Characterizing Party Influence in Legislatures: A Cross-National Analysis

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This research begins with a fundamental question about legislatures: when do parties and party systems matter for legislative outcomes? The conventional wisdom is that in a parliamentary system, a majority party or coalition that controls which proposals are considered, what amendments are allowed, and how voting proceeds can secure whichever outcomes it wants. However, while agenda power is important, it is not decisive. There are well-known cases where parties or coalitions appear to control their chamber, but could not secure their desired outcomes. These examples suggest there are fundamental limits on what a majority party or coalition can achieve. What are these limits, and why do they arise?The researchers start from the assumption that legislative institutions shape outcomes, but focus on a more fundamental constraint: the limits on legislative action created by party preferences. The premise of this research is that the potential for agenda power is shaped by the party system - the number, size, and ideological distribution of parties in the legislature, including the preferences of minority parties. The analysis aims at understanding the relationship between preferences, rules, and outcomes. For example, if agenda control conveys an advantage, changes in who holds this power alters outcomes, even if preferences stay the same. If agenda control is irrelevant, then changes in agenda power have little or no effect on legislative outcomes. Outcomes instead are sensitive to changes in party preferences. Thus, attempts to explain legislative outcomes must distinguish between the impact of institutions and the role of variation in parties and coalitions. The intellectual merit of this research stems from a tight linkage of theory, hypothesis tests, and real-world data. Building on the researchers' previous work (SES-0241778), they propose a unified analytic approach, focusing on the one thing shared by all legislatures: majority rule. The point is not that the U.S. House is the same as the British Parliament or the Russian Duma. Rather, the researchers aim at understanding why these legislatures operate so differently, why parties and coalitions are seemingly powerful in some legislatures but not others, and why party or coalition influence in some countries varies over time. The broader impact of this work lies in its focus on fundamental questions of democracy and majority rule. When one observes democracy in action, whether as scholars or as citizens, the conclusions about the fairness of the process as well as the evaluations of why things happened as they did are based on assumptions about the role of parties, institutions, and strategies in creating these outcomes. The goal in this project is to develop a better set of expectations and insights to guide both scholars and citizens in their roles as observers and as participants in the democratic process.