Interests and Information : Papers on the Comparative Analysis of Political Institutions

Interests and Information. Papers on the Comparative Analysis of Political Institutions

Habilitationsschrift zur Erlangung der Venia legendi fur Politikwissenschaft

vorgelegt von:

Thomas Brauninger

Fachbereich Politik- und Verwaltungswissenschaft und Zentrum fur den wissenschaftlichen Nachwuchs

Universitat Konstanz

November 2005

Konstanzer Online-Publikations-System (KOPS) URN: http://nbn-resolving.de/urn:nbn:de:bsz:352-opus-78377

URL: http://kops.ub.uni-konstanz.de/volltexte/2009/7837/

Contents

I INTRODUCTION

New Institutionalism and Beyond 4

II

When Simple Voting Doesn't Work: MuIticameral Systems for the Representation and Aggregation of Interests in International Organizations

British Journal ofPolitical Science33(4): 681-703,

Cambridge University Press 2003 ³⁶

Fiscal Constitutionalism in the Economic and Monetary Union International Journal of Organization Theory and

Behaviour ^7(4):530-554, PrAcademics Press 2004 67

Legitimacy Without Legality? War-Making With and Without the UN

European Political Science2(4): 19-24, ECPR Press 2003 ⁸⁷ A Partisan Model of Government Expenditure

Public Choice, Springer [forthcoming] ⁹⁴

Structural Power, Information Asymmetry and Public Policy:

A Signaling Model of Business Lobbying in Democratic Capitalism(with Patrick Bernhagen)

Political Studies53(1): 43-64, Blackwell Publishing Ltd 2005 115 Government Status and Legislative Behaviour. Partisan Veto Players in

Australia, Denmark, Finland and Germany(with Steffen Ganghof)

Party Politics, Sage Publications [forthcoming] 142

I INTRODUCTION

New Institutionalism and Beyond

Political institutions have always been a concern of the social sciences and the phrase "institutions matter" has become a common place in political science research. Sometimes the expression is stipulated as an assumption or even an assertion (N orth 1981; Shepsle 1989), at other times accompanied with a question mark (Weaver and Rockman 1993). And sometimes, when the link between institutions and outcomes is not apparent at first sight, it may indeed constitute a major research finding (Hug and Sciarini 2000). In fact, institutions are at the heart of both traditional and more recent approaches to and theories of politics.

Yet, whilst the core set of ideas of the institutionalist approach is fairly broadly shared and recognized, the questions of how and when institutions actually matter in real-world settings have received less attention. However, it is this move from theoretical questions - What is an institution? Do institutions matter? - to the inquiry into the empirical implications and predictions of these theories that may help to develop a better understanding of institutions and that therefore defines the possible future research agenda of contemporary institutionalism (Pollak 2000;

Aspinwall and Schneider 2000; Diermeier and KrehbieI2003).

The new institutionalism in political science sees institutions, for instance, as rules and procedures that structure the choice of actors by establishing expectations about the actions of other actors (Knight and Sened 1995: 10). Here, the explanatory model of the emergence and change of institutions is actor-based, and both the choice of and within institutional settings is conceived as a strategic calculation of political actors who try to achieve certain goals. The rational choice variant of this research program focuses more on the actual choice actors make, often by taking actors' goals for granted and asking how institutions structure strategies through the provision of information and the threat of sanctions. By contrast, the historical institutionalist approach is more concerned with how these ends or goals come about, that is why political actors "emphasize certain goals over others" (Thelen and Steinmo 1992: 9). But what unites both approaches is the belief that "preferences or interests expressed in action should not be conflated with 'true' preferences, that methods for aggregating interests inevitably distort,

and that institutional configurations may privilege particular sets of interests and may need to be reformed" (Immergut 1998: 8).I

In fact, the various institutions that are analyzed in this volume have much more in common than what these general characteristics of institutions suggest.

They are all political institutions and as such they allocate capacities for individuals or groups to obtain preferred outcomes without regard of other actors' preferences or choices. Most of the institutional characteristics studied in this volume are formal devices for collective decision-making within a fixed group of actors, such as the executive board of an international organization, a legislature or a cabinet at the nation-state level. Moreover, the papers also deal with the question of representation (rather than decision-making) and the by and large informal ways of special interest group politics. In this respect, they are based on a general definition of political institutions as devices that give some people greater capacity to work their will upon the world by holding positions within or holding control over those institutions (Goodin 1996: 16).

The papers in this volume share the core set of ideas of the foundational literature on institutions. Yet I believe, they differ from previous work in two respects. Firstly, the classical institutional research design, particularly in comparative politics, has been to compare a number of states with different institutional devices which are used to explain variation in some outcomes. This has resulted in descriptive and causal inferences about institutions as well as patterns of co-variation between institutional features whose importance is difficult to overstate (e.g., Waever and Rockman 1993; Lijphart 1999). Yet, whilst this approach is most successful in making sense of cross-national variation, thc weakness of this approach, as dissected by Pontusson (1995: 123), is that, institutionalists "consistently emphasize the causal significance of institutional arrangements" but are unable to explain "why policy outcomes sometimes change within relatively stable institutions".

One reason for that is that institutions are often seen as stand-alone devices postulated to work in one and only one direction, e.g., they produce stability or enhance efficiency. I argue that these accounts are too narrow. The analysis of institutions should not presuppose that different institutional features have different consequences for outcomes. Institutions are (merely) contextual features that define constraints on, and opportunities for, individual behavior; the link between institutions and outcomes then is behavior (Diermeier and Krehbiel 2003: 126). The empirical assessment and testing of institutional theories is therefore essential in judging the usefulness of the institutional approach. It is this

For a discussion of differences and common grounds between the three major versions of institutional ism, rational choice, organisational/sociological and historical institutionalism, see Hall and Taylor (1996), and Aspinwall and Schneider (2000). For a discussion of the different conceptions of interests or preferences in the three variants, see Immergut (1998).

principal understanding that lies at the heart of the approach I adopt in the essays in this volume.

Secondly, the papers share the common spirit of emphasizing the importance of the interest component in the new institutionalist approach. Of course, interests are a basic concept in the actor-oriented research program on social and political institutions. Yet, the following papers differ from other variants of institutional analysis. They make a case for the view that only a close look on what actors interest are, where they are grounded, how they emerge, or how preferences over outcomes result in strategies over actions can produce a more comprehensive picture of political institutions. In comparative politics, for instance, studies usually rely on "ideological-programmatic" differences between parties or party families when explaining patterns of public policy (e.g., Lane and Ersson 1987;

Garrett 1998). Parties may indeed be differentiated according to their self-labeling as Christian, liberal, or rural etc. But in terms of party families there is nothing that distinguishes German Social-democrats or British Labour in the 1970s from their "new labour" counterparts in the late 1990s. Interests or preferences, however, may be specific to policy areas or even policies, they may vary with the level of the political system, and they may change over time.

