Multiparty Governments Research Articles

Not always on an equal footing: power, partiality and the conditional effect of multiparty government on public spending

AbstractPublic spending arguably increases with the number of parties in government as each party seeks to secure benefits to its target groups. In this study, two factors that affect the budgetary consequences of multiparty government are identified. The first is the distribution ofa priorivoting power. An uneven distribution of voting power implies that all government parties are not expected to be equally successful in budgetary negotiations. The second is the degree of impartiality of the public sector. If the public sector is characterized by corruption and other forms of partiality, distributive issues can be expected to gain importance in representative politics. An analysis of data from 30 European countries suggests that changes in the number of government parties are associated with changes in public spending in cases where equally powerful parties are in government and the public sector is relatively partial.

Beyond committees: parliamentary oversight of coalition government in Britain

A legislature’s ability to engage in oversight of the executive is believed to derive largely from its committee system. For example, powerful parliamentary committees are considered a necessary condition for the legislature to help police policy compromises between parties in multiparty government. But can other parliamentary instruments perform this role? This article suggests parliamentary questions as an alternative parliamentary vehicle for coalition parties to monitor their partners. Questions force ministers to reveal information concerning their legislative and extra-legislative activities, providing coalition members unique insights into their partners’ behaviour. In order to test our argument, we build and analyse a new dataset of parliamentary questions in the British House of Commons covering the 2010‒2015 coalition. As expected, government MPs ask more questions as the divisiveness of a policy area increases. Legislatures conventionally considered weak due to the lack of strong committees may nevertheless play an important oversight role through other parliamentary devices, including helping to police the implementation of coalition agreements.

Fairness and qualitative portfolio allocation in multiparty governments

How do political parties divide coalition payoffs in multiparty governments? Perhaps the most striking answer to this question is Gamson’s Law, which suggests a strong fairness norm in the allocation of office payoffs among coalition partners. Building upon recent advancements in portfolio allocation research, we extend this approach in three important ways. First, we study fairness with regard to the allocation of policy (rather than office) payoffs. Second, we introduce measures to assess the fairness of the division of policy payoffs following two norms: envy-freeness and equitability. Third, we explore why some allocations of ministerial portfolios deviate from fairness norms. Based on an original data set of party preferences for individual portfolios in Western and Central Eastern Europe, we find substantial variation in the fairness of policy payoffs across cabinets. Moreover, coalitions are more likely to arrive at envy-free and equitable bargaining outcomes if (1) these fair allocations are based on an allocation of cabinet positions that is proportional to party size and if (2) the bargaining power is distributed evenly among government parties. The results suggest that fairness is not a universal norm for portfolio allocation in multiparty governments, but in fact depends on the cabinet parties’ bargaining positions.

Values Education or Religious Education? An Alternative View of Religious Education in the Secular Age, the Case of Turkey

Debates about the teaching of religion date back to the formation of the modern education system, when religion was first compartmentalized as a distinct subject within a broader curriculum. In many places, they continue to rage today. In Turkey, they are inextricably tied to the creation of the country’s system of secular public instruction in the 1920s and the transition to multi-party government in the 1940s. On 30 March 2012, Turkey passed a new law that revamped the country’s public educational system, mandating twelve years of instruction divided into three four-year periods (roughly corresponding to elementary, middle, and high school). This law led to the opening of many new religious schools—known as Imam-Hatip schools (i.e., schools for the training of imams and hatips, or preachers)—across the country, especially at the middle-school level. The number of students studying in these schools rose from 70,000 in 2002 to 1,300,000 after the new law. New elective courses on religion were also added to the curriculum, and curricular and extra-curricular religious-education activities offered by government-sponsored Islamic civil society organizations became more prevalent. All of this has reignited old debates about religious instruction in the country. This article begins with an overview of the history of secularism in Turkey. It then focuses on the history of religious education and the model of religious education in Turkey. It concludes with a discussion of how religious education centering on values education operates within the secular framework of public education in confessional and non-confessional formats.

