Jeannette Money

Bicameral Negotiations: The Navette System in France

This article investigates the decision-making process in the French bicameral legislature: the navette system. In this system, the legislation shuttles between the two houses until agreement is reached or until a stopping rule is applied. We examine the interaction between upper and lower houses as a bargaining game with complete and one-sided incomplete information. The complete information model permits us to evaluate the political implications of the navettes various institutional features (where the bill is first introduced, number of iterations, final veto power, etc.). The incomplete information approach permits us to predict the duration of the navette process. Data from the French Fifth Republic in the 1959–86 period corroborate the conclusions of the model. Because the navette system is the most commonly used method of decision making in bicameral legislatures, the model can be usefully generalized to other countries.

The Spatial Structure of Party Competition: Party Dispersion within a Finite Policy Space

Using the Comparative Manifesto Project (CMP) data for twenty established parliamentary democracies, the authors have studied the relationship between number of parties in a party system and party dispersion. They found that as the number of parties in the system increases, the dispersion of parties also increases, but only up to a point. The boundaries of a finite issue space appear to expand up to at most five parties. In addition, once the number of parties in the party system was controlled for, they found that electoral rules have no direct effect on party dispersion. Thus, their findings validate the theoretical predictions of spatial theory while at the same time highlighting surprising ways in which the policy space is constrained.

The political power of the french senate: Micromechanisms of bicameral negotiations

In comparison with the extensive powers of the French Senate under the Third Republic, the constitutional role of the upper legislative house in the French Fourth and Fifth Republics has been highly circumscribed; in cases of disagreement, the National Assembly is granted the ultimate power of decision. This article compares three explanations of senatorial influence under these institutional constraints. The first account accords influence to senatorial wisdom; the second refers to presidential attitudes toward the Senate; the third attributes senatorial influence to a series of institutional and political factors. Four case studies of senatorial influence are analysed. Although the legislative outcomes are consistent with both the second and third explanations, the details of the negotiation process provide additional support for the institutional/political explanation.

Bicameralism: The institutions of bicameralism

Given the diverse national paths in the development of bicameral legislatures, it is not surprising to find substantial institutional variation. In this chapter, we explore these institutional differences. The characteristics of lower and upper legislative houses differ on a number of dimensions, and analysts have relied on these differences to explain cross-national variations in upper house power. Although there are variations in size, legislative term of office, turnover, membership, representativeness, and institutional power, two particular characteristics have been emphasized. The first is the membership of the two houses, based on selection methods and categories of citizens represented. The second is the relative power of the two houses as reflected in their mechanisms for resolving intercameral differences. Here we focus on these two critical dimensions of variation. Political analysts who examine the variation in bicameral institutions argue that bicameralism produces disparate results across countries. Lijphart (1984) attributes variation to the degree of congruence between the two legislative houses and power asymmetries, whereas Mastias and Grange (1987) focus on upper house legitimacy as the important independent variable. Lijphart (1984: 99) defines “congruence” as similarity of political composition. Regardless of the variations in selection methods, if the two houses have similar political representation, they are deemed congruent. Disparities in power range from full symmetry, where agreement of the two houses is necessary to enact a law, to total asymmetry, where one house is granted decision-making power. Using these two categories, Lijphart constructs three types of bicameralism. He argues that “strong” bicameral legislatures are characterized by significant differences in composition and by relatively symmetric power. “Weak” bicameral legislatures are characterized either by asymmetric power or by congruent chambers.