The Potential Causes of Legislative Stability

Abstract

This chapter explores how previous theory has treated the issue of legislative chaos. After describing Arrow’s (1951, Social choice and individual values. Wiley)? findings that chaos is likely in almost all majority voting situations, I overview three approaches academics have proposed for “solving” legislative chaos. One approach, called preference-induced equilibriums (PIE), proposed constraining legislator preferences to a single dimension, thus creating an equilibrium at the preferences of the median legislator. Academics defended this assumption of unidimensional preferences because it seemed acceptable among legislators who have strong, unidimensionalizing, ideologies (Converse (1964) The nature of belief systems in mass publics. In: Ideology and discontent; Noel (2012) Political ideologies and political parties in America). Another approach, called structure-induced equilibriums (SIE), argued that even if legislators have multidimensional preferences, universal domain can be sacrificed through the use of legislative institutions in order to create stability (Shepsle and Weingast (1981) Pub Choice 37(3):503–519). Finally, the third approach to “solve” legislative chaos is to sacrifice the nondictatorship assumption and simply establish a dictatorship. This is not often proposed by political scientists, but it may be possible that a strong executive—that falls short of a dictator—can stabilize legislative behavior (Cox and Morgenstern (2001) Comp Pol 33(2):171–189). In the rest of Part 1, I explore if PIEs, SIEs, or dictatorships create stability in Paraguay.