Platforms, Portfolios, Policy: How Audience Costs Affect Social Welfare Policy in Multiparty Cabinets

When and why do electoral commitments enhance parties’ ability to implement their preferred policy in multiparty governments? We propose an audience costs theory whereby strong platform commitments enhance parties’ negotiating positions in multiparty cabinets but only when they are on a salient policy issue for core voters and the party controls the policy-relevant portfolio. Utilizing new data on portfolio allocations in eight parliamentary democracies over 40 years, we show that absent a strong platform commitment, control of the portfolio of social affairs by social democrats, alone, is not associated with changes in welfare generosity. Notably, our findings are independent of party size and hold in most multiparty legislative systems not dominated by three parties.

Beyond Committees: Parliamentary Oversight and Coalition Government in Britain

A legislature's ability to engage in executive oversight is believed to derive largely from its committee system. Strong parliamentary committees, for example, allow parties in multiparty government to keep tabs on each other. This paper suggests the instrument of parliamentary questions as an alternative parliamentary vehicle for coalition parties to monitor their partners. Questions force ministers to reveal information concerning their legislative and extra-legislative activities, providing coalition members unique insights into their partners’ behaviour. To test our argument, we build and analyse a new dataset of parliamentary questions in the British House of Commons covering the 2010-15 coalition. As expected, government MPs ask more questions of ministries held by the other party, and especially target questions to ministries where coalition parties are furthest apart ideologically. Legislatures conventionally considered weak due to the lack of strong committees may nevertheless play an important role in policing the bargain and managing coalition government.

Bring back the party: personalisation, the media and coalition politics

What effect, if any, does a change in type of government have on the degree of media personalisation? This article argues that the different incentives that single- and multi-party governments provide to individual politicians and parties affect the level of media personalisation. Where the parties are more involved (i.e. multi-party coalitions) there will be less media personalisation. In contrast, where a single individual can command the party, there will be more media personalisation. The article tests these assumptions with a novel dataset created from over 1 million newspaper articles covering a continuous 24-year period in the UK. It finds that the switch to a coalition government in 2010 indeed changed the dynamics of media personalisation. These findings not only provide key insights into the phenomenon of personalisation but also enable us to better understand some of the potential consequences of changes in government types for power dynamics and democratic accountability.

Translating the State: Czechoslovakia's Search for the Soviet Model of the Secret Police, 1945–52

