Essays on Responsibility Attribution and Legislative Policy-Making in Parliamentary Democracies

Autor(en)

Mariyana Angelova

Abstrakt

This dissertation includes five essays on voters’ responsibility attribution and account- ability decisions in coalition settings and incumbent’s legislative decision making choices in parliamentary democracies. In particular, I study two central questions: how voters navigate in complex political systems and assign policy responsibility in coalition settings and what challenges incumbent governments have and which strategies they follow when they structure their legislative policy output in parliamentary democracies.
Chapter 2, which is a co-authored publication with Thomas K ̈onig and Sven-Oliver Proksch, investigates how voters assign responsibility among coalition partners. We use survey questions from the German Internet Panel and find that voters rely on the proposal power and size heuristic to assign policy responsibility between the coalition partners.
Chapter 3 is a single authored paper and investigates how voters decide whether to hold the incumbent government and not other involved actors responsible and accountable in coalition settings. I propose that voters use signals of coalition conflict as a heuristic to infer government responsibility. Using survey data from the German Internet Panel I show that voters relate signals of coalition conflict with government responsibility for policy failure and condition their performance based evaluation of the government and performance based voting on signals of coalition conflict.
Chapter 4, which is a co-authored paper with Daniel Strobl, Hanna B ̈ack and Wolfgang C. Müller, studies how the anticipation of voters’ punishment influences incumbent’s legislative decisions. In particular, we investigate whether and when incumbents strate- gically time austerity measures. Using unique unprecedented data on important aus- terity measures introduced in 13 Western European countries and over a period of 20 years, we find that incumbents introduce austerity measures with a declining probability towards elections. This strategic timing is more pronounced for governments which can credibly shift the responsibility to the preceding government and act swiftly.
Chapter 5, which is a co-authored publication with Hanna B ̈ack, Wolfgang Mu ̈ller, and Daniel Strobl, studies what influences government’s ability to make policy changes and produce reforms. We test propositions of the veto player theory using data on more than 5000 important reform measures in four broad policy areas, introduced in 13 Western European countries over a period of 20 years. We find support for the veto player theory, but only for the special case of minimal winning cabinets.
Chapter 6 is a co-authored publication with Tanja Dannwolf and Thomas König and it investigates the role of different factors which influence incumbent’s decision to comply or not with EU law. We present a systematic research synthesis of compliance findings from 37 published compliance articles, where we gauge the robustness of the e↵ects of 12 central theoretical arguments on the non-compliance decisions of EU member states. We find robust findings for the “goodness-of-fit” and “institutional decision making arguments”.

Organisation(en)

Institut für Staatswissenschaft

Anzahl der Seiten

284

Publikationsdatum

02-2019

ÖFOS 2012

506014 Vergleichende Politikwissenschaft, 506004 Europäische Integration, 506010 Politikfeldanalyse

Link zum Portal

https://ucrisportal.univie.ac.at/de/publications/f005ed82-78f2-4816-8790-b601cf41dd1a