Agenda control in the Bundestag, 1980–2002

Abstract

We find strong evidence of monopoly legislative agenda control by government parties in the Bundestag. First, the government parties have near-zero roll rates, while the opposition parties are often rolled over half the time. Second, only opposition parties' (and not government parties') roll rates increase with the distances of each party from the floor median. Third, almost all policy moves are towards the government coalition (the only exceptions occur during periods of divided government). Fourth, roll rates for government parties skyrocket when they fall into the opposition and roll rates for opposition parties plummet when they enter government, while policy movements go from being nearly 100 per cent rightward when there is a rightist government to 100 per cent leftward under a leftist government.

Acknowledgments

The authors thank Thomas Saalfeld for supplying his data on Bundestag roll call votes; and Adriana Bejan, Cheryl Boudreau, Nick Weller, and Markus Wendler for research assistance. The authors acknowledge funding from the National Science Foundation, grant numbers SBR-9422831 and SES-9905224, from the UCSD Committee on Research, and from the Chancellor's Associates Chair at UCSD. Previous versions of this article were presented at a conference on legislative politics in 2004 sponsored by the UCSD Public Policy Research Project and at the 2005 Annual Meeting of the American Political Science Association, Washington DC. All data used in this paper and all results reported can be found and downloaded at www.settingtheagenda.com.

Notes

1. Recent studies of backbench rebellion show that there is indeed diversity of opinion even within the majority party in the UK. (See, e.g., Giacomo Benedetto and Simon Hix, ‘The Rejected, the Ejected, and the Dejected: Explaining Labour Rebels in the House of Commons’, manuscript on file with authors (2005).)

2. For interesting discussions of discipline and agenda control, see Simon Hix, Abdul Noury, and Gerard Roland, Democracy in the European Parliament, manuscript on file with authors (Forthcoming) and Gary W. Cox and Mathew D. McCubbins, Setting the Agenda: Responsible Party Government in the US House of Representatives (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2005).

3. Cf. John Huber, ‘The Vote of Confidence in Parliamentary Democracies’, American Political Science Review, 90 (1996), pp.269–82.

4. Details on Bundestag procedure described here are drawn from Rupert Schick and Wolfgang Zeh, The German Bundestag, Functions and Procedures (Neue Darmstädter Verlagsanstalt: Rheinbreitbach, 1999).

5. For a discussion of the persistence of procedural consensus in the Bundestag, see Gerhard Loewenberg and Tracy H. Slagter, ‘The Persistence of Procedural Consensus in the German Bundestag’, Working paper (2005).

6. Gerhard Loewenberg, ‘Agenda Setting in the German Bundestag: Origins and Consequences of Party Dominance’, Journal of Legislative Studies 9 (2003), pp.17–31; Thomas Saalfeld, ‘The West German Bundestag after 40 Years: The Role of Parliament in a “Party Democracy”’, Parliaments in Western Europe, 13(1990), pp.68–89.

7. For an interesting discussion of how German MPs commit to consensual policymaking in committees, but remain adversarial in opposition–government relationships at the plenary level, see Thomas Saalfeld, ‘Professionalisation of Parliamentary Roles in Germany: An Aggregate Level Analysis, 1949–94’, in Members of Parliament in Western Europe: Roles and Behaviour (eds.), Wolfgang C. Müller and Thomas Saalfeld (London: Frank Cass Publishers, 1997).

8. Loewenberg, ‘Agenda Setting in the German Bundestag’, p.22; Schick and Zeh, The German Bundestag, Functions and Procedures, p.31.

9. It is up to the vote of the Bundestag to decide on the number, size and specific composition of the committees (which is proportional to the size of parliamentary groups).

10. The Council of Elders is composed of the President, the deputies and 23 members of the Bundestag appointed by the parliamentary groups in proportion to their size. These include all the parliamentary secretaries or whips of each parliamentary group.

11. Loewenberg, ‘Agenda Setting in the German Bundestag’.

12. Ibid., p.22.

13. Werner J. Patzelt, ‘Chancellor Schröder's Approach to Political and Legislative Leadership’, German Politics, 13(2004), pp.268–99, 272.

