Comparing constitutions: Cohesion and distribution in legislatures

This paper summarizes our recent work on analyzing the effects of constitutional features on legislative outcomes and voting behavior. It illustrates how a general framework may be used to examine the effects of one of the principal features of parliamentary democracy: the vote of confidence procedure. We show how the confidence procedure creates incentives for governing coalitions to vote cohesively on policy issues that might otherwise split them. As a consequence, legislative majorities in parliamentary democracies behave in a more disciplined fashion and capture more of the legislative rents than in non-parliamentary settings.