Majority Coalition Research Articles

Tension in the Unitary Executive: How Taft Constructed the Epochal Opinion of Myers v. United States

This article is excerpted from the forthcoming Volume X of the Oliver Wendell Holmes Devise History of the Supreme Court of the United States, which covers the period 1921-1930 when William Howard Taft was Chief Justice. The article will be published in an upcoming issue of the Journal of Supreme Court History. The article offers for the first time a detailed account of the process by which William Howard Taft authored his pathbreaking opinion in Myers v. United States, the first Supreme Court decision ever to hold a statute of Congress unconstitutional because incompatible with Article II prerogatives of the President. The decision was six to three, featuring strong dissents by Brandeis, McReynolds, and Holmes. Using archival sources, the article discusses competing views within Taft’s majority coalition of six, as well as Taft’s own independent views about the question of the presidential power of removal. Analyzing the reasoning of Myers in detail, the article argues that the decision is neither an example of originalism, as Justice Antonin Scalia has claimed, nor is it compatible with contemporary understandings of the “unitary” executive.

Formation of Parties and Coalitions in Multiple Referendums

We consider a thought experiment in which voters could submit binary preferences regarding each of a pre-determined list of independent relevant issues, so that majorities could be tallied per issue. It might be thought that if such voting became technically feasible and widespread, parties and coalitions could be circumvented altogether and would become irrelevant. In this paper, we show, however, why and how voters would spontaneously self-organize into parties, and parties would self-organize into coalitions, prior to elections. We will see that such coordination is possible, even assuming very limited capabilities of communication and coordination. Using both analytical and empirical methods, we show that the average voter in a majority coalition would gain more than if no parties were formed, but the average voter overall (in or out of the coalition) would be worse off. Furthermore, the extent of these gains and losses is inversely proportional to the degree to which voters line along a unidimensional left–right axis.

Gender Diversity, Women’s Leadership, and Consensus in State Supreme Courts

ABSTRACT In this article, we argue that the leadership of women as chief justice or the majority opinion author, as well as an increased presence of women on the panel, should increase the likelihood of unanimous decisions and the size of majority coalitions in state supreme courts. Using an original dataset of cases in three policy areas from all state supreme courts from 1990–2015, we uncover some surprising results. In some issue areas, majority coalitions are larger when a woman serves as the majority opinion author, though we see smaller coalitions when more women are on the court and a man is assigned to write the majority opinion. Taken together, our results suggest that the role of gender diversity and women’s leadership in the opinion-writing process may be more complex than previously understood.

Majority rule dynamics between a double coalition and a third opinion: coalition profit models and majority coalition ties

This article explores the opinion dynamics of a double coalition opinion against a third opinion under majority rule updates on odd fixed size connected groups. For this purpose, coalition benefit criteria and three opinion formation models which extend the 2-state majority rule model on lattices are introduced. The proposed models focus on the coalition profit of its constituent coalition opinions and cover the possible final scenarios from coalition alliance perspective: either minor opinion or major opinion is favored, or dynamics do not favor to any coalition opinion. Opinion exchanges take place on a torus embedded lattice network of a 3-state system having in consideration tie configurations and two rules to break them: either by random choice or leaving ties unaltered. Models were analyzed in the statistical mechanics spirit through Monte Carlo simulations without node replacement. Estimations for coalition benefits, the growth of coalition ties, and consensus probabilities are reported. The loss of coalition strengths due to coalition ties and its indecision is indicated. In particular, the logistic decay of consensus probability is due to the logistic adaptive growth of coalition ties. Scaling behaviors for consensus time and coalition ties in terms of network size are suggested. The results of numerical simulations are discussed in the context of social influence and social dynamics.

Slovakia’s Oversized Cabinet after the 2020 Parliamentary Elections: Barrier against Extremism Vol. II, or Protection of Its Own Stability?