This calls for a refined methodology that is based on measurements rather than typologies (e.g., Budge et al. 2001; Laver et al. 2003). Other areas are plagued by similar problems (Konig 2005: 263). In European integration studies a commonly employed assumption is that supranational actors such as the Commission and the European Parliament have "pro-integrationist preferences" whilst member states may have different but in any case less integrationist preferences (e.g. Tsebelis 1994). While this makes some intuitive sense, it is questionable on empirical grounds. In their study of the principal dimensions of conflicts during the negotiation on an EU Convention, Hix and Crombez (2005: 371), for instance, show that the EU Commission and the European Parliament did not ^hold extremist positions on the conflict dimension that refers to the vertical allocation of power between the EU and the member states.

The papers in this volume show that it is the interest rather than the institutional component of the research program that calls for empirical work to accompany any theoretical approach to the study of real-world institutions. The simple reason for this lies in the fact that institutions are relatively unique ^and more or less stable; they are a "relatively enduring collection of rules and organized practices" (March and Olsen 2005: 4). By contrast, actors' preferences usually are manifold (because they are actor-specific) and often they are shaky (they change over time). When studying real-world electoral systems, for instance, we basically know what "proportional representation" is. Assessing the actual effect of this institutional feature in terms of votes and seat distribution but also with respect to issues of strategic voting, turnout or the number of effective parties, however, requires more. We have to understand the key dimensions of

conflict within the electorate and the party system, we have to consider the distributions of voters' preferences and the like.

The articles in this volume seek to support these claims in different ways and from various points of view. Their fundamental stipulation is that the actual appearance or "nature" of political institutions can only be evaluated in terms of how institutions promote or hinder actors in attaining political outcomes they are interested in. In other words, the claim is that studying institutions necessitates looking at the interplay of institutions and preferences of the actors involved. At first glance, this seems obvious and hardly surprising. In fact, this general contention lies at the heart of the formal political theory or public choice approach summarized by Plott (1991) in what is sometimes called the fundamental equation of politics:

Preferences x Institutions~Outcomes

However, the actual application of the approach is far from straightforward.

First, as I will argue in several of the following papers, a large literature looks at either the institutional or the interest component often providing a partial if not misleading picture of the nature of political institutions. Secondly, any application of the approach at least requires attaining the preferences of the actors involved, either by measuring preferences empirically or making informed assumptions about the goals political actors want to achieve. Thirdly, institutions can take on a variety of forms. They may consists of formal mles (constitutions, common law) and informal mles (conventions, norms) and come together with a number of enforcement mechanisms. In any case, the key to the (constrained) choice individuals make is their perceptions of situations, which are "a function of the way the mind interprets the information it receives" (North 1995: 17).

Specifically, any application of the above approach requires a thorough study of the perceptions individuals have about the nature of institutions, the constraints these impose, and, in particular, the credibility of enforcement mechanisms.

Finally, a consistent and forceful application of this approach is demanding since it presupposes knowledge about how preferences and institutions actually interplay. The twist here comes from two sides. On the one hand, institutions can be perceived as socially shared mles that shape individual behavior and actions in social situations. Taking this as a starting point, analyzing the effect of institutions on the one hand necessitates studying the effects of such constraints (or opportunity stmctures) at the level of individual actors. On the other hand, social situations are inherently interactive so that any understanding of the effect of institutions presupposes knowledge as to how individual choices aggregate to political outcomes at the macro-level.

In this introduction, I explain and address some of the emerging questions when introducing into and connecting the papers of this volume. Table 1 shows a

synopsis of the papers In terms of types of conflicts, types of institutions, and levels of analysis.

Table 1: Synopsis ofsubject areas ofthe study

Type of conflict Type of institution Level of analysis Paper

conflict of (state) formal& informal: institutional change: When simple voting interests multi cameral constitutional politics doesn't work

representation and voting systems

conflict of (state) formal: weighted institutional change: Fiscal

interests voting systems constitutional politics constitutionalism in the Economic and Monetary Union conflict of beliefs formal: voting systems institutional effects: Legitimacy without

with vetoing judicial politics legality?

(vote- and policy- formal: legislative and institutional effects: A partisan model of based) conflict of cabinet decision- fiscal politics government

interest making expenditure

conflict of interest_& informal: interest institutional effects: Structural power and conflict of beliefs group mediation interest group politics public policy (vote- and policy- formal: coalition institutional effects: Government status based) confl ict of bargaining public policy-making and legislative

interest behaviour

Type ofconflict: conflict ofinterestvsconflict ofbeliefs

The first criteria is the type of the (potential) conflict, institutions help to resolve by defining appropriate behavior or help to prevent in the first place. In this respect, most of the literature is concerned with conflicts of interest: the conflict of individuals over the provision of public goods in local communities (e.g.

Ostrom 1990), the conflict of states over moves "along the Pareto frontier" in international regimes (e.g. Krasner 1991), or the conflict of political parties over the allocation of resources and public policies in legislative politics (e.g. Weingast et al. 1981).

However, some institutions help to resolve conflicts of a very different type.

Quite often, political actors can agree on common goals but they can not agree on the means to produce these outcomes for the mere reason that they lack knowledge how to achieve their goals. The problem here comes from the fact that actors have evidence as regards the true state of the world but they cannot be certain about their beliefs. In this case, not the divergence of interests but the uncertainty of assessments sets up a real-world problem (Condorcet 1785; Nitzan

and Paroush 1982; Austen-Smith and Banks 1996). Institutions may provide mechanisms to resolve such conflicts. Jury decision making is one example where actors have a common interest in producing a correct decision but differences in their assessments make a collective decisions necessary. The question here is what is the appropriate institutional setting that maximizes the probability of a correct assessment but minimizes the risk of a false one (F eddersen and Pesendorfer 1998; Coughlan 2000; for a recent overview, see Nurmi 2002).