14. While regional politics remains the most important influence on Bundesrat decision-making, partisan politics has come to play an important role too. Since the Bundesrat's consent on bills passed by the Bundestag is required in many policy areas, when the two legislative majorities are incompatible, the opposition in the Bundesrat can veto legislation in hope of extracting policy concessions (an absolute majority vote of the Bundesrat is required for about 60 per cent of all legislation). In the 1970s and 1980s, the partisan lines in the Bundesrat were quite clear, as few Land delegations were mixed coalitions of government and opposition parties. But by the 1990s, mixed Land coalitions had become a permanent feature of German federalism (See Roland Sturm, ‘Divided Government in Germany: The Case of the Bundesrat’, in Robert Elgie (ed.), Divided Government in Comparative Perspective. (New York: Oxford University Press, 2001), pp.167–81.) Because the Länder cast their weighted votes as a bloc (Art. 51), the federal government is constrained by the fact that it cannot buy off the votes of individual members. Instead, it must convince certain Länder to support its bills. This can be achieved by rewarding these Länder with distributive benefits. Scholars criticise the partisanship of the Bundesrat and many regard divided government as a basic flaw of the German system. The question of the effects of divided government is whether the use of vetoes leads to gridlock, or to consensus politics. First, the use of veto politics can lead to gridlock. During divided government we see the use of veto politics – when the opposition in the Bundesrat can block bills by vetoing them. If the opposition holds two-thirds in the Bundesrat, its use of veto politics is very powerful, because the Bundestag needs to match the Bundesrat veto by overriding it with a two-thirds majority (Thomas König, Till Blume, and Bernd Luig, ‘Policy Change without Government Change? German Gridlock after the 2002 Election’, German Politics, 12 (2003), pp.86–146). Such veto politics can lead to political immobilism (Gerhard Lehmbruch, ‘Institutional Linkages and Policy Networks in the Federal System of West Germany’, Publius: The Journal of Federalism 19 (1989), pp.221–35; Fritz Scharpf, ‘The Joint-Decision Trap: Lessons from German Federalism and European Integration’, Public Administration 66 (1988), pp.239–78; Sturm, ‘Divided Government in Germany’). Second, situations of divided government can lead to compromise and consensus (Cf. Sturm, ‘Divided Government in Germany’). The mediation (conference) committee acts as a consensus arena, trying to solve differences between the two chambers. For instance from 1972 to 1980, 17 out of 34 Bundesrat vetoes were overcome with the use of conference committee work. Between 1990 and 1998, the government rarely held a majority on the conference committee, yet 53 out of 80 Bundesrat vetoes were overcome through compromise (Ibid.).

15. Patzelt, ‘Chancellor Schröder's Approach to Political and Legislative Leadership’.

16. By a pivotal party we mean one whose withdrawal would deprive the government of a majority in the assembly.

17. We shall here ignore the possibility that C_k's coalition partners might send a bill to the floor even after C_k has ‘vetoed’ it, perhaps in the belief that C_k is bluffing and will not really bring down the government over this issue. See Cox and McCubbins, Setting the Agenda for models in which vetoes are not so cut and dried.

18. Patzelt, ‘Chancellor Schröder's Approach to Political and Legislative Leadership’, p.273.

19. Octavio Amorim Neto, Gary W. Cox, and Mathew D. McCubbins, ‘Agenda Power in Brazil's Câmara dos Deputados, 1989–98’, World Politics, 55 (2003), pp.550–78; Gary W. Cox and Mathew D. McCubbins, ‘Agenda Power in the US House of Representatives, 1877 to 1986’, in Party, Process, and Political Change in Congress: New Perspectives on the History of Congress (eds.) David Brady and Mathew D. McCubbins, (Stanford: Stanford University Press, 2002); Cox and McCubbins, Setting the Agenda.

20. Eric C. Browne and Mark N. Franklin, ‘Aspects of Coalition Payoffs in European Parliamentary Democracies’, American Political Science Review 67 (1973), pp.453–69; Ian Budge and Hans Keman (eds.), How Party Government Works: Testing a Theory of Formation, Functioning, and Termination in 20 Democracies (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1990), Ch.4; Michael Laver and Norman Schofield, Multiparty Government: the Politics of Coalition in Europe (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1990), Ch.7; Royce Carroll and Gary W. Cox, ‘The Logic of Gamson's Law: Pre-Electoral Coalitions and Portfolio Distribution’, unpublished typescript, University of California, San Diego (2005).