This article deals with one of the major political consequences of parliamentary elections in every parliamentary regime – the process of government formation. It focuses on the formation of the coalition government following the 2020 parliamentary elections in Slovakia, in the context of both pre-election developments as well as the main challenges and appeals of contemporary politics in general – the rise of far-right political parties. Its aim is to identify the coalition strategies presented before the elections of political parties and movements that had a theoretical chance of being elected to Parliament. Special emphasis is placed on the definition by the other political parties and movements of the long-time ruling party Smer and the far-right party Our Slovakia. The analysis continues with the post-election government formation process, the classification of the established coalition, including the allocation of cabinet portfolios, assessment of the similarities and differences of coalition parties, and factors that could possibly cause both instability as well as stability. It concludes that the joint definition by the new ruling parties and movements of Smer and Our Slovakia will, at least for some time, serve as a unifying factor keeping the coalition together. However, the coalition’s stability will be under almost constant pressure coming from both relations between coalition parties and the possibility of internal conflicts within the coalition parties and movements. The article argues that the establishment of the surplus majority coalition might – besides the official justification for it – serve as a protection against government destabilization.

The Sources and Consequences of Political Rhetoric

AbstractHow do political actors use rhetoric after an initial policy battle? We explore factors that lead Supreme Court justices to integrate disagreeable rhetoric into opinions. Although disagreeable language has negative consequences, we posit that justices pay this cost for issues with high personal significance. At the same time, we argue that integrating disagreeable rhetoric has a deleterious effect on the institution by reducing majority coalition size. Examining opinions from 1946 to 2011 using text-based measures of disagreeable rhetoric, we model the language of opinion writing as well as explore the consequences for coalition size. Our findings suggest serious implications for democratic institutions and political rhetoric.

The Protagonism of the USSR and Socialist States in the Revision of International Humanitarian Law

Abstract The USSR and Socialist states played a crucial and still largely underappreciated role in the re-negotiation of international humanitarian law (IHL) in 1949 and 1977. Drawing on new multi-archival research, I demonstrate that the support of the Soviet Union and Socialist Bloc states was essential to the negotiation of key legal achievements with regard to non-traditional conflict forms and actors, including rules on internal conflicts, national liberation war, and irregular fighters. They exerted influence chiefly through concerted action to create or side with majority coalitions alongside neutral Western or Third World countries, forcing their principal Western foes to accept rules they found undesirable. Yet Soviet-Western interactions in the re-making of IHL were not simply confrontational. In the 1970s, as Cold War hostilities cooled, East and West engaged in partial backdoor cooperativeness, leading to critical features of the Additional Protocols I and II, including rules for the protection of civilians and IHL oversight.

Bargaining and Strategic Voting on Appellate Courts

We explore the properties of voting rules and procedures employed by appellate courts in the US. Our model features: (1) a two-stage decision-making process (first over case disposition, then over majority opinion content), (2) dispositional consistency (the new rule must yield the Court's indicated case disposition when applied to the instant case), (3) restricted bargaining entree (only members of the winning dispositional coalition bargain over policy), (4) competitive offers (potentially many competitive majority opinions), and (5) absolute majority in joins (a majority of the court must endorse the rule in the majority opinion if it is to have precedential power). We show that the median judge is pivotal over case dispositions, although she (and others) may not vote sincerely. Strategic voting becomes more likely as the location of the case becomes more extreme, resulting in majority coalitions that give the appearance of less polarization on the court, than is truly the case. The equilibrium policy depends on the composition of the dispositional majority, and generically does not coincide with the ideal policy of the median judge either in the dispositional majority or the bench as a whole. Rather, opinions are drawn toward a weighted center of the dispositional majority but often reflect the preferences of the opinion author.

Crony Capitalism as An Electoral Outcome

When property rights are poorly secured, crony relations i.e. the tight connection between the owners of major firms and the government are the primary informal mechanism securing the property. However, this institutional framework creates high entry barriers on markets. We propose a theory that explains why in a democracy the majority of voters may prefer this type of institutions. This paper develops a simple voting model with heterogeneous agents, which differ in their skills and wealth endowment. We show that if the policy space is two-dimensional, the wealthy elite and low-skilled workers may form a majority coalition, supporting the regime with high-entry barriers. In this case, the wealthy elite agrees on a higher level of redistribution, preferred by the least skilled agents. We compare the possibility of this outcome for different voting rules, and prove that the electoral support of crony capitalism is more likely for countries with a low level of human capital and high income and skill inequality. The model is also able to explain different effects of democratization process on the institutional structure of the society.

