Veto player theory generates predictions about governments' capacity for policy change. Due to the difficulty of identifying significant laws needed to change the policy status quo, evidence about governments' ability to change policy has been mostly provided for a limited number of reforms and single-country studies. To evaluate the predictive power of veto player theory for policy making across time, policy areas and countries, a dataset was gathered that incorporates about 5,600 important government reform measures in the areas of social, labour, economic and taxation policy undertaken in 13 Western European countries from the mid-1980s until the mid-2000s. Veto player theory is applied in a combined model with other central theoretical expectations on policy change derived from political economy (crisis-driven policy change) and partisan theory (ideology-driven policy change). Robust support is found that governments introduce more reform measures when economic conditions are poor and when the government is positioned further away from the policy status quo. No empirical support is found for predictions of veto player theory in its pure form, where no differentiation between government types is made. However, the findings provide support for the veto player theory in the special case of minimal winning cabinets, where the support of all government parties is sufficient (in contrast to minority cabinets) and necessary (in contrast to oversized cabinets) for policy change. In particular, it is found that in minimal winning cabinets the ideological distance between the extreme government parties significantly decreases the government's ability to introduce reforms. These findings improve our understanding of reform making in parliamentary democracies and highlight important issues and open questions for future applications and tests of the veto player theory.
One reason why people avoid using social media to express their opinions is to avert social sanctions as proposed by the spiral of silence theory. We here elaborate on individual-level sensitivity to social rejection in relation to voicing political opinions on social media sites. Given the uncertainty about sharing political views in social media, and the fact that social acceptance, or rejection, can be easily communicated through, for instance, likes, or a lack of likes, we argue that rejection sensitive individuals are less likely to share political information in social media. Combining an analysis of unique survey data on psychological characteristics and online political activity with focus group interviews with Swedish youth supports our argument, showing that rejection sensitive individuals are less inclined to engage politically in social media. The results extend on previous research by establishing the role of rejection sensitivity in political engagement in social media.
Engaging in political protests are becoming increasingly common, and considering the potential, individual, costs and the low probability of affecting the political outcome, it is necessary to understand the motivations behind such actions. The desire to be part of a social group is deeply rooted in human nature, and previous research proposes that the groups one belongs to may influence the decision to engage in protests. We build on this research and suggest that social exclusion, individual fear of exclusion and need to belong interact in explaining who is likely to become engaged. In two studies, one natural experiment and one lab-experiment, we show that social exclusion increase willingness to participate in protests for individuals high in both rejection sensitivity and need to belong. We conclude that contextual factors, such as exclusion or marginalization should be considered in relation to individual level personality factors when explaining who is likely to become engaged in political protests. These results are important since they suggest that some people engage in politics simply due to social reasons and are less ideologically motivated.
Much of identity formation processes nowadays takes place online, indicating that intergroup differentiation may be found in online communities. This paper focuses on identity formation processes in an open online xenophobic, anti-immigrant, discussion forum. Open discussion forums provide an excellent opportunity to investigate open interactions that may reveal how identity is formed and how individual users are influenced by other users. Using computational text analysis and Linguistic Inquiry Word Count (LIWC), our results show that new users change from an individual identification to a group identification over time as indicated by a decrease in the use of "I" and increase in the use of "we". The analyses also show increased use of "they" indicating intergroup differentiation. Moreover, the linguistic style of new users became more similar to that of the overall forum over time. Further, the emotional content decreased over time. The results indicate that new users on a forum create a collective identity with the other users and adapt to them linguistically.
Why do people engage in collective actions, such as demonstrations? We suggest that intentions to engage in protest activities come from the perception that the action is an efficient way to affect policy but is also dependent upon the level of others' engagement. Specifically, lower support should spur intentions to engage if the individual believes that the collective act is an efficient means to bring about social change. In two experiments, manipulating social support, efficacy increased intentions to participate in collective actions but mainly for participants with low social support (Experiments 1 and 2). In Experiment 3, manipulating efficacy, high social support was related to decreased intentions to engage. However, in this study, social support did not interact with efficacy.
Are female politicians less likely to be promoted to specific ministerial posts, and is it important for them to toe the party line? This article focuses on whether the selection of ministers has a gender-specific dimension. Building on role congruity theory and research showing that female and male politicians are evaluated in a different manner in leadership positions, we present some original hypotheses. For example, we hypothesize that female politicians are less likely to be appointed to cabinet when they have held gender-incongruent committee positions in parliament. We also hypothesize that women are less likely to be appointed to cabinet posts when they have previously deviated from the party line. In an empirical analysis of Swedish ministerial appointments in six cabinets, we find that female politicians were less likely to be appointed to cabinet posts when they have held positions in 'masculine' parliamentary committees and when they deviated from the party line in their parliamentary speeches. These results suggest that women are more harshly judged when holding positions that are not in line with traditional gender stereotypes and have important implications for our understanding of gender and political leadership.
