Paul V. Warwick

Portfolio Salience and the Proportionality of Payoffs in Coalition Governments

A fundamental divide has emerged over how portfolio payoffs are distributed among parties in parliamentary coalitions. On one side lies very strong empirical evidence that the parties in a governing coalition tend to receive portfolios in one-to-one proportion to the amount of legislative support they contribute to the coalition, with perhaps some slight deviations from proportionality coming at the expense of larger parties that lead coalition negotiations. On the other side of the debate lies a stream of formal theories that suggest the opposite – that parties in charge of coalition negotiations ought to be able to take a disproportionately large share of portfolio benefits for themselves. In this article, we address this disjuncture by re-examining the empirical connection between legislative seats and portfolio payoffs with the aid of a new and more extensive dataset, a different method of analysis, and what we see as a more valid operationalization of the dependent variable. This operationalization involves the inclusion, for the first time, of evidence concerning the importance or salience of the portfolios each party receives, as opposed to just their quantity. The article concludes with an assessment of the implications of our findings for the debate over the rewards of coalition membership in parliamentary democracies.

Coalition Government Membership in West European Parliamentary Democracies

The results of a quantitative investigation into the factors affecting coalition government membership in West European parliamentary democracies are reported in this article. Using a new data set covering the post-war era to 1990, separate logistic regression analyses are performed to determine what influences the odds of becoming the government ‘formateur’ and the odds of becoming a coalition partner. In addition, Laver and Shepsles portfolio allocation theory is subjected to testing. Among the independent variables considered are a partys size, its previous experience in government, its willingness to trade off policy for office, and its ideological position in the parliamentary party system. The findings point to the important roles played by the formateurs preferences and by the need to build workable coalitions, given party-system constraints. They also suggest several criteria that ought to, but often do not, guide formal theory-building.

ECONOMIC TRENDS AND GOVERNMENT SURVIVAL IN WEST EUROPEAN PARLIAMENTARY DEMOCRACIES

In this study, I investigate the linkage between trends in key economic indicators (inflation, unemployment, and growth in gross domestic product) and government survival in 16 postwar European parliamentary democracies. The partial likelihood method, which allows for variation in indicator values over the lifetimes of individual governments, constitutes the basic analytic tool. The findings reveal overall causal roles for both inflation and unemployment, as well as important differences in these roles between socialist and bourgeois governments and between pre-oil crisis and post-oil crisis eras. Most significant, the introduction of these indicators to the analysis helps to resolve the debate between two rival explanations of governmental stability, the bargaining complexity hypothesis and the ideological diversity hypothesis, in favor of the latter.

Coalition Policy in Parliamentary Democracies Who Gets How Much and Why

This study investigates several hypotheses relating to the policy positions adopted by coalition governments in parliamentary democracies. Previous research, based on the comparative manifestos projects coding of party manifestos and coalition government declarations, has found that the linkage between the left-right positions of coalition governments and the positions of the parties that compose them is surprisingly weak. This investigation uses the same data to reveal a much closer correspondence between the two in West European systems. This linkage initially appeared to be weak because it is partially masked by additional influences on government policy emanating from the formateur party, the finance ministers party, the external support parties sustaining the government (if any), and the parliamentary center of gravity. In addition, government policy is affected by the position of the preceding government and shows a marked tendency to drift rightward with the passage of time since the last election.

Ideological Diversity and Government Survival in Western European Parliamentary Democracies

A major lacuna in the empirical investigation of government stability in Western European parliamentary regimes is the failure to test rigorously the hypothesis that the ideological diversity within governments influences their survival in office. This study attempts to remedy this deficiency by developing and testing measures of the concept based on a wide variety of sources, including expert scales of party positions, voter-based estimates of party ideologies, and assessments of party positions derived with the aid of the European Manifestos Projects coding of electoral platforms. The key findings are that not only is ideological diversity inversely related to government survival, even when other relevant factors are taken into account, but that this connection seriously challenges bargaining environment interpretations of stability advanced within the past 2 years.