THE FAILURE TO SIGN THE UKRAINE-EU ASSOCIATION AGREEMENT (OCTOBER-NOVEMBER 2013)

The failure to sign the Association Agreement with the EU in autumn 2013 has been investigated. The role of the Russian factor, which became decisive in the foreign policy reversal of the Yanukovych regime, has been revealed. The importance of Viktor Yanukovych’s meeting with Russian President Vladimir Putin on October 27, 2013, in the dramatic change of Ukraine’s international vector has been emphasized. On the basis of diplomats’ memoirs, the assumption about intimidation of the Ukrainian President by the Russian side has been substantiated. The timeline of the preparation of the 2013 Vilnius Summit, the position of EU structures and the attempts of the fourth President of Ukraine to win time to trade with the Russians have been reproduced. The thesis about the Donetsk clan’s attempts to prepare public opinion for a 180 degree turn in late October - early November 2013 has been presented. For this purpose, demonstration meetings were organized with representatives of Ukrainian business and trade unions, who called for revision of plans for European integration on their own initiative. The main role in manipulating public opinion rested on the government of Mykola Azarov and the Verkhovna Rada, which had a majority coalition led by the Party of Regions. Instead, Viktor Yanukovych continued his European integration rhetoric and reiterated to Western partners his own willingness to sign the Association Agreement between Ukraine and the EU. On November 21, the real position of the ruling elite was made available to the Cabinet of Ministers of Ukraine. According to it, the process of preparation for the signing of the Association Agreement was suspended, the proposal was made for the trilateral Ukraine-EU-Russia negotiations, and the ministries were tasked with developing measures to maintain economic ties with the CIS countries. The decision was rejected by European partners and led to Yanukovych’s attempts to find other ways to thwart the signing of the Agreement. It has been proved that this role was played by Yanukovych’s requirements for financial assistance from the EU amounting to about 160 billion euros, which aimed to prevent the signing of the Association Agreement. Key words: Viktor Yanukovych, association of Ukraine with the EU, эYulia Tymoshenko, European integration, Pat Cox, Alexander Kwasniewski, Vladimir Putin.

Timor-Leste

Timor-Leste Michael Leach (bio) From 25 January, when the president announced an early election for 12 May, it was clear that 2018 would prove an eventful political year in Timor-Leste. The May election followed a nine-month fretilin-led minority government, which proved unable to steer its program and budget through Parliament because the opposition parties formed a majority bloc a month after the government was installed (fretilin is the acronym for one of Timor-Leste’s major political parties, the Revolutionary Front for an Independent East Timor). The election brought the Xanana Gusmão–led Alliance for Change and Progress (amp) coalition back into office. Having returned to power, the new government soon found itself mired in a standoff over ministerial appointments with the president, fretilin’s Francisco Guterres, in the first genuine experience of cohabitation under Timor-Leste’s semi-presidential system. The year also saw a historic agreement between Timor-Leste and Australia that fixed maritime boundaries at the median line in the Timor Sea (Leach 2018), ending a long-running dispute between the two nations. The year was capped off by the government outlining its bold vision for resource sovereignty, and its plan to purchase a majority share in the Greater Sunrise joint venture, to advance its ambitious goal of downstream processing oil and gas on the East Timorese south coast. The July 2017 election saw the opposition fretilin party emerge narrowly ahead of the National Congress for Timorese Reconstruction (cnrt) in terms of seats but unable to establish the alliances necessary to form a majority. With no alternative majority coalition then being proposed, in September President Guterres appointed the first minority government in Timor-Leste’s short constitutional history: a thirty-seat minority coalition with the Democratic Party. But events moved rapidly, and a political standoff emerged in October when three opposition parties—the cnrt, the Popular Liberation Party (plp), and Enrich the National Unity of the Sons of Timor (khunto), together controlling thirty-five of Parliament’s sixty-five seats—rejected the government’s program. Having failed to pass a budget rectification measure needed to fund new programs, the state reverted to a duo-decimal system based on a monthly allocation of one-twelfth of the previous year’s budget. The extended use of this reserve budget system lasted until a new budget was passed in September 2018, and it depressed the national economy, which remains heavily reliant [End Page 563] on government-led expenditures. Rather than installing the opposition amp coalition as the government, President Guterres instead announced a new election, with the fretilin– Democratic Party executive acting as a caretaker government in the meantime. Meanwhile, in the realm of international relations, maritime boundary negotiations with Australia continued under the aegis of a United Nations Convention on the Law of the Sea (unclos) compulsory conciliation process, which was triggered by Timor-Leste. Following twelve months of negotiations that saw “confidence-building measures” enacted—including the termination of the Certain Maritime Arrangements in the Timor Sea treaty, which purported to delay maritime boundary determination for fifty years, and Timor-Leste’s cessation of a separate espionage case against Australia—Timor-Leste and Australia jointly declared that they had reached an agreement on “central aspects” of a maritime-boundary determination in late 2017 (Permanent Court of Arbitration 2017). Once ratified by both parties, the agreement, which was finally revealed on 6 March 2018 (Permanent Court of Arbitration 2018), will create permanent maritime boundaries and revised resource-sharing arrangements in the yet-to-be-developed Greater Sunrise oil and gas field. Timor-Leste secured a median-line boundary in the Timor Gap, creating a permanent maritime boundary for the first time. The median-line boundary will place 100 percent of the existing Joint Petroleum Development Area in Timor-Leste’s waters, where current treaties divided the revenue 90 to 10 in its favor. As these fields are nearing the end of their life, far more financially significant is the renegotiated revenue split over the as-yet-untapped Greater Sunrise field, worth in excess of us$40 billion, which straddles the eastern lateral (or side) boundary of the Joint Petroleum Development Area. The renegotiated agreement...

