A Model of Endogenous Government Formation

Political parties bargain over the allocation of cabinet portfolios when forming coalition governments. Non-cooperative theories of legislative bargaining typically predict that the “formateur” enjoys a disproportionate share of government ministry positions. However, empirical evidence indicates that parties receive shares of portfolios proportional to their nominal voting weight, in support of Gamson’s Law of portfolio allocation. This paper examines government formation as a process in which the role of formateur is determined endogenously, or within, a coalition and parties have different preferences over cabinet positions. In equilibrium, if parties have similar preferences over cabinet portfolios, the share of seats they are allocated will be proportional to the parties’ sizes. [This draft: 6/08]

Trading Office for Policy. A Legislative Bargaining Model of Minority and Super-majority Governments.

In parliamentary democracies, political parties bargain over the allocation of cabinet portfolios when forming coalition governments. The non-cooperative theory of bargaining predicts the formation only of minimal winning coalitions. However, the empirical evidence suggests that half of all governments are either minority or super-majority. In this paper, we develop a multistage non-cooperative bargaining model of multi-party government formation where political parties care both about the allocation of cabinet positions and the expected policy implemented by the future government. For sufficiently high values of the "policy concern" parameter, parties may be willing to sacrifice the office benefits in their entirety in order to achieve a more desirable government policy. Minority government are predicted in equilibrium with the support of external parties with high policy concern. Furthermore, the introduction of uncertainty over implemented policy allows to explain why parties have an advantage to form super-majority governments. [Coming up soon]

Delegating Disenfranchisement Decisions

Most empirical analyses of voting rights laws focus on the implications of the laws on potential voters and political outcomes as if they are fully implemented. However, the administrative structure used by states varies as does the extent that the implementation is monitored and the competitiveness of the electoral environment. We formally model the process by which states choose voting rights measures such as felon disenfranchisement laws. We find that different administrative and monitoring structures as well as competitiveness of the electoral environment are likely to affect both the adoption and implementation of the laws. Even states with identical laws but different administrative and/or monitoring systems and different levels of electoral competition are predicted to have di¤erent degrees of implementation. We argue that empirical research that ignores these interactive e¤ects may inaccurately estimate the effects of the laws on potential voters and political outcomes. With Rebecca Morton and Jessica Trounstine [This draft: 10/08]