Daniel Diermeier

Cohesion in Legislatures and the Vote of Confidence Procedure

W T He present a framework to analyze the effects of constitutional features on legislative voting with respect to cohesion and the distribution of payoffs. We then apply this framework to parliamentary democracies and show how a prominent feature of decision making in parliaments, the vote of confidence procedure, creates an incentive for ruling coalitions to vote together on policy issues that might otherwise split them. The key feature that creates cohesive voting is the fact that votes on bills are treated as votes on who controls floor access in future periods. As a consequence, legislative majorities capture more of the legislative rents from the minority in parliamentary democracies than in nonparliamentary settings.

A Political Economy Model of Congressional Careers

Theories in political economy depend critically on assumptions about motivations of politicians. Our analysis starts from the premise that politicians, like other economic agents, are rational individuals who make career decisions by comparing the expected returns of alternative choices. The main goal of the paper is to quantify the returns to a career in the United States Congress. To achieve this goal we specify a dynamic model of career decisions of a member of Congress and we estimate this model using a newly collected data set. Given estimates of the structural model, we assess reelection probabilities for members of Congress, estimate the effect of congressional experience on private and public sector wages, and quantify the value of a congressional seat. Moreover, we use the estimated model to assess how the imposition of term limits would affect the career decisions of politicians and the returns to a career in Congress.

Elections, Governments, and Parliaments in Proportional Representation Systems

This paper presents a theory of parliamentary systems with a proportional representation electoral system, a formateur selected based on party representation in parliament, and parties that cannot commit to the policies they will implement once in government. Government formation involves efficient proto-coalition bargaining, and elections yield unique strong Nash equilibrium outcomes. Depending on the status quo, minimal-majority, surplus, or consensus governments can form. If parties and voters are myopic and the status quo is subject to shocks, consensus governments and centrist policies occur only in a crisis. Otherwise, governments are minimal winning, and policies reflect only the preferences of the government parties.

Cabinet Survival and Competing Risks

We attempt to resolve a recent controversy in the study of cabinet terminations pertaining to the shape of hazard rates. On the one hand, Warwick (1992b) provides evidence that cabinets are more likely to terminate the longer they are in office. Alt and Kings (1994) analysis, on the other hand, suggests that hazard rates are constant over the life-time of a cabinet. This issue is of particular theoretical importance, since a constant hazard rate would add support to the nonstrategic model of cabinet termination due to Browne et al. (1986) while an increasing hazard rate would seem to favor Lupia and Stroms (1995) strategic approach. By applying a semi-parametric competing risk approach to data on cabinet durations, we are able to show that through its use of theory-based censoring the previous literature in effect analyzed only one mode in which cabinets terminate: the case where one cabinet is replaced by another without a new election. Once cabinet terminations that lead to chamber dissolutions with subsequent elections are analyzed directly, we can show that they are governed by a very different stochastic process. Hazard rates are not flat as in the case of replacements, but increase over the life of the government. Further the covariates governing replacement terminations fail to explain dissolution terminations. These findings add support to the strategic approach suggested by Lupia and Strom.

Government Turnover in Parliamentary Democracies

In this paper we consider a dynamic model of government formation and termination in parliamentary democracies. Our analysis accounts for the following observed phenomena: (1) Cabinet reshuffles; (2) Cabinet replacements; (3) Early elections; (4) Surplus governments; (5) Minority governments; (6) The relative instability of minority governments.

An empirical investigation of coalitional bargaining procedures

Models of government formation processes in multi party democracies are usually highly sensitive to the rules that govern the selection of formateurs (i.e., the parties selected to propose a potential government). The theoretical literature has focused on two selection rules: selection proportional to seat share, and selection in order of seat share. In this paper we use a new data set on government formations in 11 parliamentary democracies to empirically assess which selection rule most closely approximates the data. We find that while there is little empirical support for selection in order of seat share, proportional selection fits the data well.

Cabinet Terminations and Critical Events

We present an empirical assessment of Lupia and Strøms noncooperative bargaining model of cabinet terminations. We construct a stochastic version of the model and derive several testable implications. As the next mandatory election approaches: (1) the probability of an early election increases; (2) a cabinets risks of being replaced without an intermediate election may be flat or even decrease; and (3) the overall chance that a cabinet falls (for whatever reason) increases. Using nonparametric duration analysis on a 15-country data set, we find qualified support for the Lupia and Strøm model. We conclude that the strategic approach is more promising than the nonstrategic alternative, but a more fully dynamic strategic model will be required to account for the dynamics of cabinet stability.

A Person-Centered Approach to Moral Judgment

Both normative theories of ethics in philosophy and contemporary models of moral judgment in psychology have focused almost exclusively on the permissibility of acts, in particular whether acts should be judged on the basis of their material outcomes (consequentialist ethics) or on the basis of rules, duties, and obligations (deontological ethics). However, a longstanding third perspective on morality, virtue ethics, may offer a richer descriptive account of a wide range of lay moral judgments. Building on this ethical tradition, we offer a person-centered account of moral judgment, which focuses on individuals as the unit of analysis for moral evaluations rather than on acts. Because social perceivers are fundamentally motivated to acquire information about the moral character of others, features of an act that seem most informative of character often hold more weight than either the consequences of the act or whether a moral rule has been broken. This approach, we argue, can account for numerous empirical findings that are either not predicted by current theories of moral psychology or are simply categorized as biases or irrational quirks in the way individuals make moral judgments.

Language and Ideology in Congress

Legislative speech records from the 101st to 108th Congresses of the US Senate are analysed to study political ideologies. A widely-used text classification algorithm – Support Vector Machines (SVM) – allows the extraction of terms that are most indicative of conservative and liberal positions in legislative speeches and the prediction of senators’ ideological positions, with a 92 per cent level of accuracy. Feature analysis identifies the terms associated with conservative and liberal ideologies. The results demonstrate that cultural references appear more important than economic references in distinguishing conservative from liberal congressional speeches, calling into question the common economic interpretation of ideological differences in the US Congress.

Information and Congressional Hearings

While Congressional scholars agree that hearings are an important activity there is little consensus on their role in the legislative process. The traditional literature on hearings pplays down their role as mechanisms of disseminating information because committee members often do not appear persuaded by the information they reveal. In this paper we explore the premise that hearings may not be informative to committees but may provide crucial information to the floor. We show that, if hearings have some intrinsic informative content and are costly, even extreme committees can transmit useful information to the floor. Furthermore, the possibility of holding hearings creates an incentive for extreme committees to specialize and reveal information simply by the decision whether to hold hearings.