Government‐opposition or left‐right? The institutional determinants of voting in legislatures

Hix, Simon and Noury, Abdul (2016) Government‐opposition or left‐right? The institutional determinants of voting in legislatures. Political Science Research and Methods, 4 (2). 249 - 273. ISSN 2049-8470

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Abstract

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.

Item Type:	Article
Official URL:	http://journals.cambridge.org/action/displayJourna...
Additional Information:	© 2015 The European Political Science Association
Divisions:	Government
Subjects:	J Political Science > JA Political science (General)
Date Deposited:	04 Jun 2015 15:04
Last Modified:	15 Sep 2023 15:24
URI:	http://eprints.lse.ac.uk/id/eprint/62179

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