It is a human fundamental to desire to be valued, loved and respected - to be significant. Social exclusion induce significance loss which elicits a 'quest for significance' - the search for opportunities to re-gain significance. The present article establishes this relation in a laboratory experiment (N = 71, mean age = 28, SD = 10.42, 65% women, 35% men), showing that socially excluded individuals who are subsequently included by a radical group, adapt their attitudes in line with this group. We use a modified version of the well-known paradigm 'Cyberball' to elicit the quest for significance. The results show that when experiencing social exclusion, highly rejection sensitive individuals tend to adapt to the radical group's opinions. The results are important, highlighting a mechanism in the radicalization process and the importance of taking social factors into account in this process.
Because the importance of coalition formation has been long established, there is no shortage of ideas explaining and predicting coalition outcomes. However, one of the problems for contemporary coalition research is that most coalition theories have been thoroughly tested on the same data on national governments that have formed in the West European postwar democracies. This stresses the need for finding new data that can increase our ability to test and refine coalition theories. This article uses unique elite survey data from an investigation conducted among councilors in a large sample of local authorities in Sweden to test hypotheses on coalition formation. Another problem in coalition research is that the large number of coalition hypotheses have not been tested extensively using multivariate models that provide sufficient controls. By using a methodological approach that models government formation as a discrete choice between potential governments, we can draw conclusions about the relative importance of different types of variables. The results found in this analysis indicate that we have to pay attention to both traditional variables, such as size and policy, and institutional variables if our aim is to explain and predict coalition formation.
Traditional theories about government formation in parliamentary democracies are based on the assumption that parties can be characterized as unitary actors. Many authors have questioned the soundness of this assumption. The problem with keeping it is that we may miss important factors explaining why certain coalitions form if we do not consider the role of intra-party politics. In this article, I evaluate two hypotheses drawn from a discussion about intra-party politics and coalition formation, hypotheses stating that, internally democratic parties and factionalized parties are less likely to get into government. Using different methods of evaluating coalition theories on data from Swedish local government, I find support for both hypotheses. It is concluded that we should consider the internal workings of parties when explaining and predicting coalition formation.
Parliamentary debates and the discussion on different law proposals are a key part of the process of policy making. We argue in this article that a high economic problem pressure in the region an MP represents will affect the MP's legislative speechmaking. We also hypothesise that parties tend to coordinate their speakers in parliament to display a cohesive profile in the domain of labour, employment and immigration issues, i.e., in issue areas which reflect redistributive policies that are highly salient for almost all parties. We evaluate our expectations based on an analysis of Swedish parliamentary debates on labour, employment and immigration policy during the period between 1994 and 2014. The findings show that parliamentary parties coordinate speechmaking: Those MPs who represent economically troubled districts are less likely to appear in plenary debates, as well as MPs who deviate programmatically from the party line.
Parliamentary debates provide an arena where Members of Parliament (MPs) present, challenge, or defend public policies. However, the "plenary bottleneck" allows the party leadership to decide who participates in a debate. We argue that in this decision the timing of a debate matters: in proximity of elections, the leadership should be concerned with maintaining its brand name and therefore restrict floor access, in particular if the debate is salient for the respective party. We evaluate our hypotheses in a cross-country study drawing on a novel data set covering all speeches given during one or two legislative terms in six European parliaments. We find that the electoral cycle matters for the distribution of speaking time: Party leaders do restrict parliamentary speechmaking to a smaller number of MPs at the end of the term. This has important implications for our understanding of parliaments as an electoral arena and for our understanding of intraparty politics.
How do political parties arrive at their policy positions? We conceptualize position formation in federalist countries as an intra-party bargaining process in which subnational parties compete with each other in an attempt to get their own positions into their national party manifesto. Drawing on theories about inter-party bargaining over ministerial portfolios, we hypothesize that the bargaining success of subnational parties depends on their parliamentary strength. We evaluate our hypotheses based on a comprehensive dataset on policy positions of national and subnational parties in Germany from 1990 until 2009. Our results show that German subnational parties that are powerful in the second parliamentary chamber (Bundesrat) are particularly successful in shaping the manifesto of their national party. The findings have important implications for our understanding of intra-party politics and position formation within political parties in Germany more specifically and federalist countries more generally.
Given the increasingly polarized debates in many modern democracies over migration and integration, the behaviour of members of parliament (MPs) with a migrant background has important implications for patterns of representation. Drawing on role congruity theory, we hypothesize that MPs with a migrant background deliver more legislative speeches in debates that are of interest for citizens with a migrant background. The findings, which are based on speeches delivered in the German Bundestag between 2009 and 2013, indicate that MPs of immigrant origin, in particular those MPs who have a "visible" migrant background, deliver significantly more speeches in debates focusing on civil rights. We also find that migrant MPs who are elected via the party list, as opposed to MPs who are directly elected in a district, are more likely to speak in debates on citizen and minority rights, suggesting that the parliamentary party leadership strategically selects migrant MPs as speakers in certain parliamentary debates.
