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]

It could be worse: every member of the Bulgarian Constitutional Cour has been to the same university.

I grabbed some recent data about coalition duration from Matt Golder’s site.

I then carried out a simple survival analysis using a number of independent variables:

• pre-electoral coalition or not;
• majority status
• single party status
• government ideological range
• caretaker government or not
• number of formation attempts
• effective number of parliamentary parties
• formal investiture requirement
• and post-election formation or not

which gives you the following model:

Plug in values of 2.58 for the effective number of parliamentary parties, and 11.4 on the ideological range (admittedly using figures taken from the 2005 election), and all the other relevant dummies, and you get the following:

• Expected duration (days): 2103
• 10th percentile: 222 days
• 90th percentile: 4843 days

Okay, so there’s a huge amount of uncertainty surrounding the prediction, but still, I’d say that on this basis, if you believe the coalition will fall before 2015, you have to make some kind of argument to the effect that British politics is uncongenial to coalition government.

R code:

library(foreign)
library(survival)
coal<-read.dta("coalition1.dta") ## from matt golder's site

my.exp.basic<-survreg(Surv(duration,ciep365==0)~ pec+majority2+postelection+singleparty+range+caretaker+ incbargain+enpp2+investiture,data=coal, dist="exponential")


predict(my.exp.basic, newdata= data.frame(pec=0,majority2=1,singleparty=0,range=11.4, caretaker=0,incbargain=1,enpp2=2.58,investiture=0,postelection=1), type="response")
predict(my.exp.basic, newdata= data.frame(pec=0,majority2=1,singleparty=0,range=11.4,caretaker=0,incbargain=1,enpp2=2.58,investiture=0,postelection=1), type="quantile", p=c(0.1,0.9)))

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.”

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.