Should the government be able to suspend parliament?

Petra Schleiter and Thomas Fleming examine the power to prorogue Parliament. They outline the legal basis of prorogation, survey its uses in the UK and other Westminster systems, and discuss how the UK rules could be reformed

Cabinet Reshuffles and Parliamentary No-Confidence Motions

How do cabinet reshuffles affect the parliamentary opposition's use of no-confidence motions in the government? Opposition parties employ no-confidence motions as electoral signals to highlight government incompetence and to position themselves as a government in waiting. We argue that cabinet reshuffles – which prime ministers use to respond to policy failures, scandals, poor ministerial performance and disloyalty – present an opportunity for the opposition to deploy no-confidence motions to this end. The incentives to deploy this strategy, however, are contingent on the nature of the party system and are greatest where party-system concentration positions a single opposition party as the alternative to the government and sole beneficiary of a no-confidence vote. We test this expectation using a multilevel modelling approach applied to data on reshuffles in 316 governments and 16 parliamentary democracies, and find support for our expectation: cabinet reshuffles raise the probability of no-confidence motions conditional on party-system concentration

Backlash policy diffusion to populists in power.

We analyze how parties respond programmatically to populist parties in power abroad. Political parties often copy the policies of governing parties in other countries-a phenomenon that contributes to waves of transnational policy diffusion. We report the first large-scale comparative study showing that populist parties in government abroad trigger the opposite reaction: instead of inspiring emulation, their highly visible governing dilemmas provoke a policy backlash by parties in other states. We argue that dilemmas arise because populist parties confront unique and debilitating trade-offs between maintaining their anti-system posture and governing effectively, which make them electorally vulnerable. Other parties observe foreign populists' governing dilemmas and respond by distancing themselves in order to avoid these problems. We detect this "foreign populist backlash effect" using spatial econometric analysis, a method that allows us to estimate international policy connections between parties, applied to over 200 European parties' programmatic positions since the 1970s. Our findings illuminate parties' election strategies and show that this backlash effect constrains the spread of populism across Western democracies

Presidents, Assembly Dissolution and the Electoral Performance of Prime Ministers

Many European presidents have extensive constitutional powers to affect the timing of early parliamentary elections, which enables them to influence when incumbent governments must face the electorate. This paper examines whether presidents use their assembly dissolution powers for partisan benefit. To date, presidential activism in the electoral arena of parliamentary and semi-presidential democracies remains poorly understood. We hypothesize that presidents use their powers to influence election calling for the advantage of their political allies in government. To test this argument, we use data on 190 elections in eighteen European democracies. Our results suggest that presidents with significant dissolution powers are able to shape the electoral success of incumbents. Prime ministers whose governments are allied to such presidents realize a vote and seat share bonus of around five per cent. These findings have implications for our understanding of presidential activism, strategic parliamentary dissolution and electoral accountability

Replication Data for Party System Institutionalization, Accountability and Governmental Corruption

Replication data for Party System Institutionalization, Accountability and Governmental Corruptio

Power to the Presidents: Democracy and Constitutional Innovation

As the election campaign gets under way, the signs are that all is not well with British democracy. Turnout in the election expected in May is likely to drop even below the dismal 59 percent of the last national poll in 2001, itself the lowest response since 1945. Opinion polls put this down to electoral dissatisfaction with Prime Minister Tony Blair's leadership and the alternatives on offer. Analysts and pollsters chart a picture of a disenchanted electorate that feels increasingly unable to hold its leaders accountable at election time. But there are alternatives and the semi-presidential systems of eastern Europe are showing the way

Replication Data for "The Electoral Benefits of Opportunistic Election Timing"

Stata dataset and do file to replicate the results of the analyses reported in the paper