John D. Huber

Congruence between Citizens and Policymakers in Two Visions of Liberal Democracy

This paper explores two quite different visions of the democratic processes that can create congruence between citizen preferences and public policies. In the Majority Control vision , electoral competition and citizen choices result in the direct election of governments committed to policies corresponding to the preferences of the median voter. In the Proportionate Influence vision , election outcomes result in legislatures that reflect the preferences of all citizens; legislative bargaining results in policies linked to the position of the median voter. The authors give more explicit theoretical form to those visions and link them empirically to specific types of modern democracies. They then attempt to test the success of each vision in bringing about congruence between citizen self-placements and the estimated positions of governments and policymaker coalitions on the left-right scale in twelve nations in the late 1970s and early 1980s. Although the analysis reveals weaknesses in each approach, it suggests a consistent advantage for the Proportionate Influence vision.

The Vote of Confidence in Parliamentary Democracies

I present a formal model of the confidence vote procedure, an institutional arrangement that permits a prime minister to attach the fate of a particular policy to a vote on government survival. The analysis indicates that confidence vote procedures make it possible for prime ministers to exercise significant control over the nature of policy outcomes, even when these procedures are not actually invoked. Neither cabinet ministers, through their authority over specific portfolios, nor members of parliament, through the use of no-confidence motions, can counteract the prime ministers policy control on the floor of parliament. The analysis also illuminates the circumstances under which prime ministers should invoke confidence vote procedures, focusing attention on the position-taking incentives of the parties that support the government, rather than on the level of policy conflict between the government and parliament.

Legislatures and statutory control of bureaucracy

Existing theories of legislative delegation to bureaucracies typically focus on a single legislature, often the U.S. Congress. We argue that this parochial focus has important limitations. If one contends that politicians respond rationally to their political environment when adopting strategies for controlling bureaucrats, then theories of control should be able to explain how differences in the political environment-and in particular in the democratic institutional arrangements that shape this environment-influence strategies for controlling bureaucrats. We offer such a theory about the conditions under which legislatures should rely on statutory control (i.e., detailed legislation) in order to limit the discretion of agencies. The theory focuses on the interactions of four factors: conflict between legislators and bureaucrats, the bargaining costs associated with choosing the institutions for controlling bureaucrats, the professional capacity of legislators to create institutions for control, and the impact of political institutions on the relative costs and benefits of statutory and nonstatutory strategies of control. We test our argument using legislation from 1995 and 1996 that affects Medicaid programs. The results show that legislatures are more likely to make use of statutory controls when control of government is divided between the two parties, the two chambers of the legislature are unified in their opposition to the executive, the legislature is more professionalized, and the legislature does not have easily available options for nonstatutory control. ureaucratic involvement in policymaking is a pervasive condition of modern political life. Bureaucracies implement policies that legislatures have enacted, and they create policies where legislatures have avoided doing so. They can act to regulate industries, to distribute benefits and costs, and to redistribute wealth. They tackle policy areas as disparate as telecommunications, the environment, transportation, and public health. Given the pervasiveness of bureaucratic activity, it is not surprising that political scientists long have sought to understand the relationship between legislatures and agencies. Understanding this relationship is essential to democratic theory, as it focuses attention on the legitimacy of the role played by unelected policymakers in a representative democracy. Furthermore, it sheds light on the actions, abilities, and motivations of legislators. Thus, scholars have attempted to ascertain whether, to what extent, and under what conditions legislators influence the actions of agencies. Much of the focus of this research has been on the U.S. Congress, and much of the debate has centered on the question of whether in fact Congress controls the bureaucracy. This is a difficult question to answer, as it requires fairly precise information on legislator preferences and agency outputs. But while settling the empirical issue has been difficult, in addressing this question scholars have clarified several strategies for control, including the use of budget processes (e.g., Banks 1989; Bendor, Taylor, and Van Gaalen 1987), ongoing oversight (e.g., Aberbach 1990), and statutory control, whereby legislators use legislation to influence agency decisions.

Economic versus Cultural Differences: Forms of Ethnic Diversity and Public Goods Provision

Arguments about how ethnic diversity affects governance typically posit that groups differ from each other in substantively important ways and that these differences make effective governance more difficult. But existing cross-national empirical tests typically use measures of ethnolinguistic fractionalization (ELF) that have no information about substantive differences between groups. This article examines two important ways that groups differ from each other—culturally and economically—and assesses how such differences affect public goods provision. Across 46 countries, the analysis compares existing measures of cultural differences with a new measure that captures economic differences between groups: between-group inequality (BGI). We show that ELF, cultural fractionalization (CF), and BGI measure different things, and that the choice between them has an important impact on our understanding of which countries are most ethnically diverse. Furthermore, empirical tests reveal that BGI has a large, robust, and negative relationship with public goods provision, whereas CF, ELF, and overall inequality do not.

