Here.
Here is the paper I’ll be presenting at LSE today, a slightly revised version of my PSA paper with Christel Koop.
Fresh from… well, fresh from doing something, one presumes, the Italian parliament is ready to vote on a law hamstringing the press even further (the so-called <a href=”http://www.repubblica.it/politica/2010/05/19/news/senato_accelera-4186524/?ref=HRER1-1″>legge bavaglio</a>).
The main provisions of the law relate to the publication of leaks from public prosecutors’ office: in particular, a ban on any information before the initial hearing, a ban on publication of wiretap evidence, and a ban on concealed recording. It is, of course, entirely coincidental that this law should have risen to prominence after a network of corrupt exchanges was uncovered through… leaks from prosecutors’ offices.
Before I sat down to write this, I checked the UK legal situation to see if there were any laws similar in effect (if not in intent) to those proposed by the majority in the parliament. Okay, wiretap evidence is much less common in the UK than in Italy, so some of these concerns aren’t raised, but I was pleasantly surprised to see that the one time the Crown Prosecution service tried to go after the journalist rather than the leak, they were <a href=”http://www.timesonline.co.uk/tol/news/uk/crime/article5251192.ece”>laughed out of court</a>.
This was largely (as far as I can tell without having the text of the judgement) on the grounds that journalists had a right under Article 10 of the EHCR to publish information given to them.
So this legislation too would probably go against the ECHR. Hell, it probably also goes against the Italian constitution. But then I think that both of those could also be said of Italian defamation legislation — and that remains an extremely handy tool for politicians.
[See this video if you want to know the reason behind the title]
So people have noted that if Elena Kagan becomes a Supreme Court Justice, every member of that Court will have been to either Harvard or Yale.
It could be worse: every member of the Bulgarian Constitutional Cour has been to the same university.
I was inspired by this post at The Monkey Cage to repeat an exercise I’ve previously carried out for Italy: namely, to calculate the expected duration of the new cabinet using some off-the-shelf models. I think it’ll last a full five year term — here’s why.
The LibCon coalition’s first mistake (excepting any original sin) seems to be requiring a supermajority of 55% for motions of no confidence motions of no confidence leading to dissolution. There’s already a protest group.
Andrew Rudalevige explains the significance of 55% very succinctly at the Monkey Cage. (I’m not aware of any other supermajority requirements in UK politics, but pipe up in comments if you know of some).
It’s an ugly solution. I can understand the need to bind the coalition together — and indeed to make it more difficult to bring down the government — but there are a number of intermediate solutions.
One could require confidence motions to have the support of a majority of members of the House, instead of a majority of those voting. As far as I can see, this would have prevented the 1979 fall of the Callaghan government: Callaghan lost 311-310, but a 50%+1 majority would have been 318.
The second option would be to go the German route, and require that votes of no confidence be constructive. But this wouldn’t protect the Tories against a LibDem defection to a Rainbow coalition.
Neither solution would bind the coalition so totally as the 55% solution does — but neither is so objectionable.
Update: Nice briefing note from the Constitution Unit at UCL:
“Some commentators appear to have confused a dissolution resolution moved by the government, and a confidence motion tabled by the opposition. On no confidence motions tabled by the opposition parties, the normal 50% threshold should continue to apply.”
Geektastic discussion at PoliticsHome.
Thank God someone’s bringing this out in the UK — for my classes I’ve had to rely on an Italian copy with outrageously bad English subtitles.
Back in Italy, one can always count on the left to tear itself apart just when some ministers in the Berlusconi government are under fire.
The election result in the UK was astonishingly close the results predicted by the BBC/Sky exit poll, with the Conservatives at 307, somewhat short of a majority.
I don’t know what this means for arcane debates about uniform versus proportional swing; the swings during the night were all over the place. It’s possible that uniform national swing is still a better model than proportional swing, but the stochastic element looked huge. (And of course, it’s the stochastic element that the Curtice et al projection model models).
The Conservatives have now reached out to the Conservatives; former Prime Minister John Major has suggested that having `one or two’ LibDems in the cabinet would be a price worth paying to have stable government quickly.
I would suggest that’s a bad deal for the LibDems other things being equal (and bear in mind that the big other thing is electoral reform). One of the best supported law-like statements in political science — perhaps more law like than Duverger’s Law — is Gamson’s law.
Gamson’s law states that parties receive cabinet seats in proportion to their contribution to the seats in the majority.
At the moment, the Conservatives have 306/7 seats, the LibDems 57. That means that the LibDems have roughly 16% of the seats in a hypothetical Conservative-Liberal Democrat majority.
Now, the last Brown cabinet had 23 ministers. 16% of that is a little bit over three and a half. So a `proportionate’ share of ministers would be bigger than the number Major suggests.
UPDATE: More on this, together with normalized Banzhaf scores (woo!) at the LSE Election Experts blog.