Coalition Formation and Bargaining in Legislatures

在所有民主制度中，政策结果基本上是组成联盟和立法机构内部讨价还价的产物。在20世纪60年代的S和70年代初的S对这些问题进行了一系列的基础研究之后，我们对这些现象的理解几乎没有什么进展。然而，最近在理论上的分析进展为生产性研究开辟了新的途径。本研究聚焦于两个逻辑上截然不同的问题。第一个问题涉及不确定性在议会民主政体各党派之间的立法谈判中的作用。在早期的工作中，调查人员探索了当三党立法机构中没有一个政党拥有多数席位时，一种特定类型的谈判机构的后果。在这个机构中，研究人员假设最大的政党获得了组建联合政府的第一个机会，提出了要实施的政策和投资组合的分配。如果这个政党失败了，那么下一个最大的政党就会得到类似的机会，以此类推。研究人员发现，如果政党的目标以及对政策和投资组合的相对评估不存在不确定性，那么最大的政党总是会与最小的政党成功地组建联合政府。显然，这种情况并不总是发生。进一步发展该模型的一种自然方式，即提供预测一套更丰富的立法结果的可能性的方式，是做出更现实的假设，即并非每个其他政党都肯定知道一个政党目标的所有方面。这一进展是调查人员在该奖项下研究的第一个问题。第二个问题涉及投资组合在立法结果中的作用。在上面提到的工作中，“投资组合”被简单地描述为任职期间的津贴。因为调查人员假设保单有一个非常简单的结构(即。线上的点)，这种描述是明智的。然而，真正的政策是复杂的，投资组合本质上是为选择总体政策的某些方面而分配的权利和责任。认识到这一点，研究人员正在研究各种机构的战略属性，以确定如何在联合政府中分配投资组合，以及它们随后制定的政策。初步工作已经表明，少数群体政府可以在这样的制度下出现并保持稳定：到目前为止，事实证明，找到一个能够预测少数群体政府的理论模型是难以捉摸的。

In all democratic systems, policy outcomes are essentially the product of coalition formation and bargaining within the legislature. After a flurry of basic research on these topics in the 1960's and early 1970's, there has been very little progress in our understanding of the phenomena. However, recent analytical advances in theory have opened up new avenues for productive research. This research focuses on two logically distinct issues. The first concerns the role of uncertainty in legislative bargaining among parties in parliamentary democracies. In earlier work, the investigators explored the consequences of a particular type of bargaining institution when no party in a three-party legislature held a majority of seats. In this institution, the researchers assumed that the largest party was given the first opportunity to form a coalition government, proposing a policy to implement and a distribution of portfolios. If this party failed, then the next largest party was offered a similar opportunity, and so on. The researchers discovered that if there was no uncertainty about parties' objectives and relative evaluations of policy and portfolio, then the largest party would always form a coalition government successfully with the smallest party. Evidently, this does not always happen. One natural way to develop the model further, one which offers the possibility of predicting a richer set of legislative outcomes, is to make the more realistic assumption that not all facets of a party's objectives are known for sure by every other party. This development is the first issue that the investigators are studying under this award. The second issue concerns the role of portfolios in legislative outcomes. In the above referenced work, "portfolios" were characterized simply as perqs of office. Because the investigators assumed that policies had a very simple structure (viz. points on a line), this characterization was sensible. However, real policies are complex and portfolios are essentially allocations of rights and responsibilities for choosing certain aspects of overall policy. Recognizing this, the researchers are studying the strategic properties of a variety of institutions for determining how portfolios are allocated in coalition governments, and what policies they subsequently generate. Preliminary work already reveals that minority governments can occur and be stable under such institutions: hitherto, finding a theoretical model that can predict minority governments has proved elusive.