Georg Vanberg
Biographic Data
| ID | 1125480 |
|---|---|
| NAME | Georg Vanberg |
| GIVEN NAMES | Georg |
| FAMILY NAME | Vanberg |
| SIGNATURE | VANBERG G |
| AFFILIATIONS | Duke University |
| ORCID | 0000-0002-6228-6679 |
| VERIFIED | Yes |
| TOTAL WORKS | 41 |
| TOTAL CITATIONS | 1430 |
| AUTHOR COUNT | 40 |
| EDITOR COUNT | 1 |
| FIRST PUBLICATION YEAR | 1998 |
| LATEST PUBLICATION YEAR | 2026 |
| H-INDEX | 19 |
Refining Gamson: The Isometric Log-Ratio Transformation and Portfolio Proportionality in Multiparty Governments
One of the most robust empirical findings in political science is that in multiparty democracies cabinet ministries are distributed in rough proportion to parties’ legislative seat shares, a pattern known as Gamson’s Law. Yet existing research often overlooks the fact that portfolio and seat shares are compositional—mutually dependent parts of a whole. Standard methods treat them as unconstrained, risking bias, misleading uncertainty estimates, a…
Federalism, political imbalance, and the right to secession
A Wolf in Sheep’s Clothing: Citizen Uncertainty and Democratic Backsliding
Transitional Justice and the Rule of Law: Tainted Judges and Accountability for Nazi Crimes in West Germany
Contractarianism, constitutionalism, and the status quo
Feuding, arbitration, and the emergence of an independent judiciary
William R. Keech: In Memoriam
The Future Matters: Judicial Preferences Over Legal Rules and Decision-Making on Collegial Courts
High courts such as the US Supreme Court announce legal rules that guide subsequent decisions by lower courts and other actors. Because legal rules are forward-looking in this sense, judges’ expectations about the distribution of future cases are critical. Focusing on this fact, we provide microfoundations for judicial preferences over legal rules by deriving them directly from expectations about the distribution of future cases. Doing so has imp…
Coalition Government, Legislative Institutions, and Public Policy in Parliamentary Democracies
Most democracies are governed by coalitions, comprising multiple political parties with conflicting policy positions. The prevalence of these governments poses a significant question: Which parties' electoral commitments are ultimately reflected in government policy? Recent theories have challenged our understanding of multiparty government, arguing that the relative influence of coalition parties depends crucially on institutional context. Speci…
What You See Is Not Always What You Get: Bargaining before an Audience under Multiparty Government
Party elites in coalition governments are acutely aware that the deals they strike will be critically evaluated by their supporters, and that they risk losing support if they are perceived as ineffective negotiators. This has a powerful influence on the bargains parties strike. Because most supporters are unaware of the complex aspects of bargains and instead rely on simple heuristics to evaluate their most visible features, parties have incentiv…
Introduction: Liberal Constitutions During Financial Crises
The constitutions of most liberal democracies contain provisions that constrain governmental action in relation to economic policy. Some provisions grant citizens rights: For example, Americans enjoy a right under the US constitution's Contract Clause, prohibiting states from impairing the obligation of contracts. Most constitutions also provide individual rights protections against uncompensated and arbitrary taking of property. Structural provi…
Constitutions in Times of Financial Crisis
Constitutional political economy, democratic theory and institutional design
Committee Chairs and Legislative Review in Parliamentary Democracies
Recent research on parliamentary institutions has demonstrated that legislatures featuring strong committees play an important role in shaping government policy. However, the impact of the legislators who lead these committees – committee chairs – is poorly understood. This study provides the first examination of whether the partisan control of committee chairs in parliamentary systems has a systematic impact on legislative scrutiny. The article …
Gordon Tullock as a political scientist
Constitutional Courts in Comparative Perspective: A Theoretical Assessment
In many democratic polities, constitutional courts significantly shape the political landscape. Yet, how they are able to do so is a puzzle: With limited resources at their disposal, and no direct powers of enforcement, judges must rely on the willingness of executives and legislators to comply with their decisions and to respect judicial authority. This essay surveys recent literature that has explored the conditions that sustain judicial author…
A Step in the Wrong Direction: An Appraisal of the Zero-Intelligence Model of Government Formation
In a recent article in the Journal of Politics, Golder, Golder, and Siegel (2012) argue that models of government formation should be rebuilt “from the ground up.” They propose to do so with a “zero-intelligence” model of government formation. They claim that this model makes no theoretical assumptions beyond the requirement that a potential government, to be chosen, must be preferred by all its members and a legislative majority to the incumbent…
Parties and Policymaking in Multiparty Governments: The Legislative Median, Ministerial Autonomy, and the Coalition Compromise
In parliamentary democracies, governments are typically composed of multiple political parties working together in a coalition. Such governments must confront a fundamental challenge in policymaking—the preferences of coalition parties often diverge significantly, but the government can adopt only one common policy on any specific issue. This fact raises a critical question that has far‐reaching implications for the quality of democratic represen…
Narrow versus broad judicial decisions