Translating the StateCzechoslovakia's Search for the Soviet Model of the Secret Police, 1945–52 Molly Pucci (bio) In January 1948, a month before the communist takeover of Czechoslovakia, Czech secret police official Jindřich Veselý went on an observation tour of the Polish secret police. His aim, as he wrote to the Central Committee in Prague, was to "become closely familiar with the organization of the Ministry of Public Security of Poland and, above all, the work of the state security organ and intelligence services."1 While there, he conversed with Polish secret police officials, took notes on the organization of their forces, and compared and contrasted what he saw with the policing institutions of his own country. His notes reveal the differences in the communist secret police forces that had been built in each country since the end of World War II. Since there was no equivalent in Czechoslovakia to the institution Veselý was touring in Poland, he described what he was seeing to leaders in Prague in terms of analogy: the authority of the Polish secret police and its affiliated militia approximated the force of Czechoslovaks' civil police, criminal police, and regional and district government authorities. Veselý had helped organize communist secret police networks in Czechoslovakia between 1945 and 1948. He was observing the Polish secret police forces created during the same era. Although these institutions were supposedly built on the same "Soviet model," they had developed different [End Page 317] structures, personnel, and methods of violence from the mid- to the late 1940s. As Veselý discovered, the Polish Communists and their Soviet advisers had created a military-style force of around 30,000 officials who worked from 1945 to 1947 in a state governed by martial law.2 Polish secret police officials, most recruited from communist partisan groups and military units, carried weapons and had the authority to arrest citizens and hold them for up to 48 hours.3 In contrast to Czechoslovakia, Veselý noted, all political trials in Poland took place in military courts. By 1948, the Polish secret police had developed a massive infrastructure that reached into most areas of Polish public, civic, and state life and could, as Veselý described, "allow or ban meetings, allow or ban clubs, distribute permits to carry weapons, etc., etc.," and conduct surveillance on political parties, the youth, the intelligentsia, the church, and the state administration. As was evident from his conversations with local officials, Veselý concluded that the "Ministry of State Security is a decisive power factor in Poland. There is no area in which it does not intervene in a decisive way."4 The Czechoslovak secret police he had helped organize, in contrast, was a network of around 200 agents who were not allowed to carry weapons or arrest suspects. Communist intelligence agents in Czechoslovakia dressed in civilian clothing and worked covertly in the official intelligence services of the National Front, a democratic multiparty government, to collect information on noncommunist political parties for communist leaders.5 Veselý's trip to Poland was one of several covert observation tours that East European secret police agents took to each other's countries between 1946 and 1954, the foundational years of communism in the region. What do these trips tell us about how East European agents learned to build communist policing institutions after World War II? What do they reveal about how East European Communists interpreted the Soviet model of political policing? As the Czechoslovaks' tour of the Polish forces shows—Veselý's trip was one of several—answering these questions requires adopting a multinational, comparative approach to policing between the mid-1940s and the 1950s. Such an approach is not only a methodological decision; it is [End Page 318] a reflection of the decision-making processes and self-perceptions of agents and officials at the time, who consciously studied and integrated the practices of the policing systems of other countries of Eastern Europe. Almost a decade before the creation of the Warsaw Pact in 1955, agents, ideas, surveillance technologies, organizational practices, and institutional models crossed the national borders of the countries of Eastern Europe and the Soviet Union, allowing Communists to coordinate their security forces and study...

Alternative of the homogeneous socialist multiparty government in 1917

Alternative of the homogeneous socialist multiparty government in 1917

Evolution of manifestos in a developing parliamentary democracy with proportional representation and multiparty coalition governments

In exploring the first two decades of evolution of political programmes applied for the electoral processes in Slovenia, a young European multiparty parliamentary democracy with a proportional electoral system and multiparty government coalitions, the article contributes to a rich tradition of studying the programmes of political parties as relevant narrators of the development of democratic systems and suggests an answer to ‘why do parties write manifestos?’ The main findings include the distinct issue emphasis of parliamentary and non-parliamentary parties’ manifestos and convergence in issue emphasis over time among parliamentary parties who go on to form coalition governments. Regarding the ‘why’, these and other findings indicate that the manifestos considered here are intended more for post-election purposes – in particular, for the formation of alliances and negotiating and running a coalition government – than for attracting voters in the pre-election period. Party programmes are seen more as self-intended tools for political struggle than as promoters or control mechanisms for the further development of the democratic political system.

Multiparty government and economic policy-making

Multiparty government has often been associated with poor economic policy-making, with distortions like lower growth rates and high budget deficits. One proposed reason for such distortions is that coalition governments face more severe ‘common pool problems’ since parties use their control over specific ministries to advance their specific spending priorities rather than practice budgetary discipline. We suggest that this view of multiparty government is incomplete and that we need to take into account that coalitions may have established certain control mechanisms to deal with such problems. One such mechanism is the drafting of a coalition agreement. Our results, when focusing on the spending behavior of cabinets formed in 17 Western European countries (1970–1998), support our claim that coalition agreements matter for the performance of multiparty cabinets in economic policy-making. More specifically, we find clear support for an original conditional hypothesis suggesting that coalition agreements significantly reduce the negative effect of government fragmentation on government spending in those institutional contexts where prime ministerial power is low.