Two notes are at hand. First, making good use of the above distinction is often difficult. Means regularly constitute also ends. Schools of thought in economic politics are one example in this respect. Even if one assumes that economic growth is the common goal of parties of different ideological origin, the question of Keynesian or classical economic policies is not exclusively a question of means. It is also an end in itself if ideologically defined constituencies disapprove any inconsistency between party or candidate policies and the perceived party ideology. I deal with these issues in two of the following essays. The paper on the legitimacy of the United States' (US) war on Iraq considers the United Nations Security Council decision of March 2003 on whether the Iraq was in breach of international law. This is a situation where, ideally, states only had a common interest and that is convicting a guilty Iraqi government but acquitting an innocent one. The key insight of this paper is that, in principle, the conflict within the Security Council can be understood in terms of a conflict of beliefs and not only as a conflict of interest between superpowers as it is generally conceived in the literature. Of course, situations might involve both conflict of interest and conflict of beliefs. This is the setting considered in the paper on the structural power of business interest groups. The paper argues that business lobbying situations are characterized by both common and conflicting interests of political and private actors who, however, have different levels of knowledge about technical or economic conditions.

Type ofinstitution: formalvs informal rules

Most of the cases presented in this study deal with formal mechanisms of control such as electoral rules, veto rights, legislative rules, monitoring and sanctioning provisions. A large part of the literature on a positive theory of institutions is in fact focused on these "hard" institutions, admittedly excluding and probably disregarding the impact of various informal institutions (Helmke and Levitsky 2004: 72Sr Examples for the latter category are conventions, norms, unwritten legislative rules but also patterns of consociationalism, clientelism, or corruption.

Whilst the critique is certainly valid, the analytical distinction between hard and

2 There are notable exceptions in formal political theory, however. See, e.g., Knight (1992).

soft institutions is far from clear-cut. One reason for this is that often formal rules serve as a last resort actors refer to when informal rules break down or are too costly to enforce; they then serve as frames of reference.

The paper on institution-building for the deep-seabed may serve as an example in this respect. A major finding of the study on the ISA is the importance actors attached to formal as compared to informal rules. As with most international organizations, member states are requested to reach consensus 'on major issues as often as possible and to fall back on majority voting as a last resort only. The history of the ISA shows, however, that at all times member states intensely bargained over the design of the voting mechanism and never considered the informal rule of consensus building as a realistic scenario.

Level ofanalysis: effect ofinstitutions vs change ofinstitutions

The research on political institutions is usually motivated by one of two questions (Weingast 1996). The first one asks for the effects of institutions on social outcomes. This has been the focus of the older literature according to which institutions can provide groups of actors with the means to produce collective goods that would be unattainable or costly to produce otherwise. Whilst some of the, often but not exclusively functionalist, literature has merely assumed the efficiency of institutions (e.g. Buchanan and Tullock 1962), the more recent literature is more open-minded for the possibility that institutions do not result in socially optimal outcomes (e.g., Ostrom 1990: 143-81), or that they do not produce stability in expectations, actions and outcomes (e.g., Groseclose and McCarty 200 I). Four of the papers in this volume engage in the exploration of ways in which institutional arrangements make a difference. They all differ with respect to the specific institution employed, the context and issue area, including (quasi-)judicial politics in an international organization, interest group politics at the domestic level, and cabinet decision-making on fiscal policies. Yet, they all ask for the way how a specific institution and a specific configuration of conflict of interest or knowledge matter.

Two of the papers address the second basic question, namely as to the origins of institutions, that is the creation and change of institutional arrangements. Here, a major issue of debate centers around the question whether institutions emerge or are subject to intentional design (see Knight and Sened 1995: 2-5). The distinction is much more tricky than it seems to be in the first place (Diermeier and Krehbiel 2003). Of course, political institutions are themselves the product of politics.

Although any change at the institutional level may be conceived as the result of some choice at the individual level of political actors, institutional change can be the unintended consequence of such interactions. Rational instrumental choice does simply not imply functional institutions (Miller 2000). And even institutions that are in fact designed by rational, informed and fore-sighted actors are never

created de novo. Intentional design is embedded in the experience of its designers and constrained by their horizons. We should therefore expect to see hangovers from the past and we should not expect institutions to be internally consistent (Riker 1995: 121).

In the two papers that deal with cases of institutional design and redesign I enter this debate by simultaneously treating institutions as both causes and effects of patterns of political interaction. In the case of the International Seabed Authority (ISA), an international institution for administering the deep-seabed's resources had to be built from anew. As an international organization within the framework of the United Nations, it had obvious predecessor in terms organization, organs, agencies and bureaux. Yet, the striking thing with the ISA is its multi-cameral voting body that had no obvious model. In the paper on the European Economic and Monetary Union, the gradual "loosening" of the rules of the Stability and Growth Pact are analyzed. Here, there were not only forerunners but institutions that were in place and which actors intended to change gradually.

Both papers shows how the choice of an institutional setting can be understood in terms of the expectations actors have about the ways these institutions will make a difference in the future.

The essays in this volume address these issues in various ways. In the reminder of this introduction, I discuss, one after the other, the implications of these problems for the study of international politics and comparative politics. In doing so, I first present some of the issues at stake in the two subfields, and secondly, I outline how the papers in this volume address these questions and how they speak to each other.

Interest and Information Aggregation in International Relations Research

In international politics actors bring forward, mitigate or enforce their interests as regards substantial issues that are deemed not to be resolvable at the level of domestic politics. The set of issues is wide including public goods like global environmental protection, club goods like security, or private goods like territorial claims or economic protection. Actors are states represented by state governments, international governmental organizations, as well as international and domestic non-governmental actors of various kinds. The types of conflict to be resolved comprise conflicts of knowledge, conflicts of interests, and conflicts over values and normative standpoints. The types of actions range from mere coordination to institutional cooperation, from peaceful dispute settlement to armed conflict, and from communication to arguing. Insofar international politics 11

is not fundamentally different from any other political game, it is the quest for both power and the good. Its key questions belong to the wider class of questions about social order and development (March and Olson 1998: 943).

What is, however, fundamentally different in international politics is the predominance of the principle of state sovereignty. In the traditional view state sovereignty is a state's "supreme authority, an authority which is independent of any other earthly authority. Sovereignty in the strict and narrowest sense of the term implies, therefore, independence all round, within and without the borders of the country" (Oppenheim 1955: 118). Two of the many consequences of this approach are that first, sovereign states are juridically equal. Second, any form of obligation in international law presupposes the consent amongst the interested states, irrespective of whether or not enforcement of such obligations is achievable.

This classic VIew on the traditional foundation of international law IS challenged from two angles. First, even though today states are juridically sovereign, the powers stemming from that premises "have greatly shrunk" as new rules and mechanisms of the international community have evolved "according to which any excessive use of sovereign powers should be excluded" (Tomuschat 2002). In fact, since at least the late 20^th century, the international legal system and the institutionalization of international cooperation in particular has amounted to a tight framework that cannot longer be characterized as unrestrained freedom but puts, at least, enormous pressures on states to behave in a community friendly way (Tomuschat 2002). Human rights, for instance, are increasingly perceived as universal in the sense that their enforcement concerns all members of the international community. Most importantly, this view has mounted to customary international law that is distinctly more comprehensive than conventional treaty law that states have agreed to explicitly. Closely linked to this is the process of institutionalization, i.e. the emergence of a plethora of international regimes and institutions since the beginning of the 20^th century and after 1945, in particular.

