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Parties are thought to organise democratic legislatures by influencing the voting behaviour of individual legislators. We examine whether parties and party coalitions influence the behaviour of legislators in Kenya. Ethnicity has been seen as the driver of party and electoral politics in Kenya and therefore Kenya provides a hard test of the proposition that political parties organise the legislature in Africa. Analysing roll-call voting in the 11th Parliament (2013–2017), we find that both political parties and coalitions induce structure to roll-call voting, although clientelism and ethnicity continue to influence the behaviour of MPs. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Issue salience and ideological disagreement often predict coalition government behavior. However, research on portfolio allocation has yet to fully specify the complex relationship between issue salience, disagreement, and coalition negotiations. Scholars treat issue salience and disagreement as distinct and disconnected, despite evidence that they work together and with conditional effects in a range of settings. Following a logic of portfolio trades or “logrolls,” we propose that the relative salience of issues and disagreements at the issue level within the coalition both moderate the effect of issue salience on portfolio allocation. Using data drawn from the Parliamentary Democracy Data Archive, we find compelling evidence for our theory that links party manifestos to portfolio allocation. Consistent with a story on the conditional effect of salience and disagreement, we find evidence that the effect of salience is mitigated by the extent of disagreement between coalition parties. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Recent research has shown that niche parties are both increasing in importance in European party systems and behave differently than their more mainstream counterparts. Indeed, there is growing evidence that the dynamic between green parties and social democratic parties is especially nuanced. Regionalist parties differ from other niche parties in that they can be found on the left, right, and center of the ideological spectrum. We find that regionalist parties benefit from increasing the ideological distance between themselves and the mainstream party that most often wins at the national level. However, regionalist parties’ relationship with the mainstream party that most often wins in their home region is more nuanced. Regionalist parties must be distinct enough from the mainstream rival in their home region to be an alternative but close enough to serious compete for the same voters. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

We present a formal model of party competition to explain differences in party ideological ambiguity. Existing works generally argue that parties are more or less ambiguous depending on whether their supporters are risk-acceptant or risk-averse. Our model explores more fully strategic choice of ambiguity by considering nonelectoral benefits to ambiguity--that is, party elite recruitment and retention. In terms of costs, we assume that all voters are risk-averse, who therefore prefer less ideological ambiguity. Explicitly considering both costs and benefits derives our hypotheses and highlights the importance of party competition--ambiguity is influenced by the proximity to a party's closest ideological competitor. An empirical analysis of twenty-eight European countries supports our hypotheses. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

We build on previous theories of junior minister allocation and coalition oversight by incorporating a novel theory of strategic changes in the issues covered in party manifestos. We argue that parties use junior ministerial appointments to oversee their coalition partners on portfolios that correspond to issues emphasized by the parties’ activists when the coalition partner’s preferences deviate from the party’s. The findings, based on a data set of more than 2800 party-portfolio dyads in 10 countries, show significant support for these expectations. We find that party leaders who successfully negotiate for junior ministers to particular portfolios are most concerned about checking ideologically contentious coalition partners in areas of concern to activists. The results also illustrate the usefulness of our dyadic approach for the study of junior minister allocation. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Single-party parliamentary governments often have no institutional checks on their authority. Such governments can pass and implement policies constrained only by the need to maintain party loyalty and win elections. Literature on delegation suggests that such governments would never adopt reforms such as Administrative Procedures Acts (APAs) that are designed to constrain this freedom. Nevertheless, such governments do pass APAs: Greece, Portugal, Romania, Spain, and Sweden have all done so in the past 30 years. We argue that the possibility of losing power motivates parliamentary governments, both single-party and coalition, to trade current policy loss for future gain with APAs. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

This study examines when and why members of the European Parliament ( EP) use parliamentary questions as a form of fire alarm oversight. We argue that the multilevel nature of the EU political system allows members of the EP from national opposition parties to use parliamentary questions to alert the European Commission to governments' failures to implement EU policy. Representation in the EP provides the only avenue for such oversight for national opposition parties. Using a new sample of EP parliamentary questions, we demonstrate that MEPs from national opposition parties are more likely to alert the Commission to violations of EU law in their own member states. These parliamentary questions may lead the Commission to take legal action against member-state governments. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Much of the current literature on compulsory voting (CV) examines its effects by simulating complete turnout. We argue that these studies do not capture the full effects of CV, as there is something qualitatively different about compulsory voting rules as compared to only increasing turnout. Furthermore, CV and turnout have important, yet unexplored, interactive effects. To test this argument, we look at governments in 43 countries over the 1990–2006 period. Nine of these countries have some form of CV. We examine the effect of CV on the ideological position and range of governments, left party seat share, and the effective number of parties. We find that high turnout in the presence of CV laws spreads out the distribution of voters and leads to an increase in the effective number of parliamentary parties and a larger ideological range of governments. These results have important implications for how we study CV and its consequences for party strategy. [Copyright &y& Elsevier]