The Allocation of Ministries in Multiparty Governments

How do coalition parties in parliamentary democracies distribute government ministries? The predominant empirical finding from four decades of research is that ministerial portfolios are allocated in such a way that coalition parties receive payoffs that are roughly proportional to their share of legislative seats. I argue, however, that most work to date has limited our understanding of portfolio allocation by focusing solely on numerical payoffs received by parties, neglecting more nuanced policy payoffs associated with holding ministerial posts. I implement a new empirical approach that evaluates the seat proportionality thesis as it pertains to multiple types of payoffs. I demonstrate that: (1) parties distribute both the number and types of ministries in proportion to legislative seat share; (2) concentrating purely on numerical proportionality leads to mistaken inferences about its importance in bargaining; and (3) accounting for policy payoff proportionality vastly improves the predictive power of existing models of portfolio allocation.

Cabinet payoffs in coalition governments

Understanding how coalition parties in multiparty governments divide office and policy payoffs is one of the greatest challenges in political science. Gamson’s Law predicts that ministries are allocated proportionally with the coalition members’ legislative seat holding. However, doubts remain about how differences in the valuation of portfolios affect their distribution. The challenge is not only to determine whether government parties receive their fair share of cabinet payoffs once the importance of individual ministerial posts is taken into consideration, but also to develop a measure of portfolio importance that takes time and context into account. This article proposes a new method of measuring portfolio salience using official records of cabinet appointments in the Fifth French Republic that list ministerial posts hierarchically. The result is a more nuanced measure of portfolio importance, which is context sensitive and varies with time. The article argues that the new measure is able to reduce artificial deviations from the one-to-one linkage of seat shares and portfolio shares and that it can travel beyond the French case.

Divided we govern: coalition politics in modern India

Divided We Govern investigates the rise and fall of the broader parliamentary left in modern Indian democracy, and the dynamics of national coalition governments. Since the 1970s, socialist, communist and regional parties in India have sought to forge a progressive 'third force'. Most scholars typically dismiss its principal manifestations -- the Janata Party, National Front and United Front -- as inherently opportunistic coalitions of power-seeking politicians. Sanjay Ruparelia provides a fine-grained analytic narrative to challenge this prevailing wisdom. Employing a variety of methods and resources, including the rare confidential testimonies of key political actors, Ruparelia demonstrates how the politics of each governing coalition, despite their self-evident flaws and short-lived tenures, revealed the outlines of a distinctive national vision. His fresh analysis of the politics of coalition in India also yields wider theoretical insights. Most studies fail to question or explain how these multiparty governments actually functioned. Hence they overstate the stability of and polarity between multiple political motivations, Ruparelia contends, discounting internal party debates over whether to share power, with whom and to what extent, and how. In such circumstances, the strategies, tactics and choices of actors become especially significant. The pursuit of power in a highly regionalized federal parliamentary democracy such as India creates incentives to forge national coalition governments, yet paradoxically decreases their chances of surviving. Ultimately, the failure of socialists and communists to judge their real historical possibilities at key junctures led to the decline of the broader Indian left.

Do the media set the parliamentary agenda? A comparative study in seven countries

AbstractA growing body of work has examined the relationship between media and politics from an agenda‐setting perspective: Is attention for issues initiated by political elites with the media following suit, or is the reverse relation stronger? A long series of single‐country studies has suggested a number of general agenda‐setting patterns but these have never been confirmed in a comparative approach. In a comparative, longitudinal design including comparable media and politics evidence for seven European countries (Belgium, Denmark, France, Netherlands, Spain, Switzerland and the United Kingdom), this study highlights a number of generic patterns. Additionally, it shows how the political system matters. Overall, the media are a stronger inspirer of political action in countries with single‐party governments compared to those with multiple‐party governments for opposition parties. But, government parties are more reactive to media under multiparty governments.

