Suchergebnisse

In most developed democracies, parties adjust their positions to polls and public opinion. Yet, in a coalition government, the policy that emerges is often the outcome of negotiations between governing parties. We argue that the credibility of exit threats by current coalition members and the importance of outside parties for the formation of potential alternative coalitions both matter for policy adoption. Building on a new data set measuring the expected coalition‐inclusion probabilities of parties in parliamentary democracies, we estimate the effect of coalition prospects on an important policy outcome—environmental policy stringency—in nine European countries between 1990 and 2012. Our findings demonstrate that only polling shifts that alter coalition probabilities affect outcomes. Changes in the coalition‐inclusion probability of green parties—regardless of whether they are in government—predict changes in the environmental policy stringency of sitting governments. Political polls, in contrast, do not.

Does democratization diffuse? For over two decades, numerous studies have asserted that democratization diffuses across countries but recent research has challenged this claim. Most recently, work by Brancati and Lucardi has buttressed this null finding by demonstrating that an oft assumed mechanism for the diffusion of democratization—the diffusion of pro-democracy protests—lacks empirical support. We review this contribution in the context of recent research and pose the question: if democratization does not diffuse, then why does democratization cluster in time and space? The answer, we argue, is that democratization occurs in two steps. First, common shocks, economic or political, lead to regime collapse. Then, diffusion does emerge in a second step: new elites are more likely to install a democracy following a regime collapse if neighboring countries have recently democratized. We present evidence from democratic transitions in 125 autocracies between 1875 and 2014.