Comparative Constitutional Design of Parliamentary Democracies

政治制度研究最近经历了政治经济学和比较政治学的复兴。一类有趣的政治机构是多党议会民主政体，在那里，行政机关的授权来自立法机关，并对立法机关负有政治责任。议会民主政体在其宪法中规定其政府如何形成和终止的具体规则方面有所不同。在观察到的政府组建进程的持续时间、由这些进程产生的政府联盟的类型(即少数派、最小赢家或盈余)和规模以及政府的相对持久性方面，议会民主国家也有系统地不同。这些观察提出了以下重要问题：体质特征能解释这些观察到的差异吗？如果是这样的话，从数量上讲，哪些机构对联合政府的类型和稳定性最重要？提供这些问题的答案对于现代议会民主国家的宪法设计(或重新设计)非常重要，并具有重大的经济意义。我们的研究目标是建立一个统一的理论和实证框架，以调查一大类机构对议会民主国家联合政府行为的影响。我们的方法包括指定一个政府组建和解散的讨价还价模型，估计模型的参数，评估模型对数据关键特征的解释能力，然后使用估计的结构模型进行比较宪法设计的实验。特别是，我们拟议的研究将侧重于议会结构，特别是两美制，以及政府政策，特别是预算进程。

The study of political institutions has recently experienced a renaissance in political economy and comparative politics. An interesting class of political institutions are multi-party parliamentary democracies, where the executive derives its mandate from and is politically responsible to the legislature. Parliamentary democracies differ with respect to the specific rules in their constitutions that prescribe how their governments form and terminate. Parliamentary democracies also differ systematically with respect to the observed duration of their government formation processes, the type (i.e., minority, minimum winning, or surplus) and size of the government coalitions that result from these processes, and the relative durability of their governments. These observations raise the following important questions: Can constitutional features account for these observed differences? And, if so, which institutions are quantitatively most important for the type and the stability of coalition governments? Providing answers to these questions is very important for the design (or redesign) of constitutions in modern parliamentary democracies and has significant economic implications.The goal of our research is to develop a unified theoretical and empirical framework to investigate the effects of a large class of institutions on the behavior of coalition governments in parliamentary democracies. Our approach consists of specifying a bargaining model of government formation and dissolution, estimating the model's parameters, assessing the ability of the model to account for key features of the data, and then using the estimated structural model to conduct experiments of comparative constitutional design. In particular, our proposed research will focus on the structure of parliament and, in particular, bicameralism and on government policy and, in particular, the budget process.