TY  - GEN
A1  - Ganghof, Steffen
A1  - Eppner, Sebastian
A1  - Stecker, Christian
A1  - Heeß, Katja
A1  - Schukraft, Stefan
T1  - Do minority cabinets govern more flexibly and inclusively?
BT  - evidence from Germany
T2  - Postprints der Universität Potsdam Wirtschafts- und Sozialwissenschaftliche Reihe
N2  - A widespread view in political science is that minority cabinets govern more flexibly and inclusively, more in line with a median-oriented and 'consensual' vision of democracy. Yet there is only little empirical evidence for it. We study legislative coalition-building in the German state of North-Rhine-Westphalia, which was ruled by a minority government between 2010 and 2012. We compare the inclusiveness of legislative coalitions under minority and majority cabinets, based on 1028 laws passed in the 1985–2017 period, and analyze in detail the flexibility of legislative coalition formation under the minority government. Both quantitative analyses are complemented with brief case studies of specific legislation. We find, first, that the minority cabinet did not rule more inclusively. Second, the minority cabinet’s legislative flexibility was fairly limited; to the extent that it existed, it follows a pattern that cannot be explained on the basis of the standard spatial model with policy-seeking parties.
T3  - Zweitveröffentlichungen der Universität Potsdam : Wirtschafts- und Sozialwissenschaftliche Reihe - 114 
KW  - Australian bicameralism
KW  - pledge fulfillment
KW  - majority formation
KW  - veto players
KW  - patterns
KW  - coalitions
KW  - consensus
KW  - democracy
KW  - parties
KW  - policy
Y1  - 2019
U6  - http://nbn-resolving.de/urn/resolver.pl?urn:nbn:de:kobv:517-opus4-434175
SN  - 1867-5808
IS  - 114
SP  - 541
EP  - 561
ER  - 
TY  - GEN
A1  - Ganghof, Steffen
T1  - Does public reason require super-majoritarian democracy?
BT  - Liberty, equality, and history in the justification of political institutions
T2  - Politics, philosophy & economics
N2  - The project of public-reason liberalism faces a basic problem: publicly justified principles are typically too abstract and vague to be directly applied to practical political disputes, whereas applicable specifications of these principles are not uniquely publicly justified. One solution could be a legislative procedure that selects one member from the eligible set of inconclusively justified proposals. Yet if liberal principles are too vague to select sufficiently specific legislative proposals, can they, nevertheless, select specific legislative procedures? Based on the work of Gerald Gaus, this article argues that the only candidate for a conclusively justified decision procedure is a majoritarian or otherwise ‘neutral’ democracy. If the justification of democracy requires an equality baseline in the design of political regimes and if justifications for departure from this baseline are subject to reasonable disagreement, a majoritarian design is justified by default. Gaus’s own preference for super-majoritarian procedures is based on disputable specifications of justified liberal principles. These procedures can only be defended as a sectarian preference if the equality baseline is rejected, but then it is not clear how the set of justifiable political regimes can be restricted to full democracies.
T3  - Zweitveröffentlichungen der Universität Potsdam : Wirtschafts- und Sozialwissenschaftliche Reihe - 86 
KW  - public-reason liberalism
KW  - democracy
KW  - coercion
KW  - political equality
KW  - majority rule
KW  - Gerald Gaus
Y1  - 2018
U6  - http://nbn-resolving.de/urn/resolver.pl?urn:nbn:de:kobv:517-opus4-477860
VL  - 12
IS  - 2
ER  -