Download Office and policy payoffs in coalition governments Marc Debus

Office and policy payoffs in coalition
governments
Marc Debus
Presentation by:
Jacopo Gandin
Research questions
Which parties in a multiparty system have to be
considered as key players in the coalition- building
game?
And, if they exist:
Can we make predictions about office and policy
payoffs for these parties in the government
formation?
Definitions
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Key parties are defined by many coalition theories
having superior powers in terms of coalition
formation.
Dominant player (Peleg 1981): a party that should
be included in the government because of its
parliamentary seat strenght.
Central player (van Deemen 1991; van Roozendaal
1993): a party that holds a pivotal position due to
the inclusion of median legislator.
Models
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The author uses two models, drawn from the
spatial theory of voting tradition, to define key
actors in the coalition building process.
The first is the portfolio allocation model (Laver &
Shepsle 1990), assuming that every party in the
coalition receives a portfolio according to its own
issue salience.
The second is the political heart model (Schofield
1986), where key parties are supposed to be the
parties bounding the “heart” (space delimited by
the medians.
Theories of Coalition Politics
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A starting point can be to analyse the motivation
for a party to put itself in coalition.
The first approach is called office- orientated, and
takes into account as a variable only party
parliamentary seat strenght.
The second is the policy- orientated approach,
considering party position before and after
elections in order to define their
multidimensional programmatic position.
Portfolio allocation
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This approach is based on the idea of ministerial
government. Each party tries to get a minister in
the issue(s)that it considers salient.Who gets a
portfolio can be the policy setter with regard to
that issue.
A government can be only formed by strong or
very strong parties, that, according to Laver &
Shepsle definition: a strong party is present with
at least one minister in all possible coalitions
preferred by every actor to the status quo.
Political heart
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We have to take into account the distinction
between dominant and peripheral parties.
Dominant parties must be members of every
possible government.
Dominant: a party located at the core of the
intercepts between all medians. If a dominant party
does not exists, the only possible coalitions are
formed by parties located at the bound of the core.
Example: Belgium 1978- only possible coalitions
according to the core: PSB-PVV, PSB-CVP and CVPPVV.
Institutional and behavioural
constraints
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That hypotesis was not verified in the reality: the
coalition in Belgium 1978 was CVP-PSB-FDF-VU.
That was because institutional rules ensured equal
representation to Flemish and Walloon
components, forcing FDF (Walloon) and VU
(Flemish), to be included in the coalition.
In this case, institutions represent a limit to the
spatial theory of voting, as in other cases
behavioural aspects do (ex. Pre- electoral
agreements- Germany 2005: FDP with CDU and w/o
SPD- SPD and Greens w/o Die Linke).
Effects of these constraints
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There are some differences among actors during
the coalition building process. Parties that don't
reject any a priori coalition would get a higher
payoff in the game than parties avoiding some
particular coalition possibililities.
In the latter case they break the core and modify
the political heart, favouring parties standing inside
the new asset, that should increase their blackmail
potential.
Behavioural constraints can strongly modified each
party's coalition potential.
Case selection
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Selected cases: Austria 1983- 2002, Belgium 19852003, Ireland 1982- 2oo2, Germany 1980- 2002, the
Netherlands 1977- 2003.
Similarities:
1) classifiable by Laver & Schofield typology (1998)
about party system: unipolar, bipolar or
multipolar.
2) frequent a priori coalition statements and alliance
rejection.
Method
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Ideological competition is based on conflicts in
economic and social policy, referring to Laver &
Hunt data (1992).
A third country- specific dimension is included:
Austria, Germany, the Netherlands: foreign policy
Belgium: decentralization
Ireland: position about Northern Ireland
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In this way the author checks the presence of
possible modified heart parties.
Method
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Since expert surveys do not make difference
between party and government position, the
author refers to some policy documents: the
coalition agreements contained in the election
manifestos.
Party ideology is weighted both on position and on
issue saliency. Values are assigned with the
wordscore method.
To evaluate pre- electoral statements the author
analyses electoral campaigns, considering only
potential coalitions.
Findings
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The differences between original and modified
solutions are quite relevant, either by using strong
party or political heart model.
Strong party model does not seems to fit very well:
the modified solution corrects the original one in 8
of 28 cases. In 7/28 cases the model gives a wrong
prediction.
Original political heart model often includes an
extremely wide range of parties; after the
correction every time the resulting party is included
in the coalition
Findings
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In 10/39 cases all coalition members are exactly
predicted by the modified political heart model.
Just in 2 cases a party that was not predicted by
any model appears in the coalition: they are
Belgium 1988 and Ireland 1994, where peripheral
parties were included in the coalition.
Behavioural reasons stand at the basis of the
correction of FPOE strong party role in 1994: OEVP
in that year ruled out any alliance with the liberal
formation, unlike 1990 and 1995.
What means to be a key player?
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A key player should be able to get a greater
number of offices in government than its actual
parliamentary seat share.
Furthermore, a key party should be closer to its
programmatic position mentioned in the coalition
agreement.
The latter expectation is tested against the
assumption that large parties are more likely to
achieve their policy goals.
Testing the hypoteses
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The author tests his hypoteses by means of the
formula pointing out the Euclidean distance
between programmatic positions contained in a
coalition agreement and that of a strong
party,weighted by issue salience.
FORMULA
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He compares this measure with intra- coalition
strenght (measure by % of parliamentary seat
share) and share of captured offices.
Office and policy findings
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According to the author,using modified strong
party method the first hypotesis is weakly
confirmed: only in 4/21 cases a strong party gets a
higher number of offices than its intra- coalition
strenght.
The correlation seems to be stronger with regard
to the second hypotesis: if consider it, we
observe that in 14 cases over 21 key parties remain
closer to their programmatic platforms.
Office and policy findings
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The modified political heart method seems to
provide similar outcomes: with regard to the first
hypotesis, 8/24 cases (33.3%) get a higher payoffs
than their intra- coalition strenght.
The second hypotesis on the contrary is slightly
confirmed: 83.3 % of cases (20/24) show how we
can argue with good approximation that be a key
party means the possibility to remain close to the
political position expressed at the moment of
coalition agreement.
Conclusions
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The author states that by method of modified
strong party (portfolio allocation) we can only
find out the existance of strong parties (as in 28
over 39 cases happens).
By the modified political heart system, we can
generalize about the partisan composition of next
government, and observe how this method is
reliable for what concerns policy payoffs, less for
office payoffs predictions.