Comparative Constitutional Design of Parliamentary Democracies

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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.