Electoral Responsiveness, Legislative Institutions, and Government Policy in Parliamentary Democracies

2015 ◽  
Author(s):  
Lanny W. Martin ◽  
Georg Vanberg
Keyword(s):  
Government Policy ◽  
Parliamentary Democracies ◽  
Legislative Institutions

Coalition Policymaking and Legislative Review

2005 ◽  
Vol 99 (1) ◽  
pp. 93-106 ◽  
Author(s):  
LANNY W. MARTIN ◽  
GEORG VANBERG
Keyword(s):  
Agency Problems ◽  
Coalition Government ◽  
Parliamentary Democracies ◽  
Legislative Review ◽  
Institutional Mechanism ◽  
Legislative Institutions

Political scientists know remarkably little about the extent to which legislatures are able to influence policymaking in parliamentary democracies. In this article, we focus on the influence of legislative institutions in periods of coalition government. We show that multiparty governments are plagued by “agency” problems created by delegation to cabinet ministers that increase in severity on issues that divide the coalition. We also argue that the process of legislative review presents an important—but understudied—institutional opportunity for coalition partners to overcome these tensions. We evaluate our argument using original legislative data on over 300 government bills collected from two parliamentary democracies. The central implication of our findings is that legislatures play a more important role in parliamentary democracies than is usually appreciated by providing a key institutional mechanism that allows coalition partners with divergent preferences to govern successfully.

Committee Chairs and Legislative Review in Parliamentary Democracies

2017 ◽  
Vol 49 (2) ◽  
pp. 785-797 ◽  
Author(s):  
David Fortunato ◽  
Lanny W. Martin ◽  
Georg Vanberg
Keyword(s):  
Government Policy ◽  
Parliamentary Democracies ◽  
Parliamentary Systems ◽  
The Impact ◽  
Policy Proposals ◽  
Legislative Review ◽  
Opposition Parties

Recent research on parliamentary institutions has demonstrated that legislatures featuring strong committees play an important role in shaping government policy. However, the impact of the legislators who lead these committees – committee chairs – is poorly understood. This study provides the first examination of whether the partisan control of committee chairs in parliamentary systems has a systematic impact on legislative scrutiny. The article argues that committee chairs can, in principle, use their significant agenda powers to serve two purposes: providing opposition parties with a greater ability to scrutinize government policy proposals, and enabling government parties to better police one another. Analyzing the legislative histories of 1,100 government bills in three parliamentary democracies, the study finds that control of committee chairs significantly strengthens the ability of opposition parties to engage in legislative review. The analysis also suggests that government parties’ ability to monitor their coalition allies does not depend on control of committee chairs.

scholarly journals Agenda Control and Timing of Bill Initiation: A Temporal Perspective on Coalition Governance in Parliamentary Democracies

2021 ◽  
pp. 1-18
Author(s):  
THOMAS KÖNIG ◽  
NICK LIN ◽  
XIAO LU ◽  
THIAGO N. SILVA ◽  
NIKOLETA YORDANOVA ◽  
...  
Keyword(s):  
Government Policy ◽  
Policy Making ◽  
Democratic Governance ◽  
Temporal Constraints ◽  
Agenda Control ◽  
Temporal Perspective ◽  
Parliamentary Democracies ◽  
Coalition Governments ◽  
Circular Regression ◽  
Using Data

Although democratic governance imposes temporal constraints, the timing of government policy making activities such as bill initiation is still poorly understood. This holds especially under coalition governments, in which government bills need to find approval by a partner party in parliament. We propose a dynamic temporal perspective in which ministers do not know whether they face a cooperative or competitive partner at the beginning of a term, but they learn this over time and use their agenda control to time further bill initiation in response. A circular regression analysis using data on more than 25,000 government bills from 11 parliamentary democracies over 30 years supports this temporal perspective, showing that ministers initiate bills later in the term when their previous bills have experienced greater scrutiny. Ministers further delay bill initiation when coalition parties’ incentives to deviate from compromise increase and when they have less power to constrain their bills’ scrutiny.

The ‘Modernisation’ of Scotland and its Impact on Glasgow, 1955–1979: ‘Unwanted Side Effects’ and Vulnerabilities

2016 ◽  
Vol 25 (3) ◽  
pp. 294-316 ◽  
Author(s):  
Chik Collins ◽  
Ian Levitt
Keyword(s):  
Side Effects ◽  
Government Policy ◽  
Regional Policy ◽  
Excess Mortality ◽  
Policy Agenda ◽  
Policy Makers ◽  
Uk Government ◽  
1960S And 1970S ◽  
The 1960S ◽  
The Impact

This article reports findings of research into the far-reaching plan to ‘modernise’ the Scottish economy, which emerged from the mid-late 1950s and was formally adopted by government in the early 1960s. It shows the growing awareness amongst policy-makers from the mid-1960s as to the profoundly deleterious effects the implementation of the plan was having on Glasgow. By 1971 these effects were understood to be substantial with likely severe consequences for the future. Nonetheless, there was no proportionate adjustment to the regional policy which was creating these understood ‘unwanted’ outcomes, even when such was proposed by the Secretary of State for Scotland. After presenting these findings, the paper offers some consideration as to their relevance to the task of accounting for Glasgow's ‘excess mortality’. It is suggested that regional policy can be seen to have contributed to the accumulation of ‘vulnerabilities’, particularly in Glasgow but also more widely in Scotland, during the 1960s and 1970s, and that the impact of the post-1979 UK government policy agenda on these vulnerabilities is likely to have been salient in the increase in ‘excess mortality’ evident in subsequent years.

Reasons for the Onset of the Uniat Clergy’s Movement Towards Orthodoxy in the Russian Empire in the Beginning of the 19th Century

2020 ◽  
Vol 58 ◽  
pp. 293-317
Author(s):  
Protopriest Alexander Romanchuk
Keyword(s):  
19Th Century ◽  
Government Policy ◽  
Catholic Church ◽  
Russian Empire ◽  
Latin Church ◽  
The Government ◽  
The Russian Empire ◽  
In The Beginning ◽  
Church Service ◽  
The 19Th Century

The article studies the system of pre-conditions that caused the onset of the uniat clergy’s movement towards Orthodoxy in the Russian Empire in the beginning of the 19th century. The author comes to the conclusion that the tendency of the uniat clergy going back to Orthodoxy was the result of certain historic conditions, such as: 1) constant changes in the government policy during the reign of Emperor Pavel I and Emperor Alexander I; 2) increasing latinization of the uniat church service after 1797 and Latin proselytism that were the result of the distrust of the uniats on the part of Roman curia and representatives of Polish Catholic Church of Latin church service; 3) ecclesiastical contradictions made at the Brest Church Union conclusion; 4) division of the uniat clergy into discordant groups and the increase of their opposition to each other on the issue of latinization in the first decades of the 19th century. The combination of those conditions was a unique phenomenon that never repeated itself anywhere.

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