Veto power fosters cooperative behaviour: institutional incentives and government-opposition voting in the German Bundestag

Abstract

This article argues that opposition veto power in institutional arenas such as second chambers can foster a more consensual relationship between government and opposition parties in parliament. This theoretical claim is supported in the article using data on legislative voting behaviour in the German Bundestag. The statistical analysis shows that opposition and government parties are much more likely to vote the same way, if the opposition controls a majority in the second chamber and this chamber enjoys veto power. This pattern holds even when controlling for policy-area specific ideological distances between government and opposition parties and electoral signalling incentives. The article’s findings suggest that government and opposition parties seek compromises early in the legislative process and that bicameral conflicts are often already resolved in the lower chamber. The results here support theoretical arguments on the absorption of institutional veto players and challenge the frequent claim that opposition veto power leads to more competitive behaviour and gridlock.

Keywords:

• Government-opposition relations
• bicameralism
• consensus
• legislative voting
• Germany

Acknowledgements

Previous versions of this paper were presented at the 2018 APSA Annual Meeting, and the 2018 EPSA Conference. We are grateful for helpful comments and suggestions by all audiences and two anonymous reviewers.

Disclosure statement

No potential conflict of interest was reported by the author(s).

Notes

1 We use the established term ‘roll call vote’ for recorded vote, although the names of MPs are not literally called in the plenary.

2 Opposition parties facing minority cabinets also enjoy veto power within the lower chamber because the cabinet has to find agreement with at least some of them to pass its proposals. Such deals are often struck in legislative committees leading to a more consensual style of policy making in this arena (Sjölin 1993; Strøm 1990b). We do not address such internal veto power because it is not relevant for our empirical case.

3 Even second chambers without ultimate veto power can have some policy influence if they are able to slow down the legislative process and an impatient government is willing to trade policy concessions for swift passage (Tsebelis and Money 1997).

4 Besides the Bundesrat, the second important arena for opposition parties is the constitutional court (Hönnige 2007; 2009). However, the Bundesrat provides the more attractive option for influencing policy because the behaviour of the constitutional court is often hard to predict (Hönnige 2007).

5 This is not to deny that state governments may also use the Bundesrat to promote state interests that cut across partisan lines. Separating these different motivations empirically is methodologically demanding (Bräuninger et al. 2010) and does not produce clear results. However, the problem does not undermine our argument as we analyse behaviour in the Bundestag where the assumption of a partisan logic is undisputed.

6 This process has become more complicated since unification with an increasing diversification of party systems at the state level.

7 Between 1990 and 2013, 52.9% of all bills introduced were initiated by the federal government, 34.3% by one or more parliamentary parties and 12.8% by the Bundesrat. Of those bills that were passed, 73.3% had been initiated by the government, 22.4% by the parliamentary parties and 4.3% by the Bundesrat (calculations based on data in Feldkamp 2018: Section 10.1).

8 For large periods of time, it is impossible to identify individual opposition parties as veto players in the Bundesrat because the necessary majority can be achieved by including different state governments made up of different parties.

9 We use ‘motion’ as a generic term for the object of a vote in the Bundestag. In contrast to Manow and Burkhart (2007) we study not only votes on bills, but include all legislative motions, such as bills, resolutions and other matters because they also provide parties with the opportunity to signal support or confrontation towards other parties. Our main argument also holds when we reduce the sample to final passage votes only (see Online Appendix, Table OA-4).

10 From 1990 to 2017, only four bills came into force that were initiated solely by opposition parties in the Bundestag; the last such case occurred in the legislative period 1994-98 (Feldkamp 2018: Ch. 10.1). In some cases, governments sometimes take up (parts of) opposition initiatives and introduce them as own motions (Sebaldt 1992).

11 Note that party unity is extremely high in the Bundestag so that the party line is almost always supported by a large majority or even all members of the party group (Sieberer et al. 2018).

12 Of those, about 85 per cent were sponsored by the Mediation Committee of Bundestag and Bundesrat or the Bundesrat, 10 percent were sponsored jointly by government and opposition parties and 5 percent by the council of elders. For all of these motions, it is impossible to identify which specific party or group of parties was the sponsor.

13 The variable “years” starts at “1”. We use the log because we expect the effect of being new to parliament to decrease over time, e.g. due to learning effects and a socialization into informal norms of behaviour.

14 Excluding motions of the category “other sponsor” from the analysis slightly weakens the effect of scenario III, which however remains statistically significant on the 5% level (see Online Appendix, Table OA-5).

15 For the simulation, the remaining variables in the model are held at their empirically observed values (Hanmer and Kalkan 2013). The random effects are set to zero.

16 We fit the model without party fixed effects and found the substantial results to be robust (see Online Appendix, Table OA-3).

Additional information

Funding

This work was supported by the Fritz Thyssen Foundation [grant number 10.12.1.125].

Notes on contributors

Lukas Hohendorf

Lukas Hohendorf is a researcher and PhD candidate at the Professorship of Empirical Political Science, University of Bamberg. His research interests include party strategies and parliamentary and electoral policy positions of legislators and candidates in multi-party systems. [[email protected]]

Thomas Saalfeld

Thomas Saalfeld is Professor of Comparative Politics at the University of Bamberg and Director of the Bamberg Graduate School of Social Sciences (BAGSS). His research interests include the study of legislatures, representation and coalitions. He has published extensively in these areas and is one of the editors of the Oxford Handbook of Legislative Studies. [[email protected]]

Ulrich Sieberer

Ulrich Sieberer is Professor of Empirical Political Science at the University of Bamberg. His main research interests are political institutions, institutional design, legislative behaviour and coalition politics. His work has been published, among others, in the British Journal of Political Science, Electoral Studies, European Journal of Political Research, Legislative Studies Quarterly, Party Politics and West European Politics. [[email protected]]