The Sources of Bipartisan Politics in Parliamentary Democracies

Thomas Bräuninger () and Marc Debus ()
Additional contact information
Thomas Bräuninger: University of Mannheim
Marc Debus: University of Mannheim

Chapter Chapter 7 in Reform Processes and Policy Change, 2011, pp 145-164 from Springer

Abstract: Abstract Bipartisan bills are frequent in presidential systems, but they exist in virtually all parliamentary systems. In fact, despite the predominance of governments in legislative agenda-setting in parliamentary systems, considerable shares of both introduced and successful bills are (co-)sponsored by individuals or party groups that belong to both the government and the opposition camp in parliament. Given the government–opposition divide in parliamentary systems this requires explanation. In this paper, we seek to address the reasons for the introduction and passage of bipartisan bills in parliamentary democracies – bills that originate with government and opposition party actors. To answer this question in a comparative framework, we develop a simple model that links institutional and policy-related characteristics to the likelihood of a bipartisan sponsorship of bills. More specifically, we look at the effect of divided and minority government, heterogeneity of government coalitions, polarization of parliament and issue salience. Our statistical analysis uses original data for about 11,000 bills in two parliamentary systems, Belgium and Germany, 1986–2003.

Keywords: Policy Position; Coalition Government; Party Leader; Veto Player; Opposition Parti (search for similar items in EconPapers)
Date: 2011
References: Add references at CitEc
Citations:

There are no downloads for this item, see the EconPapers FAQ for hints about obtaining it.

Related works:
This item may be available elsewhere in EconPapers: Search for items with the same title.

Export reference: BibTeX RIS (EndNote, ProCite, RefMan) HTML/Text

Persistent link: https://EconPapers.repec.org/RePEc:spr:stpchp:978-1-4419-5809-9_7

Ordering information: This item can be ordered from
http://www.springer.com/9781441958099

DOI: 10.1007/978-1-4419-5809-9_7

Access Statistics for this chapter

More chapters in Studies in Public Choice from Springer
Bibliographic data for series maintained by Sonal Shukla () and Springer Nature Abstracting and Indexing ().