Wary Partners

Are political parties willing to partially forgo their office and policy goals to maximize their coalition governance capacities? Multiparty governments are plagued with preference heterogeneity and uncertainty about policy outcomes. In this article, we argue that parties choose to make a strategic allocation of portfolios to curb delegation perils. They use portfolios with jurisdiction overlaps to shadow each other at the ministerial level. We define a wary partners’ situation when different parties control the portfolios that form a jurisdiction combination. We test this hypothesis for 12 West European parliamentary democracies since 1945. Our contribution conjugates a Monte Carlo simulation, which estimates whether real-world distribution differs significantly from expected allocation under nonstrategic behavior, with in-depth interviews with more than 40 former ministers. Results show that wary partners are used extensively as coalition governance mechanisms, particularly because of their capacity to curb information asymmetries and to avoid interministerial gridlock.

Challenges to multiparty governments

How does governing in coalitions affect coalition parties’ responsiveness to voters? In this article, we seek to understand the relationship between political parties’ participation in multiparty governments and their responsiveness to voters. We argue that the extent to which coalition parties respond to policy priorities of voters is influenced by the divisiveness of policy issues within the cabinet and the ministerial responsibility for policies. To test our hypotheses, we combine data on the issue attention of 55 coalition parties from the Comparative Manifestos Project with data on government composition and data on the policy priorities of voters from the Comparative Study of Electoral Systems and various election studies in 45 elections across 16 European countries from 1972 to 2011. While we find that intra-cabinet divisiveness decreases coalition parties’ responsiveness, we find no effect for portfolio responsibility. Our findings shed light on the relationship between party competition and coalition governments and its implications for political representation.

“Trust Is Good, Control Is Better”

Even though institutional design clearly shapes legislative processes and outputs, explanation of cross-national variation in how legislatures are organized remains elusive. Building on research that emphasizes the role of legislatures in enforcing coalition agreements, we provide new data on committee structures in thirty-one parliamentary democracies, demonstrating that where multiparty government is the norm, legislatures tend to develop strong committees that are structurally equipped to enable the governing parties to keep tabs on one another’s ministers. To probe the institutional argument further, we present a case study of committee reform in the Irish parliament. We demonstrate that institutional change within the Irish parliament is directly related to the shift from single-party to multiparty government and in particular to the desire of the smaller coalition party to be able to keep tabs on the larger party’s ministers. The paper aims to spark a deeper dialogue among party and legislative scholars in search of the micro-foundations of legislative organization.

The distribution of individual cabinet positions in coalition governments: A sequential approach.

Multiparty government in parliamentary democracies entails bargaining over the payoffs of government participation, in particular the allocation of cabinet positions. While most of the literature deals with the numerical distribution of cabinet seats among government parties, this article explores the distribution of individual portfolios. It argues that coalition negotiations are sequential choice processes that begin with the allocation of those portfolios most important to the bargaining parties. This induces conditionality in the bargaining process as choices of individual cabinet positions are not independent of each other. Linking this sequential logic with party preferences for individual cabinet positions, the authors of the article study the allocation of individual portfolios for 146 coalition governments in Western and Central Eastern Europe. The results suggest that a sequential logic in the bargaining process results in better predictions than assuming mutual independence in the distribution of individual portfolios.

Commitment Problems in Coalitions: A New Look at the Fiscal Policies Of Multiparty Governments

Many political scientists and economists have argued that coalition governments tend to accumulate more debt than single-party governments do, but the evidence for this proposition is mixed. This article argues that only some coalition governments are more likely to increase public debt than single-party governments: those in which parties are unable to make credible promises to their partners about future policy. It introduces the concept of ‘commitment potential’ within coalitions and proposes a way of measuring it. The study evaluates its theoretical claims using data on 20 advanced democracies observed over a period of almost 50 years. It finds that multiparty governments with high commitment potential do not, on average, accumulate more debt than single-party governments, but that governments with low commitment potential do.