This book examines how parties negotiate coalition deals at the subnational level using the examples of Germany and Spain. In such multi-level settings, parties are present at various negotiation tables often having to make difficult choices about their role in the coalition and the relative merits of being in government over the opposition.
This book explores how intra-party politics affects government formation and termination in parliamentary systems, where the norm is the formation of coalition governments. The authors look beyond party cohesion and discipline in parliamentary democracies to take a broader view, assuming a diversity of preferences among party members and then exploring the incentives that give rise to coordinated party behaviour at the electoral, legislative and executive levels. The chapters in this book share a common analytical framework, confronting theoretical models of government formation with empirical data, some drawn from cross-national analyses and others from theoretically structured case studies. A distinctive feature of the book is that it explores the impact of intra-party politics at different levels of government: national, local and EU. This offers the opportunity to investigate existing theories of coalition formation in new political settings. Finally, the book offers a range of innovative methods for investigating intra-party politics which, for example, creates a need to estimate the policy positions of individual politicians inside political parties. This book will be of interest to political scientists, especially scholars involved in research on political parties, parliamentary systems, coalition formation and legislative behaviour, multilevel governance, European and EU politics.
How does coalition governance shape voters' perceptions of government parties and how does this, in turn, influence party behaviors? Analyzing cross-national panel surveys, election results, experiments, legislative amendments, media reports, and parliamentary speeches, Fortunato finds that coalition compromise can damage parties' reputations for competence as well as their policy brands in the eyes of voters. This incentivizes cabinet partners to take stands against one another throughout the legislative process in order to protect themselves from potential electoral losses. The Cycle of Coalition has broad implications for our understanding of electoral outcomes, partisan choices in campaigns, government formation, and the policy-making process, voters' behaviors at the ballot box, and the overall effectiveness of governance.
The essays in this examination analyze the consequences of globalization and offer a thorough analysis of the changes in the way international politics must be understood in light of such globalization. Capturing the morphing nature of politics both within and beyond the state, this volume details the centrifugal migration of politics away from state-based institutions--which occurs in an upward fashion toward the international level, and endows decentralized and private actors with policy making powers. The resulting picture is that of a central state that continues to guide politics, but needs to be complemented with attention to the sub- and the supranational tiers of government.
This volume re-examines how the incentives created by specific electoral institutions affect the behaviour of voters and party elites. It provides the first systematic analysis of multi-level politics at three distinct levels: regional, national, and European Parliament elections.
Trade Policy in Multilevel Government investigates how multilevel polities organize openness in a globalizing political and economic environment. In recent years, the multilevel politics of trade caught a broader public's attention, not least due to the Wallonian regional parliament's initial rejection of the EU-Canada trade deal in 2016. In all multilevel polities, competencies held by states and regions have increasingly become the subject of international rule-setting. This is particularly so in the field of trade which has progressively targeted so-called 'behind the border' regulatory barriers. In their reaction to this 'deep trade' agenda, constituent units in different multilevel polities have shown widely varying degrees of openness to liberalizing their markets. Why is that? This book argues that domestic institutions and procedures of intergovernmental relations are the decisive factor. Countering a widely-held belief among practitioners and analysts of trade policy that involving subcentral actors complicates trade negotiations, it demonstrates that the more voice a multilevel polity affords its constituent units in trade policy-making, the less the latter have an incentive to eventually exit from emerging trade deals. While in shared rule systems constituent unit governments are directly represented along the entirety of the policy cycle, in self-rule systems territorial representation is achieved merely indirectly. Shared rule systems are hence more effective than self-rule systems in organizing openness to trade. The book tests its theory's explanatory power on the understudied case of international procurement liberalization in extensive studies of three systems of multilevel government: Canada, the European Union, and the United States.
“In this innovative study, Dr Ruel explores why political alternation—a bedrock of democratic functioning—has been largely absent in three under-studied regions in Portugal and Spain. Focusing on Madeira, the Azores and the Canary Islands, this book explains how party competition, intra-party democracy and regional economic performance have contributed to political party stasis since the return of democracy in the mid-1970s.” —Paul M. Heywood, Sir Francis Hill Professor of European Politics seconded 0.5 FTE to Global Integrity, Washington DC (2018-21), Faculty of Social Science, University of Nottingham, UK This book is about political alternation. It’s about parties and politicians. It’s about power and resources employed to secure longevity in power over time at Azores, Madeira and the Canary Islands. This book explores the phenomenon of political alternation through an in-depth contextual understanding of the path of regional historical legacies at democratization and decentralization processes started in the 1970s; the institutional architectures and the scope of regional authority endowed in those regions; the specific dynamics of regional politics; and the constellation of political parties and actors and the regional elections results, as well as contextual factors that might explain why some political parties have better performances than other at regional elections. Throughout comparative lessons Ruel seeks to highlight the range of factors that affect regional electoral dynamics and outcomes and to develop a comprehensive understanding of the drivers of long-standing incumbency (Azores and Canary Islands) or the absence of political alternation (Madeira) within regional democracies.
