Government-Opposition or Left-Right? The Institutional Determinants of Voting in Legislatures*

By S. Hix, Abdul Noury. Political Science Research and Methods, 2015

132 citations recorded by the source corpus.

This study uses roll-call voting data from 16 legislatures to investigate how the institutional context of politics—such as whether a country is a parliamentary or presidential regime, or has a single-party, coalition or minority government—shapes coalition formation and voting behavior in parliaments. It uses a geometric scaling metric to estimate the “revealed space” in each of these legislatures and a vote-by-vote statistical analysis to identify how much of this space can be explained by government-opposition dynamics as opposed to parties’ (left-right) policy positions. Government-opposition interests, rather than parties’ policy positions, are found to be the main drivers of voting behavior in most institutional contexts. In contrast, issue-by-issue coalition building along a single policy dimension is only found under certain restrictive institutional constraints: presidential regimes with coalition governments or parliamentary systems with minority governments. Put another way, voting in most legislatures is more like Westminster than Washington.

Subfields: Gender Studies, Political Science and International Relations, Strategy and Management

View Paper: https://www.semanticscholar.org/paper/5f954ca334e68c9b9585a0b9c1a973f01f47f153