The authors examine the administrative procedures acts (APAs) of separation of powers and parliamentary systems. They examine sixteen national APAs (thirteen parliamentary and three presidential) and forty-eight APAs from the U.S. states that have institutional structures analogous to the presidential systems. They identify a very stark difference between the parliamentary and presidential APAs. While all of the presidential system APAs place constraints on both adjudicative and rulemaking activities, only two of the parliamentary APAs make any reference to rulemaking at all. The authors present an institutional explanation for this observation based on recent work on veto players and delegated discretion to administrative agents. They argue that the presence of partisan veto players discourages focus on rulemaking in APAs. [ABSTRACT FROM PUBLISHER]

With 27 member states using a variety of administrative practices and institutions to implement European Union (EU) policy, the EU has been widely used as a natural laboratory for analyzing administrative politics and institutions. This research has largely focused on the institutional relationships as they are at the time of the analysis. However, the EU has used several legislative procedures. Furthermore, there has been little attention given to the administrative and delegatory consequences of changes in the EU's legislative procedures. This article examines how legislative institutions' preferences for limits to the implementing discretion of the Commission and the member states have changed with the shift from the cooperation procedure to the codecision procedure. I find that the European Parliament (EP) responded to the codecision procedure by increasing the share of its amendments that expand the implementing discretion of member states. Furthermore, the Council significantly changed its attitude toward EP amendments restricting Commission discretion. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

There is growing interest in whether and how parties matter. We add to this discussion by exploring the ways in which parties matter for policy outcomes. To do this, we look at the European Union (EU) member states' progress towards the greenhouse gas emissions targets set for them by the Kyoto Protocol and the EU's Burden Sharing Agreement. We find that governments that are more pro-environment and less ideologically divided make better progress towards their targets. We also demonstrate that green party representation in government predicts convergence. This article contributes to research examining the ways in which parties matter as well as the growing literature on coalition politics and veto players. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Recent research on the European Parliament (EP) has neglected the idiosyncrasies of niche parties. Similarly, analyses of niche parties have not fully engaged the literature on the EP. This article builds on both literatures by analysing niche party behaviour in the EP as a distinct phenomenon. It is argued that niche parties will respond differently to institutional stimuli than parties more generally. To test this argument, Hix, Noury and Roland's work on EP party voting behaviour is replicated concentrating on niche parties only. It is found that participation in national government and institutional changes affect niche party legislators' voting behaviour, whereas they do not for legislators in the EP overall. These results have important implications for understanding both party behaviour in the EP and niche party behaviour more generally. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Most theories of how to control bureaucracies are derived from American experience and are tested with data from the U.S. In contrast, this article uses evidence from the 15 members of the European Union to examine oversight mechanisms through which legislators attempt to control the bureaucracy. Analysis of European data shows that “police patrol” mechanisms of oversight appear in countries with relatively little gridlock as measured by the ideological range of their governments. “Deck stacking” mechanisms appear in countries that experience greater problems with gridlock measured in the same way. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Analyzes the legislative procedures in the European Union countries. Role of the Commission, the Parliament, and the Council in co-operation and co-decision legislative procedures; Ability of co-decision procedure to increase European Parliament powers; Advantage of the agenda-setting powers accorded to the Parliament by co-operation procedure.

This article highlights the electoral effects of holding salient portfolios within a coalition government. For voters, holding ministries can be seen as a symbol of a party's success within the coalition. As a voting heuristic, parties not controlling the portfolios on issues important to their platforms signal their failure to achieve these goals. Following this perspective, we hypothesize that the difference between coalition parties that hold salient portfolios and those that do not partially predicts the extent of the electoral cost of coalition participation. Using a data set that covers 11 European parliamentary democracies between 1966 and 2002, we show that for junior coalition partners there is an electoral reward for holding their most salient portfolio. There is also an electoral benefit for a junior partner to hold a larger number of portfolios if they do not control their most salient portfolio. Conversely, holding their most salient portfolio and a larger number of additional ministries results in greater electoral losses in the subsequent parliamentary election. These results indicate that parties' success at negotiating for their policy priorities in coalition governments holds consequences for their future electoral success. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]