21. Cf. Sebastian Saiegh, ‘Government Defeat: Coalitions, Responsiveness, and Legislative Performance’, Ph.D. Dissertation, New York University (2004).

22. When we refer to the ideal point of a party, we mean the median of the ideal points of all MPs of that party.

23. If the government can bring a bill to the floor and protect it completely from amendments (as closed rules in the US House allow), then some status quo points in the region (2M – F,M) can be addressed by the government. For example, M would agree to change a status quo at M – e to some point in the interval [M,M + e]. If F and M can agree on single such point, they can bring in a bill and pass it.

24. We should hasten to note that these predictions that ‘the majority party never gets rolled’ are similar in analytic status to other predictions drawn from complete information models, in which actions are costless, such as ‘there is never any war’, or ‘there are never any vetoes’ (Cf. Charles M. Cameron, Veto Bargaining: Presidents and the Politics of Negative Power (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2000)). Cox and McCubbins, Setting the Agenda explore a model with costly action in Chapter 6 and one with incomplete information in Chapters 8 and 9 of that book, showing that the main results derived here are largely preserved.

25. A prime example is the Schröder government's pursuit of labour market and welfare reform (Agenda 2010) against the will of many Bundestag members of its own party.

26. This is indeed, precisely the pattern that Cox and McCubbins, Setting the Agenda, Ch.9 found for the US House.

27. Note that our dataset is constructed from the Bundestag roll call votes that Thomas Saalfeld, Parteisoldaten und Rebellen. Eine Untersuchung zur Geschlossenheit der Fraktionen im Deutschen Bundestag (1949–1990) (Opladen: Leske u. Budrich, 1995) collected and analysed.

28. Wahlper means ‘legislative period’ – that is, the period between governments. This would be equivalent to a Congress in the American sense. The recorded votes can be found in Verhandlungen des Deutschen Bundestages, Stenographische Berichte – a publication of the Bundestag equivalent to the Congressional Record in the US.

29. The assumption is that final passage votes are sincere reflections of preference, as there is no advantage to strategic action at the final stage of the game. Other votes, on amendments, procedure and so forth, may be strategic and thus, we cannot accurately evaluate preferences and thus cannot determine rolls, the direction of policy movements, etc.

30. Simply comparing the number of ‘yeas’ and ‘nays’ can be criticised for ignoring instances where a large majority of the party chooses to abstain, because abstention might be an important strategic choice. By abstaining, a party might prevent the necessary support for passage; thus, votes on which the party abstains that ultimately pass could be ‘possible rolls’. We also calculated expanded roll rates that included ‘possible rolls’ as rolls. The results are still consistent with our hypotheses. Adding possible rolls does not change numbers much – it only increases the roll rates of federal opposition parties that are not in government in the second chamber from 0.73 to 0.77 and the roll rates of opposition parties that are in Land governments in the second chamber from 0.60 to 0.65. There are no changes to the roll rates of governmental parties.

31. Thomas König and Thomas Bräuninger, ‘Power and Political Coordination in American and German Multi-chamber Legislation’, Journal of Theoretical Politics 8(1996), pp.331–60.

32. Because some of these legislative subperiods included very few votes, we have dropped all the subperiods with less than eight final passage votes, leading to a total number of 34 remaining legislative period-party observations.

33. Information on seats held in the Bundestag and Bundesrat were found in Wahlergebnisse in Deutschland 1946–2003 (Mannheim: Forschungsgruppe Wahlen e. V., 2003).

34. For example, during Wahlpers 9–13, there was only one vote (on an issue of criminal law) where both governmental parties, CDU/CSU and FDP, were rolled. During the fourteenth Wahlper, there was again only one vote (on the issue of the rebuilding of the Palace of the Kaiser) where both governmental parties, SPD and the Greens, were rolled.

35. Just as we offer this brief comparison of the US and Germany, so too have other scholars situated Germany in a broader comparative context (see, e.g., Russell Dalton, Democratic Challenges, Democratic Choices: The Erosion in Political Support in Advanced Industrial Democracies (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2004) and Wolfgang C. Müller and Kaare Strøm. Coalition Governments in Western Europe, (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2000)).

36. Ian Budge, Hans-Dieter Klingemann, Andrea Volkens, Judith Bara and Eric Tanenbaum, Mapping Policy Preferences, Estimates for Parties, Electors, and Governments 1945–1998, (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2001).

