In the recent entry on India, I noted how the Left alliance is not really credible in its threats to bring down the Congress Party-led United Progressive Alliance government over the US-India nuclear deal. There, I made a general point about how small parties are usually not able to be the “tail that wags the dog”–that is, demand a price in terms of policy influence above their contribution to the majority coalition: unless the small parties are close to indifferent as to which major party leads the government, their bluff can usually be called by the bigger party.
Vasi1 took exception to this statement with respect to the shift, in 2002, of then-Republican Senator Jim Jeffords to Democratic-supporting independent status. This is a good example, and given one Senator’s ability to swing the chamber, is it an exception to my generalization?
No. First, in the India discussion and other times I have made this point about small-party influence, I have been referring to coalition government, and whether a small party can effectively “blackmail” a bigger party, demanding a high price for its support. In the Jeffords case, his swing made a huge difference because he determined which party held sole control over the institution’s agenda, not which one led a multiparty coalition.
Second, notwithstanding the big impact of his decision, the other side of the equation is what the party or legislator making this shift is able to get in return. This is the crux of the matter for those who argue that small parties (or individual pivotal legislators) have inordinate influence. I am not aware of any evidence that Vermont or Jeffords’s own policy preferences were specifically catered to by Democrats, once he let them take power over the Senate. (In fact, I recall somewhere reading a claim that he had probably extracted more when he was in the Republican caucus, but I can’t say for sure.)
An individual legislator who switches parties–especially when he then never runs for reelection again–is not the same as a party that has to face its own voters again over the coalitions it has chosen to support. The Indian Left simply can’t face its electorate as the party that threw out the UPA in favor of the BJP-led NDA. Because of that, it is not able to exert influence out of proportion to its contribution to the governing majority, and perhaps not even commensurate with that contribution (though it would not be an easy thing to measure accurately). It is not free to swing.2
So, what about the case of Israel, one often cited in defense of the tail (small party) wagging dog (determining which big party can lead a coalition). Vasi also raised this example:
The various ethnic- or religious-constituency parties don’t really care who governs.
Indeed, these are the sorts of parties that can potentially demand an above-proportional share of influence. Some Israeli parties are indifferent between Labor and Likud (or Kadima in 2006) and thus potentially can swing coalitions, and as a result, demand concessions. Yet, as I have noted before, there is little evidence for the “tail wagging the dog” argument in Israel. And if we can’t find it there, with its big multiparty coalitions and frequent government changes, there aren’t many places we can find it!
The conditions under which small parties or individual legislators can exploit “pivotalness” and demand influence beyond their contribution to the majority are much stricter than often assumed.
- Hope you can return to regular commenting, Vasi! [↩]
- While Jeffords did not have to face his electorate again, it is likely he was reflecting its (changed) preferences when he made his swing to the Democrats. A similar example might be the German FDP, when it brought down the SPD-led government in 1982 and effectively put the Christian Democrats in power. The 1983 election appeared to confirm that it was following–or anticipating–the voters, not “dictating” who would govern. [↩]
Veteran Australian political journalist Mungo McCallum – despite his argument in other contexts that “[m]inorities can be too mighty,” Melbourne Herald (5 July 1989) – has argued that the National [nee Country] Party’s influence over its larger (8-10% to 35-45%) coalition partners, the Liberals, has been overrated.
Eg, after PM Harold Holt drowned in Dec 1967, his Liberal colleagues elected a Senator, John Gorton, to succeed him. This is highly unusual in Westminster systems – like Douglas-Home in UK, Gorton had to quit the Upper House and find a Lower seat ASAP – but the senior Lib in the House of Reps, Billy McMahon, was considered ruled out gecause he “had been the subject of a thunderous veto by [John] McEwen on the behalf of the Country Party. Although the veto was almost entirely bluff – the Country Party relied on its position in government to deliver goodies to its supporters, and, even if it had moved to the cross-benches, was hardly likely to vote to replace a Liberal government with a Labor one – the Libs caved in with surprising alacrity” (Mungo MacCallum, Mungo: The Man Who Laughs, 2001, p 139).
“I have said before that I always regarded McEwen’s threats to leave the Coalition as largely bluff; under almost any circumstances, the Government seats were more comfortable than the cross-benches, and actual Opposition was unthinkable” (p 213).
However, Gorton offended (or just plain bewildered) so many conservative voters and MPs that after just over two years he was dumped. McEwan having died in the interim, Billy McMahon (father, BTW, of actor Julian) got to be PM at last, but only briefly, until he was defeated by Gough Whitlam in 1972.
And the Liberals, as junior coalition partner in Queensland from 1957 to 1983 (always fewer seats than the Nats, despite usually polling more votes), had almost zero influence in “wagging the dog”. Most Qld Lib State MPs were “wets”, ie “small-L Liberal” centrists, but they went along with the far-right regime of Joh Bjelke-Petersen with only rare grumblings and even rarer parliamentary floor-crossings.
Seed planted by Tom Round — 31 August 2007 @ 19:49
I agree that Jeffords is not the best example for me to have used–I hesitated somewhat before mentioning that because an individual does not a party make.
However, one of your reasons for rejecting the Jeffords example is that we should focus on the policy concessions a party can wrangle from the government, rather than simply their impact as “kingmaker”. I suggest we apply this same standard to the McGann and Moran paper. Their results do show that the religious parties don’t have a disproportionate effect on government formation, or sheer number of cabinet positions. But they only briefly consider the primary goals of the religious parties–control of the religious aspects of government. Looking at their table of the ministries held by small parties, we see that the Interior and Religious Affairs ministries were held seventeen times by religious parties (NRP and Shas), five times by neutral parties (Labor, Likud and Yisrael B’Aliyah) and just twice by explicitly secular parties (Shinui, counting their abolition of the ‘Religious Affairs’ ministry as if they had held it themselves).
This doesn’t mean that I disagree with you, I certainly don’t see an ideologically committed party like the Indian Left switching sides! You’re absolutely right that it comes down to “conditions…much stricter than often assumed”. The “Strong Tail-Wagging-Dog hypothesis”, that every small party in every PR system will inevitably have more power in every way, is just a bogeyman. But a weaker version remains, that a centrist or non-committed party can achieve policy results not warranted by its size.
Seed planted by Vasi — 31 August 2007 @ 22:10
Vasi, that is an excellent point on the religious parties, and I agree that McGann and Moran do not (by my recollection) take this factor into account.
I think the general point holds, but the “religious” parties in Israel certainly have gotten what they wanted, despite their very small size (not only in votes for parliamentary parties, but also in terms of adherents to their brand of Judaism in the broader public).
(I put “religious” in quotation marks because I am not willing to concede to these parties, or their rabbinical masters the definition of what constitutes a “religious” or “observant” Jew. But that’s a topic for another place, even if I was the one to raise it here!)
Seed planted by MSS — 02 September 2007 @ 18:24