A central debate among judges and legal scholars concerns the appropriate scope of judicial opinions: should decisions be narrow, and stick to the facts at hand, or should they be broad, and provide guidance in related contexts? A central argument for judicial ‘minimalism’ holds that judges should rule narrowly because they lack the knowledge required to make general rules to govern unknown future circumstances. In this paper, we challenge this a…
Multiparty Government, Fiscal Institutions, and Public Spending
A large body of research has claimed that budget making by multiparty governments constitutes a "common pool resource" (CPR) problem that leads them to engage in higher levels of spending than single-party governments and, further, that this upwards fiscal pressure increases with the number of parties in the coalition. We offer a significant modification of the conventional wisdom. Drawing on recent developments in the literature on coalition gov…
Towards a (re-)integration of the social sciences: The Calculus of Consent at 50
Who Controls the Content of Supreme Court Opinions
Conventional arguments identify either the median justice or the opinion author as the most influential justices in shaping the content of Supreme Court opinions. We develop a model of judicial decision making that suggests that opinions are likely to reflect the views of the median justice in the majority coalition. This result derives from two features of judicial decision making that have received little attention in previous models. The first…
Parliaments and Coalitions: The Role of Legislative Institutions in Multiparty Governance
This text reveals that parliaments play a much more important role in policymaking in parliamentary systems than is usually acknowledged. Based on an analysis of roughly 1300 government bills across five democracies, it paints a detailed picture of the treatment of government legislation in contemporary parliaments.
Assessing the Allocation of Pork: Evidence From Congressional Earmarks
Distributive politics represents one of the most important and controversial aspects of legislative policymaking. In the U.S. Congress, controversies over distributive politics are most evident in the area of legislative earmarking. In this article, we employ a unique set of data matching earmarks to their legislative sponsors to assess the leading explanations of distributive politics. We find that members of the majority party do considerably b…
Measuring Policy Content on the U.S. Supreme Court
Political scientists have developed increasingly sophisticated understandings of the influences on Supreme Court decision making. Yet, much less attention has been paid to empirical measures of the Court's ideological output. We develop a theory of the interactions between rational litigants, lower court judges, and Supreme Court justices. We argue that the most common measure of the Supreme Court's ideological output—whether the Court's decision…
Policing the Bargain: Coalition Government and Parliamentary Scrutiny
Policymaking by coalition governments creates a classic principal‐agent problem. Coalitions are comprised of parties with divergent preferences who are forced to delegate important policymaking powers to individual cabinet ministers, thus raising the possibility that ministers will attempt to pursue policies favored by their own party at the expense of their coalition partners. What is going to keep ministers from attempting to move policy in dir…
Coalition Policymaking and Legislative Review
Political scientists know remarkably little about the extent to which legislatures are able to influence policymaking in parliamentary democracies. In this article, we focus on the influence of legislative institutions in periods of coalition government. We show that multiparty governments are plagued by “agency” problems created by delegation to cabinet ministers that increase in severity on issues that divide the coalition. We also argue that t…
Parties and Policymaking in Multiparty Governments: The Legislative Median, Ministerial Autonomy, and the Coalition Compromise
In parliamentary democracies, governments are typically composed of multiple political parties working together in a coalition. Such governments must confront a fundamental challenge in policymaking—the preferences of coalition parties often diverge significantly, but the government can adopt only one common policy on any specific issue. This fact raises a critical question that has far‐reaching implications for the quality of democratic represen…
Coalition Government and Political Communication
One of the central challenges facing multiparty governments in parliamentary democracies is the need for coalition parties to communicate to their constituents that they have not strayed significantly from their electoral commitments when agreeing to policy compromises. We argue that one of the main ways parties attempt to make their case to constituents is through their behavior in legislative debate. Debate provides a unique opportunity—tied di…
Election Laws, Disproportionality and Median Correspondence: Implications for Two Visions of Democracy
Comparative studies of election rules and legislative representation have focused intensively on vote–seat disproportionality as an indication of poor representation. Beginning with citizens' preferences, rather than votes, has important advantages and is especially more appropriate for a majoritarian vision of democracy. We analyse the effect of election rules on both vote–seat correspondence and median left–right correspondence in seventy elect…
Legislative-Judicial Relations: A Game-Theoretic Approach to Constitutional Review
from 1983 to1995. ourts with the power to exercise constitutional review-as constitutional courts or in a decentralized system of judicial reviewconstitute central institutions of governance in most Western-style democracies. I present a simple game-theoretic model that provides a unified account of the multi-faceted interactions between such courts and the legislatures they are, at least in part, intended to control. The model addresses legislat…
The Value of Vagueness: Delegation, Defiance, and Judicial Opinions