37. The farthest left parties were the PDS in the twelfth, thirteenth, and fourteenth Wahlpers and the Greens in the tenth and eleventh Wahlpers. The farthest right party was the CDU/CSU in the ninth and fourteenth Wahlpers; indeed, these were the only two Wahlpers where there existed a farthest right party that was not in the government.

38. For our DISTANCE_GOVT measure, we treat the interior government party as the median and the exterior government party as non-median; therefore, we need only to identify and distinguish those government parties that are not the median in each Wahlper. Specifically, these non-median government parties are the SPD in the ninth Wahlper, the CDU/CSU in the tenth and thirteenth Wahlpers, the FDP in the eleventh and twelfth Wahlpers, and the Greens in the fourteenth Wahlper. We use this ordinal DISTANCE_GOVT variable as a proxy for distance because there does not exist a cardinal measure.

39. Budge et al., Mapping Policy Preferences.

40. Throughout, we treat the MPP score as an ordinal ranking, including in Figures 4 and 5.

41. We drop the ninth Wahlper from the regression, as there is only one opposition party, so we are unable to distinguish a measure of distance among the opposition parties.

42. Gary King, Unifying Political Methodology: The Likelihood Theory of Statistical Inference (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1989; reprinted, Ann Arbor: University of Michigan Press, 1998).

43. Bradley Palmquist, ‘Analysis of Proportion Data’, paper Prepared for the Annual Meeting of the Political Methodology Society, College Station Texas, 15–19July (1999).

44. Extended beta binomial (EBB) is an estimation technique used originally in toxicology studies in which there are both individual and group effects of a treatment. In studies of parliaments, we believe EBB is an appropriate technique because there are both individual and parliament-level factors that influence the probability of being rolled (for more on EBB, see J.K. Haseman and L.L. Kupper, ‘Analysis of Dichotomous Response Data from Certain Toxicological Experiments’, Biometrics, 35(1979), pp.281–93; L.L. Kupper and J.K. Haseman, ‘The Use of a Correlated Binomial Model for the Analysis of Certain Toxicological Experiments’, Biometrics, 34(1978), pp.69–76; D.A.Williams, ‘The Analysis of Binary Responses from Toxicological Experiments Involving Reproduction and Teratogenicity’, Biometrics, 31(1975), pp.949–52.

45. To estimate policy moves we used a scaling method called Optimal Classification (OC), developed by Keith T. Poole, Spatial Models of Parliamentary Voting (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2005) for scaling roll call votes in legislatures. See his website at http://www.voteview.com/Optimal_Classification.htm. To estimate party positions we used all 556 recorded votes during the eleventh through fourteenth Wahlpers.

46. OC also makes few classification errors. If it misclassifies the cutpoint, it indicates so, enabling us to drop misclassified votes from the analysis.

47. Specifically, there were only two votes in our dataset that split the government coalition, and we, therefore, excluded these votes from our analysis. In the twelfth Wahlper, the FDP voted against the CDU/CSU twice to vote ‘yes’ on abortion bills with the opposition parties. Note that including these two votes in our analysis would not change our results.

48. Patzelt, ‘Chancellor Schröder's Approach to Political and Legislative Leadership’.

49. Sturm, ‘Divided Government in Germany’.

50. We did not code as government- or opposition-controlled those seats held by Land coalitions made up of both opposition and governmental parties, or of small regional parties, or universal coalitions of all together (government plus opposition plus small regional parties).

51. For this regression, we exclude Wahlper 9, where FDP was a coalition partner of SPD.

52. Again, for this regression we exclude Wahlper 9, when SPD is a coalition partner of FDP.

53. If policy change is determined solely by the distribution of status quo points and the floor median, then for policy moves to be uniformly leftward (rightward) all status quo points must lie to the right (left) of the chamber median. This might be possible when a rightist government takes over for a leftist government, but it seems like an implausible distribution of status quo points when a rightist or leftist government is in power for a continued amount of time.

54. Gary W. Cox, Mikitaka Masuyama, and Mathew D. McCubbins, ‘Agenda Power in the Japanese House of Representatives’, Japanese Journal of Political Science, 1(2000), pp.1–22.

55. Cox and McCubbins, Setting the Agenda.

56. König, Thomas, ‘Bicameralism and Party Politics in Germany: An Empirical Social Choice Analysis’, Political Studies (2001), pp.411–37.