if anyone wants to play around with Banzhaf voting power analysis there’s a page on wiki, a download for wolfram (requires mathematica playa) demonstrations.wolfram.com/BanzhafPowerIndex/
and an excel macro – home.comcast.net/~raagnew/site/?/page/Downloads

Both are pretty horrible to use tbh – but I managed to get the excel working for the current UK parliament after rolling up my sleeves & increasing the size of a couple of arrays… anyone fancy writing a decent banzhaf programme for R? it’d be fun.

Non-coalition governments are in the middle, while both the top recipients and top disciplinarians are coalition governments. This does broadly support the idea that coalitions between roughly equal strenght partners are less fiscally responsible (both the grand coalition of CDU and SPD and the SPD-PDS/Die Linke line up fill that slot), but coalitions with one strong and one weak partner (SPD-greens, CDU-FDP, SPD-FDP) do rather well.

An extremely good idea to look at the research on this and, on a quick scan on the items listed, it would appear the evidence is contradictory and no doubt has kept many social scientists happily working away with their toolbox of statistical tools for many a long year.

In any event, the thought that a simple little scatter chart, like the one used to illustrate this item, is actually at all likely to shed some blinding shaft of light onto such a complex problem is, to say the least, dubious when so many have struggled on this before.

Just because it is possible to phrase a simple question does not mean that there is an equally simple answer, although politicians often seek to make it appear that way.

Personally, I suspect any effect of whether majority or coalition governments are more likely to maintain good public finances is probably going to get swamped by a multitude of other factors.

As some observers have pointed out, the association illustrated by the scatter plot may well be a dynamic in nature.

Just a few references, but you get them free:

The Weak Government Thesis: Some New Evidence
Public Choice, Volume 101, Numbers 3-4 / December, 1999

Jakob de Haan, Jan-Egbert Sturm and Geert Beekhuis

Abstract This paper presents new evidence on the hypothesis that coalition governments will find it more difficult to keep their budgets in line after an adverse economic shock than do one-party, majoritarian governments. The estimates are based on a broad sample of OECD countries, for the period 1979–1995. Using various specifications as suggested in the literature, we do not find evidence that the type of government affects cross country variation in fiscal policy. However, the number of political parties in government affects central government debt growth.

Government Strength, Power Dispersion in Governments and Budget Deficits in OECD-Countries. A Voting Power Approach

Public Choice, Volume 116, Numbers 3-4 / September, 2003

Gerald Huber, Martin Kocher and Matthias Sutter

Abstract We test for the influence of government strength and dispersion of power among the parties of coalition governments on the size of annual debt accumulation through budget deficits in OECD-countries from 1970 to 1999. Government strength and power dispersion in coalition governments are measured by the Banzhaf index of voting power, respectively the standard deviation of Banzhaf indices of coalition parties. We believe that these are better-suited proxies than most of what has been applied so far. Government strength turns out to be insignificant. However, coalitions with equally strong partners run significantly higher deficits than coalitions with one dominating party.

P-values for correlation coefficients give very small p value from totally uninteresting data, usually they’re a mistake. The ‘limits of agreement method’ (Bland/Altman) is more informative, it’d tell you how far off you could be in predicting debt from size of largest party (hopelessly far off).

> (hp)
Country Party Debt
1 Belgium 19.96310 -4.2559524
2 Finland 25.49815 -1.8750000
3 Denmark 25.49815 -1.6964286
4 Netherlands 27.26937 -5.2083333
5 Austria 31.03321 -4.3154762
6 Slovenia 32.14022 -4.4047619
7 Slovakia 33.24723 -4.7023810
8 Sweden 37.23247 -0.8333333
9 Norway 37.78598 -7.3511905
10 Germany 39.88930 -3.7797619
11 Portugal 42.10332 -7.0535714
12 Italy 43.76384 -3.4821429
13 Ireland 46.30996 -7.8869048
14 Canada 46.42066 -3.0059524
15 Spain 48.30258 -7.3214286
16 New Zealand 48.30258 -2.0535714
17 Greece 53.28413 -8.8988095
18 France 54.16974 -4.6130952
19 United Kingdom 54.94465 -7.5595238
20 Australia 55.27675 -4.9107143
21 USA 59.04059 -9.2261905
22 Japan 64.13284 -7.5000000
> cor(Party, Debt, method=”pearson”)
[1] -0.5506873
> shapiro.test(Party)

