Western European Parliamentary Research Articles

The punitive impact of radical right populism on foreign aid: immigration pressure and mainstream partnership

AbstractThis study investigates populist radical right (PRR) influence on aid amid widespread concerns about a potential connection between its rise and the reduction of aid allocation. Previous studies failed to address these concerns owing to the disuse of immigrant inflows as an intervening variable and a bilateral framework capable of investigating properties in donor and recipient countries. By analyzing panel data on Western European parliamentary democracies, the study demonstrates the PRR’s reducing effect via a coalitional pathway on bilateral aid to the recipients, failing to stem emigration into the donor countries. Further, analysis shows that such reduction intensifies in conjunction with the donors’ weak pluralistic institutions and the recipients’ sociocultural characteristics different from the ordinary citizens represented by the PRR. The findings make a novel contribution to the expanding literature on the PRR to integrate insights on the aid–immigration nexus, strategies for policy influence, and ideational profiles.

Talking to the Populist Radical Right: A Comparative Analysis of Parliamentary Debates

In many Western European states, right‐wing populist parties made it into national parliaments. This presents the established parties with the challenge of how to behave towards the new party. While the scholarly literature has focused more on the interaction with the populist radical right in the electoral arena, we know little about how it functions in an institutionally constrained arena such as parliament. This study asks in what way these structures affect the position taking and confrontation in speeches. Using different text‐as‐data approaches, I analyze parliamentary debates in four Western European parliaments after the entry of right‐wing populist parties. The results show that government‐opposition dynamics continue to structure parliamentary debates by and large, but right‐wing populist parties succeed in polarizing debates on immigration. They also become the center of attention in these debates. These results have important implications for the analysis of strategic party interaction in the parliamentary context.

Beyond Parliament: Gandhian Democracy and Postcolonial Founding

Through a study of Gandhian political writings in mid-twentieth-century India, this article explores the neglected question of how the issue of representative democracy shaped anticolonial thought. The rise of a Gandhian perspective on electoral representation was made possible by the account of modern democracy given in Gandhi’s "Hind Swaraj" (1909). From the 1930s, four key Indian thinkers influenced by Gandhi expanded on "Hind Swaraj" to argue that capitalist economics were a threat to democratic equality and produced the kinds of unaccountability and elite capture of legislatures that they identified in Western European parliamentary states. In response, Gandhian thinkers developed proposals for federalist postcolonial constitutions, combining a system of participatory legislative councils with collectivist agrarian socialism. I trace the intellectual origins of Gandhian democratic thought in the 1930s and 1940s and outline how its main proponents articulated ideas of antiparliamentarism and moral economics. Revisiting the Gandhian tradition, I suggest, highlights the importance of economic ethics in participatory theories of democracy and popular sovereignty.

Do party system parameters explain differences in legislative organization? Fragmentation, polarization, and the density of regulation in European parliaments, 1945–2009

The article studies whether the party system characteristics fragmentation and ideological polarization increase the density of institutional regulation in parliaments. It introduces a comprehensive time-series-cross-sectional dataset of standing orders in 15 Western European parliaments that allows studying how densely various fields of legislative activity such as lawmaking, controlling the government, and creating publicity were regulated over a period of more than 60 years. Descriptively, the data show increased regulation in all areas but also some variation between countries. Dynamic panel regression analyses for non-stationary time series find no systematic effect of fragmentation or polarization on the density of regulation indicating that large parts of legislative organization change for reasons unrelated to party system dynamics. We identify changes in the environment of legislatures such as increasing complexity and professionalization of politics, technological change, and Europeanization as potential drivers of such Pareto-efficient reforms.

Negative personalization and voting behavior in 14 parliamentary democracies, 1961–2018

Existing research has begun to tackle the electoral consequences of affective polarization through the lens of negative partisanship. However, not equal attention has been paid to voters’ polarized opinions toward political leaders and their impact on electoral behavior. This paper offers a comparative, longitudinal assessment of the relationship between negativity towards party leaders and vote choice in multi-party systems. We develop our negative personalization hypothesis and test it empirically on an original pooled dataset featuring 109 national election surveys from 14 Western European parliamentary democracies collected over the last six decades. Our findings confirm the existence of a robust relationship between negative party-leader evaluations and vote choice. Furthermore, the results demonstrate a sizable growth in the incidence of negative personalization across time, now of a magnitude that compares to that exerted by in-party-leader evaluations. This finding constitutes a central innovation adding to the personalization of politics literature.

