Parliamentary Vote Research Articles

Prospektives versus retrospektives Argumentieren.

This study aims to investigate the linguistic differences between an argumentation referring to a potential future action (prospective argumentation) and one justifying a past action (retrospective argumentation) in the parliamentary arena. It is based on the analysis of German and French speeches taken from the protocols of the plenary sessions of the European Parliament.
 In a plenary session, parliamentary votes are preceded by a general debate. During this debate, speakers may give reasons supporting their own choice in an upcoming vote, but they may also try to persuade other Members of Parliament to vote the same way. This argumentation is prospective. After the vote, Members may give an oral or written explanation of vote designed to justify their decision. The argumentative orientation in this case is retrospective. In an exemplary approach, 50 speeches per language (German/French) and communication situation (prospective/retrospective) will be analyzed. The study argues that the macrostructure of the speeches is influenced by the orientation of the conclusion: In a prospective argumentation, speakers tend to first present their arguments before coming up with their conclusion, the conclusion being a declaration of one’s own intent to vote or a recommendation for other Members of Parliament. In a prototypical explanation of vote, the conclusion precedes the arguments. Special attention is given to the analysis of argument and conclusion markers. The study tries to show that conclusion markers are relatively more frequent in prospective argumentation, while retrospective argumentation makes broader use of argument markers.

Party system in the context of functioning of atypical semi-presidential system of government in the Republic of Azerbaijan (1995–2019)

The author analyzed the systems of government within the framework of a republican form of government. Extremely different factors of political process and interinstitutional relations, which are the conditions for defining and distinguishing between different types of systems of government, can be indicators for distinguishing typical and atypical systems of government. Atypical semi-presidential systems of government in the Post-Soviet countries requires a detailed analysis in Political Science. The atypical character of the semi-presidential system of government in the Republic of Azerbaijan is considered on the basis of such an indicator as the institution of vote of no confidence in governments. In this context, the analysis of party system in atypical semi-presidential system of government in the Republic of Azerbaijan in 1995–2019 is extremely actual. The purpose of the article is to determine the types of party system in atypical semi-presidential system of government in the Republic of Azerbaijan in 1995–2019. New institutionalism and its various types and paradigms are chosen as theoretical and methodological basis of the proposed research. The main method of the study is the method of comparative analysis. As a result of the article, it is argued that parliamentary vote of no confidence in government does not automatically lead to government’s resignation, since it depends on the position/will of a president in the Republic of Azerbaijan in 1995–2019. It determines the atypicality of semi-presidential (constitutional) system of government in the analyzed country. Based on the author’s methodology, it was classified the types of party system in atypical semi-presidential system of government in the Republic of Azerbaijan in 1995–2019. Consequently, it is argued that a single-party system with a high level of non-partisanship was established in the Republic of Azerbaijan, in 1995/1996–2000/2001, 2005/2006–2019; single-party system with the medium level of non-partisanship in 2000/2001–2005/2006.

Investiture rules and formation of minority governments in European parliamentary democracies

In parliamentary systems, political parties must often bargain with each other in order to form a government. Do parliamentary rules regulating government formation impact the type of government that is formed? Existing scholarship suggests that the need for an investiture vote—a requirement that a new government must face a parliamentary vote at some point during its formation—reduces the likelihood of a minority government. This article suggests that while real-world investiture rules can vary across several dimensions, only the investiture decision rule—which specifies the size of the majority required for a decision to be made—impacts the propensity for parties to form minority governments. Using new data on investiture rules for 26 European countries since 1946 or the first year of democracy, we find that parliamentary democracies that have an investiture requirement are not less likely to experience minority governments than those where governments come to power without an investiture vote. However, when an absolute majority is required for a government to succeed at the investiture stage, minority governments are considerably less likely to form; absolute majority investiture rules reduce the frequency of minority governments.

