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了一个理论，即立法机构在最大限度地减少联盟伙伴之间的冲突方面发挥着重要作用;这个项目提出了一个广义的理论版本，声称立法机构也有助于减轻一党内阁中的党内政策争议。几个假设可以从这个广义的理论和aree测试，以确定理论的有效性。鉴于议会民主制的立法机构的决策作用一直是一个相对被忽视的研究领域，本项目对不断增长的文献做出了重大贡献。为了验证从广义理论得出的假设，有必要构建内阁内部政策部门的某种衡量标准。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）和四十年来数百名部长的政策立场，通过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，这个新的数据集将是相当重要的各种学者，因为它代表了量化的广度和深度的政策差异在一个大的横截面内阁的第一次努力。这些数据不仅可以用于验证模型，还可以作为政党内部政策偏好的起伏变化的重要信息来源。以往的研究表明，后座议员的政策偏好存在很大差异，而本研究则是首次对前座议员的政策偏好进行详细探讨。因此，学者们将有可能对党内政治在一党政府模型中的重要性做出明智的判断。此外，这一项目将进一步加强最近的调查结果，即立法机构是决策过程的一个重要组成部分，希望这一过程能增加规模虽小但不断增长的立法机构的数量和克里思，关于议会民主制立法机构重要性的对话。对政党派系主义感兴趣的学者也将从这个项目中受益，因为对派系主义的认真调查受到限制，确定非正式派别成员的困难。这个项目提供了可以很容易地查明派别结构的工具。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，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.