The impact of majority coalitions on local government spending, service delivery, and corruption in Indonesia

This study examines the impact of majority coalitions on local government spending, service delivery, and corruption in Indonesia. The investigation finds that majority coalitions, i.e. those coalitions for which participating political parties control greater than half of council seats, cause a shift in local government spending towards health sector activities and induce improvements in citizen health service access—but only for a year or two, after which the positive effects disappear. The study shows that budget fraud starts to become problematic in the last two years of the coalition's life. Majority coalition support for the local health spending and service agenda dissipates quickly as attention turns to corrupting the budget, via increased infrastructure outlays and associated rent-seeking. We hypothesize that budget fraud serves, in part, to finance subsequent rounds of local parliamentary and executive elections.

Equal Performance of Minority and Majority Coalitions? Pledge Fulfilment in the German State of NRW

This study examines how a government’s majority status affects coalition governance and performance. Two steps are investigated: the inclusion of government parties’ electoral pledges into the coalition agreement, and the ability to translate pledges into legislative outputs. The main results of a comparative analysis of 183 pledges of a minority (without a formal support partner) and majority coalition in the German State North Rhine-Westphalia indicate that government parties with minority status include fewer pledges in the coalition agreement. But this does not mean that they also perform badly at pledge fulfilment. In fact, they show an equivalent performance in fulfilling election pledges, at least partially, when compared to majority government parties. However, there is tentative evidence that the prime minister’s party shows a lower quality of pledge fulfilment, as measured by a higher share of partially enacted pledges.

Kommunalt koalitionsbyggande i ett nytt parlamentariskt landskap

Coalition formation in a new municipal parliamentary landscape. Pragmatism in policy-related windows of opportunitiesCoalition building in Swedish municipalities has traditionally been dominated by two political blocks at the opposite sides of the ideological left–right scale (Bäck 2003; Wångmar 2006). The success of the Sweden Democrats in the last elections have challenged that pattern. Statistics on coalition formation since the 2014 election indicate that the traditional policy scale no longer dominates local government. Coalitions of parties closely situated next to each other on the left–right scale are not as common as before. Interviews with 19 leading politicians in five Swedish municipalities that formed majority coalitions, including parties on the left as well as the right block, indicate that neither the traditional left–right scale nor the GAL–TAN dimension played a decisive role in these coalition formation processes. Instead, the ability of political parties to cooperate within the coalitions and building on personal chemistry, was considered the most important factor in the coalition building process on the municipal level.