Bureaucratic Capacity, Delegation, and Political Reform

We analyze a model of delegation and policymaking in polities where bureaucratic capacity is low. Our analysis suggests that low bureaucratic capacity diminishes incentives for bureaucrats to comply with legislation, making it more difficult for politicians to induce bureaucrats to take actions that politicians desire. Consequently, when bureaucratic capacity is low, standard principles in the theoretical literature on delegation no longer hold. We also use the model to examine the issue of political reform in polities with low bureaucratic capacity. The model indicates that politicians in such polities will be trapped in a situation whereby they have little incentive to undertake reforms of either the bureaucracy or other institutions (such as courts) that are crucial for successful policymaking.

Replacing Cabinet Ministers: Patterns of Ministerial Stability in Parliamentary Democracies

We examine the stability of individual ministers across parliamentary democracies. Our data show that this stability is only loosely related to the stability of cabinets, making it impossible to rely primarily on arguments about cabinet duration to explain patterns of individual stability. We argue that to explain patterns of individual stability, it is useful to focus on the problems that party leaders have in identifying which individuals have the qualities necessary to do their jobs well. The institutional powers of ministers, coalition attributes, and party-specific variables should affect the uncertainty that party leaders have about which individuals will be successful ministers, on one hand, and the ability of party leaders to replace unsuccessful ministers, on the other. Our empirical tests support these arguments. The analysis therefore has implications for expectations regarding the circumstances under which minister stability should positively or negatively influence the policymaking performance of government.

Procedural Choice and the House Committee on Rules

The Rules Committee has long played a key role in the American legislative process through its ability to craft special amendment rules in the U.S. House. This article develops and tests a formal model of policy-making in Congress, highlighting the central role of the Rules Committee. This model generates simple conditions under which restrictive and nonrestrictive procedures will be used. It also provides a new view of restrictive procedures, one which sees restrictive amendment rules as devices for securing noncentrist policy outcomes on the Floor of the House. Evidence based on rule assignments in the Ninety-fourth through Ninety-eighth Congresses supports the claim that the preferences of the Rules Committee should be incorporated in any attempt to understand the pattern of restrictive rules in the House.

Restrictive Legislative Procedures in France and the United States.

I develop a framework for applying existing formal models of restrictive amendment procedures in Congress to the study of the French governments use of two restrictive legislative procedures, the package vote and the “guillotine”. I test six hypotheses derived from existing formal models and from existing research on the French National Assembly. The analysis shows that the French government invokes the two procedures on the same types of distributive and jurisdictionally complex bills that frequently receive closed rules in Congress. The analysis also shows that the decision to use the restrictive procedures is strongly linked to the majority status of the government, suggesting they are used to preserve agreements between parties in the same way that restrictive amendment procedures are used to preserve agreements between individual members of Congress. Thus, existing formal models of legislative institutions can help us study how procedural structures shape strategic bargaining between political parties in parliamentary systems, especially during coalition and minority government.

Delegation to civil servants in parliamentary democracies

This article reviews institutionalarrangements that cabinet ministers and otherpolitical actors employ to influence civil servantbehavior in parliamentary democracies. I then discusshow unlike other theories of bureaucratic structure,the principal-agent framework can be employed togenerate testable hypotheses about systematiccross-national variation in delegation instruments. Ialso offer an empirical illustration of the approach,one that examines the relationship between cabinetturnover and delegation strategies on health policy.The analysis underlines the need to be cautious aboutmaking claims concerning the impact of politicalfactors (like cabinet instability) and institutionalfactors (like cabinet decision-making rules) ondelegation outcomes without first examining how thesefactors influence delegation strategies themselves.

How Does Cabinet Instability Affect Political Performance? Portfolio Volatility and Health Care Cost Containment in Parliamentary Democracies

Cr7lhis article explores the relationship between cabinet instability and political performance in parliamentary democracies. I develop two theoretical arguments about how cabinet instability should affect government effectiveness, and I use these to define several measures of instability. The first argument suggests that instability in the partisan composition of cabinets should make it difficult for governments to adopt and implement new policy programs. The second argument suggests that instability in the partisan control of portfolios within the government (portfolio volatility) should make it difficult for cabinet ministers to obtain relevant information during policy formulation and implementation. I test both arguments by examining the short- and long-run effect of the instability variables on success at health care cost containment. The analysis indicates that short-run increases in portfolio volatility present problems for government decision makers, but in the long run, unstable systems are able to address the problems that instability poses.