Replication data for: Government-Opposition or Left-Right? The Institutional Determinants of Voting in Legislatures

We use roll-call voting data from 16 legislatures to investigate how the institutional context of politics – such as whether a country is a parliamentary or presidential regime, or has a single-party, coalition or minority government – shapes coalition formation and voting behaviour in parliaments. We use a geometric scaling metric to estimate the ‘revealed space’ in each of these legislatures and a vote-by-vote statistical analysis to identify how much of this space can be explained by government-opposition dynamics as opposed to (left-right) policy positions of parties. We find that government-opposition interests rather than parties’ policy positions are the main drivers of voting behaviour in most institutional contexts. In contrast, we find that issue-by-issue coalition-building along a single policy dimension only exists under restrictive institutional constraints; namely presidential regimes with coalition governments or parliamentary systems with minority governments. Put another way, voting in most legislatives is more like Westminster than Washington, DC.本研究采用16个立法机构的点名投票（roll-call voting）数据，旨在探究政治制度背景——例如一国实行议会制还是总统制，其政府为一党制、联合制还是少数派政府——如何塑造议会中的联盟形成与投票行为。我们采用几何标度指标（geometric scaling metric）估算各立法机构的“显露空间”，并通过逐票统计分析，识别该空间中有多大比例可由政府-反对党动态所解释，而非各政党的（左右翼）政策立场。研究发现，在多数制度语境下，投票行为的主要驱动因素是政府与反对党的利益分歧，而非各政党的政策立场。与之相对，我们发现仅在限制性制度约束下，才会出现沿单一政策维度的逐议题联盟构建行为，具体而言即实行联合政府的总统制，或是实行少数派政府的议会制。换言之，大多数立法机构的投票模式更贴近英国威斯敏斯特体系，而非美国华盛顿特区的国会体系。