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The Design and Evolution of the Instruments of Parliamentary Policy

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The Design and Evolution of the Instruments of Parliamentary Policy The Design and Evolution of the Instruments of Parliamentary Policy Statements in Western Europe Dissertation submitted for the degree of Doctor of Social Sciences (Doctor rerum socialium) Presented by Julia Frederike Keh at the Faculty of Politics, Law, and Economics Department of Politics and Administration Defense: 21.05.2015, Konstanz Examiners: PD Dr. U. Sieberer (Uni. of Konstanz), Prof. Dr. W. C. Müller (Uni. of Vienna), Prof. Dr. S. Shikano (Uni. of Konstanz) Konstanzer Online-Publikations-System (KOPS) URL: http://nbn-resolving.de/urn:nbn:de:bsz:352-0-294466 Acknowledgements First of all, I would like to thank my supervisors PD Dr. Ulrich Sieberer, Prof. Dr. Wolfgang C. Müller, and Prof. Dr. Susumu Shikano for their excellent guidance. Their support, critical questions, and insightful suggestions have been invaluable for writing this dissertation. I would like to thank all participants of the colloquium of the Chair of Political Methodology and the colloquium of the Politics and Public Administration PhD Program at the University of Konstanz for their helpful suggestions and comments. I also greatly benefitted from the remarks of colleagues at conferences in Chicago, Mainz, Oxford, and Vienna. In particular, I would like to thank Radoslav Zubek for insightful comments on my paper. In addition, I would like to extend my sincere gratitude to Marius Bayer and Peter Meißner for technical support and to PD Dr. Martin Elff and Prof. Dr. Peter Selb for advice on statistical questions. I am much obliged to my wonderful friends. I especially thank Philipp Köker and Benjamin Engst for their support, advice and a great time at conferences and Christina Lein and Katrin Kern for being the best girlfriends one could wish for. Last but definitely not least, I would like to thank Kolja Dutkowski for everything – advice, motivation, patience, and most importantly love. Finally, I would like to thank my family. My gratefulness for their continued support and encouragement cannot be put into words. Therefore, I dedicate this dissertation to my parents, Ursula and Stefan Keh. Note Parts of this dissertation have been published in altered form in the following article: Keh, Julia F. 2015. ‘The Centralisation of Parliamentary Policy Statements in Western European Parliaments.’ West European Politics . DOI:10.1080/01402382.2015.1045318. Abstract In this dissertation, I map and explain the design of the instruments of Parliamentary Policy Statements (PPS) in Western Europe. I define PPS as taking place within parliament and thus being institutionally guaranteed to parliamentary actors, as being visible to the public, and as and allowing for a direct and nuanced communication of parliamentary actors to the public. Based on this definition, parliamentarians can communicate PPS through the following instruments: plenary debates, the presentation and discussion of committee reports, oral and written questions, and interpellations. To explain the design of these instruments, the dissertation at hand proceeds in four steps. In the first part of the dissertation, I set up a theoretical framework for understanding the design of the instruments of PPS. The main argument of this framework is that decisive coalitions of parliamentary actors design the instruments of PPS to maximize their votes. To do so, decisive coalitions of parliamentary actors design the instruments of PPS on two dimensions: the centralization – decentralization dimension and the majority – minority dimension. Which parliamentary actors make up the decisive coalitions depends on the dimension of the instruments of PPS. While frontbenchers and backbenchers seek to control the degree of centralization of the instruments of PPS to their respective advantage, the parliamentary party groups of the government and the opposition strive to impact how majority-friendly the instruments of PPS are designed. Parliamentary actors have two kinds of instruments of PPS at their disposal which can be distinguished depending on the interaction of parliamentary actors when employing them: open instruments of PPS and closed instruments. Open instruments of PPS provide a little structured interaction as is the case in plenary debates and the discussion of committee reports. Closed instruments provide a more structured interaction where the addressed actor has to respond and only the questioner and the questioned actor are allowed to participate. Oral and written questions as well as interpellations are closed instruments of PPS. Building on this theoretical framework, I derive hypotheses about the degree of centralization and the degree of majority-friendliness of the instruments of PPS. I argue that the degree of centralization of the instruments of PPS depends on the accountability of parliamentarians, the workload of parliament, and the characteristics of the instruments of PPS. I also derive hypotheses about the degree of majority-friendliness of the instruments of PPS from the theoretical framework. I argue that the