Lawrence C. Dodd

Coalitions in Parliamentary Government

For eighty years, students of parliamentary democracy have argued that durable cabinets require majority party government. Lawrence Dodd challenges this widely held belief and offers in its place a revisionist interpretation based on contemporary game theory. He argues for a fundamental alteration in existing conceptions of the relationship between party systems and parliamentary government.The author notes that cabinet durability depends on the coalitional status of the party or parties that form the cabinet. This status is created by the fractionalization, instability, and polarization that characterize the parliamentary party system. Cabinets of minimum winning status are likely to endure; as they depart from minimum winning status, their durability should decrease. Hypotheses derived from the authors theory arc examined against the experience of seventeen Western nations from 1918 to 1974. Making extensive use of quantitative analysis, the author compares behavioral patterns in multiparty and majority party parliaments, contrasts interwar and postwar parliaments, and examines the consistency of key behavioral patterns according to country. He concludes that a key to durable government is the minimum winning status of the cabinet, which may be attained in multiparty or majority party parliaments.Originally published in 1976.The Princeton Legacy Library uses the latest print-on-demand technology to again make available previously out-of-print books from the distinguished backlist of Princeton University Press. These paperback editions preserve the original texts of these important books while presenting them in durable paperback editions. The goal of the Princeton Legacy Library is to vastly increase access to the rich scholarly heritage found in the thousands of books published by Princeton University Press since its founding in 1905.

Party Coalitions in Multiparty Parliaments: A Game-Theoretic Analysis.

This study focuses on A. Lawrence Lowells classic thesis that a parliamentary democracy must possess a majority party system if durable cabinets are to exist. The argument of this study is that majority party government is not essential to cabinet durability. Rather, in line with the British analyst W. L. Middleton as well as more contemporary game-theoreticians, the critical factor is held to be the coalitional status of the cabinet: (1) cabinets of minimum winning status should be durable; as cabinets depart from minimum winning status, cabinet durability decreases; (2) the coalitional status of the cabinet that forms is partially a product of party system fractionalization, instability, and polarization. Hypotheses derived from the theory are tested with data drawn from 17 Western parliamentary democracies, from 1918 to 1940 and from 1945 to 1970. The findings generally support the theory. A key to durable government is the minimum winning status of the cabinet. Minimum winning cabinets are possible in multiparty and majority party systems.

Nicaragua: Progress Amid Regress?

This essay examines Nicaraguas municipal elections of November 2008 against the backdrop of Daniel Ortegas return to the nations presidency in 2006. While Ortega has engaged in authoritarian practices, municipal-level Sandinista politicians have helped foster a vibrant local democracy. Engaging citizens in local problem-solving, they have dominated municipal elections since 2001, winning most major municipalities again in 2008. Sandinista success has pushed Liberals toward a more policy-oriented versus clientelistic approach to local government and generated a more responsive and competitive municipal politics nation-wide. These developments, contrasted with Ortegas behavior, indicate that Nicaragua is experiencing progressive and regressive forces in its democratization process.

Coalition-Building by Party Leaders: A Case Study of House Democrats

This study explores the process by which party leaders build winning coalitions. Focusing on House passage of impoundment legislation in the 93rd Congress, the essay documents the extensive efforts of Democratic leaders to create a viable bill and persuade party members to support it. Analyses of whip counts demonstrate that the leaders passed the impoundment bill in part because they could bargain with and convert “successful” party members whose past career advancement and future achievements depended in part on leadership assistance. The essay concludes by identifying six conditions that nurtured the bargaining capacity of the Democratic leaders and fostered their coalition-building success.1

Congress and the Polarity Paradox: Party Polarization, Member Incivility and Enactment of Landmark Legislation, 1891–1994

This research demonstrates that a polarity paradox exists in the enactment of landmark laws by the U.S. Congress. Moderate conflict facilitates the production of landmark laws whereas movement to the polar extremes of conflict—toward low or high conflict—inhibits it. The number of landmark laws passed by a Congress is low when polarization between the parties is low, particularly if uncivil interpersonal conflict within the parties is low, and when polarization between the parties is high, particularly if uncivil interpersonal conflict between the parties is high. Movement away from these polar extremes toward moderate conflict yields increased landmark productivity.

