Comparative Constitutional Design of Parliamentary Democracies

对政治制度的研究最近在政治经济学和比较政治学中经历了复兴。一种有趣的政治制度是多党议会民主制，在这种制度下，行政机关的任务来自立法机关，并在政治上对立法机关负责。议会民主制在宪法中规定政府如何形成和终止的具体规则方面有所不同。议会民主制在观察到的政府组建过程的持续时间、类型（即，少数、最小获胜或盈余）和由这些过程产生的政府联盟的规模，以及其政府的相对持久性。这些意见提出了以下重要问题：宪法的特点可以解释这些观察到的差异？如果是的话，从数量上看，哪些机构对联合政府的类型和稳定性最重要？这些问题的回答对于现代议会民主国家的宪法设计（或重新设计）具有重要意义，并具有重要的经济意义。本研究的目标是建立一个统一的理论和实证框架，以研究议会民主国家中一大类制度对联合政府行为的影响。我们的方法包括指定一个讨价还价的政府形成和解散的模型，估计模型的参数，评估模型的能力，占数据的关键特征，然后使用估计的结构模型进行比较宪法设计的实验。特别是，我们拟议的研究将侧重于议会结构，特别是两院制，以及政府政策，特别是预算过程。

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.