Wolfgang C. Müller

Political parties in parliamentary democracies: Making delegation and accountability work

In modern democracies politicalparties exist because (1) they reduce transactioncosts in the electoral, parliamentary and governmentalarenas and (2) help overcome the dilemma of collectiveaction. In Western Europe political parties are the central mechanism to make the constitutionalchain of political delegation and accountability workin practice. Party representatives in public officeare ultimately the agents of the extra-parliamentaryparty organization. In order to contain agency lossparties rely on party-internal mechanisms and theinstitutionalisation of party rights in public rulesand, in contrast to US parties, they apply the fullrange of ex ante and ex post mechanisms.Generally, the role of party is weaker the furtherdown the chain of delegation.

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.

Meeting the Challenges of Representation and Accountability in Multi-party Governments

In systems of proportional parliamentarism political parties play a double role. On the one hand they make delegation and accountability work; on the other they add complexity to the delegation regime, as minority situations require inter-party cooperation. Because coalition government usually involves policy compromises, the question arises how the coalition parties can ensure that the ministers stick to the coalition deal. Employing the principal–agent framework, this paper shows that coalitions can use several control mechanisms to pursue this goal. The authors consider ex ante mechanisms such as policy agreements that set the agenda for future policy decisions and coalition screening of ministerial candidates. Next they discuss the effects of ex post mechanisms such as strong committee systems and institutional checks like ‘watchdog’ junior ministers. Employing a simple spatial model, they illustrate how these instruments work. Using control mechanisms is not costless, however, and actors may want to avoid these costs. The article specifies conditions that make the use of control mechanisms likely to occur.

Reshaping the state in Western Europe: The limits to retreat

Throughout Western Europe, it is alleged, ‘the state is in retreat’. This volume explores some of the pressures leading to state retreat programmes as well as the nature of those programmes. Focusing exclusively on the functional, rather than the territorial, level it reveals that the reshaping of the state in Western Europe involves different policies across Europe and conflicting tendencies in the impact of the various reform programmes. Whilst the state may be in retreat in some respects, its activity may be increasing in others. And nowhere, not even in Britain, has its key decision‐making role been seriously undermined.

Parliamentary Opposition in Post-Consociational Democracies: Austria, Belgium and the Netherlands

This paper derives various hypotheses about parliamentary opposition in Austria, Belgium and the Netherlands from consociational theory, with the common denominator that there was cooperation rather than competition among the main political parties. Although to varying degrees, and with significant exceptions, this expectation was largely confirmed. Since the 1960s, though, each of these countries has experienced some degree of de-pillarisation, which had the hypothesised effect of increased competition in the electoral and parliamentary arenas. However, at the same time the main parties lost some of their ideological distinctiveness, leading to a major change in the basic opposition patterns that could be characterised, with some exaggeration, as having evolved ‘from opposition without competition to competition without opposition’. In the 1960s Arend Lijphart predicted that this would lead to anti-system opposition from the radical Left. Contrary to that expectation, the three countries witnessed challenges from the populist Right, with important differences between Belgium on the one hand, and Austria and the Netherlands on the other, as to the reaction by the main parties to this new opposition.

Patronage by National Governments

Patronage, as understood in this chapter, is the use of public resources in a particularistic manner for political goals. While it is easy to give a general definition of patronage, it is much harder to identify it in practice. After all, technically, patronage is either an appointment (for example to a civil service position) or a policy decision (for example to give a contract or to pass a law). It is only the intention and effect which qualify some decisions as patronage. Thus patronage definitively belongs to the realm of covert politics. In this respect it is in sharp contrast with the other dimensions studied in this volume, ‘grand’ public policies and appointments.

The Life Cycle of Party Manifestos: The Austrian Case

Election manifestos are one of the most prominent sources of data for the study of party politics and government. Yet the processes of manifesto production, enactment, and public reception are not very well understood. This article attempts to narrow this knowledge gap by conducting a first investigation into the ‘life cycle’ of election manifestos from the drafting stage to their use in the campaign and post-election periods. Specifically, it investigates the Austrian case between 1945 and 2008 (with special emphasis on the 1990s and 2000s), employing a wealth of qualitative and quantitative data. While the research is thus mostly exploratory, it develops systematic expectations about variation between parties according to their ideology, organisation, government status, and characteristics of their electorates across the stages of the manifesto life cycle. Of those factors, organisational characteristics and status as government or opposition parties were found to be relevant.

Corporatism in Crisis: Stability and Change of Social Partnership in Austria

While recent developments in Western Europe provide numerous examples of the instability and decay of corporatist arrangements in the face of economic crisis, Austrian social partnership still exhibits remarkable stability. The article tries to explain this stability of corporatist politics in Austria. The Austrian case is also used to demonstrate some limitations of the academic literature on the breakdown of corporatism. However, stability in the Austrian case does not mean that nothing has changed. Changes have occurred within the existing institutional framework. Two main factors in the transformation of Austrian social partnership are pointed out, namely socio-cultural and political changes. Finally, some future perspectives of Austrian corporatism are outlined.

Reforming the Rules of the Parliamentary Game: Measuring and Explaining Changes in Parliamentary Rules in Austria, Germany, and Switzerland, 1945–2010

Questions of institutional change have recently received increased attention in comparative politics. Even though comparative legislative research has identified important effects of parliamentary rules on processes and outputs as well as large variation across countries, we know very little about changes in these rules. This article takes several steps towards mapping and explaining rule changes in European parliaments. Theoretically, it sketches a model explaining such changes based on the rational choice notion of institutions as endogenous equilibria. Methodologically, it proposes two complementary approaches to measure rule changes. In combination, these measures allow us to identify the content, relevance, and effects of changes in parliamentary rules. Empirically, the article provides the first systematic analysis of all changes in the parliamentary standing orders of Austria, Germany, and Switzerland since 1945. This analysis demonstrates that parliamentary rules are changed frequently and massively. It also identifies differences across countries and content areas that are largely in line with theoretical expectations.

Evil or the ‘Engine of Democracy’?Populism and Party Competition in Austria

The international attention received by Austria in recent years has mainly been due to the spectacular rise of the Freedom Party (FPO), which began in 1986, when Jorg Haider was elected party leader.1 A party which had virtually been written off in the early 1980s, it became the second strongest party in terms of votes in 1999 (having won 415 votes more than the People’s Party, OVP). In terms of seats won, it is now on equal terms with the OVP, and even ‘within striking distance’ of the Social Democrats (SPO) (Table 9.1).