Doctoral Dissertation Research in Political Science: Ministerial Policy Preferences and the Role of Legislative Institutions in Ameliorating Conflict in Single-party Cabinets

该奖项是根据2009年《美国复苏和再投资法案》(公法111-5)资助的。马丁和范伯格最近提出的理论认为，立法机构在尽量减少联盟伙伴之间的冲突方面发挥着重要作用；该项目提出了这一理论的一般版本，声称立法机构也有助于缓解一党内阁中的党内政策争端。从这一广义理论中可以得出几个假设，并进行了检验，以确定该理论的有效性。鉴于直到最近，议会民主国家立法机构的决策作用一直是一个相对被忽视的研究领域，这个项目对不断增长的文献做出了重大贡献。为了检验从广义理论得出的假设，有必要构建内阁内部政策分歧的某种衡量标准。为此，该项目估计了四个国家(澳大利亚、加拿大、新西兰和英国)数百名部长的政策立场，并使用计算机辅助内容分析从政治文本和演讲的电子档案中提取意识形态立场。除了简单的假设检验，这一新颖的数据集将对各种学者具有相当重要的意义，因为它代表了在大范围的内阁横截面中量化政策差异的广度和深度的首次努力。除了被用来测试所提出的模型外，这些数据还将是关于议会党派内政策偏好起伏的重要描述性信息来源。虽然之前的研究表明，后座议员的偏好存在很大差异，但这个项目将是第一次对前座议员的政策偏好进行详细调查。因此，学者们将有可能对党内政治在模拟一党政府方面的重要性做出明智的判断。此外，该项目将增加最近的调查结果，即立法机构是决策进程的重要组成部分，这有望增加关于议会民主国家立法机构重要性的小型但日益增长的对话的数量和节奏。对党派派系感兴趣的学者也将从该项目中受益，因为对派系的认真调查因难以确定非正式派系的成员而受到限制。这个项目提供了工具，通过这些工具可以很容易地确定派系结构。最后，数据集将产生广泛的影响，因为这种新的数据来源将导致新的问题，而这些新的问题可能需要新的理论来解释党内政策差异的起伏以及这些差异对政策制定过程的影响。

This award is funded under the American Recovery and Reinvestment Act of 2009 (Public Law 111-5).Martin and Vanberg have recently theorized that legislative institutions play an important role in minimizing conflict between coalition partners; this project presents a generalized version of this theory that purports that legislative institutions serve to mitigate intra-party policy disputes in single-party cabinets as well. Several hypotheses can be drawn from this generalized theory and aree tested to determine the validity of the theory. Given that the policy-making role of the legislative institutions of parliamentary democracies has until recently been a relatively neglected area of study, this project makes a major contribution to a growing literature.To test hypotheses drawn from the generalized theory, it is necessary to construct some measure of the policy divisions within a cabinet. Toward this end, the project estimates the policy positions of hundreds of ministers across four countries (Australia, Canada, New Zealand, and the United Kingdom) and four decades by using computer-assisted content analysis to extract ideological positions from electronic archives of political texts and speeches. Beyond simple hypothesis testing, this novel dataset will be of considerable importance to a wide variety of scholars as it represents the first effort to quantify the breadth and depth of policy differences within a large cross-section of cabinets. In addition to being used to test the proposed model, the data will be an important source of descriptive information regarding the ebb and flow of policy preferences within parliamentary parties.While previous studies have shown that there is wide variation in the preferences of backbenchers, this project will be the first time the policy preferences of the frontbench have been probed in great detail. Thus, it will be possible for scholars to make an informed judgment regarding the importance of intra-party politics in modeling single-party governments. Additionally, this project will add additional weight to recent findings that legislative institutions are an important component of the policy-making process which should hopefully increase the volume and the tempo of the small, but growing, dialogue regarding the importance of the legislative institutions of parliamentary democracies.Scholars interested in party factionalism will also benefit from this project as serious inquiry into factionalism has been limited by the difficulty in determining the membership of informal factions. This project provides tools by which factional structures can be readily identified. Finally, the dataset will have broad implications as this new source of data will lead to new questions and those new questions may need to new theories explaining the ebb and flow of intra-party policy differences and the impact of those differences on the policy-making process.