Ideology in Times of Crisis a Principal Component Analysis of Votes in the European Parliament, 2004–2019

This paper aims to identify the main dividing lines that determine the voting behaviour of Members of the European Parliament (MEPs) and how they evolved throughout the crisis. Introducing a new database that collects and classifies the full population of plenary votes from 2004 to 2019, this work uses principal component analysis to identify the latent patterns on which MEPs ally and divide. Focussing on economic votes, it finds that, while pre-crisis votes were mainly determined by differences across the left-vs-right spectrum and, only secondly, by differences in support for European integration, the crisis inverted this trend, making support for Europe the most relevant dividing line in the European Parliament. In support of this evidence, the paper introduces a new vote-scraping technique to investigate the ideological nature of these dimensions. Vote scraping reveals that the left-right cleavage is mainly ideological but with limited impact on budgetary resources, whereas the European dimension mostly reflects a conflict over the budget, with higher legislative impact and seemingly low ideological content.

The Case Against Granting a Secret Ballot to Elected Representatives: Democratic-Theoretical Reflections on a South African Controversy

ABSTRACTMany critics of President Zuma’s government argued that it was constitutionally and democratically permissible for Members of Parliament to vote secretly in motions of no confidence in the Executive. The Constitutional Court agreed, interpreting the Constitution as empowering the parliamentary Speaker to authorise a secret ballot no-confidence vote and seemingly encouraging her to rule in favour of one. This article argues against secret ballots in parliamentary votes, but on democratic-theoretical rather than constitutional-legal grounds. While a secret ballot is appropriate for voters, elected representatives have no right to conceal their voting choices. The absence of direct election of individual MPs in a given electoral system does not negate the requirement of accountability to voters. Moreover the system of party mandate, whatever its merits, is not democratically indefensible. Representatives ought to account to citizens for their voting choices either directly or indirectly via mandate-bearing parties. Further, a parliamentary secret ballot could be employed against those seeking executive accountability.

Is the ideal of independent regulation appropriate? Evidence from the United Kingdom

The liberalization of utilities has generally led to the creation of an economic regulator, nominally independent of government. The United Kingdom, as a pioneer of this process, has more than 30 years of experience with independent regulators. However, by 2019, the three main regulated utilities in the United Kingdom, energy, water and rail, were in disarray with a combination of high prices, poor service and a failure to achieve the goals of competition set at the time of the reforms. Government, the companies and the regulators must all bear the blame for this situation. We focus on the regulator in this article and argue that there a number of factors behind their failings including a concentration on economic issues to the detriment of other issues such as environment and public welfare, a lack of public accountability and a poor culture in the regulators based on a view that regulatory interventions were always counterproductive. Given that regulators are appointed by government and funded by Parliamentary vote, the claim of independence is not credible and there are circumstances when government should be able to overrule regulators in the broader public interest. We suggest that expanding the range of skills among the regulatory decision makers, regular rigorous Parliamentary scrutiny and a much stronger focus on the attributes consumers require – affordability, reliability and sustainability – rather than the current obsession with competition would improve the regulators’ performance.

Multiple partitioning of multiplex signed networks: Application to European parliament votes

For more than a decade, graphs have been used to model the voting behavior taking place in parliaments. However, the methods described in the literature suffer from several limitations. The two main ones are that 1) they rely on some temporal integration of the raw data, which causes some information loss; and/or 2) they identify groups of antagonistic voters, but not the context associated with their occurrence. In this article, we propose a novel method taking advantage of multiplex signed graphs to solve both these issues. It consists in first partitioning separately each layer, before grouping these partitions by similarity. We show the interest of our approach by applying it to a European Parliament dataset.