This gradual move from "anarchy" to "hierarchy" (Pappi et al. 2004: 27) mounts to a number of questions regarding the relation of state sovereignty, institutionalized cooperation, and state compliance. At least, the process of institutionalization uncouples the principle of state consent from cooperation, and consequently, it repels unanimity rule for collective decision-making in international organizations:

- In this context, the question of how to reach decisions states are willing to comply with has attracted considerable attention. The quest for a reform of the decision-making mechanisms in the European Union Council of Minister is a recent prominent example (e.g., Carrubba and Volden 2001; Beisbart et al.

2005). Two examples that are discussed in the following papers are the

International Seabed Authority and the monitoring and enforcement rules and procedures of the European Economic and Monetary Union.

The second critique on the classical principle of state sovereignty is based on the observation that states have different resources and capabilities and for that very reason the notion of sovereign equality is of little practical use. Indeed, states may have different capabilities to enforce their interests by acting unilaterally. They often have also different resources that help to provide public goods that would be unattainable otherwise. And they may have different interests, are differently affected by the issue in question, or they have different information and technology levels that make them more or less apt for playing a key role in an international institution.

The notion that states have different resources and capabilities is of course a standard and widely accepted view on international pOlitics. The typical perspective is to see resources as means to pursue one's interest, notably to pursue interests that are in conflict with other actors' interests. Still, as outlined above, different capabilities may also play a role when there is no conflict of interest but a conflict a beliefs, notably when actors have a common objective but differ in the quantity of information they have and can provide for the production of the collective good. Key questions in this respect are:

- What are the mechanisms that allow groups of states to aggregate these different bits of information "efficiently"? How large should such a committee be? How does the concurrent existence of conflicting and common interests alter actors' strategies and outcomes? These are some important questions when analyzing how states with different informational capabilities interact in institutionalized settings (e.g. Gerling et al. 2003; Grtiner 2004). The paper on the Iraq case before the United Nations Security Council takes on such a perspective.

Three of the papers collected in this volume address some of these questions. The following paragraphs introduce the papers, one by one. To do so, I shall briefly state what the type of conflict at hand was, and describe the institutional setting that was either a constraint on actors' behavior or a result of their actions. I then outline major findings and state what contribution the paper makes to the study of political institutions for the representation and aggregation of interests and beliefs.

When Simple Voting Doesn't Work: Multicameral Systems for the

Representation and Aggregation of Interests in International Organizations

The type of conflict: In 1982, the Third United Nations Conference on the Law of the Sea (UNCLOS Ill) adopted a convention for governing the world's oceans by an overwhelming majority of 149. The states agreed on major issues of ocean use,

including transport, transit and overflight, fisheries, oil and mineral resource exploitation, as well as environmental protection. Several, almost exclusively industrialized, countries rejected the ocean regime, however, as they were in opposition to the convention's Part XI establishing the International Seabed Authority. The Seabed Authority was vested with power to administer the use of the seabed's mineral resources that were regarded as highly important for national economies in the future. Because the seabed is beyond national jurisdiction, existing international law had previously granted all states free access to the deep seabed. Rejection by the economically and politically important countries substantially endangered the new regime and the universality of the convention.

The type of institution: Under these circumstances, the developing countries signaled their willingness to renegotiate in 1989. Five years later, the United Nations General Assembly set up an implementation agreement to ensure the universality of the convention, making major concessions to the disgruntled highly industrialized countries. The latter finally won reduced production limitations and more weight in the ISA decision-making procedures. More specifically, the renegotiated treaty establishes a rather unique multicameral system that grants collective veto rights to specific interest groups - namely, states investing in deep-sea mining, major consumer states, and states producing the minerals in question. States belonging to the specific groups are more likely to occupy a seat in one of the four council chambers and attain a veto on majority decisions, whereas most developing countries and nonspecific states have lower chances to be elected in the council. Under these multicameral provisions, both the large part of the international community and the highly industrialized countries were willing to collaborate in protecting and using the global commons of the deep seabed.

Analysis and Results: The article analyses this problem of representation and voting in an international organization while tackling the problem in a broader perspective. Taking the ISA as an example it reflects on the origins and consequences of complex arrangements for the representation and aggregation of actors' interests - be they individuals (voters at the domestic level) or agents (government representatives at, e.g., the international level). In fact, bicameralism is a widespread institutional feature in national political systems raising the question as to its why and when. The paper argues that constitutional politics, i.e.

the design of such institutions can be studied in terms of the expectations actors associate with the outcomes these institutions are likely to generate. Of course, this "rational design approach" to constitutional politics presupposes that first, such institutions matter in the sense that they shape actors' beliefs and behavior, and, secondly, actors are forward-looking and goal-oriented at the constitutional stage. The paper makes three moves:

- It extends the Hammond and Miller (1987) theorem on bicameralism to multicameralism. Using tools of formal political theory it is shown that in a voting body where decision making requires that a simple majority within any of a fixed number of groups approves the proposal, outcomes are located in a bargaining space that is spanned between these groups.

- It conjectures on the conditions that favor the design of such rules. More specifically, if there are no visible and stable conflictual divisions between individuals or groups within society or between states within an international regime, unicameral institutions such as simple majority voting prove most useful, in general. By contrast, if the inclusion of distinct groups of individuals or agents is a prerequisite for state/regime functioning, multicameral rules may be more effective.

- Applying the theoretical results to the ease of the seabed mining regime, the paper puts forward and tests three hypotheses as regards the design of the multicameral system of the Seabed Authority. The empirical analysis draws on a large dataset on states' interests in deep-sea mining collected from secondary content analysis of negotiation documents. Comparing likely decision-making outcomes under unicameral and multicameral voting rules from 1996 to 2002, the results suggest that multicameral outcomes are more likely to be stable and supported by those actors critical for the effective functioning of the regime.

The paper shows how specific arrangements can allow for a deeper institutionalization of an issue area even if conflicting interests abound and any agreement requires to the consent of all actors involved.