Shapiro-Wilk normality test

data: Party
W = 0.9744, p-value = 0.81

> shapiro.test(Debt)

Shapiro-Wilk normality test

data: Debt
W = 0.9514, p-value = 0.3372

So, greater than 0.2 then but…. all of the above caveats make this fairly redundant. Just in case anyone was still interested. Yes the r^2 is ok but let’s face it the data isn’t really able to cause inter-ocular trauma (it doesn’t hit you between the eyes).

Also, I love “R”. If you’re not using “R”. If you’re using something wet like SAS or Stata or worse… ew …. SPSS, then download “R” and play with it…. real men (and real women) (and possibly some real men that think they’re real women) (and vice versa) Use R!

Finally, perhaps the most prescient part of the Hung Parliament report that Ben posted:

“But the greater risk is that when it happens, the media will denounce minority government as something fearful, unstable and deeply undesirable.”

Sadly spot on.

So the point was more about the financial situation in a single year vs the incumbent government’s majority being a rather crude measure, which I guess we all new anyway. I mean, the UK is about to leap from right to left on the graph overnight with no change in what what kind of government caused our current condition.

To put the same point another way; as a remedy for fiscal indiscipline one-party majorities are snake oil; and nothing more.

Just wondered if there was any sort of method governing which countries were included really.

In this context, the US is probably an outlier anyway – it may have a first-past-the-post electoral system but its separation of powers (and the “swing” power that is often in the hands of a handful of congressmen and particularly senators) means that the government’s ability to control expenditure is highly constrained anyway. The US has a weird mix – traditionally low overall public expenditure allied to a system that is almost constitutionally incapable of reducing it without being held hostage by vested interests.

I agree with msjhaffey above that there are two different questions. It may be that perpetual coalition is the best way to ensure sustainable public expenditure – in stark contrast to the ridiculous Tory-underspend Labour-splurge cycle we have to put up with in the UK. But if you find yourself in a position where you have to confront vested interests in order to reduce expenditure, more coalition partners means more chance for the vested interests to get in the way. With the possible – and somewhat undemocratic – exception that if you’re in a coalition you can always blame your coalition partner!

Eg. Finnish system is essentially a three-party system. There are three major parties out of which two always form the government with some smaller parties. I would think it is more significant which parties form the government than the vote share of the largest party.
However, the spending versus _the_government_’s share of votes could be interesting. Of course, using only one year’s data contains so much noise (parties, economic situation) that any trend found can not be taken seriously.

I was sent this chart as an “aha” moment by a facebook friend so I thought I’d stop by.

Some thoughts:

Firstly, don’t worry about the differing electoral systems – let us not forget that Belgium was without a functional political leadership for several months.

Secondly don’t worry about applying “seats won at last election” as the measure of stability in these radically differing systems – Australia vs France for example.

Thirdly, don’t worry about not correcting for currency fluctuations (is this in local currency or USD) or taking any sort of longer term look at the surplus data. Fourthly don’t worry about the relative size of the economies in question.

Lastly, don’t worry that the graph doesn’t begin to get close to proving that a coalition is better at controlling government spending than a single party over time (no correction for stable near single party coalitions and unstable coalitions, and no attempt to suggest a cause just a correlation.)

Also, just to throw my cat firmly among the pigeons, anyone want to guess at the countries globally with the largest surplus. Do we think China, Saudi Arabia, and some other size of largest party = 100% of seats won upset the correlation?

So – what we should all be worried about is that not one of these democracies can run a surplus, not one. Arguing that coalitions are the least worst way of breaking the economy isn’t particularly useful.

Am I a political data nerd?: Scatterplot with information added on GDP Per Capita (pointsize)and Ratio of Health to Defense spending as a % of GDP (colour, red:blue):

bit.ly/cuLyvZ

On the basis that one might hypothesise and increase (or decrease) in wealth, “democratisation” or even “socialisation” with smaller parties … but.. looks like not.

might as well vote by throwing yer granny down the stairs and seeing which way up she lands