Description

The CCPD-program examined West European parliamentary politics from a principal-agent perspective. It involves thirty-five scholars from Western Europe and the Americas. It has made both conceptual and empirical contributions in the fields of comparative politics, parliamentary democracy, and coalition politics in particular.

The theoretical approach is outlined below. For more information on the overall program and research methods see Bergman, Torbjörn; Müller, Wolfgang C., and Strøm, Kaare (2005). ‘Comparative parliamentary democracy: a project report’. European Political Science, Vol. 4, No. 1, 42-54.

Democracy, delegation and accountability

Today, parliamentarism is the most common form of democratic delegation and accountability. Yet knowledge about this regime type has remained incomplete and is often unsystematic. Drawing on the framework outlined below, we investigate the different stages in the chain of delegation and accountability and we explore how governance in parliamentary democracies is related to a variety of institutional mechanisms. When we study the dynamics of parliamentary democracy, two fundamental questions exist: 1) how do citizens delegate to elected representatives? and 2) can they hold elected representatives accountable?

Contemporary democracy is built on representation (Pitkin, 1967). Among the many schools of thought on representative democracy, one highlights how competing parties and party elites allow voters to choose their leaders and, above all, make it possible for voters to remove unwanted political leaders from office. Schumpeter (1942) is often recognized as the paramount thinker in this tradition. A contrasting view emphasizes the participatory aspects of democracy and is therefore critical of how the former school places emphasis on leadership (Pateman, 1970). Generations of thinkers have maintained these basic distinctions.

In the Comparative Parliamentary Democracy project, we have adopted a somewhat different approach to representation and democracy. Our view of democracy emphasizes that competition among political leaders is a necessary element of any large-scale democracy, but also that the election of democratic leaders does not solve all the problems extant in the relationship between leaders and followers. Instead, selection and control problems exist at every level of democracy, not only at the highest levels of government. The potential for such problems is always present, and the accountability of democratically elected leaders is a concern throughout their tenure, not only at election time. This is sometimes referred to as a Jeffersonian (after Thomas Jefferson) view of democracy (Kiewiet and McCubbins, 1991). It can be more precisely defined as a series of delegation and accountability relationships between principals and agents. In a chain of delegation, those authorized to make political decisions (principals) conditionally designate others (agents) to act in their name and place. A delegation chain thus consists of a series of agency relationships.

Two perils of agency relationships are adverse selection and moral hazard. The former problem may lead principals to select the ‘wrong’ agents, i.e., those who do not have the most appropriate skills or preferences. The problem of moral hazard arises when agents, once selected, have incentives and opportunities to take action contrary to the principal’s interests. Hence, where democratic delegation is exercised, accountability becomes necessary (otherwise delegation becomes abdication). As Lupia (2003) points out, we can think of accountability as a property of political procedures (control), or as an outcome. The focus of the project is largely on the former. Political accountability, then, refers to mechanisms by which agency loss can be contained. Strictly speaking, accountability focuses on the rights and sanctions (oversight) that the principal retains after she has contracted with the agent. However, in a broader sense, principals can accomplish some of their control objectives even before delegating.

The principal-agent literature identifies several means by which principals can contain agency costs: (1) contract design, (2) screening and selection mechanisms, (3) monitoring and reporting requirements and (4) institutional checks (Lupia, 2003). The first two are mechanisms by which principals seek to contain agency losses ex-ante, i.e., before entering into any agreement. The remaining control mechanisms are ways to contain agency losses after the contract has been made (ex post facto). Such ex-post accountability may rely on information produced by the principal (known as monitoring or police patrols), by the agent (reporting), or by some third party (institutional checks and so-called fire alarms). In politics, legislators may seek to control executive agencies through committee hearings at which ministers or civil servants have to appear and testify (see Mattson and Strøm, 1995). Additionally, executive agencies may be required regularly to report to their democratic principals.

Many important control mechanisms serve as vehicles of both ex-ante and ex-post control. They can be used both to select agents in the first place and to subject them to sanctions and possible ‘deselection’ after the fact. The most basic mechanism of representative democracy ‘election’ is clearly of this kind. Voters use elections both prospectively (to select officeholders) and retrospectively (to sanction incumbents).

Principals face two serious constraints on oversight. First, even though the principal may find some forms of oversight (such as selection, reporting, fire alarms) less burdensome than others (for example because they rely on third-party efforts), all oversight is costly. Therefore, the principal obviously wants to maximize effectiveness relative to cost. And reliance on third-party oversight provides no free lunch, since it introduces additional agency problems. For example, when can the principal trust the reports she gets (Lupia and McCubbins, 1994)? Second, principals may face collective action and coordination problems in their oversight activities. For example, in most large-scale societies, voters cannot actively deliberate about the selection and supervision of all their agents. And while it is typically in the interest of all principals that someone bears the cost of monitoring their agents, individual principals may have no incentive to do so. Nonetheless, principals possess a substantial menu of oversight mechanisms that facilitate accountability. A major task of this project is to examine these mechanisms in representational politics in order to generate knowledge about how parliamentary democracy functions today.

Coalition politics

With the spread of parliamentary government and proportional representation, multi-party politics has become more frequent. And in multi-party systems, where three or more parties gain parliamentary representation, the possibility always exists that no party alone will command a parliamentary majority. Indeed, that possibility has become the rule, rather than the exception, in the majority of the world’s parliamentary systems. Minority situations require some sort of interparty coalition-building coalition building. Whenre parliaments operate by majority decision rules, as is commonly the case, single parties cannot hope to monopolize political control. Coalitions become a necessity. But the shape of such alliances is by no means foreordained. Coalitions in minority situations could be purely legislative alliances, in which a minority government seeks support from day-to-day and from issue-to-issue among its companions in parliament. More commonly, however, coalition-building coalition building involves more committal agreements that include the offices of the executive branch as well, in the sense that typically the parties that form the parliamentary majority also share control of the cabinet and the executive branch. Such coalition politics has stimulated a stream of important research since the birth of modern political science.

References

Kiewiet, R.D. and McCubbins, M.D. (1991) The Logic of Delegation. Congressional Parties and the Appropriations Process, Chicago: University of Chicago Press.

Lupia, A. (2003) ‘Delegation and its Perils’, in K. Strøm, W.C. Müller and T. Bergman (eds), Delegation and Accountability in Parliamentary Democracies, Oxford: Oxford University Press, pp. 33-54.

Lupia, A. and McCubbins M.D. (1994) ‘Learning from Oversight: Fire Alarms and Police Patrols Reconstructed’, Journal of Law, Economics, and Organization 10(1): 96-125.

Mattson, I. and Strøm, K. (1995) ‘Parliamentary Committees’, in H. Döring (ed.), Parliaments and Majority Rule in Western Europe, New York: St. Martin’s Press, pp. 249-307.

Pateman, C. (1970) Participation and Democratic Theory, Cambridge: Cambridge University Press.

Pitkin, H.F. (1967) The Concept of Representation, Berkeley: University of California Press.

Schumpeter, J.A., (1942) Capitalism, Socialism and Democracy, New York: Harper and Row.

When the final volume of this project, Cabinets and Coalition Bargaining: The Democratic Life Cycle in Western Europe, Oxford: Oxford University Press, was published in August 2008, it came with a data set we included variables from our previous publications and we have added several computed variables, indexes, manifesto scores, and more.

For some variables, you will need the Party codebook that was published below in 2006. In 2012 a file with portfolio allocation was added. This is linked to the publication mentioned in the Portfolio Allocation codebook.