Review Article
Toward a conditional model of partisanship in policymaking Isabelle Guinaudeau
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Pacte – Sciences Po Grenoble, BP 48, 38040 Grenoble cedex 9, Bordeaux, France. E-mail:
[email protected]
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Abstract Do parties matter for policies? Despite the vast number of contributions to this old question, empirical findings remain highly contrasted and fail to demonstrate a substantial partisan influence. Nevertheless, this article argues that we should not conclude that parties are irrelevant for understanding policies. After an overview of the available empirical findings, it emphasizes that studies of legislative and governmental politics provide solid reasons for expecting a partisan influence and that we could make sense of the contradictory results by exploring the conditions under which parties matter. The final section identifies potential institutional, political, contextual and issue-specific determinants of partisanship in policymaking. French Politics (2014) 12, 265–281. doi:10.1057/fp.2014.16
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Keywords: political parties; policymaking; partisan influence; legislative politics
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Introduction
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In modern representative democracies, political competition primarily takes the form of parties competing for office and policies, based on the principle of accountability of incumbent parties in elections.1 The way in which political parties define the policy alternatives submitted to vote and translate them into effective policies once in office is key to the legitimation of contemporary democracies. However, it is striking that party politics remain marginal in studies of the policymaking that tend either to elude partyrelated variables a-priori, or to emphasize their marginality or their residual character: Are policies (increasingly) made beyond party politics (Mair, 2008)? This question is, of course, at the heart of the time-honored ‘do-parties-matter’ debate, but the evidence provided by the huge amount of empirical contributions fails to offer a consistent picture of how and to what extent the partisan composition of government affects policies. This article first offers a brief overview of the macroanalyses of indicators of policy outputs (or outcomes) and of the partisan composition of government performed in this literature, and emphasizes the contrasted findings © 2014 Macmillan Publishers Ltd. 1476-3419 French Politics www.palgrave-journals.com/fp/
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delivered by such macro-analyses (Do parties matter? Contrasted results at the macro-level). Given their failure to demonstrate a substantial partisan influence on policies, I then leave this macro-level and question the plausibility of the premises of the ‘parties-do-matter’ hypothesis and of the mechanisms linking party government and policies, against the background of theories of legislative and governmental politics (How do parties matter? Discussing the premises and the mechanisms of the partisan influence hypothesis). Having concluded that partisanship is plausible in policymaking, at least under certain conditions, and that the apparent gap between normative models of democracy and practices of policymaking has not been established with sufficient precision, I finally pursue Schmidt’s (1996) effort to develop a conditional model of party influence, by identifying institutional, political, contextual and issue-specific determinants (When do parties matter? Toward a conditional theory of partisan influence).
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Do Parties Matter? Contrasted Results at the Macro-Level
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Partisan theory of policymaking has been put to test by numerous longitudinal or cross-sectional studies. Most of them perform bivariate or multivariate analyses of how the partisan composition of government relates to policy outputs – public spending, taxation, legislation, the size of government – and outcomes – growth, unemployment, inflation or inequalities for instance. Some of this work identify partisan influence and observe, for instance, that left government lean more to budget expansion (Cameron, 1978; Swank, 1988), government employment (Cusack et al, 1989) and macroeconomic intervention (Hibbs, 1977; Boix, 2000; Berry and Lowery, 1987), especially redistributive policies (Esping-Andersen, 1990; Huber et al, 1993). However, many other tests are inconclusive, or even reveal unexpected effects, as for instance left parties cutting back on welfare budgets (regarding France, see for instance Baumgartner et al, 2009). Overall, the ‘do-parties-matter’ literature remains contested and delivers mixed conclusions – an ambivalence confirmed by several meta-analyses (Imbeau et al, 2001; Burstein and Linton, 2002). These ambivalent findings may simply be because of an over-simplistic operationalization of the independent variable, reflecting a static conception of representation. Political parties are conceived as mass organizations with fixed ideologies and policy preferences, shaped by the characteristics and demands of their constituency. For instance, left parties are assumed, given their historical linkage to the working class, to stand for more welfare policies and social redistribution – or at least, in times of austerity, to be less prone to cut welfare programs (Häusermann et al, 2013). In most analyses, party preferences are modeled as a left–right opposition characterizing the presence or absence in government of the major party of the right (Castles, 1982) or of the left (for example, Hibbs, 1977; Cameron, 1978), sometimes also as a right–centre–left trichotomy (Blais et al, 1993). 266
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Such raw indicators of the preferences or ideology of the main party in government are problematic in two respects:
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1. As already pointed by several authors (for example, Schmidt, 1996), such indicators fail to account for ideological distinctions that are not captured by the left–right opposition only, most notably religious divides (see Van Kersbergen, 1995 regarding Christian democracy) and the conflict between ‘old’ and ‘new’ politics. A simple dichotomy or trichotomy of party governments is therefore probably not sufficiently precise in order to make predictions about the policies expected. Recent studies on the policy implications of governmental parties’ position on more recent divides, including environmental protection, confirm that they matter beyond the left–right opposition (Knill et al, 2010). 2. The assumption underlying partisan theory that parties represent stable interests and preferences depending on their electoral constituency seems fragile given changing characteristics of the constituencies of parties, possibly generating ambiguous and inconsistent signals for parties,2 parties’ policy moves driven by electoral strategies and dynamic interactions with competing parties, as well as the emergence, next to the programmatic type of linkage between voters and parties, of a particularistic type in which support for a party depends on the direct benefit expected by voters in return for their vote (see Häusermann et al, 2013 for an excellent review of these critiques).
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If parties’ preferences cannot be deduced (anymore) from their ideological family, it seems more promising to operationalize party preferences as a variable instead of a constant. This allows to study partisanship in the policymaking without having to prove or postulate that parties are ideological organizations with strong ties to social and electoral segments, and to document how these constituencies evolved over time. It also makes it possible to attribute a non-significant or unexpected test result either to the absence of partisanship in policymaking, or simply to a change in party preference. The Comparative Manifesto Project (CMP) database offers a valuable source in order to operationalize party positions over time: this data has been used, in particular, for computing party positions along a left–right scale (Klingemann et al, 1994; Kim and Fording, 1998), which can then be weighted according to each party’s number of ministerial portfolios in order to get a measure of government partisanship (Kim and Fording, 2002). Although sophisticated, this kind of measure still presents the drawback of a high degree of aggregation, which may be more problematic for studying the party-policy link than for accounts of party competition strategies. It seems difficult to make predictions about the policies to expect across the whole policy spectrum based on the position of a government’s position along the left–right scale, or even of its position regarding the issues captured by the CMP coding scheme: a category like ‘welfare state’ may encompass a wide range of policy issues and further CMP categories include both such hard policy measures and conceptual issues, as for instance ‘Marxist analysis’, ‘multiculturalism’ or ‘anti-growth economy’. While these topics are clearly an attempt to tap into the language likely to © 2014 Macmillan Publishers Ltd. 1476-3419
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mark far left, far right and green parties, respectively, they are not strictly comparable concepts to that of ‘education’, ‘welfare’ and ‘law and order’ and it may be difficult to figure out how a ‘multiculturalism’ or ‘Marxist analysis’ bill would look like. Alternative data sources are expert surveys measuring party positions along a large number of policy positions (for example, Bakker et al, 2012). Apparently opposed results could also be produced by differences in the operationalization of the dependent variable. As noted by Imbeau et al (2001, p. 6), studies of parties’ influence on policy outcomes are indeed less likely to be conclusive, as growth, employment, inflation or inequalities are ‘much less susceptible to manipulation by governments than policy outputs’. Many of them indeed fail to observe a partisan impact (see for instance the numerous tests performed in Leigh, 2008). Large-scale contributions to the partisan theory of the policymaking mostly look at budget spending and budget priorities, based on the assumption that left governments tend to spend more. Given the strong stability of budgets and given the impossibility to capture all dimensions of government policies, in particular regarding low capital-intensive domains, through the lens of public expenditure, scholars have argued for completing the analysis with other forms of policies, including regulations (for example, the introduction of a guaranteed basic income or the adoption of gay marriage), fiscal policy or state privatizations (for example, Huber et al, 1993). In order to progress toward such fine-grained measures of policy changes, it seems promising to examine the issue profile, the framing and the direction of policies. In a nutshell, the rich evidence produced by the ‘do-parties-matter’ debate still leaves us with many open questions. First, while some authors interpret the available results as evidence for a decline or even a disappearance of partisanship in the policymaking over time (Huber and Stephens, 2001; Mair, 2008), Imbeau et al (2001) observe a higher proportion of conclusive tests of partisan influence in studies covering the years after 1973 than in studies covering the years before: How far do parties matter less in the current context of electoral volatility and international interdependence than in the post-war era? Second, while the large majority of tests of partisan influence on policies are inconclusive, various sectorial case studies indicate that parties do sometimes matter. In France, for instance, alternation has had consequences on the book price policy after 1981 (Surel, 1997), on housing policy that was redefined after 1995 following a dialog between the RPR party and some professional communities and associations (Zittoun, 2001) and on the regulation of gay couples under the Jospin government (Lascoumes, 2009) and, more recently, under the Ayrault government.