Does it matter which electoral districts Members of Parliament (MPs) represent when participating in parliamentary debates? We suggest that the party leadership, in particular in governing parties, will try to keep MPs off the floor if they come from regions with economic problems, because such MPs are more likely to deviate from the party line. This should be especially likely when MPs are directly elected and have incentives to create a personal platform. The characteristics of the German electoral system allow for evaluating this argument. By analysing 9824 speeches in Bundestag debates focusing on economic issues and 8357 speeches held in debates on societal, foreign and education policy, we find support for our hypotheses that directly elected MPs deliver significantly fewer speeches in economic debates the worse the economic situation is in the district they represent. However, there is no clear pattern when differentiating between MPs from the government or opposition camp in terms of the number of delivered speeches in parliamentary debates.
Do female representatives participate less often in legislative debates, and does it matter which topic is debated? Drawing on the role incongruity theory, we hypothesise that women take the parliamentary floor less often because of the gender stereotypes that are likely to guide the behaviour of party representatives. Such underrepresentation is less likely to be present when debates are dealing with policy areas that can be characterised as feminine. By referring to critical mass theory, we expect women to participate less in debates if they are members of parties with fewer female representatives. The results of an analysis of speechmaking among members of parliament in seven European countries show that female members of parliament are less represented in legislative debates, especially when debates deal with topics that can be characterised as masculine. Furthermore, the effect of gender on speechmaking clearly varies across parties. However, the pattern does not follow the logic derived from critical mass theory. Instead, female members of parliament take the floor less often when they are members of parties with many female representatives.
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.
Legislative speeches are an important instrument for parties and members of parliament (MPs) to signal their positions and priorities. This raises the question of who speaks when. We evaluate whether a MP's presence on the floor depends on his or her gender. We hypothesize that female MPs give in general less speeches in parliament and that this pattern results from debates dealing with "harder" policy issues. Our expectations are supported when analyzing a new data set containing information on the number and content of speeches given in the Swedish Riksdag between 2002 and 2010.
Back H., Debus M., Muller J. and Back H. Regional government formation in varying multilevel contexts: a comparison of eight European countries, Regional Studies. Although governance in multilevel settings has become a prominent research field in political science, there are few comparative studies that focus on explaining sub-national coalition outcomes in such settings. This paper sets out to study regional government formation in eight European countries and it builds on a dataset that covers information on the policy preferences of parties drawn from regional election manifestos. The results show that parties at the regional level are likely to form congruent coalitions, that is, copying' the patterns of national government formation, and that they are more likely to do so in specific regional contexts.
This study focuses on the allocation of politicians to cabinet offices in different institutional settings. We argue that cabinet ministers are appointed with the aim of minimizing the policy distance to the most important principal, which could be the Prime Minister, the coalition, or the individual parties that form the coalition. We advance this field of research by performing a comparative analysis of different coalition systems. We evaluate our hypotheses by estimating the policy positions of Austrian, German and Swedish politicians on the basis of a computerized content analysis of their speeches given in parliament. The results provide support for our argument and show that the policy distance towards the dominant principal is important for becoming a cabinet member.
Research in public policy and political economy has provided many insights in the evolution of public resistance against genetically modified organisms (GMOs) in the last two decades. But how does the partisan composition of a government, its programmatic orientation and the allocation of cabinet offices affect policy making in this specific area? We argue that the regulation of GMOs is determined by the ideological orientation of governments and the presence of parties with a specific ideological background in the cabinet. In addition, we hypothesize that the parties' control over relevant cabinet posts matter for GMO regulation. We test our hypotheses by using an innovative dataset that contains information on biotechnology regulation outputs of European governments in the time period from 1996 until 2013, the partisan composition and policy-area specific positions of governments, and the party affiliation of key cabinet actors. The results show that the presence of a Christian democratic party in a cabinet increases the chances of a ban on biotech crops, in particular if it controls the Ministry of the Environment.
A standard conclusion of theorists who model bargaining as a non-cooperative game is that the party designated to make the first move-the formateur party-will determine the bargaining outcome. Most empirical studies of parliamentary coalition formation have paid surprisingly little attention to the formation process. In this paper we model government formation as a two-stage unordered discrete choice problem that better reflects this process. The first step involves the selection of a formateur party, and the second involves the choice of partners by the predicted formateur. We evaluate several hypotheses for the two stages, using a data set of all cabinets formed in the Western European countries from 1970 to 2006. In our analyses of formateur selection, we find that party size is clearly the dominant feature. In the second stage, we show that when predicting government composition it is fruitful to add information drawn from a first stage analysis.