National parliamentary control and voting in the Council of the European Union

AbstractThis article explores the different ways governments express dissent in the Council of the European Union (EU) through ‘No’ votes, abstentions and recorded negative statements. A game‐theoretical model is presented that studies voting behaviour and analyses how the national parliaments’ levels of control over their governments’ EU policies affect it. It is concluded that governments that are strongly controlled by their parliaments are not more likely to express dissent. However, when they do express dissent, they vote ‘No’ more often. Parliamentary control depends on the presence of formal oversight institutions as well as the motivation of parliamentarians to hold their governments accountable. Empirical support is found in an analysis of votes on 1,387 legislative proposals that represent more than a decade of Council decision making in the period 2004–2014. This article contributes to the discussion on the involvement of national parliaments in EU affairs, and clearly distinguishes the different forms of dissent in Council decision making.

Tweeting about public health policy: Social media response to the UK Government's announcement of a Parliamentary vote on draft standardised packaging regulations.

BackgroundStandardised tobacco packaging has been, and remains, a contentious policy globally, attracting corporate, public health, political, media and popular attention. In January 2015, the UK Government announced it would vote on draft regulations for the policy before the May 2015 General Election. We explored reactions to the announcement on Twitter, in comparison with an earlier period of little UK Government activity on standardised packaging.MethodsWe obtained a random sample of 1038 tweets in two 4-week periods, before and after the UK Government’s announcement. Content analysis was used to examine the following Tweet characteristics: support for the policy, purpose, Twitter-user’s geographical location and affiliation, and evidence citation and quality. Chi-squared analyses were used to compare Tweet characteristics between the two periods.ResultsOverall, significantly more sampled Tweets were in favour of the policy (49%) in comparison to those opposed (19%). Yet, at Time 2, following the announcement, a greater proportion of sampled tweets opposed standardised packaging compared to the period sampled at Time 1, prior to the announcement (p<0.001). The quality of evidence and research cited in URLs linked at Time 2 was significantly lower than at Time 1 (p<0.001), with peer-reviewed research more likely to be shared in positive Tweets (p<0.001) and in Tweets linking to URLs originating from the health sector (p<0.001). The decline in the proportion of positive Tweets was mirrored by a reduction in Tweets by health sector Twitter-users at Time 2 (p<0.001).ConclusionsMicroblogging sites can reflect offline policy debates and are used differently by policy proponents and opponents dependent on the policy context. Twitter-users opposed to standardised packaging increased their activity following the Government’s announcement, while those in support broadly maintained their rate of Twitter engagement. The findings offer insight into the public health community’s options for using Twitter to influence policy and disseminate research. In particular, proliferation of Twitter activity following pro-public health policy announcements could be considered to ensure pro-health messages are not overshadowed by anti-regulation voices.

TURK-SWITCH: The Tariff-Leverage and Legal Case for Turkey’s Switch from EU–Turkey Customs Union to FTAs with the European Union and Beyond

Soon after becoming a World Trade Organization Member, Turkey established a Customs Union with the European Union, its biggest trade partner. Despite negotiating an average 42.6 percent tariff on slightly more than one-third of industrial goods—leaving remaining industrial goods unbound from World Trade Organization commitments—Turkey, pursuant to the Customs Union, eliminated all tariffs on European Union industrial imports. Turkey also implemented the significantly lower European Union Common External Tariffs—bindings averaging 4.1 percent—on all industrial imports from other World Trade Organization Members. In return, Turkey expected the Customs Union to be the ticket to eventual, full European Union membership. Following the non-binding yet politically significant July 2017 European Union Parliament vote suspending accession talks and the recent European Union Council ‘conclusion’ foreclosing negotiations toward ‘modernization’ of the Customs Union, Turkey’s hopes for membership or a less asymmetric Customs Union have faded. This article explains why Turkey’s switch from Customs Union to pursuing free trade agreements with the European Union and other countries would advance its overall trade interests and sketches how this move could be operationalized, both legally and transactionally. (JEL: F13, F53, F55).

