Success and Failure of Parliamentary Motions: A Social Dilemma Approach

Abstract

Parliamentary motions are a vital and frequently used element of political control in democratic regimes. Despite their high incidence and potential impact on the political fate of a government and its policies, we know relatively little about the conditions under which parliamentary motions are likely to be accepted or rejected. Current collective decision-making models use a voting power framework in which power and influence of the involved parties are the main predictors. We propose an alternative, social dilemma approach, according to which a motion’s likelihood to be accepted depends on the severity of the social dilemma underlying the decision issue. Actor- and dilemma-centered hypotheses are developed and tested with data from a stratified random sample of 822 motions that have been voted upon in the Dutch Parliament between September 2009 and February 2011. The social dilemma structure of each motion is extracted through content coding, applying a cognitive mapping technique developed by Anthony, Heckathorn and Maser. Logistic regression analyses are in line with both, actor-centered and social-dilemma centered approaches, though the latter show stronger effect sizes. Motions have a lower chance to be accepted if voting potential is low, the proposer is not from the voting party, and if the problem underlying the motion reflects a prisoner’s dilemma or a pure competition game as compared to a coordination game. The number of proposing parties or a battle of the sexes structure does not significantly affect the outcome.

Too Legit to Quit? Analyzing the Effect of No-Confidence Motions on Cabinet Members’ Instability in Presidential Systems: The Cases of Colombia and Peru

“…Although scholars have analyzed the effects of NCMs in parliamentary systems, which are primarily related to policy shocks (Popping and Wittek 2015;Williams 2016), the critical assumptions asserted here also demonstrate that policy shocks and contextual factors in presidential systems limit the effect of horizontal accountability mechanisms over ministerial turnover. The substantive contribution of this inquiry is to shed light on how policy shocks and factors concerning the timing of NCM implementation in Congress, cabinet member partisanship, and party coalition cohesion in Congress, bolstered by a strategy of cabinet portfolio allocation, matter in NCM execution, which directly affects cabinet member instability in presidential systems.…”

The SAGE Handbook of Online Research Methods

“…A new field of research in which mapping is used is presented in Popping and Wittek (2015). They look at negotiations.…”