Fiscal Constitutionalism in the Economic and Monetary Union

The type of conflict: Since the early years of the European Communities, pro- integrationist politicians and bureaucrats envisaged a common currency for Europe but it took 20 years or so from the first more solid plans to the circulation of the euro as a cash currency. One reason for the late integration of monetary politics is certainty that money is a main attribute of national sovereignty the surrendering of which is noticeable every day; a fact that bothers euro-skeptical citizens probably more than less visible adverse economic effects. A second reason for the late integration in monetary politics, but also the ongoing reluctance of some member states to join the Euro area, is the central role monetary politics plays in government attempts to steer their national economies.

In fact, with the entrance into a common currency area, member states give up the power to conduct monetary, notably interest-rate and exchange-rate policies more or less autonomously.

The type ofinstitution: As it was feared that ruinous fiscal policies run by member in response to economic shocks or increasing debt burdens could weaken the common currency, an arrangement or institution preempting governments from misusing their discretionary powers had to be built. The Stability and Growth Pact adopted in 1997 plays that role. Itis designed to enhance the credibility of a tight economic policy in the euro area by defining in some detail feasible or correct economic policies and fiscal outcomes. Itsets up economic and fiscal criteria that member states of the European Union are expected to meet when preparing for or having joined the third stage of the Economic and Monetary Union (EMU). More specifically and most prominently, states are expected to have government deficits not exceeding the 3 per cent threshold and public debts not larger than 60 per cent of gross domestic product. According to EMU rules, the Commission monitors the fiscal behavior of the participants but member states themselves - as members of the Council of Ministers - finally vote on the Commission recommendations. It is therefore questionable whether these criteria actually constrain member state governments from running excessive deficits.

Analysis and Results: The paper addresses this question by asking how member states will interpret or even change the fiscal rules of the EMU in the future. In principle, the economic advantage of the fiscal rules of the EMU comes from two qualities: First, the expectation (of, above all, investors) that the rules are in effect, notably, that they are enforced; secondly, that the mles themselves are not changed.³This paper adopts a constitutionalist perspective and asks how the fiscal rules of the EMU institutional framework are likely to be interpreted in the future by assessing Council decision-making on EMU issues. The central claim of the paper is that any enforcement or even change of the EMU framework is an inherently political decision and is therefore dependent on the economic positions and political interests of the member states and their governments. The paper proceeds in the steps:

- Thc analysis of the constitutional provisions and the history of the EMU suggests that the institutional provisions that are intended to constitute a credible commitment are in fact rather vague and have already been subject to various reinterpretations. In consequence, they constitute institutional changes.

Morcover, as the enforcement mechanisms are not automatic but subject to decisions by the Council of Ministers, member states' conflicting preferences as rcgards economic policies seemingly play a larger role in the monitoring and

3 Note that this presupposes that the rulesare beneficial or economically useful; a point which has been challenged frequently by both practitioners and economists arguing that governments actually need more flexibility in fiscal stabilization. I am not dealing with this issue here.

sanctioning process than the plain evidence that a specific member state has or has not exceeded the 3 per cent deficit threshold.

- To analyze the prospects for an enforcement of EMU rules, the conflict space in EMU politics is estimated. Using data on the economic and fiscal positions of member states, factor analytical techniques suggest that in the EU-15 there are two major lines of conflict referring to government finance and the macroeconomic situation of member states.

- In a final step, the two types of information are combined. The paper analyses and makes predictions on EMU politics considering the conflict between member states and the various institutional rules for coordinating member states' economic policies but also monitoring, threatening and sanctioning those member states that have a worrying fiscal situation. Using the game- theoretical concept of the core, "outcomes" of EMU politics are estimated and compared for the EU-12 and the EU-25 after the accession of countries from Eastern and Southern Europe. The findings suggest that the recent enlargement will shift policy outcomes, but, if compared to the situation at the time of the signing of the Maastricht treaty, the effect is rather marginal.

The paper shows how rules or institutions come about and "evolve" over time;

how conflicting interests shape the applicability and effectiveness of such rules.

Legitimacy without legality? War-making with and without the UN

The type of conflict: Government officials and legal scholars broadly agree that the US-led war on Iraq had the blemish of being neither backed by a United Nations Security Council (UNSC) mandate nor by a broad multilateral coalition.

As regards the offender, even legal scholars disagree, arguing either that a deadlocked UNSC failed and the United States 'did indeed have all authority it needed' (Glennon 2003), or that, in the absence of UNSC approval, the use of force amounted to 'a war of aggression' (International Commission of Jurists 2003). Both conclusions are based on the assumption that the pursuit of power was the prime motivation for UNSC member states.

The central claim of the paper is that for a more comprehensive and better understanding of the Iraqi case before the United Nations (UN), the UNSC decision-making problem may be viewed from two angles. In a nutshell, it is argued that there was both a conflict of interest and a conflict of knowledge. On the one hand, it seems that UNSC member pursued inherently national interests when formulating and justifying their position and decision in the Council. This would be in line with both a (neo-)realist and a (neo-)liberal view on the Iraq war.

In this view, it seems obvious that the US government's foreign policy on that issue was guided by national security concerns and the pursuit to secure its

position as the key player in the Middle East (and the World, more general).

Likewise, the Franco-German alliance may be sought as the attempt to solidify their relations in order to attain the position of a leader in the international arena.

On the other hand, UNSC members may simply have pursued the truth: at least that is what they claimed. In fact, the question the UNSC had to decide on at that time was not how to respond to an Iraqi breach of international obligations. The question was whether or not the Iraqi government was in breach of international law. This, however, is a judicial question and should be analyzed as such.

The type of institution: At the analytical level, this means that actors had a common objective which was finding the "truth" and making a "correct" decision:

establishing whether the Iraqi government had or had not breached resolutions 687 and 1441, and convicting a guilty government but acquitting an innocent one.

Conceiving the Iraqi case as a trial, UNSC members can be considered as jurors in a trial whose common objective is to convict a guilty defendant and acquit an innocent one. States differ in their information level and thus in the likelihood of making a correct decision. They also differ in their standards of reasonable doubt, i.e. their willingness to take the risk of a wrongful conviction. An important question then is whether the veto system in the Security Council is an appropriate institutional setting or decision-making mechanism that makes the conviction of a guilty defendant likely but minimizes the risk of acquitting an innocent one.

Analysis and Results: While acknowledging that the fierce battle over the UN position towards the Iraq crisis encompassed elements of both types of conflict, the paper makes a case for looking at the UNSC decision as a judicial problem. In fact, the predominant view in the international relations literature is to see the UNSC as a political body composed of states who seek to maximize security benefits and minimize security threats in the international system. A better understanding may include both perspectives. The paper makes a move towards such a more comprehensive view by focusing on a possible conflict of beliefs within the UNSC.