Ideology in Times of Crisis: A Principal Component Analysis of Votes in the European Parliament, 2004–2019

This paper aims to identify the main dividing lines that determine the voting behaviour of Members of the European Parliament (MEPs) and their evolution throughout the crisis. Introducing a new database that collects and classifies the full population of plenary votes from 2004 to 2019, this work uses principal component analysis to identify the latent patterns on which MEPs ally and divide. Focussing on economic votes, it finds that, while pre-crisis votes were mainly determined by differences across the left-vs-right spectrum and, only secondly, by differences in support for European integration, the crisis inverted this trend, making support for Europe the most relevant dividing line in the European Parliament. In support of this evidence, the paper introduces a new vote-scraping technique to investigate the ideological nature of these dimensions. Vote scraping reveals that the left-right cleavage is mainly ideological but with limited impact on budgetary resources, whereas the European dimension mostly reflects a conflict over the budget, with higher legislative impact and seemingly low ideological content.

The Political Economy of the Prussian Three-Class Franchise

Did the Prussian three-class franchise, which politically over-represented the economic elite, affect policy-making? Combining MP-level political orientation, derived from all roll call votes in the Prussian parliament (1867–1903), with constituency characteristics, we analyze how local vote inequality, determined by tax payments, affected policymaking during Prussia’s period of rapid industrialization. Contrary to the predominant view that the franchise system produced a conservative parliament, higher vote inequality is associated with more liberal voting, especially in regions with large-scale industry. We argue that industrialists preferred self-serving liberal policies and were able to coordinate on suitable MPs when vote inequality was high.

Урядові кабінети в контексті функціонування атипових напівпрезидентських систем правління в Білорусі (1996–2018) та Казахстані (1995–2018).

In modern Political Science, researchers distinguish both typical and atypical semi-presidential systems of government. However, atypical semi-presidentialism in the Post-Soviet countries still requires a detailed analysis in Political Science. In this cut, the purpose of the article is to determine the types of governmental cabinets in atypical semi-presidential systems of government on the example of Belarus (in 1996–2018) and Kazakhstan (in 1995–2018). This purpose was solved in the situation when new institutionalism and its types/paradigms were chosen as a theoretical and methodological basis of the research. The main method of the study is the method of comparative analysis.The peculiarities of the parliamentary votes of no confidence in governmental cabinets in Belarus (1996–2018) and Kazakhstan (1995–2018) demonstrate the atypicality of semi-presidential (constitutional) systems of government in these countries. The author determined the types of governmental cabinets in atypical semi-presidential systems of government in Belarus (1996–2018) and Kazakhstan (1995–2018). Consequently, it is argued that all governmental cabinets in both countries are classified as: 1) those formed by president for the formation method; 2) technocratic for the type of composition; 3) non-partisan for the type of technocratic cabinets. It is proved that all governmental cabinets for their parliamentary support are determined: in Belarus (1996–2018) as cabinets supported by non-partisan majority supplemented by partisan deputies; in Kazakhstan (1995–1997) as cabinet supported by single-party minority supplemented by non-partisan deputies; in Kazakhstan (1997–2007) as cabinets supported by coalition majority supplemented by non-partisan deputies; in Kazakhstan (2007–2018) as cabinets supported by single-party majority supplemented by non-partisan deputies. The author determined that the presidents of the analyzed countries were the initiators of governmental cabinets’ resignations in Belarus (in 1996–2018) and Kazakhstan (in 1995–2018).

Parliamentary Appointment or Popular Election? Breaking the Impasse on Models for an Australian 'Westminster Republic'

