Governments and Parliaments

1
Governments and Parliaments

• Two important variables one has to examine in
  order to understand the power of the government
  as an agenda setter in parliamentary systems.
• The first is positional, the relationship between
  the ideological position of the government and
  the rest of the parties in parliament.
• The second is the institutional provisions
  enabling the government to introduce its
  legislative proposals and have them voted on the
  floor of the parliament -the rules of agenda
  setting.

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Positional advantages

• The government controls the agenda for
  non-financial legislation because it can
  associate a vote on a bill with the question of
  confidence. The parliament is forced to accept
  the government proposal or to replace the
  government.
• Every government as long as it is in power is
  able to impose its will on parliament, it does
  not matter the kind of parliamentary government,
  whether or not it controls a majority of
  legislative votes. In more than 50 percent of all
  countries, governments introduce more than 90
  percent of the bills. Moreover, the probability
  of success of these bills is very high over 60
  percent of bills pass with probability greater
  than .9 and over 85 percent of bills pass with
  probability greater than .8.
• Even if governments control the agenda, it may be
  that parliaments introduce significant
  constraints to their choices. Parliaments can
  amend government proposals so that the final
  outcome bears little resemblance to the original
  bill. Most of the time, neither of these
  scenarios is the case. Problems between
  government and parliament arise only when the
  government has a different political composition
  from a majority in parliament but such
  differences are either non-existent, or, if they
  do exist, the government is able to prevail
  because of positional or institutional weapons at
  its disposal
• Three possible configurations of the relationship
  between government and parliament minimum
  winning coalition , oversized government and
  minority government

3
Minimum winning coalition

• The most frequent (if we include single party
  governments in two party systems). The government
  coincides with the majority in parliament no
  disagreement between the two on important issues.
  The minimum winning coalition represented in
  government restricts the winset of the status quo
  from the whole shaded area of the figure to the
  area that makes the coalition partners better off
  than the status quo.
• If the government parties are weak and include
  members with serious disagreements over a bill ?,
  only a marginal possibility because votes are
  public and party leaders possess serious coercive
  mechanisms that pre-empt public dissent

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Minimum winning coalition of A, B and C W(SQ)
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Oversized coalitions

• Oversized majority governments are quite common
  in Western Europe. In such cases, some of the
  coalition partners can be disregarded and
  policies will still be passed by a majority in
  parliament. Should these parties be counted as
  veto players, or should they be ignored?
• Ignoring coalition partners, while possible from
  a numerical point of view, imposes political
  costs if the disagreement is serious the small
  partner can resign and the government formation
  process must begin over again.
• Simple arithmetic (Strom argument) disregards the
  fact that there are political factors that
  necessitate oversized coalitions. For the
  coalition to remain intact the will of the
  different partners must be respected a departure
  from the status quo must usually be approved by
  the government before it is introduced to
  parliament, and, at that stage, the participants
  in a government coalition are veto players.

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Minority governments.

• These governments are even more frequent than
  oversized coalitions. When there are minority
  governments there is a difference between a
  governmental and a legislative majority. However
  according to Tsebelis this difference has no
  major empirical significance
• Governments (whether minority or not) posess
  agenda setting powers.
• In particular, minority governments posess not
  only institutional advantages over their
  respective parliaments but also have positional
  advantages of agenda setting

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Positional Advantages a memorys refreshment
8
Consider a five-party parliament in a two
dimensional space (A,B,C,D,G) and a minority
government G quite centrally located. (E is the
multidimensional median) Can government
preferences (G) have parliamentary approval ?
Any proposal presented on the parliament floor
will either be preferred by a majority over G, or
defeated by G.
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A, C, D is a parliamentary majority that can
defeat G
10
Also B, C, D is a parliamentary majority that can
defeat G
11
The set of points that defeat G are located
within the lenses GG and GG. If the parliament
is interested in any other outcome and the
Government proposes its own ideal point, a
majority of MPs will side with the Government.
12
The situation would be tolerable for the
government if SQ were moved in the area of these
lenses that is close to G, but the hatched areas
called X are a serious defeat for the government.
13
However imagine that the SQ is in the the hatched
areas. The government G can propose something
(SQ1) better just simmetrically located. If the
government takes advantage of a closed rule SQ1
will be the final outcome.
14
Institutional Means Of Government Agenda Control

• the rules to determine the agenda of the plenary
• the degree of restrictions imposed on the
  legislature to propose money bills
• the timing of committee versus plenary
  involvement in the decision-making process
• the power of committees to rewrite government
  bills
• the rules governing the timetable of committee
  proceedings
• the rules curtailing the debate before the final
  vote in the plenary
• the maximum lifespan of a bill pending approval
• http//www.uni-potsdam.de/u/ls_vergleich/Publikati
  onen/PMR.htm
• Chap 7, p.223-246

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Legislation

• General hypothesis policy stability (defined as
  the impossibility of significant change of the
  status quo) will be the result of many veto
  players, particularly if they have significant
  ideological differences among them.
• How to test this hypothesis ? Using a dataset of
  significant laws on issues of working time and
  working conditions.
• The two issues are highly correlated with the
  Left-Right dimension that predominates party
  systems across Europe.
• One dimension test of a multidimensional model.

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• All parties are located along the same dimension
  once you identify the two most extreme parties of
  a coalition, all the others are absorbed since
  they are located inside the core of the most
  extreme ones. Italian First Republic Example

PSI
PSDI
DC
PRI
PLI
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Specific hypotheses to test

• The number of significant laws is a declining
  function of the coalition range, namely the
  ideological distance of the two most extreme
  parties in a government coalition.
  (heteroskedastic relationship)
• The number of significant laws will be an
  increasing function of the distance between the
  current government and the previous one the
  alternation
• The number of significant laws will be an
  increasing function of the government duration

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Heteroskedasticity
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Operationalization of significant laws in the
selected policy area

• Laws (1981-1991) that were in the intersection of
  both sources (NATLEX from ILO and Encyclopedia of
  Labor Law) are considered significant, while
  laws existing only in the NATLEX database were
  considered non-significant.

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Operationalization of Governments

• the variable that matters for the veto players
  theory is the partisan composition of government.
  Two successive governments with identical
  composition should be counted as a single
  government even if they are separated by an
  election, which changes the size of the different
  parties in parliament.
• A dataset of merged governments, in which
  successive governments with the same composition
  were considered a single government regardless of
  whether they were separated by a resignation
  and/or an election. Obviously, merging affects
  the values of duration and the number of laws
  produced by a government.
• Three different sources to calculate (after
  standardization) government range and alternation
  (Warwick, Castles-Mair, Laver-Hunt)

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Operationalization of Governments

• Three different sources to calculate (after
  standardization) government range and alternation
  (Warwick, Castles-Mair, Laver-Hunt)

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Veto Players and incremental legislation

• Tsebelis Hypothesis Ceteris paribus,
  significant and nonsignificant laws should vary
  inversely, because of time constraints. The
  ceteris paribus clause assumes that the
  parliament has limited time and uses it to pass
  legislation (either significant or trivial).
• Doering Hypothesis government control of the
  agenda increases the number of important bills
  and reduces legislative inflation (few small
  bills).

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1. The correlation between all laws and significant
   laws is negative in two of the three versions of
   the table, most notably the one that excludes
   Sweden.
2. Veto players correlated positively with the
   number of all laws, and negatively with the
   number of significant laws
3. Agenda control by the government is negatively
   correlated with legislative inflation.
4. The number of veto players is highly correlated
   with agenda control