Papers by Indridi Indridason
Primaries and Legislative Behavior
West European Politics, 2013
According to Gamson's Law, the allocation of cabinet portfolios in parliamentary democracies is p... more According to Gamson's Law, the allocation of cabinet portfolios in parliamentary democracies is proportional to the government parties' legislative seat shares. However, portfolio allocation departs systematically away from perfect proportionality. In this paper we propose a theory of portfolio allocation that seeks to explain the variance in proportionality across different bargaining situations. We argue that the degree to which the coalition formation process is characterized by uncertainty and complexity influences portfolio allocation. In uncertain and complex bargaining situations, parties that otherwise would be in an advantageous bargaining position will have difficult time exploiting their bargaining advantage. As a result, portfolio allocation in such circumstances will be closer to proportionality. We observe these patterns in data on coalition formation in 14 West European parliamentary systems in the period 1945-1999.
Pieces of the puzzle? Coalition formation and tangential preferences
West European Politics
France's semi-presidential form of government provides an interesting case for testing theor... more France's semi-presidential form of government provides an interesting case for testing theories of cabinet reshu es. It is not the semi-presidential form of government as such that makes France an interesting case but the sharp contrast between periods of cohabitation and unified government in terms of who leads the government. Thus, different actors are in a position to initiate cabinet reshu es at different points in time. We argue that cabinet reshu es are strategic devices that the presidents (under unified government) and ...
Expressive motives and third-party candidates
Journal of Theoretical Politics, 2012
The electoral success of an extremist party usually attracts considerable attention. Yet, they ra... more The electoral success of an extremist party usually attracts considerable attention. Yet, they rarely have an opportunity to directly influence policy as they are, more often than not, shut out of the policy-making process by mainstream parties. Extremist parties may, however, influence policy indirectly by inducing mainstream parties to adjust their electoral strategies. I consider a model of electoral competition between an expressive extremist party and two mainstream parties in first-past-the-post and majority runoff elections. The presence of an extremist party results in an equilibrium policy outcome that is further away from the extremist’s preferred policy but the magnitude of the effect is shown to depend on the type of electoral system.
Political Science Research and Methods
People are commonly expected not to waste their vote on parties with small probabilities of being... more People are commonly expected not to waste their vote on parties with small probabilities of being elected. Yet, many end up voting for underdogs. We argue that voters gauge the popular support for their preferred party from their social networks. When social networks function as echo chambers, a feature observed in real-life networks, voters overestimate underdogs’ chances of winning. We conduct voting experiments in which some treatment groups receive signals from a simulated network. We compare the effect of networks with a high degree of homogeneity against random networks. We find that homophilic networks increase the level of support for underdogs, which provides evidence to back up anecdotal claims that echo chambers foster the development of fringe parties.
Political Science Research and Methods, 2017
The legislative agenda in most parliamentary systems is controlled tightly by the government and ... more The legislative agenda in most parliamentary systems is controlled tightly by the government and bills offered by individual members of parliament have low rates of success. Yet, members of parliament (MPs) do seek to present (private) members’ bills even where the rate of adoption is very low. We argue that members’ bills serve as an electoral connection but also as an opportunity for MPs to signal competence to their co-partisans. To demonstrate the presence of an electoral connection we take advantage of the random selection of private members’ bills in the New Zealand House of Representatives and show that survey respondents approve more of electorate MPs whose bills were drawn on the ballot. In addition, we show that MPs respond to the incentives created by the voters and parties’ willingness to reward legislative effort and, consequently, that electorally vulnerable legislators are more likely to place members’ bills on the ballot.
Electoral Studies, 2016
Austerity policies -policies of sharp reductions of a government's budget deficint involving spen... more Austerity policies -policies of sharp reductions of a government's budget deficint involving spending cuts and tax increases -are claimed to boost support for radical political parties. We argue, counter to popular claims, that austerity measures actually reduce support for radical and niche parties. Austerity policies force traditional left-right politics to the forefront of political debate with the traditional mainstream parties having a stronger ownership over those issues. We systematically explore the impact of austerity measures on the electoral fortunes of niche parties in 16 developed countries over a 35-year period, while controlling for a number of socio-economic variables. We find that austerity policies that rely on tax increases affect radical parties on the left and the right in different ways than fiscal adjustments based on spending cuts.
The Journal of Politics, 2016
In studying coalition politics, scholars have increasingly begun focusing on conflict within coal... more In studying coalition politics, scholars have increasingly begun focusing on conflict within coalitions. Here we examine the role of coalition agreements in managing intra-coalitional conflict. We argue that there is a trade-off between making policy agreements at the coalition's formation-and delegating implementation to the portfolio minister-and postponing the issue's resolution by creating procedures for settling policy disputes. The trade-off is increasingly resolved in favor of dispute resolution mechanism when coalitions are ideologically heterogeneous and the coalition parties differ in size. By testing our theory in the German Länder between 1990 and 2013 we are able to isolate the effects of ideology and the bargaining situation while holding the institutional environment constant. The empirical results support our main argument: When intra-coalition conflict is high, parties write shorter coalition contracts but are more likely to adopt procedures for conflict resolution.