Partisan dealignment and the personalisation of politics in West European parliamentary democracies, 1961–2018

Partisan dealignment is recurrently presented in the literature as one of the main drivers of the ‘personalisation of politics’. Yet, on the one hand, the claim that leader effects on voting behaviour are increasing across time is short on comparative evidence. On the other hand, there is limited empirical evidence that such an increase is due to dealignment. This article explores the longitudinal relationship between partisan dealignment, leader effects and party choice, through a novel dataset pooling 109 national election surveys collected in 14 Western European parliamentary democracies across the last six decades. The results show that leader effects increased over time as a function of the decline of party identification. Additional panel evidence from selected countries shows that partisan dealignment is responsible for increasing leader effects on party choice at the individual level. The longitudinal dimension of this study contributes to the most contested aspect of the personalisation of politics debate.

‘Going institutional’ to overcome obstruction: Explaining the suppression of minority rights in Western European parliaments, 1945−2010

AbstractWhen and why do parliamentary majorities in Europe suppress parliamentary minority rights? This article argues that such reforms are driven by substantive policy conflict in interaction with existing minority rights. Government parties curb minority rights if they fear minority obstruction due to increased policy conflict and a minority‐friendly institutional status quo. Empirical support is found for this claim using comparative data on all reforms in 13 Western European parliaments since 1945. A curbing of minority rights is significantly more likely under conditions of heightened policy conflict and these effects are stronger the more the institutional status quo favours opposition parties. Contrary to frequent claims of consensual rule changes from single‐country studies in Europe, these findings demonstrate the importance of competitive strategies in explaining institutional reform in European parliaments. The conditional impact of the status quo provides interesting theoretical links to historical institutionalist arguments on path dependence.

Image that Matters: News Media Consumption and Party Leader Effects on Voting Behavior

Television is customarily put forward as a driver of the “personalization of politics.” The characteristics of this visual medium arguably accentuate personality at the expense of substantive programmatic goals, downplaying partisan attachments and ideology as determinants of the vote in favor of candidate and party leader assessments. While there is evidence of this trend for presidential democracies, notably the United States, this linkage is yet to be fully explored for parliamentary democracies undergoing a process of personalization. This study addresses this gap through an analysis of pooled national election study data from thirteen Western European parliamentary democracies collected between 1982 and 2016. Our results show that leader effects are significantly stronger among individuals with a television-dominant media diet. The findings provide support to the yet underdeveloped theoretical relationship between media change and the personalization of politics, while also speaking to the broader question involving the importance of media for contemporary democratic elections.

From party to leader mobilization? The personalization of voter turnout

Partisan dealignment has been frequently advanced as a pivotal driver of the personalization of voting behavior. As voters’ long-term attachments with parties have eroded, it is argued that partisanship has lost importance relative to short-term factors, like voters’ evaluations of party leaders. Such theoretical reasoning has been applied recurrently in research dedicated to explaining vote choice. However, we hypothesize that dealignment can downplay partisanship’s impact vis-à-vis leaders in the same way regarding turnout decisions. This article aims at demonstrating the importance of voters’ evaluations of party leaders in their probability to turn out in parliamentary elections through a novel data set pooling 52 national election surveys from 13 Western European parliamentary democracies between 1974 and 2016. The results confirm the increasing relevance of leaders in explaining turnout decisions and a decline of partisanship’s mobilizing ability. These trends are further accentuated among individuals with a television-dominated media diet, demonstrating the role of media change in driving this process.

Shadow chairs as monitoring device? A comparative analysis of committee chair powers in Western European parliaments

ABSTRACTRecent work on coalition governance claims that government parties use the chairs of parliamentary committees to ‘shadow’ ministers and thus to monitor coalition partners. This argument rests on the assumption that committee chairs enjoy special powers to extract information from ministries and to affect policy-making in committee. To test this assumption, the paper develops the first comparative measure of committee chair powers in fifteen Western European democracies. The analysis shows that most committee chairs have very limited formal powers and that the share of shadowing chairs does not increase when committee chairs are more powerful. Both findings cast doubt on the interpretation of shadow chairs as a monitoring device. We sketch an alternative explanation according to which coalition parties employ the shadowing strategy in order to increase public visibility and to counteract issue ownership by the minister’s party.

