Project Details
Projekt
Legislative reforms and party competition (C01)
Subject Area
Political Science
Term
from 2010 to 2021
Project identifier
Deutsche Forschungsgemeinschaft (DFG) - Project number 139943784
The project investigates under what circumstances government parties are able to initiate and adopt policy reforms in parliamentary systems, and how parties trade off partisan responsiveness and public responsibility under policy uncertainty. In the first two phases, we studied the implications of principal-agent problems caused by delegation in multiparty governments for agenda setting and policymaking in Parliament. We demonstrated that ministers can refrain from making proposals when their office-holding costs exceed their policy benefits. Furthermore, we showed that parliamentary decision-making process is complicated not only by the interaction among government parties, but also by the interaction between the government and the opposition, the strength of parliamentary institutions, the capacities of parties, and their different electoral needs. In the third phase, we will continue and expand our research by examining the role of Prime Ministers, unusual oversized and minority coalitions, and opposition activities with respect to the trade-off between partisan responsiveness and public responsibility. We seek to identify the political contents and contexts in which political parties in government and opposition act, and how their interactions affect output. We expect that the final research output of this project will improve our knowledge about reform-making and provide a better understanding of democratic governance and representation.
DFG Programme
Collaborative Research Centres
Subproject of
SFB 884:
Political Economy of Reforms
Applicant Institution
Universität Mannheim
