.1 The main instrument for legislators to substantiate parliamentarism is the vote of censure: If a no-confidence motion receives a simple majority of votes, the government is constitutionally obliged to resign. In practice, however, the mere expectation of such an event often is sufficient for governmental change.2

An extension of Black's theorem on voting orders to the successive procedure

Duncan Black (1958) stated his voting order theorem — ‘the later any motion enters the voting order, the greater its chance of adoption’ — exclusively for the amendment procedure. Niemi and Gretleins (1985) extension is similarly limited. Here we show that with a change in the focus from social preferences to individual preferences, both Blacks theorem and that proved by Niemi and Gretlein apply as well to the successive procedure.

Election Campaigns, Issue Focus and Voting Intentions: Survey Experiments of Norwegian Voters

This article investigates whether and how changes in issue focus in election campaigns affect voting intention, even if no preference change takes place, and whether such effects vary systematically across different groups of voters. Evidence is reported from two survey experiments of Norwegian voters, where respondents were treated with information drawing their attention towards issues pertaining either to immigration or the environment. Although irrelevant for policy learning or persuasion, this information strongly increased the support of particular parties. More specifically, parties with ‘ownership’ of the issues involved gained votes. Certain types of voters were more likely to change voting intentions post-treatment than others, but which types crucially depended on the issue area under focus. Nevertheless, the results indicate that the issue focus of campaigns is very important for vote choice. Hence, one should expect that, for instance, even ‘neutral’ political news coverage at or close to election day could affect voters in predictable ways. Furthermore, one should expect different parties to fight hard to steer the focus of campaigns towards issues where they have ownership.

Political Parties and Constitutional Change

This chapter explores why constitutions are changed. The chapter begins with an overview of why constitutional design and redesign are important questions. The second section provides a background to the study of constitutional change which has tended to be embedded within legal scholarship rather than political science. The third section reviews competing theories of constitutional change, noting the general absence of political parties from these theories and the lack of success in explaining observed patterns of constitutional amendments. The next section suggests the need to “bring the party in” and suggests how incorporating the preferences of parties and the shape of the party system can advance our understanding of constitutional change. A number of empirical cases suggest that parties and party systems shape constitutional change are discussed briefly. The chapter concludes with suggestions for how further progress can be made in integrating research on parties and party systems with research on constitutional change.

On the real voting power index

Abstract Both formal and real voting power indices completely disregard the significance of voting methods to processes of coalition formation. This may result in misleading figures of voting strength if estimated probabilities of certain coalitions are utilized in the indices. It is shown that application of the real voting power index of Stenlund, Lane and Bjurulf (a measure closely related to the Banzhaf index) to parliaments using the amendment voting procedure, is problematical. If a parliament votes upon three or more alternatives, the winning coalition on the issue depends more or less on the order of voting. The measurement of real voting power is distorted both if the formation of the voting order is based on application of general voting order rules, or if it is totally unregulated.

Manipulation in a Multiparty Parliament: The Case of the Norwegian Storting

Just as most continental European legislatures, the Norwegian parliament uses the successive voting procedure. This article discusses what kind of manipulatory strategies Norwegian legislators may use. By far the major part of Storting voting seems, however, to be sincere or non-strategic. The part of the voting process in which a manipulator is most likely to succeed occurs when the voting order is being determined. After the voting order is fixed, manipulatory manoeuvres are extremely unlikely.