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In parliamentary democracies, governments are typically composed of multiple political parties working together in a coalition. Such governments must confront a fundamental challenge in policymaking—the preferences of coalition parties often diverge significantly, but the government can adopt only one common policy on any specific issue. This fact raises a critical question that has far-reaching implications for the quality of democratic representation: Whose preferences are ultimately reflected in coalition policy choices? In this study, we explore three competing answers to this question derived from the theoretical literature on multiparty governance and parliamentary institutions. Our findings, based on an analysis of the legislative history of more than 1,000 government bills from three parliamentary democracies, strongly suggest that coalition policies reflect a compromise between government parties rather than the preferences of the ministers proposing them or the preferences of the median party in the legislature.

Almost all legislators are subordinate to party leadership within their assemblies. Institutional factors shape whether, and to what degree, legislators are also subject to pressure from other principals whose demands may conflict with those of party leaders. This article presents a set of hypotheses on the nature of competing pressures driven by formal political institutions and tests the hypotheses against a new dataset of legislative votes from across 19 different countries. Voting unity is lower where legislators are elected under rules that provide for intraparty competition than where party lists are closed, marginally lower in federal than unitary systems, and the effects on party unity of being in government differ in parliamentary versus presidential systems. In the former, governing parties are more unified than the opposition, win more, and suffer fewer losses due to disunity. In systems with elected presidents, governing parties experience no such boosts in floor unity, and their legislative losses are more apt to result from cross-voting.

The presidential-parliamentary distinction is foundational to comparative politics and at the center of a large theoretical and empirical literature. However, an examination of constitutional texts suggests a fair degree of heterogeneity within these categories with respect to important institutional attributes. These observations indicate that the classic presidential-parliamentary distinction, and the semi-presidential category, may not be systemic. This article investigates whether the defining attributes that separate presidential and parliamentary constitutions predict other attributes that are stereotypically associated with these institutional models. The results suggest the need for considerable skepticism of the ‘systemic’ nature of the classification. Indeed, the results imply that in order to predict the powers of a country's executive and legislature, it is more useful to know where and when the constitution was written than whether the country has a presidential or parliamentary system.

This paper shows how a series of institutional reforms since 1994 have transformed the Japanese prime minister's relationship with other actors in the Japanese parliamentary system and expanded his power. It further discloses that his power has grown even more since the formation of the second Abe administration in 2012.

In this paper, we investigate the relationship between the level of democracy and fiscal-policy response to the economic crisis induced by the COVID-19 pandemic. We use a novel cross-country panel dataset of fiscal-policy responses with time variation. Our results suggest that more democratic countries adopted substantially larger fiscal-policy packages (in % GDP), and the gap regarding the size of packages between more democratic and less democratic countries widened over time. Our analysis of the components of fiscal policy shows that democracies, in particular, provide larger packages that benefit the broad public. Furthermore, our system-equations estimations suggest that the relation of democracy level with the fiscal-policy response is established through democracy’s relation with inclusive institutions, represented by the parliamentary system, and corruption.

Policymaking by coalition governments creates a classic principal-agent problem. Coalitions are comprised of parties with divergent preferences who are forced to delegate important policymaking powers to individual cabinet ministers, thus raising the possibility that ministers will attempt to pursue policies favored by their own party at the expense of their coalition partners. What is going to keep ministers from attempting to move policy in directions they favor rather than sticking to the \"coalition deal\"? We argue that parties will make use of parliamentary scrutiny of \"hostile\" ministerial proposals to overcome the potential problems of delegation and enforce the coalition bargain. Statistical analysis of original data on government bills in Germany and the Netherlands supports this argument. Our findings suggest that parliaments play a central role in allowing multiparty governments to solve intracoalition conflicts.

There are two distinctive modes by which democracies become nondemocracies, which have not yet been differentiated in the literature. One is when a democratic government is toppled by a force outside of the government, such as a military coup, and the other is when a democratically elected leader suspends the democratic process. Employing a competing risks model, this article examines the effects of economic and institutional factors on a state’s risk of experiencing either of these paths to democratic breakdown. An analysis of the duration of 135 democratic periods, between 1950 and 2004, provides evidence that lower levels of economic development and economic growth rates increase the risk of military coups and that incumbent democratic leaders are more likely to end the democratic process themselves in a presidential system than in a parliamentary system.

Do voters reward or punish incumbents for retrospective performance similarly in different democratic regimes? Despite debates on the merits of different regimes, little research has investigated the implications of constitutional design on voters' ability to hold politicians to account. This article shows that regime type determines the way and extent to which elections enable voters to reward or sanction incumbents. These regime effects are separate from and conceptually prior to factors previously identified in the literature on comparative economic voting. Analysis of elections from seventy-five countries reveals that, all else equal, voters have greater potential to hold incumbents to accounts under the separation of powers than under parliamentarism. Moreover, variables particular to separation of powers systems – the electoral cycle in pure presidential systems and instances of cohabitation in semi-presidential systems – affect the relative impact of the attribution of responsibility. The results contribute to ongoing debates about the relative advantages of different constitutional formats for democratic performance.

Research on government formation in parliamentary democracies is replete with theoretical arguments about why some coalitions form while others do not. Unfortunately, this theoretical richness has not led to the development of an empirical tradition that allows scholars to evaluate the relative importance of competing theories. We resolve this problem by applying an empirical framework that is appropriate for modeling coalition choice to evaluate several leading explanations of government formation. Our approach allows us to make conclusions about the relative importance of traditional variables relating to size and ideology and to assess the impact of recent new-institutionalist theories on our ability to explain and predict government formation.

Political parties that wish to exercise executive power in parliamentary democracies are typically forced to enter some form of coalition. Parties can either form a pre-electoral coalition prior to election or they can compete independently and form a government coalition afterwards. While there is a vast literature on government coalitions, little is known about pre-electoral coalitions. A systematic analysis of these coalitions using a new dataset constructed by the author and presented here contains information on all potential pre-electoral coalition dyads in twenty industrialized parliamentary democracies from 1946 to 1998. Pre-electoral coalitions are more likely to form between ideologically compatible parties. They are also more likely to form when the expected coalition size is large (but not too large) and the potential coalition partners are similar in size. Finally, they are more likely to form if the party system is ideologically polarized and the electoral rules are disproportional.