Royce Carroll

Shadowing Ministers Monitoring Partners in Coalition Governments

In this article the authors study delegation problems within multiparty coalition governments. They argue that coalition parties can use the committee system to “shadow” the ministers of their partners; that is, they can appoint committee chairs from other governing parties, who will then be well placed to monitor and/or check the actions of the corresponding ministers. The authors analyze which ministers should be shadowed if governing parties seek to minimize the aggregate policy losses they suffer as the result of ministers pursuing their own parties’ interests rather than the coalition’s. Based on data from 19 mostly European parliamentary democracies, the authors find that the greater the policy disagreement between a minister’s party and its partners, the more likely the minister is to be shadowed.

How parties create electoral democracy, chapter 2

Parties neither cease to exist nor cease to compete for office when the general election is over. Instead, a new round of competition begins, with legislators as voters and party leaders as candidates. The offices at stake are what we call �mega-seats.� We consider the selection of three different types of mega-seats�cabinet portfolios, seats on directing boards, and permanent committee chairs�in 57 democratic assemblies. If winning parties select the rules by which mega-seats are chosen and those rules affect which parties can attain mega-seats (one important payoff of �winning�), then parties and rules should coevolve in the long run. We find two main patterns relating to legislative party systems and a countrys length of experience with democratic governance.

The Structure of Utility in Spatial Models of Voting

Empirical models of spatial voting allow legislators’ locations in a policy or ideological space to be inferred from their roll-call votes. These are typically random utility models where the features of the utility functions other than the ideal points are assumed rather than estimated. In this article, we first consider a model in which legislators’ utility functions are allowed to be a mixture of the two most commonly assumed utility functions: the quadratic function and the Gaussian function assumed by NOMINATE. Across many roll-call data sets, we find that legislators’ utility functions are estimated to be very nearly Gaussian. We then relax the usual assumption that each legislator is equally sensitive to policy change and find that extreme legislators are generally more sensitive to policy change than their more centrally located counterparts. This result suggests that extremists are more ideologically rigid while moderates are more likely to consider influences that arise outside liberal-conservative conflict.

Judicial Behavior on the Chilean Constitutional Tribunal

Research on judicial independence suggests that high courts can be designed to serve as external checks on political actors. However, independence from political influence does not necessarily imply incentives to use these powers. Chiles Constitutional Tribunal, while possessing significant powers, has been characterized as generally deferential to political actors. Using rulings from the Tribunal from 1990–2010, we examine whether reforms that increased the number of judges appointed by politicians and expanded the Tribunals jurisdiction have contributed to a more assertive use of judicial review power. We find that the reforms have not produced an increased tendency to rule laws unconstitutional under abstract review. However, the new appointment structure has nevertheless increased the types of judges relatively more likely to assert this power. Specifically, after the reforms, judges appointed by elected actors were individually more likely to find laws unconstitutional than those appointed by the Supreme Court, especially on cases of concrete review of enacted laws. We also find that cases of abstract review brought by legislators have been especially associated with both unconstitutional rulings and individual judicial votes for unconstitutionality.

Ideological Voting on Chile's Constitutional Tribunal: Dissent Coalitions in the Adjudication of Rights

In this article, we examine the relationship between judicial behavior on the Chilean Constitutional Tribunal and the political background of its judges since the constitutional reforms of 2005. We first examine judges’ positions on rulings and find that some distinction has emerged among judges with different political backgrounds and between partisan members and nonpartisans. Notably, these distinctions vary across subject matter and case type. Second, we examine the judges’ behavior in nonunanimous cases using a multidimensional scaling analysis and find that the pattern of dissent coalitions is consistent with a general separation between the judges with center-left and right backgrounds. Finally, we examine several cases to illustrate the patterns on the Tribunal in this period. We conclude that some ideological differences on the Tribunal have emerged while a broadly “political” pattern of judicial dissents has so far not occurred.

Party Institutionalization and Legislative Organization: The Evolution of Agenda Power in the Polish Parliament

This paper examines conditions under which parties in parliamentary government establish dominance over the legislative process. We focus on two aspects of this dominance: negative agenda control and legislative success. We argue that the logic of organizing a legislature for majority control is conditional on features of institutionalized parties. To examine this question, we examine the evolution of the Polish Sejm, a case that emerged from a transition to democracy with a weak and fragile party system yet with strong formal legislative institutions that give influence to individual MPs and opposition parties. Using roll call votes and bills submitted during four terms of the Polish Sejm (1997-2011) in conjunction with interviews with MPs, we examine how changes in the party system have influenced the government’s use of legislative institutions to establish majoritarian control over the legislature. We argue that, in contrast to governments formed by the transitional parties that ultimately collapsed, governments led by more institutionalized parties were able to effectively delegate power to the their leadership to pursue collective party goals and to reduce the opposition’s legislative influence. With better-organized, more programmatic and more stable parties, governments can establish increasingly strong control over legislative institutions— even during periods of cabinet crisis.

Measuring and Comparing Party Ideology and Heterogeneity

Estimates of party ideological positions in Western Democracies yield useful party-level information, but generally lack the ability to provide an insight into the intraparty politics of party elites. In this article, we generate comparable measures of latent individual policy positions from elite survey data that enable analysis of elite-level party ideology and heterogeneity. This approach has some advantages over both expert surveys and approaches based on behavioral data, such as roll-call voting, and is directly relevant to the study of party cohesion. We generate a measure of elite positions for several mostly European countries using a common space scaling approach and demonstrate its validity as a measure of party ideology. We then apply these data to examine sources of party elite heterogeneity, focusing on the role of intraparty competition in electoral systems, nomination rules, and party goals. We find that policy-seeking parties and centralized party nomination rules are associated with less party heterogeneity. While intraparty competition has no effect, such contexts appear to condition the effect of district magnitude.