Replication Data for: Comparing ‘responsible party government’ in the US and the UK

Responsible parties are conventionally defined as those capable of announcing their legislative goals and then passing them on the strength of their own members’ votes. In this paper, I consider why UK majority parties have closely approximated these conditions for responsibility since the 1880s, while US majority parties have never approximated them closely. I provide the first systematic evidence on when the British opposition began to offer across-the-board opposition to the government’s agenda and when the government became able to pass bills using only its own members’ votes. I also explore the role that leaders’ control of the legislative agenda and their followers’ nominations played in these developments. I attribute US parties’ inability to mimic their British counterparts to different costs of defending bill passage coalitions against “weakest-link” attacks.责任政党（responsible parties）的常规定义为：能够宣告自身立法目标，并凭借本党议员的投票推动该目标得以通过的政党。本文聚焦探讨：自19世纪80年代起，英国多数党为何能够近乎完全契合责任政党的上述履职要件，而美国多数党却始终未能达到这一标准。本文首次提供系统性实证证据，明确了英国反对党何时开始对政府立法议程发起全面抵制，以及英国政府何时得以仅依靠本党议员的投票通过法案。本文还探讨了政党领袖对立法议程的控制权，以及其对本党议员提名权的把控，在上述政治演进过程中所发挥的作用。本文将美国政党无法效仿英国政党的成因，归结为二者在维护法案通过联盟以抵御“最弱环节攻击”时所需承担的成本存在差异。