How do Parties Matter? Discussing the Premises and the Mechanisms of the Partisan Influence Hypothesis Faced with the ambivalent results of macro-analyses of how the partisan composition of government affects policies, this section proposes to leave this macro-level and to 268
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discuss the likely mechanisms of partisanship in policymaking. This hypothesis departs from a mandate conception of democracy, in which parties define policy alternatives, the party with the most popular policy position wins the election, enters office and is expected to fulfill its electoral promises (for example, Klingemann et al, 1994; Budge et al, 2010). In the following lines, I examine the mechanisms at play in this model and the reasons why to expect that parties present distinct policy preferences, that government parties have the capacity to shape policies and that these parties are policy oriented.
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Party incentives to present distinct policy alternatives
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Party influence requires that parties propose clearly different policy alternatives to voters. If there are no clear constituencies with consistent policy demands, why should parties defend such alternatives? First, parties are likely to do so if they are approached as organizations with a resilient identity and ideology, whether rooted in their social constituency or not, which attract like-minded people who are strongly committed to similar ideological values and stances. Elected officials may well face delicate trade-offs between policy, office and votes, but they have no incentive to ignore systematically the policy preferences of the party members and activists, whose support is necessary to ensure nomination and the financial and human resources necessary in order to mobilize voters at the next election (Aldrich, 1995; Müller and Strøm, 1999). If ideology is constraining (Budge et al, 2010), policy moves outside the parties’ own policy segment and leapfrogging of a party by another are clearly limited: ‘Any Socialist party that totally abandons its concern about welfare imperils its own existence’ (Budge et al, 2010, p. 792). This line of reasoning has been contested by the cartel party theory (Katz and Mair, 1995). In this view, following the cartelization of party politics, party leaders are primarily office oriented and remain relatively autonomous toward party members. Nonetheless, strong assumptions about parties as ideological organizations are not necessary in order to expect party differences: parties have also vote-related incentives to demarcate themselves, as shown by Downs’ (1957) spatial model of party competition. Downs predicts party convergence toward the position of the median voter when preferences present a unimodal distribution, but he predicts nonconvergence when this distribution is multimodal, given the incentives linked to the expected marginal gains and losses of votes following a policy move. In a simulation of party strategies in the context of uncertainty about the nature and level of their support among voters, Budge et al (2010) demonstrate that these strategies most likely result in party differentiation. Grynaviski (2010) also argues that there are vote-related incentives for maintaining a party’s traditional ideology and identity: parties may benefit from an electoral premium for having created a stable ‘party brand’ that seems both intelligible and trustworthy to voters. Following him, voters © 2014 Macmillan Publishers Ltd. 1476-3419
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favor a political environment with two ideologically distinctive (and internally cohesive) parties, since this facilitates policymakers’ communication to citizens and voters’ policy and party choice. In this perspective, a consistent ‘party brand’ allows voters to anticipate how the party’s elected officials will behave once in office. However, voting-maximizing strategies, depending on the party system and on other parties’ strategies, may also result in parties competing for contested constituencies that were once considered outside the party’s core electorate (Franklin et al, 1992). The issue competition literature documents how, in this context, parties contest their opponents’ issue ownership, dynamically adjust their policy position to competitors’ strategies and electoral performance, sometimes even by taking up the same position. Furthermore, parties may revise their policy position in order to make it compatible with the one of a pivotal coalition partner (Green-Pedersen, 2002; Bolleyer, 2007) and Mair (2008) adds that the growing number of parties currently coalitionable translates into less partisanship in policymaking (p. 216). These theoretical reflections confirm the necessity of measuring party preferences over time. They suggest that there are theoretical reasons that partisan differentiation takes place, but that this differentiation cannot be taken for granted in all policy domains. Dividing lines between left and right, conservatism and liberalism, socialism and communism, and so on, are likely to vary depending on the issue considered, as electoral supply and demand become more particularized. This is reflected in numerous examples of mainstream party convergence and reducing polarization among former anti-system parties (Mair, 2008), while differences in party positions still persist in many cases (Laver and Hunt, 1992; Klingemann et al, 1994; Budge et al, 2001; McDonald and Budge, 2005).
