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.
1) The first is positional, the relationship between
the ideological position of the government and
the rest of the parties in parliament.
2) 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.
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
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
Minimum winning coalition of
A, B and C
W(SQ)
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.
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:
1. Governments (whether minority or not) posess
agenda setting powers.
2. In particular, minority governments posess not
only institutional advantages over their
respective parliaments but also have positional
advantages of agenda setting
Positional Advantages:
a memory’s refreshment
Z
If the agenda setter was more centrally located as
regards the other veto players, it could choose best
alternatives (and sometimes even its idela point) as Z,
that is insed the winset of A and B
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.
A, C, D is a parliamentary majority that can defeat G
Also B, C, D is a parliamentary majority that can defeat G
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.
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.
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.
Institutional Means Of Government
Agenda Control
1. the rules to determine the agenda of the plenary
2. the degree of restrictions imposed on the legislature to
propose money bills
3. the timing of committee versus plenary involvement in the
decision-making process
4. the power of committees to rewrite government bills
5. the rules governing the timetable of committee proceedings
6. the rules curtailing the debate before the final vote in the
plenary
7. the maximum lifespan of a bill pending approval
http://www.uni-potsdam.de/u/ls_vergleich/Publikationen/PMR.htm
Chap 7, p.223-246
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.
• 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
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
Heteroskedasticity
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.
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)
Operationalization of Governments
• Three different sources to calculate (after
standardization) government range and
alternation (Warwick, Castles-Mair, LaverHunt)



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).
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