Substantially, it is argued that the US war on Iraq has to be considered as an illegal action. Yet, the way some member states, most notably France, handled the Iraq case before the UNSC can be considered as a de-legitimation of the UNSC decision-making which in turn increased the legitimacy for a US unilateral operation. The paper makes three steps to arrive at this conclusion:

- Looking at the Iraqi case, it is argued that first, the decision the UNSC had to take in March 2003 was whether or not the Iraq was in compliance with two UNSC Resolutions, whether or not it met certain humanitarian obligations under international treaties, and whether or not it violated fundamental human rights. Secondly, the use of force was permitted only under a UN mandate as the US conception of a "pre-emptive self-defense" can not be seen as being

backed by either the UN Charter or state practice. Thus, the 2003 Iraq case before the UNSC was a trial at the end of which only a guilty verdict by the UNSC member states as jurors had opened the option for a solely UN- mandated military operation.

- Conceiving the Iraqi case as a trial, a simple social choice jury model is presented to study the implications of this setting.

- The results suggest three things: First, the UNSC⁴ acting under unanimity rule is more likely to end with a correct decision than a single actor, e.g., the US as a superpower acting unilaterally. Secondly, if one member state, e.g. the US, had an extremely low threshold of reasonable doubt - which is what the empirical record suggests - the final decision is biased with the effect that an innocent defendant is convicted more likely. Thirdly, if one member state, e.g.

France, has an extremely high threshold of reasonable doubt, the chances for the conviction of a guilty defendant are nil.

In sum, whilst the US ambition for an authorization of the use of force obviously biased the UNSC decision, the French reluctance had the opposite effect. In the extreme, it would have made the procedure pointless. As a result of this distortion, the UNSC could not guarantee a "fair" trial so that the institution's legitimacy by procedure was eroded. In more general terms, the analyses shows exemplarily that the behavior of the US and France is explicable in terms of different standards of reasonable doubt and therefore in terms of a conflict of knowledge rather than a conflict of interest. Certainly, the analyses does not rule out that there was a conflict of interest. Instead, the paper makes a point for an alternative view on state interests in the international system and the functioning of international institutions.

Interests and Information Aggregation in Comparative Politics

Parliamentary and presidential systems differ in many ways. In terms of definition, a powerful "president" is popularly elected as chief executive III

presidential systems. In parliamentary systems, the executive and the chief executive are chosen by a popularly elected "parliament" (e.g. Verney 1959;

Shugart and Carey 1992). These institutional settings generate very different environments for political interactions. One impOltant aspect is the role of political parties. Parties are generally considered to be less cohesive in presidential systems than in parliamentary ones. In parliamentary systems,

4 To simplify matters, the UNSC is conceived as a five-member committee consisting of the five permanent members, only.

governments are closely linked to a party or a coalition of parties that holds a majority of seats in parliament. Governments usually have considerable control over the legislative agenda but they are also controlled by the parties supporting the government. Thus the confidence relationship and the threat of losing office makes parties in parliamentary systems more cohesive, or at least, more disciplined (see, e.g., Huber 1996; Diermeier and Feddersen 1998).

Here, the term cohesion refers to the uniformity in the substantial policy interests of individual representatives that is MPs or Congressmen vote together purely because they all prefer the same alternative (Bowler et al. 1999). Cohesion may result from the way parties select candidates and the way electoral systems define constituency-representative relationships, or a mere "socialization" of representatives ones they are in parliament. By contrast, discipline refers to the fact that representatives may follow the party line even though it is in conflict with the personal vote preference. Relying on vote-based measures of partisanship a huge literature has analyzed the degrees to which individual legislators' preferences and partisanship give rise to actual voting behavior (for an overview, see, e.g., Sinclair 1998, Krehbiel 2000). The central claim of this literature is that a the degree of partisanship, i.e. an observed coherent voting pattern along party lines, crucially depends on both preference-based behavior and party identification (KrehbieI2000: 213).

The interest in the relative importance of preference-based and "party-based"

behavior certainly has a presidential, or US-system bias. Even though there is also variation in the degree of partisanship in parliamentary systems (Best and Heller 2005), individual legislators in these systems most often vote for the party line.

While this renders the analysis of roll-call voting records (Poole and Rosenthal 1997) less feasible for parliamentary systems, these types of analyses nevertheless raise a number of important questions:

- How is party discipline enforced? Given that any individual legislator will on occasions want to vote against her party, what constrains her in doing so (Bowler et al. 1999)? The list of possible factors include the threat of loosing the backing of the party in the current legislative term or the next general election (Carey and Shugart 1995), and the risk of loss of policy gains from future governments (for members of government parties, in particular) (Diermeier and Feddersen 1998)

- Who determines the party line? If parties are disciplined rather than cohesive then what do individual MPs vote for, whose interests do they represent? The list of possible factors is long and includes both individual, party and institution level factors. The party platform may be chosen by majority voting by party members or a (dictatorial) party leader (Snyder and Ting 2002). Other determinants are the government status of a party, or the import of specific intraparty groups.

- Does and if so, how does the degree of discipline vary with parties? Large parties ceteris paribus should more heterogeneous rendering it harder to maintain discipline (Mainwaring and Linan 1997) but they are also less susceptible for defecting votes (Best and HelIer 2005). Another factor is the majority-minority status of parties (Volden and Bergman [forthcoming]).

These are some of the questions in the wider research area on the role of political parties in shaping, representing, and aggregating individual interests in the context of various institutional settings. The following three papers address some of these issues. In a nutshell, the first paper, A Partisan Model of Government Expenditure, asks for the validity of the partisan theory claim that party ideology is the driving force behind the party vote. In fact, a large literature in comparative politics and political economy is based on the assumption that party policies and votes can be understood in terms of whether these parties are left, right, centrist, Christian-democrat and so on. The paper advances a model of partisan vote that is based on party platforms rather than party labels. Put simply, the more general contention is that first, interest-based approaches yield important insights into legislative politics. Secondly, the nature of these interests may be complex; the empirical analysis of electoral platforms can provide such information whereas considering only party labels does not.

The second paper on Structural Power, Information Asymmetry and Public Policy addresses the question of the party line from a different perspective.

Considering the case of interest group lobbying, it seeks to analyze some of the conditions that render parties not(even) to pursue the pledges they made in their electoral platform. In brief, the argument states that parties deviate from their policy pledges depending on the nature of the electoral competition (the reputation costs from breaking pre-election pledges and the electoral costs from adverse economic effects) but also on the nature of state-interest group relations (the reputation costs and the material lobbying costs of business).

