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Varieties of Legislative Voting Patterns

The Impact of Majority, Minority, and Caretaker Governments

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Jahrbuch für Handlungs- und Entscheidungstheorie

Part of the book series: Jahrbuch für Handlungs- und Entscheidungstheorie ((JAHAEN))

Abstract

We discuss how legislative voting patterns are affected by different types of governments. The analysis relies on a novel data set containing complete voting records of all members of the Czech Chamber of Deputies from 1996 to 2013. By employing spatial models, we analyze the positions of parties under formal minority, substantive minority, caretaker, and majority governments. In contrast to previous research, which has mainly focused on between country comparisons, our research design allows for a longitudinal analysis of voting patterns in a stable context limiting the number of potential confounders. We show that majority governments and formal minority governments are characterized by a dominance of government-opposition voting, which is in line with our theoretical expectations. In contrast, left-right differences become more relevant in times of substantive minority governments. We further specify this finding by offering a discussion of patterns observed under caretaker governments. We show that they share important characteristics with substantive minority governments. The results expand our understanding of legislative position taking and have implications for the analysis of roll-call votes in parliamentary democracies.

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Notes

  1. 1.

    It is important to note that we refer to ideal points in a very broad sense. In a more narrow understanding of the term, an ideal point is the position of a political actor in a low-dimensional policy space. In contrast, we refer to an ideal point in this paper as the position estimated based on standard scaling techniques although we are fully aware of the fact that this position is heavily influenced by non-spatial factors such as the government-opposition divide and party discipline.

  2. 2.

    It is important to note that we discuss the general patterns of parliamentary voting and that exceptions to this rule are likely, for example, due to rebels who tend to vote more sincerely (Spirling and McLean 2007) or due to “free votes” in which no means of party discipline are employed. Yet, these exceptions should not affect the overall positioning of parties.

  3. 3.

    Such a coalition might be surplus. Therefore, parties might also look for minimal-winning coalition. However, as the ‘coalition’ only lasts for one vote we consider it more realistic that the ideological proximity is more relevant in this context.

  4. 4.

    In other words, all votes were originally recorded but the results were not uploaded to the webpage for whatever reason.

  5. 5.

    E.g.: http://www.psp.cz/sqw/hlasy.sqw?g=45031.

  6. 6.

    The data is available at request for the purpose of replication and will be made publicly available in the near future.

  7. 7.

    We split data sets based on the number of votes (and not based on the date) to ensure that each subset of votes consists of a sufficient number of votes to be scaled. As the data is sorted by date the subsets of the data are still in chronological order.

  8. 8.

    We computed two-dimensional OC models, but focus only on the first dimension in this article since it is the most relevant. Abstentions were treated as missing values, but results remain unchanged when treated as ‘no’-votes.

  9. 9.

    Since party unity is so high in the Czech Republic all legislators of a party have almost the same estimated ideal-point. We could have also taken the median legislator as the party position, but this does not affect our results.

  10. 10.

    In the appendix all plots are provided with the observed data points and without loess smoother. Here it becomes even clearer that in some roll-call vote subsets the KSČM voted with the ODS whereas and in others KSČM is placed between the government and opposition. This corroborates our impression that KSČM did not follow a clear voting pattern. With the cabinet change from Špidla to Gross, however, KSČM voting patterns shifted.

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Author information

Authors and Affiliations

  1. Fakultät für Bildungs- und Sozialwissenschaften, Oldenburg, Deutschland

    Michael Jankowski

  2. Fakultät für Wirtschafts- und Sozialwissenschaften, Hamburg, Deutschland

    Kamil Marcinkiewicz

Authors
  1. Michael Jankowski
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  2. Kamil Marcinkiewicz
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Corresponding author

Correspondence to Michael Jankowski .

Editor information

Editors and Affiliations

  1. Fakultät für Sozialwissenschaften, Universität Mannheim, Mannheim, Germany

    Marc Debus

  2. Sozialwissenschaften, Universität Oldenburg, Oldenburg, Germany

    Markus Tepe

  3. Center for Comparative Politics, Universität zu Köln, Köln, Germany

    Jan Sauermann

Appendix

Appendix

See Figs. 6, 7, 8, 9, 10 and 11.

Fig. 6
figure 6

Second dimension in the fourth Chamber of Deputies

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Fig. 7
figure 7

Raw (no loess) positions of Czech parties in the second Chamber of Deputies

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Fig. 8
figure 8

Raw (no loess) positions of Czech parties in the third Chamber of Deputies

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Fig. 9
figure 9

Raw (no loess) positions of Czech parties in the fourth Chamber of Deputies

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Fig. 10
figure 10

Raw (no loess) positions of Czech parties in the fifth Chamber of Deputies

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Fig. 11
figure 11

Raw (no loess) positions of Czech parties in the sixth Chamber of Deputies

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Jankowski, M., Marcinkiewicz, K. (2019). Varieties of Legislative Voting Patterns. In: Debus, M., Tepe, M., Sauermann, J. (eds) Jahrbuch für Handlungs- und Entscheidungstheorie. Jahrbuch für Handlungs- und Entscheidungstheorie. Springer VS, Wiesbaden. https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-658-23997-8_2

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