COMPARING CONSTITUTIONS - COHESION AND DISTRIBUTION IN LEGISLATURES

This paper summarizes our recent work on analyzing the effects of cons titutional features on legislative outcomes and voting behavior. It il lustrates how a general framework may be used to examine the effects o f one of the principal features of parliamentary democracy: the vote o f confidence procedure. We show how the confidence procedure creates i ncentives for governing coalitions to vote cohesively on policy issues that might otherwise split them. As a consequence, legislative majori ties in parliamentary democracies behave in a more disciplined fashion and capture more of the legislative rents than in non-parliamentary s ettings. (C) 1998 Elsevier Science B.V. All rights reserved.