degree of majority-friendliness of the instruments of PPS depends on the ideological conflict between the government and the opposition and the workload of parliament. I qualify these hypotheses by arguing that the capabilities of the decisive coalitions of parliamentary actors determine how easy it is for them to implement their preferred design of the instruments of PPS. To explain the change of the design of the instruments of PPS, I adapt the previously derived hypotheses. In the second part of the dissertation, I present the research design for understanding the institutional design and change of the instruments of PPS. I analyze the design of the instruments of PPS through a cross-section of all countries of Western Europe with a parliamentary system in 2010. I measure the design of the instruments of PPS of these countries through a quantitative content analysis with manual coding of the parliamentary standing orders in force on 01.01.2010. This content analysis yields a score for each instrument of PPS in each country indicating how majority- or minority-friendly it is designed and a score indicating how centralized it is designed. To understand the changes of the centralization and majority-friendliness of the instruments of PPS, I conduct an illustrative time-series cross-section for Austria, Germany, and the United Kingdom from 1945 until 2010. This analysis allows me to assess if the explanations for the design of the instruments of PPS hold over time and to catch a glimpse of the causal mechanisms underlying the design of the instruments of PPS. To measure the evolution of the design of the instruments of PPS, I proceed in the same way as I do for measuring the design of the instruments of PPS; the only difference is that I now measure the design of the instruments of PPS on all the instances on which the design changes. In the third part of the dissertation, I map and explain the design of the instruments of PPS in 2010 for all Western European countries with a parliamentary system. When presenting the degree of centralization of the instruments of PPS, I find that most instruments of PPS are predominantly centralized, that countries are overall centralized but that their degree of centralization varies and that plenary debates are by far the most centralized instruments of PPS. I show that these patterns can be explained best by the accountability of parliamentarians and by whether the instruments of PPS are open or closed. In detail, I find that if parliamentarians are accountable to their electorate indirectly through their parties, the instruments of PPS are more centralized than if they are directly accountable to voters. Moreover, open instruments of PPS are more strongly centralized than closed instruments. The most notable patterns of the majority-friendliness of the instruments of PPS are that open instruments tend to be more majority-friendly than closed instruments, that about 1/3 of countries has overall minority-friendly instruments of PPS, and that there is variation in the degree of majority-friendliness both within and between countries. The analysis yields that these patterns can be explained by the incentives of decisive coalitions if they also have the capability to implement their preferred institutional design. In detail, I find that if the seat share of the government is large enough, a great ideological conflict between government and opposition leads to a majority-friendly design of the instruments of PPS and vice versa. The characteristics of the instruments of PPS also matter for their design, as open instruments of PPS are more majority-friendly than closed instruments. Further, the workload of parliament has a weak independent effect on the majority-friendliness of the instruments of PPS. If the workload of parliament is large, the instruments of PPS are designed to be majority-friendly and vice versa. In the fourth part of the dissertation, I trace the evolution of the design of the instruments of PPS from 1945 until 2010 for Austria, Germany, and the United Kingdom to find out if the explanations for the design of the instruments of PPS can also explain the changes made to the design of the instruments of PPS and to get a better understanding of the timing and causal mechanisms of the design of the instruments of PPS. I find that the explanations for the degree of centralization of the instruments of PPS uncovered in the cross-section can partially explain the changes made to the design of the instruments of PPS. This implies that the design and change of the design of the instruments of PPS is complex and explaining it requires an equally multi-layered model. When analyzing how the majority- and minority-friendliness of the instruments of PPS evolves in Austria, Germany, and the United Kingdom from 1945 until 2010, I find that the explanations uncovered in the cross-section hold rather well for the United Kingdom. Moreover, I show that in Austria and Germany governments tend to be willing to agree to minority-friendly changes of the instruments of PPS when they fear to lose their majority status after the following election or when they want to increase the fairness of the rules of parliament.
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