Collaborative Research: Coalition Policymaking and Legislative Review in Parliamentary Democracies

合作研究：议会民主政体中的联盟政策制定和立法审查欧洲的政治与美国的政治有三个区别。首先，个别政党很少赢得立法机构的多数席位。第二，欧洲的议会制度并没有严格地将立法和行政部门分开。要想留任，行政部门(通常称为“政府”或“内阁”)的领导人必须在议会中获得多数支持。第三个特征是前两个特征的直接后果：为了在立法机构中获得必要的多数支持，大多数欧洲政府包括几个同意以“联合政府”形式执政的政党。这个项目考察了联合政府在欧洲政治中扮演的核心角色。其他政治学家已经探讨了联合政府政治的重要方面。例如，我们很清楚哪些政党可能被纳入联盟，我们也非常了解联盟破裂的情况。但关于联合政府如何在成立和终止之间制定政策，我们的认识仍然存在巨大差距。这一差距很大，因为联合政府的政策制定构成了一项挑战：组成联合政府的政党对理想的政策有不同的看法。但联合政府在任何给定的问题上只能采取一项政府政策，因此联合政府要求政党就共同立场达成一致。然而，一旦选定，这种折衷政策必须由对相关政策领域拥有管辖权的内阁大臣实施。因此，参加联合政府的政党经常面临这样一种可能性，即部长们将背离妥协立场，奉行有利于他们的政党、损害其合作伙伴利益的政策。克服寻求共同妥协立场的需要与企图破坏这些妥协所带来的风险之间的紧张关系，是联合政府面临的一项核心挑战。如果不了解政党如何应对这一挑战，就不可能理解欧洲民主国家的政策制定是如何运作的。这个项目的目标是解释联合政府如何在这种紧张局势下制定政策。调查人员的论点集中在立法审查上--这是允许合作伙伴“监督”联合政府交易的关键体制机制。联合政府成员可以利用立法程序来审查和修改由“敌对”部长提出的立法。作为该项目的一部分，研究小组通过收集法国和丹麦政府法案处理的详细数据，证明了这种议会审查的经验相关性。加上他们已经为德国、爱尔兰和荷兰收集的类似数据，他们将能够对欧洲五个主要民主国家的立法程序进行详细研究。他们将能够调查法案是如何改变的，哪些政党能够对立法内容施加影响，以及这些动态如何与联盟成员之间的紧张关系有关。这是第一次追踪大量政府法案从导言到最终段落的演变过程的跨国研究。广泛的影响：这个项目的两个特点为我们理解欧洲政治做出了重大贡献。首先，该项目有助于将学术研究的重点从目前的联盟的形成和终止转移到对联盟共同治理的实际过程的理解上。其次，也是更重要的是，我们的分析提出了一种关于欧洲立法机构的新视角，挑战了现有的学术智慧。传统观点认为，欧洲立法机构在政策制定方面的影响力微乎其微。与此形成鲜明对比的是，这一论点强调了在很大程度上被忽视的一个方面：立法审查的可能性在联合政府中发挥着核心作用，因为它使偏好不同的政党能够成功地推行妥协政策。换言之，该项目表明，立法进程提供了一种体制机制，对于联合政府解决联盟内部冲突和遏制授权给内阁部长的影响的能力至关重要。简而言之，这一研究项目提供了对多党政府如何制定政策的更深层次的理解。与此同时，它帮助我们理解(和欣赏)立法机构在欧洲政治体系中发挥的核心作用。

Collaborative Research:Coalition Policymaking and Legislative Review in Parliamentary DemocraciesThree features distinguish politics in Europe from politics in the United States. The first is that individual parties rarely win a majority of legislative seats. The second is that European parliamentary systems do not strictly separate the legislative and executive branches. To stay in office, the leaders of the executive branch (generally called "governments" or "cabinets") must enjoy majority support in parliament. The third feature is a direct consequence of the first two: To secure the necessary majority support in the legislature, most European governments include several parties that agree to govern as a "coalition."This project examines the central role played by coalition government in European politics. Other political scientists have already addressed important aspects of coalition politics. For example, we have a good understanding of which parties are likely to be included in coalitions, and we know much about the circumstances under which coalitions break down. But there remains a huge gap in our knowledge concerning how coalition governments make policy between their formation and termination. This gap is significant because coalition policy-making poses a challenge: The parties making up a coalition have different views about desirable policies. But a coalition can adopt only one government policy on any given issue, and so coalition government requires parties to agree on a common position. Once selected, however, such a compromise policy must be implemented by the cabinet minister with jurisdiction over the relevant policy area. As a result, parties that participate in a coalition are constantly confronted by the possibility that ministers with will deviate from compromise positions and pursue policies that favor their party at the expense of their partners. Overcoming this tension between the need to pursue common compromise positions and the risk posed by attempts to undermine these compromises poses a central challenge for coalition governments. It is impossible to understand how policymaking works in European democracies without understanding how parties are able to deal with this challenge.The goal of this project is to explain how coalition governments make policy in light of this tension. The Investigators' argument focuses on legislative review - the key institutional mechanism that allows partners to "police" the coalition bargain. Coalition members can make use of the legislative process to scrutinize and amend legislation introduced by "hostile" ministers. As part of this project, the research team demonstrates the empirical relevance of such parliamentary scrutiny by gathering detailed data on the treatment of government bills in France and Denmark. Together with similar data they have already collected for Germany, Ireland, and the Netherlands, they will be able to conduct a detailed study of the legislative process in five major European democracies. They will be able to investigate how bills are changed, which parties are able to exercise influence over the content of legislation, and how these dynamics relate to the tension between coalition members. This is the first cross-national study to trace the evolution of a large number of government bills on a variety of issues from introduction to final passage.Broader Impacts: Two features of this project provide significant contributions to our understanding of European politics. First, the project contributes to moving scholarship beyond its current focus on the formation and termination of coalitions to an understanding of the actual process by which coalitions govern jointly. Second, and more importantly, our analysis suggests a novel perspective on European legislatures that challenges the existing scholarly wisdom. Conventional wisdom holds that European legislatures exercise only marginal influence in policymaking. In sharp contrast, this argument stresses an aspect that has largely been ignored: the possibility of legislative scrutiny plays a central role within coalition governments by enabling parties with divergent preferences to successfully pursue compromise policies. In other words, the project shows that the legislative process provides an institutional mechanism that is central to the ability of coalition governments to solve intra-coalition conflicts and to contain the effects of delegation to cabinet ministers. In short, this research project provides a deeper understanding of how policy is made under multiparty government. At the same time, it helps us understand (and appreciate) the central role played by legislatures in European political systems.