April 26, 2019
12:15-1:45
Lunch will be served at 11:45 am
POLI Seminar Room, Buchanan C403
Mark Kayser, Hertie School of Governance
“Coalition Prospects, Not Polls: Predicting Policy in Parliamentary Democracies, with an Application to the Environment”
Abstract – Parties decide policy. Yet, cross-national research into the determinants of policy largely ignores the office- and policy-seeking incentives of parties. Because parties are strategic and forward-looking, they adopt policy positions to attract potential future coalition partners and increase their probability of remaining in or entering government. Building on a new measure that combines coalition formation models with polling data to estimate the expected coalition inclusion probabilities of nearly all parties in most developed parliamentary democracies at a monthly frequency, we estimate the effect of coalition prospects on environmental policy in nine parliamentary democracies. The coalition inclusion probability of green parties — regardless of whether they are in government — significantly predicts the environmental policy stringency of sitting governments. In contrast, political polling, which does not capture the strategic incentives of coalition formation, fails to predict environmental policy stringency.