Finally, the third paper on Government Status and Legislative Behaviour asks for the role of the government status of a party in shaping its voting behavior. In short, the paper advances a model of party vote where parties may vote against a (majority) proposal even though they agree with the substantial policy - just because supporting the proposal is detrimental in the larger electoral game. By contrast, parties may vote for a proposal although the policy is in conflict with the party ideology or position - just because supporting the proposal is promising long-term, electoral gains.

At this point, a note on restrictions and assumptions is at hand. All papers in this volume treat parties as unitary actors. I do not deal with a situation where individual MPs or party representatives have diverse interests and party discipline is low so that non-coherent behavior should be frequent. Given the above discussion on party cohesion but also the formal literature on preference-

aggregation within collective actors (e.g. Hug 1999; Tsebelis 2002) this might seem to be a severe deficiency. In fact, I do not claim that parties are unitary actors but for the purpose of analysis and given the questions I address, it is maintainable to treat them as such. Relaxing the assumption would definitely increase the complexity of analysis with little substantial gain from it. However, what I do claim is, put shortly and oversimplifying substantially, that the above analyses suggest that even if we assume parties to be unitary actors, their actual behavior often can not be inferred from whether they belong to such broad groups like "left" or "right" or some other vague attribute. Instead, the papers argue for a closer look at what parties actually stand for at a particular point in time and also which role they play, that means whether they are government, opposition or neutral parties.

A partisan model of government expenditure

The type of conjlict: Although the expansion of the welfare state in the 20^th century, its recent retrenchment, and the development of the size and the scope of government more generally have been at the center of comparative politics research for decades, the findings on the specific impacts of various kinds of political systems, institutions and patterns of societal and political conflict are mixed (for a review, see Green-Pedersen and Haverland 2002). With respect to the topics that are central to the papers in this volume, the question is whether or not different interests raised by social or political groups actually make a difference for the development of government once these groups are in power or at least in a position that is considered as powerful.

At the heart of the question is the partisan approach (Hibbs 1977) which states that the preferences and the ideology of governments significantly influence fiscal policy and public expenditure. According to the basic hypothesis, parties competing for votes promise to implement programs that best serve the groups they represent. As lower income groups are generally in favor of a large, active and market-regulating state and tend to be more attached to parties on the left, socialist or social democratic parties are postulated to generate high levels of public spending and budget deficits. To some extent, liberal and right-wing parties represent upper income groups, which are concerned with minimizing the role of the state in market operations and its control over society's resources. This is claimed to result in lower public spending in times of non-left, liberal or right- wing governments. Others argue for a three- ~r even fourfold classification of parties (Schmidt 1996). In any case, the findings are less clear-cut. There are studies which dismiss the expected dependence of public spending on party preferences as well as studies suggesting strong causal relationships.

The paper addresses this puzzle arguing that most of the previous literature has relied on two assumptions that oversimplify the role of parties in public policy making. The first assumption refers to the type of conflict. As argued above, most studies rely on "ideological-programmatic" differences between parties when explaining patterns of public policy. I argue that neither the labels parties have nor the ideology their adhere to may crucial when it comes to public (and fiscal) policy-making. Another approach is to assess parties' position on ideological Left-Right continuums, e.g. by means of expert judgments. But this is certainly a

"skyline view" of party systems (Gross and Sigelman 1984) as there are good reasons to expect that programmatic differences in certain policy domains have an effect on policies in that and only that area whilst ideological differences may not play an important role. This, however, calls both for a more sophisticated theory of party preferences and a refined measurement methodology. In particular, one would be interested in information on partisan actors' preferences on those spending dimensions that are relevant for expenditure in the respective budget sector.

The type of institution: The second assumption refers to the effect of the institutional context. Early work in the area focused on the US and the UK;

accordingly, the partisan hypothesis was based on the assumption of two-party competition and single-party governments whose policy reflects party ideology in a one-to-one mapping. Yet, in the developed countries coalition governments are frequent, what raises questions about policy outputs and fiscal stances of governments of this type. This is a theoretical challenge with obvious impediments for operationalization and measurement. For example, one commonly cited work, Woldendorp et al. (2000), classifies governments on a 1-5 scale based upon the dominance of left, center, and right-wing parties in parliament and in government. In practice, such scales are unsatisfactory because they are often ambiguous. The coding of "4"couldindicate that a center-left party has enough votes in parliament, but it could also mean that the given left party is in a power-sharing arrangement with a center party.

Analysis and Results: The paper thus seeks to the extend previous literature in several directi ons:

- First, a model of spending preferences is developed that relates actors' preferred level and allocation of expenditure to electoral gains from fiscal policies. Actors differ in terms of the weight they put on "government efficiency" as well as the (electoral) salience of spending for different policy areas.

- Second, models of parliamentary and governmental decision-making are developed that take into account the complex nature of public policy-making in multi-party systems with coalition governments. The model assumes a top-

down budget process in which governmental parties are veto players (Tsebelis 2002), or, alternatively, the median legislator has the final say over fiscal policies.

- Third, in a quantitative approach using time-series cross-section data, changes in both total expenditure and the expenditure mix of two budget categories are analyzcd for the effect of parties' spending preferences as stated in their election manifestos. Using a sample of 19GEeD countries from 1971 to 1999, the paper finds support for the general partisan hypothesis. The results suggest that it is the actual spending preferences of parties that matter. In contrast, the findings indicate that parties of the left do not consistently differ in their spending behavior from parties of the right when looking at ideology only.

At a more general level, the study suggests that the simple confrontation of "left"

and "right" may not be useful (anymore), at least when it comes to the explanation of fiscal policies. Parties nevertheless do differ and a closer look at what parties' goals are proves more valuable in this respect, even though this comes at the cost of a less parsimonious explanation.

Structural power and public policy: A signaling model of business lobbying in democratic capitalism

The type of conflict: Political institutions filter interests so that public policies may vary with the different and conflicting interests "fed" into the political system. In this respect, political parties play a central role, at least in parliamentary democracies, in representing and aggregating societal interests, feeding them into the political system, and ultimately reaching collective decisions. Yet, this is obviously a too narrow depiction. Political parties arc not the only relevant actors. Instead, public policymaking in Western democracies is characterized by collective actions of organized, corporate actors such as associations of interest groups, political parties or ministries (Knoke and Laumann 1982: 256). Neither is the conflict between parties about power and/or substantive policies the only source for variances in public policies. Quite often, political actors could agree on their goals but nevertheless fail because mistrust hinders them from cooperating with each other, they lack technical or economic knowledge on how to achieve the goal, or they simply do not know that they have a common goal. All three situations are characterized by uncertainty or, more particular, uncertainty about the behavior of other actors, uncertainty about the state of the world, and uncertainty about the preferences of others.