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Governmental parties’ capacity and interest in shaping policies
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The prime minister and the ministerial cabinets are central to the policy-making process and it seems reasonable to expect that the parties appointing these officials have the capacity to impulse, veto, frame and orientate policy change. In addition, the main party in government identifies and defines public problems at an early stage of the decision-making process and they communicate about government actions to citizens. Therefore, it seems unlikely that a bill that is not supported by the majority party gets passed (Laver and Shepsle, 1994), so that the parties in the ruling coalition can be characterized as partisan veto players (VPs, Tsebelis, 1995). A similar argument can be made for parties controlling the portfolio in charge of a specific problem, for instance the finance minister regarding budget issues (O’Malley, 2010). Parties’ policy-making power has been intensively scrutinized in the parliamentary arena and theories of legislative politics make predictions about how the partisan composition of the key institutional actors influences policies. The most basic model predicts that policy changes depend on the floor median position of the legislative 270
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chamber – under bicameralism, on a compromise position between the floor medians of each chamber – and that they will thus be only marginally affected by a change in government party. This model has been completed by Krehbiel’s pivotal politics model (see Krehbiel, 1998), which considers VPs able to prevent the adoption of legislation favored by the floor medians, that are likely, following Krehbiel, to dilute even more any residual partisan influence. This author further argues that partisan organizations and leaderships have no capacity to shape legislative outcomes beyond what individual legislators would choose if there were no party direction. However, both arguments do not exclude the possibility of a partisan influence. First, parties often control pivotal politics and we may find a substantive partisanship in policymaking when a single party controls enough pivots (Richmann, 2011). Second, and more generally, it must be noticed that floor median models evacuate partisanship based on a very restrictive definition of political parties, as organizations able to constrain single legislators. Krehbiel (1993) acknowledges that a pattern of party influence may in fact result from the majority party’s predominance in parliament in terms of seats: even if legislative outcomes reflect the floor(s’) median, this median may be sensibly different depending on the election results, especially in majoritarian systems. Party influence may thus be better conceptualized with a focus on the policy preferences, ideology or party identity shared by MPs from a same party, rather than on the formal party affiliation and mechanisms of party discipline. Empirically, legislative studies have observed an off-median partisan bias in voting behavior in parliament and legislative outcomes (for example, Bianco and Sened, 2005; Richmann, 2011). The literature tends to attribute this type of bias to three types of mechanisms:
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1. Party discipline and party leadership in exchange for collective goods provided to members of the party: Theories of conditional party government (see Aldrich and Rohde, 2001) and of endogenous party government (Volden and Bergman, 2006; Patty, 2008) see parties as floor-voting coalitions, in which parties have capacities to discipline their elected officials and incite them to support bills even in case of internal divergence within the party. These incentives take the form of potential sanctions, such as the threat of non-renomination for the next election, but even more of collective benefits, including appointments to prestigious committees, the allocation of staff resources or even, in more general terms, the party’s reputation in the electorate (see also Cann and Sidman, 2011). This is how Lee (2009) explains strong partisanship in the voting behavior of members of the US senate, even regarding legislation with no ideological content: she concludes that Senators often vote along partisan lines in order to defend their party’s political interest and image (see also Cox and McCubbins, 1993). In the same vein, MPs have an interest in minimizing the party’s roll rate (Cox and McCubbins, 2005), in pursuing a partisan agenda (Patty, 2008) or even in facilitating communication © 2014 Macmillan Publishers Ltd. 1476-3419