The question of creating an Australian head of state is a symbolic, constitutional and governance issue that remains unresolved. The lesson of the 1999 referendum is that for the current constitutional arrangements to be modified, there will need to be some consensus on a model. Yet at present the movement is deadlocked between a direct election model and a parliamentary appointment model with substantively different implications. There is therefore a great challenge to create a model that satisfies both the desire for popular electoral input and the desire to retain an essentially ceremonial and politically neutral non-executive head of state. After reviewing extant models (including relevant overseas models) and historical and conceptual issues, the problems of a full popular vote are discussed. The article then responds by introducing new concepts to the debate. These are: (1) “Tri-partisan Endorsement” (or “Three-way Support”) being a three party endorsement of a single candidate to face the voters along with any other nominees in an open popular election; (2) “Fifty-Fifty” being a method for appointment of an Australian head of state which involves aggregating the results of a parliamentary and a popular vote. The first seeks to achieve a politically neutral candidate while the second seeks to moderate the parliamentary vote for such head of state with a popular vote and vice-versa. The two concepts are separate but might also be utilised in combination in a single model. Finally, the article proposes a partial response to the unresolved “1975” dilemma through “Concurrent Expiration” where a head of state who removes a Prime Minister against the will of the House of Representatives will see the former’s own tenure expire 75 days after the holding of the ensuing election (subject to possible re-election). The article concludes that such concepts offer hope for the development of a judicious consensus model capable of achieving the support of the Australian people at a referendum.

Looming Parliament vote boosts Brexit jitters for U.K. scientists

Looming Parliament vote boosts Brexit jitters for U.K. scientists

Useful, but Not Necessarily Idiots

Using evidence from roll-call voting in the European Parliament and data from the Euromanifesto project, this study employs statistical analysis (linear and logistic regression models) in order to identify the ideological linkages among Putin-sympathizer parties in Europe. The analysis demonstrates that one of the linkages among them is provided by their rejection of European integration, and that Putin-sympathizer parties tend to display ideological radicalism on both ends of the left–right ideological continuum, thus falling into the category of anti-system parties. At the same time, one of the important shared characteristics of Putin-sympathizer parties is populism.

Italian Political Parties and Military Operations: An Empirical Analysis on Voting Patterns

AbstractSince the end of the bipolar era, the military activism of several Western powers has raised questions about parliamentary control, fostering growing research and analyses on the features, drivers and consequences of the different kinds of oversight exercised by legislative assemblies. Within this scholarly debate, this article focuses on the under-studied case of Italy. How did Italian parties vote on military operations abroad in the post-Cold War era? In order to answer this question, the article presents the first detailed and comprehensive set of data on parliamentary votes over the deployment of the Italian armed forces in the post-Cold War era (i.e. from the beginning of the 1990s to the recent operation against ISIL). Thanks to this extensive new empirical material, the article assesses selected arguments developed by the literature on political parties and foreign policy, paving the way for further research.

GABON: Parliamentary Vote

GABON: Parliamentary Vote

Parliament, public engagement and legislation in Bangladesh: a case study of Domestic Violence Act of 2010

ABSTRACTThis paper examines the process of enactment of the domestic violence bill in Bangladesh. One of the distinctive features of the bill, passed in 2010, was that it originated in civil society and widespread public engagement characterised its enactment process. The paper explores the factors that encouraged different actors to agree to enact the law. There are, however, not many examples of parliament–CSO interaction in the legislative process. The paper identifies reasons that discourage engagement in other areas of public concern. Prominent among the reasons underlying weak public engagement in the legislative process are: monopoly of the government in the legislative process and its eagerness to pass laws in haste, dominance of part-timers in parliament, legal restriction on ‘independent’ voting in parliament, over-centralization of power in political parties and politicisation of CSOs.

Party politics at the water’s edge: contestation of military operations in Europe

This paper contributes to current debates on the politicization of international politics by examining party-political contestation of peace and security missions. It is guided by two inter-related questions, (a) to what extent deployment decisions are contested amongst political parties and (b) what drives such contestation. We examine data from a new data set on parliamentary votes on deployment decisions in France, Germany, Spain, and the United Kingdom and from the Chapel Hill Expert Survey. Against conventional wisdom and in an effort to address the often-overlooked role of political parties, we find that military deployments have been systematically contested amongst political parties across Europe. Further, we find that contestation is driven by the left/right axis, as opposed to newer cleavages captured here by the so-called gal/tan axis. We also find evidence that patterns of contestation depend on parties’ positions in government or opposition, a factor we relate to bureaucratic and international pressures on the parties in office, and to political opportunities for opposition parties.