Kaare Strøm

Delegation and accountability in parliamentary democracies

Parliamentary democracy has been widely embraced bypoliticians and especially by the scholarly communitybut remains less widely understood. In this essay, Iidentify the institutional features that defineparliamentary democracy and suggest how they can beunderstood as delegation relationships. I proposetwo definitions: one minimal and one maximal (orideal-typical). In the latter sense, parliamentarydemocracy is a particular regime of delegation andaccountability that can be understood with the help ofagency theory, which allows us to identify theconditions under which democratic agency problems mayoccur. Parliamentarism is simple, indirect, andrelies on lessons gradually acquired in the past. Compared to presidentialism, parliamentarism hascertain advantages, such as decisional efficiency andthe inducements it creates toward effort. On theother hand, parliamentarism also implies disadvantagessuch as ineffective accountability and a lack oftransparency, which may cause informationalinefficiencies. And whereas parliamentarism may beparticularly suitable for problems of adverseselection, it is a less certain cure for moral hazard.In contemporary advanced societies, parliamentarism isfacing the challenges of decaying screening devicesand diverted accountabilities

Policy, Office, or Votes?: Political Parties and Hard Choices

Political leaders routinely make momentous decisions, but they cannot always get what they want. Very often their important choices feel both difficult and painful. This is sometimes because these leaders have to act on the basis of incomplete information or because they realize that their options are risky. But it could also be because they have to abandon one goal to attain another. Politicians feel the tug between conflicting options as much as anyone else. Even when making decisions does not mean choosing the lesser of two evils, there may well be severe and uncomfortable trade-offs between different goals they have set themselves. Leadership frequently means making hard choices. In modern democracies, the leaders who make these choices are highly likely to be party politicians or indeed party leaders. Political parties are the most important organizations in modern politics. In the contemporary world, only a few states do without them. The reason that political parties are well-nigh ubiquitous is that they perform functions that are valuable to many political actors. Political parties play a major role in the recruitment of top politicians, on whom the momentous and painful political decisions often fall. With very few exceptions, political chief executives are elected on the slate of some established political party, and very often the head of government continues to serve as the head of the political party that propelled him or her into office. Democracy may be conceived as a process by which voters delegate policy-making authority to a set of representatives, and political parties are the main organizational vehicle by which such delegation takes place.

Constraints on cabinet formation in parliamentary democracies

Coalition theory typically treats political parties involved in government formation in parliamentary democracies as if they were unconstrained players in an institution-free world. Yet actual coalition options are often severely constrained by institutional arrangements and prior commitments. We develop a systematic account of different constraints on government formation and examine their frequency across 10 parliamentary democracies. Hypothetical and empirical examples demonstrate how a small number of constraints can dramatically reduce the range of coalition options and redistribute bargaining power among political parties. More adequate coalition theories need to recognize the effects of such constraints and to build on the theoretical lessons of the neoinstitutionalist approach to legislative behavior.

Rules, reasons and routines: Legislative roles in parliamentary democracies

Parliamentary roles, the behavioural patterns or routines that legislators adopt, can be viewed as strategies for the employment of scarce resources toward specific goals. This article argues that parliamentary behaviour can be understood against the background of four typical and largely hierarchically ordered objectives that parliamentarians have: reselection, re‐election, party office, and legislative office. Legislative roles describe the ways in which parliamentarians harness their scarce resources in order to reach their goals. These strategies are in turn affected by the institutional rules under which parliamentarians operate. The article examines the specific legislator objectives under parliamentary government and discusses the roles that describe the various ways in which they pursue these goals.

Minority Governments in Parliamentary Democracies: The Rationality of Nonwinning Cabinet Solutions

Minority cabinets account for about 35% of all governments in 15 parliamentary democracies since 1945. Conventional explanations associate minority government formation with political crises, instability, polarization, factionalization, and failures of interparty bargaining. Such explanations are tested and found lacking in empirical support. Instead, minority governments are explained as rational solutions under specified conditions. Minority cabinets form when even oppositional parties can influence parliamentary legislation, and when government participation is likely to be a liability in future elections. This rationalist explanation receives substantial empirical support in tests against competing hypotheses. The results suggest important modifications to theories of government and coalition formation.

Party Goals and Government Performance in Parliamentary Democracies

From assumptions of parties as rational actors, this study develops four measures of government performance: duration, mode of resignation, subsequent alternation, and electoral success. These measures are used in a test of competing hypotheses concerning minority government performance in parliamentary democracies. Minority governments are conventionally portrayed as poor performers, but tests of this proposition have been seriously limited. An alternative hypothesis depicts minority governments as rational cabinet solutions without significant performance liabilities. These hypotheses are tested against an extensive cross-national data set including 323 postwar governments in 15 parliamentary democracies. The conventional wisdom about minority governments is not supported by the evidence. In some respects, minority governments are clearly superior to majority coalitions. Moreover, minority government formation may enhance systemic responsiveness and accountability. The findings support the explanation of minority governments as rational cabinet solutions.

Parliamentary committees in european democracies

Parliamentary committees are among the most important features of legislative organisation in contemporary democracies. This analysis identifies three perspectives on committees in the neo‐institutional rational choice literature on legislative organisation, in which committees are viewed as vehicles for gains from trade, information acquisition and partisan co‐ordination, respectively. Guided by these perspectives, the article then surveys the structure, procedures and powers of legislative committees in 18 western European democracies from 1990. The data are drawn from a cross‐national collaborative research project directed by Herbert Doring (1995).

Strategic Parliamentary Dissolution

An important agenda power in parliamentary democracies is the discretion over the dissolution of parliament. We argue that variation in constitutional rules and the political environment will systematically affect the frequency of early elections. We hypothesize that dissolution will be more frequent under single-party governments, when the head of state plays an insignificant role, when neither parliament nor the cabinet can inhibit dissolution, when minority governments are in power, when the head of state can dissolve unilaterally, and later in the constitutional term. Using standard logistic and Cox-proportional hazard techniques, we test these expectations in a pooled time-series setting against observations of most OECD parliamentary democracies for the years 1960–1995. We find that parliamentary dissolutions are more frequent earlier in the constitutional term, under minority governments, when the head of state plays an insignificant role, and when the parliament or the cabinet is not involved.

Contending Models of Cabinet Stability

A spirited debate has arisen over the best approach to the analysis of the durability of governing coalitions in parliamentary democracies. In this controversy, Kaare Strom enters a number of criticisms of the stochastic modeling approach offered by Eric C. Browne, John P. Frendreis, and Dennis W. Gleiber, and by Claudio Cioffi-Revilla. In turn, Browne and his colleagues join the issue.

Policy, Institutions, and Coalition Avoidance: Norwegian Governments, 1945–1990.

Norwegian party politics is characterized by coalition avoidance that defies conventional coalition theory. This failure of coalescence can be caused either by policy pursuit (preference-induced) or by institutional constraint (structure-induced). We test the explanatory power of policy-based and institutional explanations, relying on content analysis of authoritative party and government documents for our policy measures. The results show that the left–right policy dimension has powerfully constrained Norwegian interparty bargaining and that policy-based coalition theory can account for many apparent anomalies in Norwegian coalition politics. A permissive institutional environment has also fostered coalition avoidance. Although core-based coalition theory can thus be successfully adapted to the Norwegian case, it rests on a number of critical assumptions that limit its general applicability.