An established line of research demonstrates that vague judicial opinions are less likely to be implemented than clear opinions. Vague opinions thus present a puzzle. Why would judges craft opinions that risk noncompliance? We argue that the relationships between judges and other policy makers in separation‐of‐powers systems are central to understanding this puzzle. Opinion vagueness can reflect efforts to resolve core tradeoffs associated with j…
Wasting Time? The Impact of Ideology and Size on Delay in Coalition Formation
Coalition theory has a distinguished tradition in comparative politics. Beginning with William Riker's The Theory of Political Coalitions,William H. Riker, The Theory of Political Coalitions (New Haven, Conn.: Yale University Press, 1962). comparativists have made considerable theoretical and empirical progress in understanding the complexities of coalition politics, most significantly with respect to government formation and termination
Constitutional Courts in Comparative Perspective: A Theoretical Assessment
In many democratic polities, constitutional courts significantly shape the political landscape. Yet, how they are able to do so is a puzzle: With limited resources at their disposal, and no direct powers of enforcement, judges must rely on the willingness of executives and legislators to comply with their decisions and to respect judicial authority. This essay surveys recent literature that has explored the conditions that sustain judicial author…
Who Controls the Content of Supreme Court Opinions
Conventional arguments identify either the median justice or the opinion author as the most influential justices in shaping the content of Supreme Court opinions. We develop a model of judicial decision making that suggests that opinions are likely to reflect the views of the median justice in the majority coalition. This result derives from two features of judicial decision making that have received little attention in previous models. The first…
A Robust Transformation Procedure for Interpreting Political Text
In a recent article in theAmerican Political Science Review, Laver, Benoit, and Garry (2003, “Extracting policy positions from political texts using words as data,” 97:311—331) propose a new method for conducting content analysis. TheirWordscoresapproach, by automating text-coding procedures, represents an advance in content analysis that will potentially have a large long-term impact on research across the discipline. To allow substantive interp…
Coalition Government, Legislative Institutions, and Public Policy in Parliamentary Democracies
Most democracies are governed by coalitions, comprising multiple political parties with conflicting policy positions. The prevalence of these governments poses a significant question: Which parties' electoral commitments are ultimately reflected in government policy? Recent theories have challenged our understanding of multiparty government, arguing that the relative influence of coalition parties depends crucially on institutional context. Speci…
Establishing Judicial Independence in West Germany: The Impact of Opinion Leadership and the Separation of Powers
Comparativists have recently taken an increasing interest in politics surrounding constitutional courts. This literature has focused mainly on impact of constitutional review on policy output.' A theoretically prior but intimately connected issue is ability of courts to establish and protect their institutional integrity and to ensure compliance with their decisions. This issue is theoretically prior because without such authority courts will hav…
Committee Chairs and Legislative Review in Parliamentary Democracies
Recent research on parliamentary institutions has demonstrated that legislatures featuring strong committees play an important role in shaping government policy. However, the impact of the legislators who lead these committees – committee chairs – is poorly understood. This study provides the first examination of whether the partisan control of committee chairs in parliamentary systems has a systematic impact on legislative scrutiny. The article …
Multiparty Government, Fiscal Institutions, and Public Spending
A large body of research has claimed that budget making by multiparty governments constitutes a "common pool resource" (CPR) problem that leads them to engage in higher levels of spending than single-party governments and, further, that this upwards fiscal pressure increases with the number of parties in the coalition. We offer a significant modification of the conventional wisdom. Drawing on recent developments in the literature on coalition gov…
Abstract Judicial Review, Legislative Bargaining, and Policy Compromise
The constitutions of many parliamentary democracies provide for abstract judicial review, a proceeding that allows a specified parliamentary minority to initiate judicial review against legislation in the absence of a concrete case. The paper analyzes the impact that this proceeding has on legislative bargaining, using a simple game-theoretic model. The main conclusion is that the most important effects of abstract review are indirect and anticip…
What You See Is Not Always What You Get: Bargaining before an Audience under Multiparty Government
Party elites in coalition governments are acutely aware that the deals they strike will be critically evaluated by their supporters, and that they risk losing support if they are perceived as ineffective negotiators. This has a powerful influence on the bargains parties strike. Because most supporters are unaware of the complex aspects of bargains and instead rely on simple heuristics to evaluate their most visible features, parties have incentiv…
Parliaments and Coalitions: The Role of Legislative Institutions in Multiparty Governance
This text reveals that parliaments play a much more important role in policymaking in parliamentary systems than is usually acknowledged. Based on an analysis of roughly 1300 government bills across five democracies, it paints a detailed picture of the treatment of government legislation in contemporary parliaments.
