Publication Type: Conference Paper/Unpublished Manuscript
Review Method: Peer Reviewed
Abstract: Bawn and Rosenbluth (2006) and Persson, Roland, and Tabellini (2007) examine the difference between coalition governments and single-party government to explain the positive relationship between PR systems and public spending. They find that government spending increases in the number of parties in government. However, their models rely on the questionable assumption, Laver and Shepsle’s ministerial government. Many studies in parliamentary politics have recently cast doubt on the ministerial government model. They show that coalition parties create several mechanisms to circumvent or diminish the ministerial autonomy which may lead to sub-optimal outcome. Following them, I hypothesize that 'tight' coalition agreements and the prime minister will moderate the ministerial autonomy and thus the effect of government fragmentation on government spending. Conducting a time-series-cross-section analysis of 17 Western European countries’ data, I find that the positive effect that the number of parties in government has on central government spending exists only under specific conditions: when a coalition government does not have 'tight' coalition agreements or when the ideological position of the prime minister’s party is left.

Publication Type: Conference Paper/Unpublished Manuscript
Review Method: Peer Reviewed
Abstract: This paper argues that governments formed from post-election coalitions (majority coalitiotn governments in PR systems) and pre-election coalitions (majority parties in SMD systems) aggregate the interests of voters in systematically different ways. We show that the multiple policy dimensional space that emerges from PR rules motivate parties in the government coalition to logroll projects among themselves without internalizing the costs of those projects in the same way that a majoritarian party would be forced to do. The size of government should therefore tend to be larger in PR systems. We further show that, although centrifugal electoral incentives dominate in PR systems, some incentives towards coalescence across groups and across parties exist through the greater likelihood that large parties have in becoming a member of a minimal winning coalition of parties.

Publication Type: Conference Paper/Unpublished Manuscript
Review Method: Peer Reviewed
Abstract: This paper argues that governments formed as transient, post-election coalitions of many parties make systematically different policy choices than single-party governments, even though parties large enough to govern alone obviously represent a coalition of interests. The basis of our argument is our claim that parties externalize costs not borne by their support groups. Larger parties represent more groups and therefore internalize more costs. We develop a model to show that even though groups do better if they are represented by large coalition parties, fragmented party systems result from equilibrium choices with proportional representation. The key prediction is that the size of the public sector should be larger, the more parties in government and the more fragmented the party system. These predictions are tested using data from the 1970s-1990s in 17 European countries. We find that increasing the number of parties in government and increasing the fragmentation of the party system both significantly increase the fraction of GDP accounted for by government spending. The magnitude of the effect is large.

Publication Type: Conference Paper/Unpublished Manuscript
Abstract: The average size of winning coalitions has increased in the United States Senate over time. Recent scholarship attributes this to the adoption of a cloture rule that specified a supermajority for ending debate. In this article I question the validity of this claim. Using data on the passage of landmark legislative enactments, I find that coalition sizes respond largely to partisan institutions and exogenous shifts in the congressional agenda. Further, the treatment of voice votes has an important effect on the degree to which coalition sizes have varied. I find little support for the claim that Rule XXII had a causal effect on the size of winning coalitions.

Publication Type: Conference Paper/Unpublished Manuscript
Review Method: Peer Reviewed
Abstract: The role of ideology in partisan politics cannot be explained without understanding the roots of ideology
itself. I propose a path by which ideological divisions disrupted the party equilibrium of the 1950s and remade parties in ideological terms by the early 1990s. Testing this theory requires an understanding of ideology independent of partisan institutions. I apply an item response model to a sample of articles in leading ideological journals to extract a latent trait of ideology. A hierarchical model of ideal points takes advantage of the known relationship between writers for the same journal to overcome the lack of data on individual writers. The model is applied to data from 1990 and 1970. The space defined is strongly one dimensional, even in the absence of the agenda factors present in a legislature. Future work will extend the analysis back to 1870.