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about legislation to the electorate, both for incumbents and members of the opposition (Grynaviski, 2010).3 2. Parties’ agenda-setting power: Further authors argue that parties do not need to pressure their MPs with mechanisms of party disciplines in order to ensure party loyalty. This line of reasoning sees parties as ‘procedural coalitions’ (the procedural cartel theory developed in Cox and McCubbins, 2005, Chapter 10; see also Bianco and Sened, 2005): given the collective benefits retired from being member of their party, MPs may accept to provide the party leadership with the control of the legislative agenda – for instance through the practice of government bills or through the creation of a policy committee with gatekeeping powers. The capacity to prevent the agenda setting of bills that divide the majority party (negative agenda power) and to push legislation over the preferred bills (positive agenda power) allows the ruling party to pass legislation that is substantially closer to their caucus’ position than from the floor median position. The majority party may for instance set issues on the legislative agenda on which this party’s median position is not incompatible with the floor median position. 3. Personal ideology and affinities in genuine preferences of individual legislators: As already mentioned, opponents of partisan theories of legislative politics attribute off-median bias in legislative voting behavior to individual preferences. However, how to explain the preference correlation between legislators in a same party, without considering the role of party ideology and identity? Krehbiel takes individual preferences as exogenously given and does not address them explicitly. It seems nonetheless reasonable to assume that individuals joining, say, the Democratic party, tend to have more liberal views while individuals joining the Republican party tend to be more conservative. These affinities may incite MPs to provide their party with agenda-setting powers (Diermeier and Vlaicu, 2011), or to support legislation proposed by their party, in a policy-seeking logic. The explanatory power of genuine preferences is doubted by Mair (2008) who contends that the ‘ad-hoc constituencies’ and sets of preferences that emerge in the course of electoral campaigns are ‘hardly likely to match the sort of enduring identities and interests that once characterized the traditional core constituencies of cleavages politics, and are therefore unlikely to be understood – or assumed with the same degree of conviction by political leaders’ (p. 220). Are such differences in electoral discourses really less likely to get translated into effective policies? This is not what Karol (2009) finds in his study of US parties’ discourse over various issues and positions on pieces of legislation: following him, the strategic emphasis of preferences sometimes ultimately leads the party to legislate in line with these preferences. If some issues and positions tend to recur in a party’s discourse, this may indeed affect the process of activists’ recruitment, elite replacement and incumbent designation. The integration of more activists and rank-and-file party members identifying with these issues and positions can, over time, lead an initially purely electoral issue to become subject for legislative action. 272
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Majority parties overall seem to have the capacity to influence government decisions, including spending, privatizations and decisions affecting the size of government, as well as legislation. For sure, this does not ensure strong partisan influence on policy outputs and outcomes. On the one hand, party leaders may exert a control over the legislative process, but Katz and Mair (1995) have argued that in increasingly cartellized parties, they are primarily office-seeking and remain relatively autonomous toward party members and their demands.4 On the other hand, government parties’ influence depends on the general capacity of governments to deliver policy outputs, and even more policy outcomes. Theories of the policymaking generally converge on policymakers’ limited capacity to induce policy change and invoke a large number of constraints that limit the room for change: in addition to VPs and pivotal politics path dependence and the inertia of past decisions (Pierson, 20005), cognitive limits and institutional friction given the limited capacity of policy agendas (Baumgartner and Jones, 1993), and growing international interdependence and economic, fiscal and social competition narrowing governments’ steering capacity and available policy alternatives, in particular left parties’ capacity to fulfill their objective of social redistribution and economic intervention (Frieden and Rogowski, 1996; Schmidt, 1996; Boix, 2000; Garrett, 2000; Scharpf, 2000). Given these constraints, party influence may well be only residual. However, while all this explains why policies tend not to change, it is also important to understand why they sometimes do change – and party politics may provide one valuable explanation in this respect. The rest of the article argues that in the context of scarce means and scarce attention, the challenge for the ‘do-partiesmatter’ debate is to establish the conditions favoring partisanship in policymaking – in other words, to establish when elected officials have incentives to act depending on the priorities and the preferences defended by their party.