Current research on coalition formation is plagued by two serious problems. First, we cannot predict more than about one-third of the Western European governments, and, second, we do not have a good understanding of the causal mechanisms that explain the effects found in large-n coalition studies. This article illustrates that by combining statistical and case study analyses we can solve these problems. Since statistical analyses are well equipped for measuring and isolating effects, we argue that a coalition study should start with such an analysis. Predictions made in this analysis are then used to select cases. In order to study the mechanisms underlying effects found in large-n coalition studies, we argue for selecting cases that are predicted, and then applying the method of process verification. In order to find new explanatory variables, we argue for selecting cases that are deviant, and then applying the method of process induction. Substantive results of our analysis for coalition theory point to the importance of party strategies based on parties' past experiences, which aim at curtailing present and future costs of competing and governing with other parties.
In this article, we address recent claims that executive legislative relations in parliamentary democracies are undergoing important changes owing to either a 'presidentialization' or a 'Europeanization' of domestic political systems. Therefore, we test empirically whether parliamentary democracies are indeed experiencing changes in executive-legislative relations and whether these developments can, in part, be explained by an increase in European integration. Using data on ministerial selection in Swedish cabinets during the years 1952-2006, we find that there appears to be a slight tendency towards 'presidentialization', which is indicated by a decrease in ministers with a parliamentary background being appointed, and that there exists some support for the notion that Sweden's political and economic integration into the European Union is part of the explanation for this change.
In this article we probe the effect of democratization on the state's administrative capacity. Using time-series cross-section data, we find a curvilinear (J-shaped) relationship between the two traits. The effect of democracy on state capacity is negative at low values of democracy, nonexistent at median values, and strongly positive at high democracy levels. This is confirmed under demanding statistical tests. The curvilinear relationship is due, we argue, to the combined effect of two forms of steering and control; one exercised from above, the other from below. In strongly authoritarian states, a satisfactory measure of control from above can at times be accomplished. Control from below is best achieved when democratic institutions are fully installed and are accompanied by a broad array of societal resources. Looking at two resource measures, press circulation and electoral participation, we find that these, combined with democracy, enhance state administrative capacity.
This chapter focuses on investigating various background features of individual ministers in post-WWII Sweden, specifically on whether ministers have a ‘political insider’ background, or whether they are better characterized as being ‘outsiders’ or ‘experts’. We analyse the background of ministers as a response to several claims made in the previous literature, for example, some scholars suggest that ministers with an ‘outsider’, or non-political background are more likely to be appointed as European integration increases, whereas other scholars focus on the effects of economic conditions, suggesting that ‘technocrats’ are more likely to be appointed during economic crises. On average, freshman ministers in Sweden tend to have a fairly solid political background. A majority of ministers appointed for the first time have a background as members of the Swedish Riksdag or as members of a local parliament. Taken together, evidence from Sweden suggests a continued strong role for politically experienced ministers. The Swedish parliamentary system allows for the appointment of political outsiders, not least during the European economic and financial crisis but the main pattern still is that persons appointed as ministers have a solid political background before taking office.
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.
Over 30 years ago, Eric Browne and Mark Franklin demonstrated that parties in a coalition tend to receive portfolio payoffs in almost perfect proportionality to their seat share. Even though this result has been confirmed in several studies, few researchers have asked what the underlying mechanism is that explains why parties receive a proportional payoff. The aim of this paper is to investigate the causal mechanism linking party size and portfolio payoffs. To fulfil this aim, a small-n analysis is performed. By analysing the predictions from a statistical analysis of all post-war coalition governments in 14 Western European countries, two predicted cases are selected, the coalitions that formed after the 1976 Swedish election and the 1994 German election. In these case studies two hypotheses are evaluated: that the proportional distribution of ministerial posts is the result of a social norm, and that parties obtain payoffs according to their bargaining strength. The results give no support to the social norm hypothesis. Instead, it is suggested that proportionality serves as a bargaining convention for the actors involved, thus rendering proportional payoffs more likely.
It is commonly assumed that European integration empowers prime ministers at the expense of cabinet ministers and parliamentary actors. This article follows the suggestion that an increase in cabinet reshuffles indicates power shifts in favour of the PM, and studies reshuffles in two countries that have been involved very differently in the process of European integration, Germany and Sweden. It hypothesises that if European integration empowers the PM, the PM will employ cabinet reshuffles more often. By implication, as integration increases, (1) ministerial reshuffles should become more frequent, and (2) political insiders and ministers holding important portfolios should be more likely to be dismissed. The results found in an event history analysis show that EU integration leads to an increase of turnover when looking at Swedish post-war cabinets, whereas no such effect is found for German cabinets. These results are in line with the idea that a differential impact of Europe on intra-executive relations should be expected.
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.