Nicaragua Votes: The Elections of 2001

In November 2001, Nicaraguans voted in their country’s fourth national election since the Somoza regime was overthrown in 1979 and the third since the electoral defeat of the Sandinista National Liberation Front (FSLN) in 1990. For the third straight time, they chose a conservative candidate who espoused democratic liberties. In 2001 Nicaraguan voters had three choices for the presidency, one from each of three long-established parties. Outgoing vice-president Enrique Bola~nos, running as the Liberal Party candidate, won with 56 percent of the vote, defeating Sandinista candidate and former president Daniel Ortega, who garnered 42 percent. Coming in a distant third was the Conservative Party’s Alberto Saborio, who got less than 2 percent. The observers who were present for the campaigning and voting, including former U.S. president Jimmy Carter plus Nobel laureate and former Costa Rican president Oscar Arias, were as one in endorsing the process as free and fair. Nicaragua is now more than two decades beyond the overthrow of Anastasio Somoza’s authoritarian dictatorship and well into a period of electoral competition among parties and candidates with recent governing experience. Citizens can and do participate in meaningful ways; elections are regularly scheduled; peaceful parties representing distinctive policy positions boast large followings and contend freely; elections are deemed fair by international observers; and state power is shared out across executive, legislative, and local offices that parties of both the left and the right can hope to fill. In short, democratization is clearly afoot and has been for some time. Yet Nicaragua’s path to fuller democracy is not free of roadblocks. Leslie Anderson is associate professor of political science at the University of Florida. Lawrence C. Dodd holds the Manning J. Dauer Chair in Political Science at the University of Florida. The present essay draws on research for a book they are writing entitled Learning Democracy: Citizen Engagement and Electoral Choice in Nicaragua, 1990–2001.

Congress in a Downsian World: Polarization Cycles and Regime Change

This article presents a theory of two-party democracy designed to address the divergence between Anthony Downs’ prediction of sustained two-party convergence to the ideological center and polarization cycles in the US Congress. It embraces his analytic strategy and central assumptions, which define the conditions necessary to ideological contestation. It questions the fit between his subsidiary assumptions—such as the existence of an all-powerful unitary state—and American democracy. In utilizing assumptions more appropriate to the American setting, the theory accounts for cycles of party polarization in Congress. These cyclical processes foster ongoing reconstruction of policy regimes in America.

Taking Incivility Seriously

Even casual observers of the US Congress have heard about the heated exchanges, name calling, booing and hissing, and other uncivil breaches of decorum that have occurred in the House and Senate chambers in recent years. One has only to recall the shout from the floor of the House chambers, “You Lie!,” by Congressman Joe Wilson (R-SC) in September 2009, when President Barak Obama was explaining his national health-care plan to a joint televised session of Congress. The list of anecdotes and illustrations of norm-breaking and personal incivility are numerous, with most Congresses having at least one or two publicized uncivil acts as well as many less visible ones. But what are we to make of such actions?

Electoral competition and democratic decline in Nicaragua: uncovering an electorally viable platform for the right

ABSTRACT Between the 1980s and 2006 Nicaragua was a competitive democracy where parties of the left and right won national presidential elections and relinquished power when their terms ended. More recently the quality of Nicaragua’s democracy has deteriorated. This change is due partly to autocratic behaviour by the elected leftist president, Daniel Ortega. But democratic decline is also the result of factional divisions and vague, outmoded policy commitments on the right that have crippled its electoral competitiveness, enabling Ortega’s behaviour. Utilizing an experimental research design, this article identifies two modernized policy platforms that could significantly broaden rightist electoral support in presidential campaigns, aiding democratic resurgence in Nicaragua. At a point when opposition parties are struggling to retain strength and coherence in many other democracies, the study presents a research strategy that could help clarify the ways such parties might reinvigorate their electoral competitiveness.

A Review of “On Legislatures: The Puzzle of Representation”

A second breakthrough is his creation of what he calls “Civil Rights Space.” Grose wisely judged that the left-right continuum and Poole-Rosenthal NOMINATE scores on which the roll call voting measure of congressional members is based do not work especially well in understanding how African-American voters locate themselves politically. The author recognizes both that an over-time measure is important (the frequently used Leadership Conference on Civil Rights’ annual scores are not comparable over time), and that a uni-dimensional left-right continuum does not capture the especially strong support blacks have for civil rights policy, and their more conservative positions in other policy areas. There are certainly limitations to the findings in Congress in Black and White. The analysis and language is at times perilously complex, risking the breadth of the book’s appeal. In addition, Grose concludes that substantive representation available for black citizens includes constituency service and pork (measured by projects in black districts and grants to historically black colleges and universities), but not the legislative policy generated through roll calls. Grose calls this the “Hollow Hope” (54), based on Gerald Rosenberg’s earlier work on the impact of civil rights in the courts, but that lack of access remains a fundamental and significant weakness of American democracy. These concerns about Grose’s work are not insignificant, but this is not the criticism that the reader might think this implies. Rather the book’s limitations have more to do with the deeply complicated aspects of the American polity within which these issues of race and representation were created and within which they still reside. This is an important book, and it will be widely read and recognized.