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Portfolio Allocation and the Vote of No Confidence*

Published online by Cambridge University Press:  29 November 2012

Sona N. Golder  and
Jacquelyn A. Thomas
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Abstract

There is a contradiction between theory and empirics with respect to portfolio allocation in parliamentary democracies. While the canonical model of legislative bargaining predicts the existence of a ‘formateur bonus’, empirical studies show that portfolios are allocated in a manner that favours smaller parties. This article argues that the difference between the empirical pattern and the theoretical predictions can be explained by the vote of no confidence, which provides an incentive for large formateur parties to overcompensate smaller coalition partners in exchange for their sustained support over time. This argument is tested by exploiting variations in the presence of no confidence votes across national and regional levels in France. As predicted, we find that larger formateur parties receive a greater share of portfolios if the vote of no confidence is absent than if it is present.

Type
Articles
Information
British Journal of Political Science , Volume 44 , Issue 1 , January 2014 , pp. 29 - 39
Copyright
Copyright © Cambridge University Press 2012 

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Footnotes

*

Associate Professor, Pennsylvania State University, Department of Political Science (email: sgolder@psu.edu); J.D. Candidate, Florida State University College of Law (jat07@my.fsu.edu). We thank Matt Golder, Alec Hargreaves, Michael Laver and Paul Warwick for their helpful comments on this article. The data and all computer code necessary to replicate the results and figures in this analysis are available at https://files.nyu.edu/sln202/public/ and http://dx.doi.org/doi:10.1017/S0007123412000580. All statistical models were estimated using Stata 11.

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27 See http://www.france-politique.fr and http://www.election-politique.fr.

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29 We assume that the party of the prime minister or regional president is the same as the party of the (final) formateur. We are unaware of any cases in our data that violate this assumption. We made one change to the formateur variable found in the original Warwick and Druckman (‘The Portfolio Allocation Paradox’) dataset. Rather than coding Georges Pompidou as non-partisan, we coded him as being affiliated with the Gaullist party. Although Pompidou was not a member of the National Assembly when he became prime minister, he was clearly linked with the Gaullist Party, was publicly recognized as the de facto party leader from 1964–5, and openly ran as a Gaullist presidential candidate in 1969. We should note that our results are actually stronger if we keep to the original coding of the formateur variable.

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