Doctoral Dissertation Research in Political Science: Ministerial Policy Preferences and the Role of Legislative Institutions in Ameliorating Conflict in Single-party Cabinets

William Marsh Rice University, Houston TX

Investigators

Abstract

This award is funded under the American Recovery and Reinvestment Act of 2009 (Public Law 111-5). Martin and Vanberg have recently theorized that legislative institutions play an important role in minimizing conflict between coalition partners; this project presents a generalized version of this theory that purports that legislative institutions serve to mitigate intra-party policy disputes in single-party cabinets as well. Several hypotheses can be drawn from this generalized theory and aree tested to determine the validity of the theory. Given that the policy-making role of the legislative institutions of parliamentary democracies has until recently been a relatively neglected area of study, this project makes a major contribution to a growing literature. To test hypotheses drawn from the generalized theory, it is necessary to construct some measure of the policy divisions within a cabinet. Toward this end, the project estimates the policy positions of hundreds of ministers across four countries (Australia, Canada, New Zealand, and the United Kingdom) and four decades by using computer-assisted content analysis to extract ideological positions from electronic archives of political texts and speeches. Beyond simple hypothesis testing, this novel dataset will be of considerable importance to a wide variety of scholars as it represents the first effort to quantify the breadth and depth of policy differences within a large cross-section of cabinets. In addition to being used to test the proposed model, the data will be an important source of descriptive information regarding the ebb and flow of policy preferences within parliamentary parties. While previous studies have shown that there is wide variation in the preferences of backbenchers, this project will be the first time the policy preferences of the frontbench have been probed in great detail. Thus, it will be possible for scholars to make an informed judgment regarding the importance of intra-party politics in modeling single-party governments. Additionally, this project will add additional weight to recent findings that legislative institutions are an important component of the policy-making process which should hopefully increase the volume and the tempo of the small, but growing, dialogue regarding the importance of the legislative institutions of parliamentary democracies. Scholars interested in party factionalism will also benefit from this project as serious inquiry into factionalism has been limited by the difficulty in determining the membership of informal factions. This project provides tools by which factional structures can be readily identified. Finally, the dataset will have broad implications as this new source of data will lead to new questions and those new questions may need to new theories explaining the ebb and flow of intra-party policy differences and the impact of those differences on the policy-making process.