CAREER: Government Policy Responsiveness in Multiparty Parliamentary Democracies

这个项目解决了代议制民主研究中的基本问题：公众舆论对民主治理有什么影响（如果有的话）？政策制定者真的按照公民的意愿行事了吗？如果民意改变方向，当选官员的行动是否会随之改变？支持自由民主的一个基本规范主张是，竞争性选举的反复出现促进了公民偏好与政府政策之间的持续联系。换句话说，选举竞争的目的是鼓励政府在其执政期间对公众的政策要求作出反应。虽然学者们对这个问题表现出极大的兴趣，但迄今为止，他们几乎所有的努力都局限于研究美国国会背景下的反应性。这是不幸的，原因有很多。最特别的是，世界上大多数已建立的民主国家在其制度结构和治理模式方面与美国差别很大。大多数民主国家在设计上是议会制的，其效果是将决策权交给政府（或内阁），而不是立法机构。此外，大多数议会制民主国家都有两个以上的主要政党。政策制定通常需要几个政党的合作，为什么所有政党可能同时试图吸引非常不同的选民群体。在这一点上，比较研究在揭示这些民主国家公民和选民之间的联系方面非常有限。在这个职业奖中，首席研究员创建了一个研究和教育的综合项目，以探索多党议会民主国家的政策制定是否在整个政府任期内对公民的偏好做出反应。研究者提出了一种政策响应理论，该理论侧重于多党制下政治家的选举和寻求公职的激励。核心主张是，这些激励措施鼓励政府政党根据少数选民的意愿调整政策，这些选民的政策观点可能与大多数选民的观点一致，也可能不一致。为了验证这一论点，研究人员将与来自美国和欧洲的一组学生研究人员一起，收集七个欧洲民主国家在过去十到二十年中提出和颁布的税收和福利政策的所有变化的原始立法数据。这个项目有很强的教育成分。它的目的是帮助有志从事比较立法研究的年轻学者克服与之相关的许多实际困难。研究者提出了教育和培训方面的三项创新。首先，他提议让一些学生在四个暑假的时间里出国进行档案立法研究。这项活动的一个新颖之处在于，这些学生将与来自欧洲大学的学生团队合作，这些学生也从事立法研究。研究人员还建议每年为莱斯大学的研究生和本科生教授立法研究的实习课程，鼓励他们在自己的研究中使用该项目收集的数据。最后，研究者将每年举办三次为期一周的研讨会，将莱斯大学的学生与来自全国各地和欧洲的从事比较立法研究问题的学生聚集在一起。

This project addresses fundamental questions in the study of representative democracy: What impact, if any, does public opinion have on democratic governance? Do policymakers actually do what citizens want them to do? If public sentiment changes direction, will the actions of elected officials follow? A fundamental normative claim in favor of liberal democracy is that the recurrence of competitive elections promotes an ongoing connection between citizen preferences and government policy. In other words, electoral competition is designed to encourage governments to be responsive to the policy demands of the public throughout their time in office. Although scholars have shown enormous interest in this question, almost all their efforts thus far have been confined to examining responsiveness in the context of the United States Congress. This is unfortunate for a number of reasons. Most especially, the majority of established democracies in the world differ quite markedly from the United States in terms of their institutional structures and patterns of governance. Most democracies are parliamentary in design, which has the effect of giving policymaking power to the government (or cabinet), not the legislature. Further, most parliamentary democracies have more than two major parties. Policymaking typically requires the cooperation of several political parties, why may all simultaneously be attempting to appeal to very different groups of voters. At this point, comparative research is very limited in what it reveals about the connection between citizens and voters in these democracies.In this CAREER award, the principal investigator creates an integrated program of research and education to explore the question of whether policymaking in multiparty parliamentary democracies is responsive to citizen preferences throughout the government's term in office. The investigator proposes a theory of policy responsiveness that focuses on the electoral and office-seeking incentives of politicians in a multiparty setting. The central claim is that these incentives encourage government parties to tailor policy to the wishes of narrow constituencies, whose policy views may or may not accord with those of the majority of voters. To test the argument, the investigator, along with a team of student researchers from both the United States and Europe, will collect original legislative data from seven European democracies on all changes on tax and welfare policy that have been proposed and enacted over the past ten to twenty years. The project contains a strong educational component. It is expressly designed to help aspiring young scholars wishing to do comparative legislative research to overcome many of the practical difficulties associated with it. The investigator proposes three innovations in education and training. First, he proposes to take a number of students abroad, over the course of four summers, to perform archival legislative research. A novel feature of this activity is that these students will be working in collaboration with a team of students from universities in Europe who are also engaged in legislative research. The investigator also proposes to teach yearly practicum courses in legislative research to graduate and undergraduate students at Rice University in which they will be encouraged to use the data from the project, as it is being collected, in their own research. Finally, the investigator will host three annual week-long workshops that bring students at Rice University together with students from across the country and Europe who are working on questions in comparative legislative research.