UNC on the UK

UNC Assistant Professor of Political Science Anna Bassi just wrote a guest post at The Monkey Cage on the formation of the coalition government in the UK. (This follows another recent post which cited the work of Georg Vanberg, another UNC Prof. Good to see UNC represented so well at the Cage.). She finds a few surprises:

Taken together, the recent events in the UK offer important insights about how the coalition formation process should be analyzed as an endogenous free-style negotiation process among parties, rather than as formalized by specific rules concerning the selection of a formatuer. They also provide questions about what could happen in other parliamentary legislatures. If coalitions among extreme parties can form and survive despite the popular belief, intra-party politics may harshen, leading to possible parties’ splits in search of new coalition agreements.

This is not at all my area of expertise, but it sounds right enough. The question is whether it's surprising. Bassi argues that it is if you buy into dominant models of coalition-formation. I wonder if it makes a difference that the LibDems campaigned as the center-left alternative to Labour? If the LibDems are interested in building a larger constituency and increasing their role in UK politics it could make a lot of sense to show voters they can govern without Labour. This interpretation would seemingly be supported by the fact that the LibDems' price for forming a coalition was electoral reform (to proportional representation from the current first-past-the-post system) rather than any particular policy. Labour was hesitant to grant that wish -- presumably because it would weaken their traditional position as the dominant center-left party -- and the Conservatives seem willing to put it up for a referendum. Hence, the coalition with the Conservatives.

Again, I don't know much about this so all of that could be completely wrong. Bassi in fact argues that it is:

Third, if instead parties are not policy pursuing, but just office seekers, a coalition between the Liberals and the Conservative is –theoretically- not the best coalition to seek. The Liberal Democrats(57 seats) could have coalesced with Labour (258 seats), SDLP (3 seats), Plaid Cymru (3 seats), Alliance(1 seat), and either SNP or Green which would very likely agree on coalescing in the left wing government and get just the required majority (SinnFein does not take any seats, thus the quota required is 323). In this coalition, the relative weight of the Liberal Democrats would be larger, and therefore they could get away with a larger share of offices.

But that depends on the LibDems discount rate, no? If they wanted a greater say in the government in the short run then the above is certainly right. But if they want greater long run influence on UK politics, then it makes sense to side with the party who is willing to at least countenance electoral reform. In this case, that was the Conservatives. It remains to be seen if the strategy will be successful, but it seems like that's what Clegg was thinking of. Again, though, I could certainly be wrong.

The whole post is worth reading. I suspect we'll be seeing a lot of new comparative research on this election, and Bassi is probably correct in saying that previous theories might need some revisiting.

UPDATE: As I suspected, I was wrong about at least one thing. Emmanuel corrects me in the comments.

Quote of the Day

Martin Wolf, eulogizing Gordon Brown:

All British political careers end in failure.

The rest of the op-ed is a discussion of how Brown was a product of his times, not a primary cause of them.

Added a few minutes after initial posting:

I go back and forth on this kind of thinking. On the one hand, it's basically a huge cop-out: "Everyone else believed in the Great Moderation, so why shouldn't he?" We should hope for more from our elected officials even if we don't expect to get it.

On the other hand, if everyone else believed in the Great Moderation and wanted to set policy based on it, then it would be awfully hard for Brown to maintain public support by legislating against it. Could you imagine him saying the following in 2004: "Yes, I know the business cycle has moderated over the past 25 years, but I think the vast majority of economists are wrong and doomsday is coming. Therefore, I am going to massively re-regulate Britain's financial sector, tossing off international competitiveness and ending London's run as a major financial center in the process."

Of course not. Even if he believed that, and he had little reason to, he would have been laughed out of office. It would have been like Noah's Ark: he might have been right in the long run, but nearly no one would have seen it that way in the short run, and it's unlikely that he would have survived politically in the interim.

So I guess I'd side with Wolf. Brown's mistakes were made because he trusted his expert advisors. That's too bad for him and for Britain, but what else could he have done?

Modeling Britain's New Government

Who says formal theory has no relevance to real life? Apparently Liberal Democrats have been using game theory to model potential negotiations over the formation of a government for at least several months. After the election, but before Cameron and Clegg came to terms, Tony Price tried to model those negotiations:

Game theory says you need to understand your "outside options": what the alternative to a deal with this group is. How well you do depends on how good you can make all the outside options. Here's a go at the decision tree Clegg faces. ...

The logic of my version is:

- A deal with Labour now is unlikely to deliver PR, which is what would make it worthwhile from LD's point of view
- A deal with Tories will not deliver PR
- A Tory minority government risks giving Tories a majority in 9 months and missing the historic moment
- Clegg will be very tempted to do a deal with the Tories with inbuilt failure so that LD's can return to a PR negotiation with other parties in 9 months
- Present that deal as stesman-like: "The economic crisis demands it, and I will not make the country suffer for PR ... but once the economy is on the mend, I will insist on my PR reward"

Price came up with the game tree below.



Not bad, as it has turned out.

UPDATE: Apparently the embed of the game tree isn't working perfectly. It is here.

(ht: @TimHarford)

Two Nations Divided by An (Un)Common Arithmetic

Via LGM, when a £billion might not be a £billion.

When Gordon Brown Saved the World

This morning, I spent half an hour breaking down the Westminster system of parliamentary democracy that the United Kingdom holds so dear for my students in Intro to Comparative Politics here at UNC. We also showed them an old segment of Prime Minister's Question Time (PMQT) from when Tony Blair was the opposition leader and John Major was the Prime Minister.

One of my students enjoyed PMQT so much, he found this clip of Gordon Brown from this past fall on PMQT and emailed it to me. I remember watching it when it happened and laughing hysterically at the Tory reaction. So I thought I'd share it with the rest of you since I didn't share it back then. Hope you get a laugh out of it on this Wednesday evening.