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Operationalization. The Data: Original parliamentary data about the bills from the Netherlands (1982-1994) and Germany (1983-1994) – to calculate the time
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Operationalization • The Data: • Original parliamentary data about the bills from the Netherlands (1982-1994) and Germany (1983-1994) – to calculate the time • To measure the second important indicator for parliamentary scrutiny, idelogical difference, a measurment based on an expert‘s survey by Laver a. Hunt was used (1992) • It located parties according to expert‘s opinions on a 20 point scale among 8 policy dimensions: • tax policy, foreign policy, industrial policy, social policy, clerical policy, agricultural policy, regional policy and environmental policy
2. Choice of countries: • Using the „most similiar“ research design the authors chose these 2 countries sharing institutional a. other features: • Both are non-majoritarian with multiple parties • Both have a PR electoral system • Both have rules enhancing the opposition‘s role in policymaking (Strom 1990, Doering 1995) • In addition to that all governments in both countries (during that period) were 2-party coalitions, of which each had approximatly a 4 year legislative term. • Weakness of the choice, according to the authors: e.g.: does not examine cases with a weak commitee system or cases where a minority government was in place…
3. Variables: • 3.1 Independent variables: • government issue divisiveness (main v. measuring the ideological divergence within the coalition) • + to extract internal divisions 3 other v. are calculated, which could have influence on the delay of a bill: • government issue saliency (can affect slower or faster enacting of a bill and is in relation with the divisiveness) • opposition issue divisiveness • opposition issue saliency • 3.2 Independent Variable: • time (number of days between the introduction of and the vote on a bill)
3.3 Obtaining the Variables: • For the two saliency variables, they used the Laver-Hunt scale, whose value was then weighted by the seat shares, to account for the fact that bigger parties might be better able to monitor and finally calculated the average weighted saliency for the opposition and the government parties • for government issue divisiveness, the absolute distance of the coalition parties to the minister drafting the bill along the relevant issue dimension was calculated on the same scale, weighted by the seat shares, and finally wheighted by each coalition party‘s issue saliency • (for opposition divisiveness, the same procedure was applied)
4. Calculation: By using the Weibull model of factoral analysis, the influence of certain parameters, (here the independent variables) on the time (in this case the dependent variable) is calculated… ---finally one receives the probabilities that an event may occur at some point x in time, depending on the independent variables (here the probability that a law may be passed)-
Authors‘ critique: …still unmeasured factors concerning time, may remain: some bills could just naturally take longer to be enacted as they deal with more complex issues, that entail extensive outside consultaion, for example environmental laws tackling industrial pollution. But: Also involvingthe issue dimensions has not even changed the relevant factor to prove the hipothesis, the issue divisiveness.