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When do Parties Matter? Toward a Conditional Theory of Partisan Influence We have seen that partisan theory of policymaking and legislative studies brings convincing arguments regarding the majority party’s capacity to shape policies and the incentives of elected officials to be partisan, but that the mechanisms at play may not apply to all policies and polities and that the empirical conclusions are highly ambivalent. This calls for a refinement of the research question in order to establish when, that is, under what conditions, parties determine policies. This final section thus proposes a conditional theory of party government, based on the premise that political parties are policy-, office- and vote-seeking; when faced with trade-offs between these objectives, partisan office holders are expected, in line with the argument of Katz and Mair (1995) already cited and because winning elections and seizing power are necessary to implement policies, to privilege office and votes over © 2014 Macmillan Publishers Ltd. 1476-3419
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policy. The following lines introduce the potential constraining or facilitating conditions for partisan policymaking.
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1. Counter-majoritarian institutions: So far, attempts to progress toward a conditional model of partisanship in policymaking focus to a large extent on institutional parameters, with the idea that counter-majoritarian institutions tend not only the shape party preferences, but also to dilute partisanship: the more checks and balances and the less majoritarian the democracy, the more difficult for the main party in government to determine policies (see Blais et al, 1993 and Schmidt, 1996 for the general argument). Preliminary evidence indeed indicates that several counter-majoritarian constraints limit partisan influence: federalism (von Beyme, 1984; Schmidt, 1996; Montpetit and Foucault, 2012); delegation of authority to non-majoritarian agencies (Mair, 2008, p. 216, 227) including an autonomous central bank, that complicates the implementation of left policies requiring the concentration of economic, wage and monetary policy (Scharpf, 2000; see Cusack, 2001 for opposite evidence); EU membership and delegation of competences to European institutions (Schmidt, 1996; Mair, 2008); to which me might add an influential constitutional court. Divided governments (Blais et al, 1993; Alesina and Rosenthal, 1995) are also considered to constrain partisan policymaking, although coalition government, minority government and co-governance of the opposition (for instance, in the case of the French cohabitation) might not alter partisan influence to the same extent. A ‘more detailed analysis and measurement of institutional veto-points and state structures’, as called by Schmidt (1996), is still lacking. Tsebelis (1995) considers, for instance, coalition partners whose support is necessary to pass legislation as effective VP and predicts the majority party to have more policymaking power the more cabinets it controls, and less power the more inclusive the coalition. Of course, as counter-majoritarian institutions may also be controlled by the majority party, or by a party with similar views on some issues, the conditioning impact of institutional and partisan VPs depend on their policy position – policy change and partisan influence being more likely when VPs and majority party stand on the same side of the status quo (O’Malley, 2010). If the division of power between parties in and out governments and the checks and balances defined by the institutional setting are likely to modulate partisanship in policymaking, it seems to us that a large range of further relevant factors, political, contextual and issue-specific, also deserve attention and have been neglected so far. 2. Characteristics of the party system and party polarization: Two parties with similar ideological profiles, but anchored in different party systems, may exert a very different influence on policies. Several authors have argued that partisan influence is more likely in two-party systems, because responsibilities are clearer and government parties thus more incited to be accountable and because the 274
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unique dimension of competition that is typical of such systems is seen as a necessary for voters and parties to base their relationship on representation and accountability: if there are more than one dimension, it seems difficult for citizens to provide parties with a clear mandate, and for parties, faced with more particularized and fragmented demands, to know which policy alternative their voters expect them to be active on (see Mair, 2008, p. 228 for a presentation of this argument). By contrast, I follow Downs (1957) in expecting that mainstream parties have less incentives to converge to the median voter position in multi-party systems and that more partisan differentiation will be observed in such systems. Kitschelt (1994) has indeed observed that mainstream parties challenged by a far left party tend to maintain their policies in favor of the welfare state, or at least not to cut back on welfare programs (see also Iversen and Soskice, 2006). The party polarization favored by multi-party systems, understood as intra-party cohesion and inter-party distinction, is frequently cited in legislative studies as a facilitating condition of party influence, notably because it incites majority party members to skew legislative rules and outcomes to their favor (Cox and McCubbins, 1993, p. 270; Aldrich and Rohde, 2001; Bianco and Sened, 2005, p. 363; Diermeier and Vlaicu, 2011, pp. 369–370). 