Today, parliamentarism is the most common form of democratic government. Yet knowledge of this regime type has been incomplete and often unsystematic. Delegation and Accountability in Parliamentary Democracies offers new conceptual clarity on the topic.
This book argues that representative democracies can be understood as chains of delegation and accountability between citizens and politicians. Under parliamentary democracy, this chain of delegation is simple but also long and indirect. Principal-agent theory helps us to understand the perils of democratic delegation, which include the problems of adverse selection and moral hazard. Citizens in democratic states, therefore, need institutional mechanisms by which they can control their representatives. The most important such control mechanisms are on the one hand political parties and on the other external constraints such as courts, central banks, referendums, and supranational institutions such as those of the European Union. Traditionally, parliamentary democracies have relied heavily on political parties and presidential systems more on external constraints.
This new empirical investigation includes all seventeen West European parliamentary democracies. These countries are compared in a series of cross-national tables and figures, and seventeen country chapters provide a wealth of information on four discrete stages in the delegation process: delegation from voters to parliamentary representatives, delegation from parliament to the prime minister and cabinet, delegation within the cabinet, and delegation from cabinet ministers to civil servants. Each chapter illustrates how political parties serve as bonding instruments which align incentives and permit citizen control of the policy process. This is complemented by a consideration of external constraints. The concluding chapters go on to consider how well the problems of delegation and accountability are solved in these countries. They show that political systems with cohesive and competitive parties and strong mechanisms of external constraint solve their democratic agency problems better than countries with weaker control mechanisms. But in many countries political parties are now weakening, and parliamentary systems face new democratic challenges.
Delegation and Accountability in Parliamentary Democracies provides an unprecedented guide to contemporary European parliamentary democracies. As democratic governance is transformed at the dawn of the twenty-first century, it illustrates the important challenges faced by the parliamentary democracies of Western Europe.
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Kaare W Strøm is a Distinguished Professor of Political Science at the University of California, San Diego.
Wolfgang C Müller is Professor of Democratic Governance at the University of Vienna (Austria). Previous appointments included Chair and Director of the Mannheim Centre for European Social Research (MZES) at the University of Mannheim. He is currently Speaker and Principal Investigator of the Austrian National Election Study (AUTNES). Since 2013 he has been co-editor of West European Politics. His research interests include government coalitions, political parties and political institutions.
Torbjörn Bergman is Professor of Political Science at Umeå University, Sweden. His books on representative democracy, government formation, and political parties include Political Parties in Multi-Level Polities: The Nordic Countries Compared (with N. Aylott and M. Blomgren, Palgrave Macmillan, 2013), The Madisonian Turn - Political Parties and Parliamentary Democracy in Nordic Europe (with K. Strøm, University of Michigan Press, 2011), Cabinets and Coalition Bargaining: The Democratic Life Cycle in Western Europe (with K. Strøm and W.C. Müller, Oxford University Press, 2008) and Delegation and Accountability in Parliamentary Democracies (with K. Strøm and W.C. Müller, Oxford University Press, 2003). He has also published in journals such as the European Journal of Political Research, the Journal of European Public Policy, the Journal of Legislative Studies, Party Politics, Government & Opposition, and Scandinavian Political Studies.
Octavio Amorim Neto is Research Fellow, Brazilian Institute of Economics and Assistant Professor of Political Science at the Graduate School of Economics, both at the Getulio Vargas Foundation, Rio de Janeiro.
Rudy B. Andeweg is a professor of Political Science at Leiden University and a member of the Royal Netherlands Academy of Arts and Sciences. His research interests include political legitimacy and representation.
Magnus Blomgren is Professor of Political Science, Umeå University, Sweden
Erik Damgaard is Professor of Political Science at the University of Aarhus, Denmark.
Lieven De Winter is a senior professor at the UCLouvain. His research focuses on the (comparative) analysis of government formation, legislatures, elections and political parties and political regionalism, mainly in Western Europe.
Patrick Dumont is a researcher at the University of Luxembourg. He is co-founder of the ‘Selection and Deselection of Political Elites’ (SEDEPE) network and co-editor of Routledge's ‘Research in Social and Political Elites’ book series. He has published on coalition theory, political elites, parties and party systems, and Europeanisation processes. He is a member of the Luxembourg National (and European) Election Study.
Carlos Flores Juberías is Professor of Constitutional Law, University of Valencia, Spain.
Svanur Kristjánsson is Professor of Political Science, University of Iceland.
Arthur Lupia is Professor of Political Science at the University of Michigan, USA.
Paul Mitchell is Lecturer in Political Science at LSE, Great Britain.
Hanne Marthe Narud (1958-2012) was professor of political science at the University of Oslo. Her main research focus was on coalition behaviour, political recruiting, and voting behaviour. She published articles in Comparative Sociology, European Journal of Political Research, Electoral Studies, West European Politics, Scandinavian Political Studies, Party Politics, Journal of Legislative Studies, Journal of Theoretical Politics and Acta Politica, in addition to numerous contributions to books in Norwegian and English. She also wrote a book with Henry Valen on political representation in a multiparty system. She was frequently called upon to commentate on Norwegian politics in the news media.
Benjamin Nyblade is Assistant Professor of Political Science at the University of British Columbia, Vancouver, Canada.
Tapio Raunio is Professor of Political Science, University of Tampere, Finland.
Thomas Saalfeld is Reader in Political Science at the University of Kent at Canterbury, Great Britain.
Jean-Louis Thiébault is Professor of Political Science, Université Lille II, France.
Arco Timmermans is Lecturer in Political Science at the University of Twente, the Netherlands.
Georgios Trantas is Legal Counsellour on Constitutional and Administrative Law and Independent Researcher in Athens, Greece.
Luca Verzichelli is Professor of Political Science at the Centre for the Study of Political Change (CIRCaP, University of Siena). His academic interests cover the field of comparative political institutions, political elite and budgetary politics.
Matti Wiberg is Professor of Political Science, University of Turku, Finland.
Paraskevi Zagoriti is a political scientist, based at the University of Athens, Greece.