Polarization is widely seen to have important implications in politics and a large literature add... more Polarization is widely seen to have important implications in politics and a large literature addresses the causes and consequences of polarization. It is, therefore, interesting that there is little consensus about how polarization should be measured and, sometimes, the measurement of appears to be a mere afterthought. While measuring polarization in two party systems is a relatively simple exercise, the same can not be said about multiparty systems. Here we aim to offer some insights into how we ought to go about measuring polarization by considering how polarization affects political outcomes in different political scenarios (e.g., legislative bargaining and coalition formation). We do not propose a ‘best’ measure of polarization but rather suggest that the choice of a measure should depend on the type of political problem under study. In other words, we demonstrate that it is essential that theoretical argument and measurement strategy are closely tied together.
Political Science Research and Methods
The legislative agenda in most parliamentary systems is controlled tightly by the government and ... more The legislative agenda in most parliamentary systems is controlled tightly by the government and bills offered by individual members of parliament have low rates of success. Yet, members of parliament (MPs) do seek to present (private) members’ bills even where the rate of adoption is very low. We argue that members’ bills serve as an electoral connection but also as an opportunity for MPs to signal competence to their co-partisans. To demonstrate the presence of an electoral connection we take advantage of the random selection of private members’ bills in the New Zealand House of Representatives and show that survey respondents approve more of electorate MPs whose bills were drawn on the ballot. In addition, we show that MPs respond to the incentives created by the voters and parties’ willingness to reward legislative effort and, consequently, that electorally vulnerable legislators are more likely to place members’ bills on the ballot.
The line-item veto has often be heralded as an eective tool in reducing pork barrel spending. Thi... more The line-item veto has often be heralded as an eective tool in reducing pork barrel spending. This paper considers a model of veto bargaining that distinguishes between public goods and pork barrel spending and allows for the possibility that legislators receive credit for putting pork barrel projects on the agenda even if they are vetoed by the executive. A comparison
Modeling Proportional Representation in Majoritarian Legislatures
I present a model of electoral competition under systems of proportional representation. The mode... more I present a model of electoral competition under systems of proportional representation. The model demonstrates that the results of existing models are driven by an implausible assumption about the way electoral outcomes translate into policy outcomes (seat-weighted ideal policies). Even slight modifications that account for the majoritarian aspects that characterize most of the world's legislatures result in dierent results.
Do Voters Care About Government Coalitions? Testing Downs’ Pessimistic Conclusion
Party Politics, 2006
Candidate selection in proportional representation systems is rarely con-ducted by primaries. We ... more Candidate selection in proportional representation systems is rarely con-ducted by primaries. We describe and examine primary elections in Iceland where a number of parties, over a number of elections, have employed pri-maries to produce list for proportional representation effects. There is a substantial literature on the effect of gender on candidate performance but the results are best characterized as inconclusive. The primary elections we examine allow us an unique opportunity to consider the effects of gender on candidate success in a setting where confounding factors such as party ideology or the competitiveness of the parties can only have limited effects. In the past decades, equal political representation has come to be seen as ever more important. As the elections we study involve not the selection of individual candidates but party lists via preferential vote we can also examine whether primary voters seek to produce balanced lists.
Annual Conference of the Midwest Political Science Association, 2009
Candidate selection in proportional representation systems is rarely conducted by primaries. We d... more Candidate selection in proportional representation systems is rarely conducted by primaries. We describe and examine primary elections in Iceland where a number of parties, over a number of elections, have employed primaries to produce list for proportional representation effects. There is a substantial literature on the effect of gender on candidate performance but the results are best characterized as inconclusive. The primary elections we examine allow us an unique opportunity to consider the effects of gender on candidate ...
Party Politics, 2013
Are the effects of candidate selection through party primaries largely disruptive for political p... more Are the effects of candidate selection through party primaries largely disruptive for political parties or do they have some redeeming features? Icelandic parties have used inclusive nomination procedures since the early 1970s on a scale that is without parallel in other parliamentary democracies. The Icelandic primaries thus offer a unique opportunity to study the effects of primaries in a context that is quite distinct from the most studied primary election system, i.e. the U.S., which is characterized by federalism, presidential government and two-party competition. Our findings indicate that despite four decades of primaries, the Icelandic parties remain strong and cohesive organizations, suffering almost none of the ailments predicted by critics of primary elections. We are careful to point out, however, that context matters and the way parties have adapted also plays a role.
What explains the type of electoral campaign run by political parties? We provide a new perspecti... more What explains the type of electoral campaign run by political parties? We provide a new perspective on campaigns by focusing on the strategic use of emotive language. We argue that the level of positive sentiment parties adopt in their campaigns depends on their incumbency status, their policy position, and objective economic conditions. We test these claims with a novel dataset that captures the emotive language used in over 400 party manifestos across eight European countries. As predicted, we find that incumbent parties, particularly incumbent prime ministerial parties, use more positive sentiment than opposition parties. We find that ideologically moderate parties employ higher levels of positive sentiment than extremist parties. And we find that all parties exhibit lower levels of positive sentiment when the economy is performing poorly but that this negative effect is weaker for incumbents. Our analysis has important implications for research on campaign strategies and retrosp...
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Papers by Indridi Indridason