3. Contextual political variables: A party is likely to have more capacities to pass partisan policies when it stays long in office (the positive effect of government stability on party influence has been documented by von Beyme, 1984; Swank, 1988; Blais et al, 1993; Schmidt, 1996, p. 167; Thérien and Noël, 2000); when it benefits from considerable electoral strength or popularity in the public (the bigger the party’s lead of the opposition party and the broader its electoral support and popularity over time, the less prone it will be to retreat from its policy preferences; for example, Karol, 2009); and when this government party is internally cohesive or has the capacity to maintain party discipline: if party decisions are conditioned to obtaining the support of one or several factions, it should be more difficult for the government party to influence policies (Aldrich and Rohde, 2001). Last but not least, the electoral cycle seems a crucial parameter: the imminence of an election may prompt parties in government to reelection-oriented partisanship in policymaking (Tufte, 1978). They may also benefit from a ‘honeymoon’ period in the aftermath of their election that allows them to pass their preferred policies, while partisan influence is likely to regress in the middle of the electoral cycle (Alesina and Rosenthal, 1995). This also implies that this influence may vary depending on the frequency of elections, with more incentives for partisanship when elections are frequent (Cameron, 1978). Finally, external shocks or focusing events sometimes focus public and political attention to unexpected problems that were not on the government’s schedule and set the priority on unintended decisions (Baumgartner and Jones, 1993; Birkland, 1998). I expect government parties to respond to such shocks given their unexpected and urgent nature. This hypothesis is corroborated by Walgrave et al © 2014 Macmillan Publishers Ltd. 1476-3419
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(2006) who observe an overall impact of parties on Belgian legislative priorities within a government term, but much stronger impact of external pressure including media attention and street protest on the yearly dynamic of legislative attention. We should, though, note that depending on the context, an external shock may represent an opportunity for them to pass their preferred legislation. 4. Issue-specific characteristics have been surprisingly neglected in the literature, despite the observation that partisan influence varies by policy domain and depending on the type of instrument considered – in particular whether they are of financial or of no financial nature (Imbeau et al, 2001, pp. 7–8). Three characteristics seem particularly relevant. First, the genuine importance of the issue to the party, whether it belongs to its topics of predilection or whether is it a rather peripheral topic. Second, opportunity costs: high opportunity costs are likely to decrease governments’ incentives for partisan policymaking. This may be the case of financial measures, especially when they are capital intensive and imply budgetary trade-offs, by contrast to regulatory policies, whose cost is much more limited. This sheds light on the observation that partisan influence varies by policy domain and depending on the type of instrument considered, in particular whether they are of financial or of non-financial nature (Imbeau et al, 2001, pp. 7–8). The third relevant characteristic is issue salience: I hypothesize elected officials’ trade-offs between policy, office and votes to vary considerably depending on the salience of the issue at stake. Public problems enter policy agendas more or less visibly, depending on the degree of public concern about the issue and of its newsworthiness and general visibility in the media. It seems reasonable that strategic elected officials focus their scarce attention, resources and efforts to enact partisan and popular policies in visible matters, as this allows them to appear as accountable, while inaction, or non-partisan or unpopular policymaking in invisible areas, on which the public is not well aware, is not very costly in electoral terms. Recent empirical findings on the decision making regarding corporate control in France, Germany, the Netherlands and Japan corroborate this hypothesis, as they show that policymakers tend to aggregate corporatist interests and to make concessions to interest groups in ‘quiet’ matters, while being more accountable and responsive in ‘noisy’ ones (Culpepper, 2011).6 The