Inequality and redistribution behavior in a give-or-take game

Political polarization and extremism are widely thought to be driven by the surge in economic inequality in many countries around the world. Understanding why inequality persists depends on knowing the causal effect of inequality on individual behavior. We study how inequality affects redistribution behavior in a randomized "give-or-take" experiment that created equality, advantageous inequality, or disadvantageous inequality between two individuals before offering one of them the opportunity to either take from or give to the other. We estimate the causal effect of inequality in representative samples of German and American citizens (n = 4,966) and establish two main findings. First, individuals imperfectly equalize payoffs: On average, respondents transfer 12% of the available endowments to realize more equal wealth distributions. This means that respondents tolerate a considerable degree of inequality even in a setting in which there are no costs to redistribution. Second, redistribution behavior in response to disadvantageous and advantageous inequality is largely asymmetric: Individuals who take from those who are richer do not also tend to give to those who are poorer, and individuals who give to those who are poorer do not tend to take from those who are richer. These behavioral redistribution types correlate in meaningful ways with support for heavy taxes on the rich and the provision of welfare benefits for the poor. Consequently, it seems difficult to construct a majority coalition willing to back the type of government interventions needed to counter rising inequality.

Stable coalition structures in symmetric majority games: a coincidence between myopia and farsightedness

The objective of this paper is to study stable coalition structures in symmetric majority games. We assume that players deviate from a coalition structure to another to maximize their power given by the Owen power index. We introduce three myopic core concepts and one farsighted stability concept, the farsighted vNM stable set. Our main result is that the pessimistic core, the largest myopic core, coincides with some farsighted vNM stable set for any number of players. Moreover, we show that a coalition structure belongs to the pessimistic core and the farsighted vNM stable set if and only if it contains an exact majority coalition.

Chamber of opportunities: Legislative politics and coalition security policy

This article adopts a ‘party-political’ approach to studying legislative influence on security policy-making. It argues that legislative logrolling constitutes a key mechanism for the government to secure votes in parliament while facilitating the opposition to advance its own interests, especially when the government requires parliament’s consent for security policy. The article investigates legislative logrolling in the context of weak executives, specifically looking at minority coalitions and majority coalitions with ideological and policy divergences. Logrolling is critical for these types of governments, as their structural and situational weaknesses force them to cooperate with opposition parties to maintain parliamentary support. Using the Danish and Dutch decisions to participate in the 2003 Iraq War, and Israel’s 2005 decision to unilaterally withdraw from Gaza, this article elucidates the ways in which legislative logrolling between the governing and opposition parties facilitates security policy-making in parliament.

Reciprocal climate negotiators

Do reciprocal preferences matter for participation in international environmental agreements? Combining the two canonical models of Barrett (2003) and Rabin (1993), I find that 1) the empty coalition is always stable; 2) the grand coalition is stable if reciprocity preferences are sufficiently strong; 3) if a minority of countries are not reciprocal, a majority coalition can still be stable, if reciprocity is sufficiently strong and widespread; and 4) there is also a stable minority coalition, if costs are moderate and the number of countries is not too small. The latter coalition is weakly larger than the maximum stable coalition with standard preferences, but barely improves on welfare, and is characterized by negative sentiments. The analysis illustrates that although models of reciprocity tend to be complex, the context of a specific applied game may reduce this complexity.

How is Government Stability Affected by the State of the Economy? Payoff Structures, Government Type and Economic State

To what extent are incumbent governments affected by the state of the economy when it comes to premature dissolution? This article investigates this research question using a data set on parties and governments for 18 West European countries for the period 1945–2013. In addition to investigating the general effect of the state of the economy on government termination, we hypothesize that macroeconomic conditions affect cabinet termination in different ways depending on the type of government that is in power. Using Cox proportional hazards models to estimate how different government types are impacted by the same changes in the economy, our results indicate that economic changes do matter, but that they mainly affect coalition governments. Our results also indicate that there is a difference between minority and majority governments when it comes to the type of termination. Minority coalition governments resolve to early elections, not replacements, presumably because a minority government does not survive defection. Majority coalition governments, in contrast, show sensitivity towards both types of terminations.

Existence of Dominant Players and their Role in the Formation of a Cabinet Coalition

A party is dominant if there is a majority coalition to which that party belongs such that it affords this party more possibilities to form an alternative winning coalition than any of the other members of the coalition. I present empirical evidence showing that an allocation of seats in a parliament is biased toward the high frequency occurrence of a dominant party and the low frequency occurrence of a dictator. If a dominant party forms a cabinet coalition, and if that cabinet coalition has a majority in parliament, then the dominant party tends to form a coalition which it dominates.