The type of institution: The paper addresses these issues when asking for the impact of political institutions on policymaking in situations that are characterized by political decision-makers who are uncertain about the true state of the world.

At the more practical level, we consider the case of interest group politics and ask for the conditions that lead to a powerful political position of business interest groups in democratic societies. In more theoretical terms, the paper considers and analyses situations where actors have both common and conflicting interests but different levels of knowledge or expertise about the world, i.e. technical, social or economic conditions and links. The paper analyses the conditions under which political decision-makers take their chances and override interest group, notably business complaints, and when they will be inclined to heed the signal and abandon or modify the policy. The implications of such a bias in favor of business interests are apparent. If with actual distributions of wealth the median always falls short of the mean (Breyer and Ursprung 1998), the question is not only why the poor do not take away from the rich (Roemer 1998). It also challenges the very foundation of majority rule in democratic theory.

The paper builds on two major strands of literature on special interest group politics. It considers interest groups as private actors with interest in public policies who lack the power of public decision makers but possess private information unknown and valuable to political actors. In this literature information is transmitted strategically and in exchange to valuable political events or decisions. The article also recognizes the - essentially Marxist - literature on the structural dependence of the state on capital. _Itargues that private enterprises' prerogative over investment and allocation puts them into a privileged position that abandons the need for overtly interest group pressure. The paper departs from this literature when modifying existing models of information transmission by taking into account a mixture of material, electoral and reputational costs, with special regard to the eventually privileged position of business interest groups.

Analysis and Results: The paper makes three moves:

- Itis argued that the event-specific information transmission of business interest groups is a strategic action that has to be studied considering the wider political game both political and private actors are involved in. First, in democratic political systems, elected political decision-makers always act as agents of some principals, notably their constituencies. Taking into account electoral competition necessitates paying attention to the likely negative effects from taking uninformed, objectively "wrong" decisions. These come in form of decelerating growth rates, unemployment and decreasing tax revenue and thus - as suggested by the economic voting literature - result in diminished reelection chances. We think of these costs as electoral costs. A related argument asserts that credibility and reputation are valuable assets in the electoral game. Thus, departing from previous ideological standpoints and/or breaking pre-election pledges generally decreases reelection chances. The analysis considers these costs as pledge costs. Second, it is argued that

business lobbyists face two similar costs. On the one hand, information transmission by lobbying generally involves transaction costs. On the other hand, lobbyists have long-term interests in maintaining a reputation as trustworthy suppliers of information which countervails the aspiration to greatly exaggerate and transmit false information constantly. We consider these two types of costs as material lobbying and reputation costs.

- Departing from previous models of information transmission by taking into account these four types of constraints, the paper develops a signaling model of corporate lobbying. It predicts the conditions under which elected political actors modify their policy pledges to accommodate business lobbyists' interests, and when they take their chances and override these claims. The results show that the structural power of business over public policy is contingent on two variables: the size of reputational constraints of business in relation to the material costs of lobbying, and the ratio of the politicians' reputation costs to the electoral costs from adverse economic effects.

- A case study approach is employed to evaluate the model in the light of empirical evidence. We study two cases of business lobbying on environmental policy and financial services regulation in Germany and Great Britain. Whilst the approach is qualitative in nature, we take reference to the variables that determine the lobbying equilibria in the theoretical model which evidently is useful in identifying and assessing the importance of the relevant aspects of the empirical cases. Moreover, the application exemplifies how case studies can serve as quasi-experiments in which central claims of a theory are put to a test (cp. Morton 1999: 133; see also Gerring 2004).

Government status and legislative behavior. Partisan veto players in Australia, Denmark, Finland and Germany

The type of conflict: A central topic in this volume is the question how interests are tiltered by political institutions so that outcomes renect the interests of the actors involved. The paper on interest group lobbying identified one major intermediating factor in this respect, namely the role of uncertainty. The paper on fiscal politics, by contrast, highlights the role of partisan preferences arguing that policy outcomes may better be understood in terms of what parties actually state that they prefer rather than what party labels suggests at first glance.

This paper on the impact of government status on legislative behavior moves one step further. It argues that the actual (voting) behavior of parties and party representatives depends on both policy motivations as well as office-related and/or electoral concerns. In a nutshell, the argument states that parties (as unitary actors) generally do not only have a short-term interest in policies but also a long- term interest in either policies or office or both. Therefore they (also) hold a

medium-term interest in winning the next election. The perceived stalemate in the German Bundesrat, for instance, is commonly attributed to the reluctance of federal opposition parties in the second chamber to agree to a federal government bilI even though there is no or almost no disagreement in the substance. This - again, as in the previous paper on business lobbying - points to the larger, notably electoral game democratically elected political decision makers are part of. The paper thus joins the rather extensive literature that sccks to integrate office-and vote-seeking theories of electoral competition, coalition bargaining, and government-parliamcntary policy-making (see Austen-Smith and Banks 1988).

The type of institution: At the more practical level, this type of research is promising since it reveals intriguing insights into how, when and why political parties are influencing governmental and parliamentary decision- and lawmaking.

The paper also wants to contribute to the broader literature on the comparative analysis of political institutions. It derives propositions that, for instance, are incongruent with the implications of Tsebelis' (2002) veto player theory which assumes purely policy-motivated actors. The empirical analysis finds evidence for the approach suggesting that Tsebelis' pragmatic rules for counting veto players in empirical research is doubtful.

Analysis and Results: The paper advances in three steps:

- The paper argues for a consideration of policy and positional motivations of political actors. The idea is that tackling issues on the public agenda or initiating major policy reforms generally is promising electoral gains. Since governments are key agenda-setters in parliamentary systems, governmental parties are usually keen to get government bills done (even though the actual reform in terms of policy change may be fairly small) whilst opposition parties are in opposition of the proposal per se (even though they could agree with thc policy content in principle).

- Subsequently, the paper builds a spatial model that encompasses a positional component. Specifically, it is assumed that formal political change (accompanied with a substantial change in policy or not) signifies that issues on the public agenda are tackled. It is thus associated with a variable positional loss or gain that reflects actors' expectations regarding the consequences of (legislativc) decision-making for their future electoral chances and access to government offices. The model implics that parties' status as government, opposition or "neutral" party affects their legislative behavior and hence policy outputs. More specifically, we hypothesize that govcrnment parties are most, opposition parties least accommodating.

- The above hypothesis is tested in a case-study approach that involves comparing two pairs of most similar political systems. The first study compares Danish and Finnish coalition governments that are characterized by