Policy Distance and Parliamentary Government

The policy-distance assumption stipulates that a partys incentive to join a parliamentary coalition government decreases with the distance between its policies and those of the government. Based on this assumption, recent formal work has posited a connection between the size and relative ideological centrality of the formateur party and the formation of smaller, especially minority, governments. Under these models, policy distance affects government composition in two ways: by influencing how large the government will be, and by influencing which parties will participate in it. This paper tests for these effects at both the government and party levels, using data sets covering West European parliamentary democracies in the 1945-89 era and incorporating two different measures of ideological positions. The findings support both effects, and in addition, show that the emergence of external support parties is influenced by considerations of policy distance. Although the formal models are not wholly sustained, the evidence strongly indicates that policy distance is critical to parliamentary government.

Government Intentions and Citizen Preferences in Dynamic Perspective

The relationship between median citizen opinion on the left–right dimension, as measured in the Eurobarometer and European Electoral Studies series of surveys, and the left–right positions of governments in West European democracies is explored to gain a fuller understanding of how and to what extent median opinion may influence what governments subsequently set out to do. The analysis allows for the possibility that measurement may not be equivalent across countries and surveys, that the data may contain significant dynamic effects, and that different countries may exhibit different relationships between the two variables. The analyses show that changes in the citizen median generally produce larger changes in government position, the size depending mainly on the proportionality of the electoral system.

Voters, Parties, and Declared Government Policy

A perennial question for students of democracy is the extent to which government policies align with voter preferences. This is often studied by comparing median voter opinion on a left–right scale with the cabinet weighted mean, that is, the mean left–right position of cabinet parties, weighted by their legislative sizes. Government positions may also be estimated from their declarations, however. In a recent investigation, McDonald and Budge found that declared government policy better accords with the voter median than with the cabinet weighted mean, a finding they interpreted as consistent with their hypothesis that actual government policy tends to reflect a “median mandate.” This investigation retests the McDonald–Budge model using a time-series cross-section methodology and an expanded data set. It finds no support for a median mandate interpretation but strong evidence that declared government positions respond to the positions of cabinet parties and, where present, external support parties. It also reveals a tendency for declared positions to be shifted to the right of the cabinet mean, a tendency that increases with the length of time that has elapsed since the last election (particularly for left-wing governments). This evidence that the policies governments set out to implement are systematically “right shifted” bears major consequences for our understanding of representative democracy.

Measuring the Median: The Risks of Inferring Beliefs from Votes

A large number of studies of ideological congruence, and of the effect of public opinion on policy outcomes more generally, have relied on the Kim-Fording (KF) measure of median voter opinion. This measure has the great virtue of being readily calculable – no direct measurement of voter opinion is required – but it rests on assumptions concerning party locations and voter behaviour that are unquestionably incorrect, at least some of the time. This article explores the sensitivity of the KF measure to violations of its core assumptions through simulation experiments. It then uses public opinion data to assess the degree to which consequential levels of violation occur in actual democratic systems. The article concludes with a discussion of what the KF median really measures and where it can – and cannot – be safely used.

Getting the Assumptions Right: A Reply to Laver and Shepsle

For some time now, formal modelling has been touted by its supporters as a panacea for political science – or at least as a major step forward in the disciplines development. Certainly, it embodies a number of praiseworthy elements. Its insistence on starting with a parsimonious and precisely formulated set of assumptions cannot help but constrain slippery thinking, for example, and its rigorous working out of implications, while often demonstrating the obvious, occasionally leads to unanticipated and intriguing results. Moreover, the combination of precision and rigour holds forth the promise of generating relatively clear-cut tests of rival explanations, a major boon – if it proves true – in a discipline more inclined to abandon theories than to disconfirm them. How much better the analytical or formal orientation is, then, than the ‘funnel of causality’ approach of empiricists whose quest for the highest explained variance seldom produces more than a miscellaneous grab-bag of influences on the dependent phenomenon. Empirical work of that sort may have some limited utility in identifying possible causes, to be sure, but at some point the scholarly enterprise must move to the higher level of elaborating a clear logical structure among causal factors. Here, empirical success in accounting for observed phenomena cannot be the sole guide: the best theory is the one that provides the most accurate idea of what is actually going on in the real world, not the one with the best correlations.