Coalition Formation and Bargaining in Legislatures

联盟的组建和立法机关的谈判

• 批准号: 8907224
• 负责人: David Austen-Smith
• 金额: $ 2.74万
• 依托单位: University of Rochester
• 依托单位国家: 美国
• 项目类别: Standard Grant
• 财政年份: 1989
• 资助国家: 美国
• 起止时间: 1989-07-01 至 1991-12-31
• 项目状态: 已结题
• 来源: https://www.nsf.gov/awardsearch/showAward?AWD_ID=8907224&HistoricalAwards=false
• 关键词: Coalition; Formation; Bargaining; Legislatures

In all democratic systems, policy outcomes are essentially the product of coalition formation and bargaining within the legislature. After a flurry of basic research on these topics in the 1960's and early 1970's, there has been very little progress in our understanding of the phenomena. However, recent analytical advances in theory have opened up new avenues for productive research. This research focuses on two logically distinct issues. The first concerns the role of uncertainty in legislative bargaining among parties in parliamentary democracies. In earlier work, the investigators explored the consequences of a particular type of bargaining institution when no party in a three-party legislature held a majority of seats. In this institution, the researchers assumed that the largest party was given the first opportunity to form a coalition government, proposing a policy to implement and a distribution of portfolios. If this party failed, then the next largest party was offered a similar opportunity, and so on. The researchers discovered that if there was no uncertainty about parties' objectives and relative evaluations of policy and portfolio, then the largest party would always form a coalition government successfully with the smallest party. Evidently, this does not always happen. One natural way to develop the model further, one which offers the possibility of predicting a richer set of legislative outcomes, is to make the more realistic assumption that not all facets of a party's objectives are known for sure by every other party. This development is the first issue that the investigators are studying under this award. The second issue concerns the role of portfolios in legislative outcomes. In the above referenced work, "portfolios" were characterized simply as perqs of office. Because the investigators assumed that policies had a very simple structure (viz. points on a line), this characterization was sensible. However, real policies are complex and portfolios are essentially allocations of rights and responsibilities for choosing certain aspects of overall policy. Recognizing this, the researchers are studying the strategic properties of a variety of institutions for determining how portfolios are allocated in coalition governments, and what policies they subsequently generate. Preliminary work already reveals that minority governments can occur and be stable under such institutions: hitherto, finding a theoretical model that can predict minority governments has proved elusive.

在所有民主制度中，政策结果本质上是立法机构内联盟形成和讨价还价的产物。 经过 20 世纪 60 年代和 1970 年代初期对这些主题的一系列基础研究后，我们对这些现象的理解几乎没有取得任何进展。 然而，最近理论分析的进展为富有成效的研究开辟了新的途径。 这项研究重点关注两个逻辑上不同的问题。 第一个问题涉及议会民主国家政党之间立法谈判中不确定性的作用。 在早期的工作中，调查人员探讨了当三党立法机构中没有政党占据多数席位时，特定类型的谈判制度的后果。 在这个机构中，研究人员假设最大的政党首先有机会组建联合政府，提出要实施的政策和内阁分配。 如果这个政党失败了，那么下一个最大的政党就会获得类似的机会，依此类推。 研究人员发现，如果政党的目标以及政策和投资组合的相对评估不存在不确定性，那么最大的政党总是能与最小的政党成功组建联合政府。 显然，这并不总是发生。 进一步发展该模型的一种自然方法是做出更现实的假设，即并非一个政党目标的所有方面都为其他政党所确切了解，该模型提供了预测更丰富的立法结果的可能性。 这一进展是研究人员在该奖项下研究的第一个问题。 第二个问题涉及投资组合在立法结果中的作用。 在上述参考文献中，“投资组合”被简单地描述为办公室的津贴。 因为调查人员假设政策具有非常简单的结构（即线上的点），所以这种描述是合理的。 然而，实际政策是复杂的，投资组合本质上是选择总体政策某些方面的权利和责任的分配。 认识到这一点，研究人员正在研究各种机构的战略属性，以确定联合政府中的投资组合如何分配，以及它们随后产生什么政策。 初步工作已经表明，少数派政府可以在这种制度下出现并保持稳定：迄今为止，事实证明，找到一个可以预测少数派政府的理论模型是难以实现的。