The impact of Populist Radical Right Parties on socio-economic policies

Because they are now members of most Western European parliaments, Populist Radical Right Parties (PRRPs) have the potential to influence the formulation of socio-economic policies. However, scholarly attention so far has nearly exclusively focussed on the impact of PRRPs on what is considered their ‘core issue’, that is migration policy. In this paper, we provide the first mixed methods comparative study of the impact of PRRPs on redistributive and (de-)regulative economic policies. Combining quantitative data with qualitative case studies, our results show that the participation of PRRPs in right-wing governments has noteworthy implications for socio-economic policies. Due to the heterogeneous constituencies of PRRPs, these parties not only refrain from welfare state retrenchment but are also less inclined to engage in deregulation compared with right-wing governments without PRRP participation.

Decision-making potential and ‘detailed’ legislation of Western European parliamentary governments (1990–2013)

The first and foremost task of all governments is to make decisions. Consequently, studies on governments should deal above all with their ability to produce legislation. To this respect, this article analyses the legislative productivity of 112 parliamentary governments in 12 Western European democracies (Austria, Belgium, Denmark, Finland, Germany, Ireland, Italy, the Netherlands, Norway, Spain, Sweden and United Kingdom) from 1990 to 2013. My independent variable is an index offering an immediate picture of the decision-making potential of parliamentary governments, while the dependent variable is the ‘detailed’ legislative production of those governments. If we are able to differentiate between governments who decide, and governments who do not, we could answer a considerable number of interesting questions: which Western European parliamentary democracies tend to produce more (detailed) laws and which – on the contrary – are used to facing greater difficulties for achieving that goal? What are the reasons behind these opposing trends? The empirical results largely confirms that the more a parliamentary government has got decision-making potential (in terms of the proposed index), the more likely it will pass ‘detailed’ legislation.

Introduction: coalition politics and foreign policy

Multi-party coalitions are an increasingly common type of government across different political regimes and world regions. Since they are the locus of national foreign-policy-making, the dynamics of coalition government have significant implications for International Relations. Despite this growing significance, the foreign-policy-making of coalition governments is only partly understood. This symposium advances the study of coalition foreign policy in three closely related ways. First, it brings together in one place the state of the art in research on coalition foreign policy. Second, the symposium pushes the boundaries of our knowledge on four dimensions that are key to a comprehensive research agenda on coalition foreign policy: the foreign-policy outputs of multi-party coalitions; the process of foreign-policy-making in different types of coalitions; coalition foreign policy in the ‘Global South’; and coalition dynamics in non-democratic settings. Finally, the symposium puts forward promising avenues for further research by emphasising, for instance, the value of theory-guided comparative research that employs multi-method strategies and transcends the space of Western European parliamentary democracies.

Reinventing government and the separation of powers

Challenges caused by the global economic crisis in connection with the structural, political changes transformed the construction, the nature, and the operation of the executive branch. During the last decades in the separation of powers’ system the state had been rediscovered and governmental power had been appreciated. In a world covered with the internet, financial, economic and political crisis situations appeared; governments and governmental centres had to give sufficient answers to global challenges. The world under the pressure of the media changed the daily routine of the governmental work: beside the good decision-making, carrying the governments’ point across parliaments and public opinion too became increasingly significant. Strengthening the symbiosis between the legislative and executive branch in parliamentary governmental systems can be observed. Members of the governing party attending the rigorous party discipline are decreasingly able to function as democratic control. These members rather become patronisers (‘voting machines’) of the governmental intention without critical voices. The personality of the politicians coming to the front and the marketability of the politics in the media also strengthened the process which resulted in the intensity of the Prime Minister’s role within the executive branch. Increasing the role of the Prime Minister and governmental central bodies lead to the weakening of the government’s corporative character, and the government’s gaining ground opposed to the Parliament. According to international examples in significant western European parliamentary democracies (for example: United Kingdom: Margaret Thatcher and Tony Blair, Italy: Silvio Berlusconi, Sweden: Göran Persson) the role of the Prime Minister (as the head of the government) also appreciably strengthened. Beside this attitude, the outsourcing of each governmental function (good governance), the sufficiency of state’s strengthening (good government), and making governmental public services available electronically (e-government) are also under hard discussion. The aim of this paper is to review — based on new constitutional and other changes of public law — the centralization of the head of the Hungarian government; the strengthening of the ‘chancellor-principle’ by the Hungarian Fundamental Law; and the process that lead to the Prime Minister’s Office becoming ‘top chancery’. The paper takes into consideration the transformation of the separation of powers’ system and the strengthening of the Prime Minister’s role within the executive branch and its affect on the Hungarian administrative system.