mediating effect of issue salience is likely to interact with the factor of public opinion. If elected officials are vote maximizing, they are likely to follow public opinion moves, which has been indeed observed in various empirical studies (Page and Shapiro, 1983; Soroka and Wlezien, 2010). Regarding salient issues, partisan influence is likely when the government party position is on the same side of the status quo as the modal position in the public. By contrast, when public opinion diverges from the majority party position on a salient issue, I expect that elected officials will follow the public rather than their party, because there are more vote than office maximizing (see Burstein and Linton, 2002 for a similar argumentation; and Blom-Hansen et al, 2006 for contradictory results). 276
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In a nutshell, partisan influence is more likely when there are few VPs (or few controlled by the opposition), in a multi-party system, when government is stable and electorally strong, with a cohesive majority party, short election cycles (or in the runup or the aftermath of an election) and regarding salient issues with low opportunity costs. However, government partisanship is not automatic whenever policy change is institutionally, politically and technically possible, as this factor competes with other factors of policy change. Partisanship is likely to diminish in the context of external shocks and when government is not enjoying wide support for a policy.
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This review article identifies several challenges for the ‘do-parties-matter’ debate. First, changing electoral alignments, evolving issues and party positions and the emergence of particularistic linkages between voters and parties make it necessary to provide a measure of party preferences over time that is more precise than a left–right position, whose explanatory power of indicators of policy change can then be empirically assessed. Second, the contrasted empirical findings regarding the partypolicy link should not lead us to evacuate too quickly parties from policy-making analysis, as there are theoretical grounds for expecting partisan influence, at least under some conditions. Thirdly, I draw on the fragmented evidence provided by the literature in order to identify some of these institutional, political, contextual and issue-specific conditions and develop a conditional model of party influence. I argue that party influence is most likely in multi-party systems with short election cycles, when VPs are few (or controlled by the majority party), government is stable, electorally strong and based on a cohesive party majority, and regarding salient issues on which public opinion predominantly supports the party position or is polarized, and with low opportunity costs. The relative weight of these parameters needs to be assessed in multivariate analyses. Not only will this help us to make sense of the contrasted findings regarding party influence in policymaking, but also to understand better how different channels of democratic representation – accountability, responsiveness and corporatist interest aggregation – are interrelated.
Notes 1 The motivation for studying the party-policy link and many of the references and ideas developed here stem from numerous discussions with Comparative Agendas Project colleagues, especially within the French team. I am particularly grateful to Sylvain Brouard, Caterina Froio, Emiliano Grossman, Simon Persico and Tinette Schnatterer for their input. I also would like to acknowledge the financial support of the French Research Agency (ANR) for the PARTIPOL project, devoted to the topic of partisanship in policymaking. 2 Mair (2008, p. 219) goes even further in observing that there are hardly identifiable electoral constituencies anymore and that parties, when faced with less marked and cohesive electorates, could not mirror the collective preferences of their constituencies, even if they wished to do so. © 2014 Macmillan Publishers Ltd. 1476-3419
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3 This line of argumentation is more fragile regarding MPs benefiting from a strong personal vote and who do not rely primarily on the partisan ‘brand’ for their election. 4 Katz and Mair contend that the cartellization of party organizations goes along with the emergence of a new conception of democracy, in which incumbents are not accountable based on an assessment of their electoral promises and on their consistence with the ‘party brand’, but judged on their record, for instance on their performance in fostering economic growth and in reducing budget deficits. 5 As accurately noted by Schmidt (1996, p. 169), policy inheritance is not exogenously given but reflects decisions by past governments that may, at least partly, be determined by their party composition. 6 Party influence may then be facilitated when interest groups’ demands are in line with party policies, for instance when trade unions support a left party in government (Alvarez et al, 1991).
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