On April 10, 2025, Dr. Matthew Edward Bergman, Assistant Professor at the Corvinus University of Budapest, will visit our Institute. The title of his lecture is: "Ideological Conflict, Logrolling, and Policy Reform: An Analysis of Government Declarations in Western Europe".
Time: 10 April 2025, Thursday, 13:00
Address: Budapest, Tóth Kálmán utca 4, 1097
Venue: PTI Round Conference Room (Building T, Floor 2, T.2.37.)
Language of the lecture: English
Abstract:
Government declarations take a crucial place in the political process and in the making of public policy. These declarations lay out the policies the new government will pursue in the coming years. In this paper we focus on the reform commitments parties make in such declarations. Specifically, we ask why some governments commit to more reform measures in their inaugural declarations. Theoretically, we draw on work that has stressed the importance of logrolling strategies in government formation, and we hypothesize that the degree of ideological conflict between coalition partners will increase the number and diversity of policy measures introduced in the declarations. We evaluate our expectations using a novel dataset based on a hand-coding of the content of government declarations in 13 Western European countries from 1979 to 2017, focusing on socio-economic reform measures. In line with our expectations, our analysis shows that a higher degree of intra-cabinet conflict is associated with more reform measures. We also show that a higher degree of conflict between parties increases the diversity of measures in the declarations. These results suggest that parties resort to logrolling strategies when negotiating over policy reforms in conflictual situations where time pressure is high.
The lecture is part of the HUN-REN TK Institute for Political Science Speaker Series. You can find more information about our previous events HERE.