Mapping and Explaining Parliamentary Rule Changes in Europe: A Research Program

We outline a comprehensive research program on institutional reforms in European parliaments. Original data show that parliamentary rules in Western European parliaments have been changed frequently and massively during the period from 1945 to 2010 suggesting that actors use institutional reforms as a distinct strategy to pursue their substantive goals. We discuss how institutional instability affects existing theoretical and empirical arguments about institutional effects. Furthermore, we present four ideal‐typical approaches to analyzing rule changes, present new software tools for identifying and coding changes in large text corpora, and demonstrate their usefulness for valid measurement of the overall change between subsequent text versions.

From Loose Alliances to Professional Political Players: How Swiss Party Groups Changed

AbstractSwiss parliamentary party groups have undergone a process of professionalization over the course of the last few decades. Swiss parties increasingly resemble party groups in established and more professionalized Western European parliamentary systems. Party unity has increased and party leaderships have started using instruments to strengthen party unity, in view of which party group members increasingly accept behavioural rules and norms. Our analysis suggests that Swiss parties have professionalized over the course of the last thirty years, and we demonstrate that this change has resulted from the ideological polarization in the Swiss political landscape, and conscious effort on the part of Swiss party group leaders. Thus, we contribute to the on‐going debate about party change and the question of what drives the development of parties. The development of the Swiss parties is documented using data from three parliamentary surveys from the last thirty years, and two interview rounds with party group leaders, their staff and political experts.

The Centralisation of Parliamentary Policy Statements in Western European Parliaments

Parliamentarians and their party groups can employ many different instruments to communicate policy statements to their electorate (debates in plenary, presentations of committee reports, oral questions, written questions, and interpellations). Therefore, the design of these instruments should be analysed in one common framework. This paper seeks to provide a first step towards this goal by mapping and explaining the centralisation of parliamentary policy statements in all western European countries with a parliamentary system. It is argued that, on a theoretical level, there are two different causes for a stronger or weaker centralisation of the instruments of parliamentary policy statements: the electoral connection and efficiency. Empirically, it is shown that there are striking differences in centralisation both within and between countries which are worth exploring further. Moreover, the results of the statistical models suggest that the electoral connection is the driving factor behind the centralisation of the instruments of parliamentary policy statements.

The Institutional Power of Western European Parliaments: A Multidimensional Analysis

Parliaments are more than legislative bodies. However, we lack an adequate understanding of the theoretical relationship between different facets of parliamentary activity or ‘parliamentary functions’. Relying on the principal–agent framework, this article argues theoretically that parliamentary power is a multidimensional concept comprising three distinct mechanisms to ensure policy outputs in line with the collective preferences of parliaments: direct influence on policymaking, the ex ante selection of external officeholders, and the ex post control of the cabinet. These mechanisms mirror the classic legislative, electoral, and control functions of parliaments. Empirically, the paper uses factor analysis of newly developed indicators for electoral powers and established measures of legislative and control resources to show that the institutional powers of 15 Western European parliaments comprise four distinct dimensions. These dimensions match the three theoretically derived mechanisms with committee power as an additional factor. Locating the 15 parliaments in this multidimensional space of parliamentary powers demonstrates that classifications based solely on lawmaking lead to biased assessments of parliamentary strength and weakness. Instead, the paper provides a more nuanced picture of the ways in which Western European parliaments can influence policymaking under the conditions of delegation.

Who gets what in coalition governments? Predictors of portfolio allocation in parliamentary democracies

Ministerial portfolios are the most obvious payoffs for parties entering a governing coalition in parliamentary democracies. This renders the bargaining over portfolios an important phase of the government formation process. The question of ‘who gets what, and why?’ in terms of ministerial remits has not yet received much attention by coalition or party scholars. This article focuses on this qualitative aspect of portfolio allocation and uses a new comparative dataset to evaluate a number of hypotheses that can be drawn from the literature. The main hypothesis is that parties which, in their election manifestos, emphasise themes corresponding to the policy remit of specific cabinet portfolios are more likely to obtain control over these portfolios. The results show that policy saliency is indeed an important predictor of portfolio allocation in postwar Western European parliamentary democracies. (Less)

Парламентарні монархії Західної Європи як різновид політичного режиму: досвід для України

Парламентарні монархії Західної Європи як різновид політичного режиму: досвід для України