Assessing the Allocation of Pork: Evidence From Congressional Earmarks
Distributive politics represents one of the most important and controversial aspects of legislative policymaking. In the U.S. Congress, controversies over distributive politics are most evident in the area of legislative earmarking. In this article, we employ a unique set of data matching earmarks to their legislative sponsors to assess the leading explanations of distributive politics. We find that members of the majority party do considerably b…
Narrow versus broad judicial decisions
A central debate among judges and legal scholars concerns the appropriate scope of judicial opinions: should decisions be narrow, and stick to the facts at hand, or should they be broad, and provide guidance in related contexts? A central argument for judicial ‘minimalism’ holds that judges should rule narrowly because they lack the knowledge required to make general rules to govern unknown future circumstances. In this paper, we challenge this a…
Measuring Policy Content on the U.S. Supreme Court
Political scientists have developed increasingly sophisticated understandings of the influences on Supreme Court decision making. Yet, much less attention has been paid to empirical measures of the Court's ideological output. We develop a theory of the interactions between rational litigants, lower court judges, and Supreme Court justices. We argue that the most common measure of the Supreme Court's ideological output—whether the Court's decision…
A Wolf in Sheep’s Clothing: Citizen Uncertainty and Democratic Backsliding
Judicial Advisory Opinions and Legislative Outcomes in Comparative Perspective
High courts in eleven U.S. states (and a number of countries) provide advi? sory opinions on pending legislation when requested by the executive or legislative branch of the government. To examine the implications of the advisory mechanism for institutional behavior and for policy outcomes, we develop and compare results from two incomplete-information models of judicial-legislative interaction. One game models judicial-legislative inter? action …
The Politics of Constitutional Review in Germany
Constitutional courts have emerged as central institutions in many advanced democracies. This book investigates the sources and the limits of judicial authority, focusing on the central role of public support for judicial independence. The empirical sections of the book illustrate the theoretical argument in an in-depth study of the German Federal Constitutional Court, including statistical analysis of judicial decisions, case studies, and interv…
Reply to Stone Sweet
Abstract Judicial Review, Legislative Bargaining, and Policy Compromise
The constitutions of many parliamentary democracies provide for abstract judicial review, a proceeding that allows a specified parliamentary minority to initiate judicial review against legislation in the absence of a concrete case. The paper analyzes the impact that this proceeding has on legislative bargaining, using a simple game-theoretic model. The main conclusion is that the most important effects of abstract review are indirect and anticip…
Reply to Stone Sweet
People in Political Science
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Election Laws, Disproportionality and Median Correspondence: Implications for Two Visions of Democracy
Comparative studies of election rules and legislative representation have focused intensively on vote–seat disproportionality as an indication of poor representation. Beginning with citizens' preferences, rather than votes, has important advantages and is especially more appropriate for a majoritarian vision of democracy. We analyse the effect of election rules on both vote–seat correspondence and median left–right correspondence in seventy elect…
Establishing Judicial Independence in West Germany: The Impact of Opinion Leadership and the Separation of Powers
Comparativists have recently taken an increasing interest in politics surrounding constitutional courts. This literature has focused mainly on impact of constitutional review on policy output.' A theoretically prior but intimately connected issue is ability of courts to establish and protect their institutional integrity and to ensure compliance with their decisions. This issue is theoretically prior because without such authority courts will hav…
Legislative-Judicial Relations: A Game-Theoretic Approach to Constitutional Review
from 1983 to1995. ourts with the power to exercise constitutional review-as constitutional courts or in a decentralized system of judicial reviewconstitute central institutions of governance in most Western-style democracies. I present a simple game-theoretic model that provides a unified account of the multi-faceted interactions between such courts and the legislatures they are, at least in part, intended to control. The model addresses legislat…
Law, Political Science and EU Legal Studies: An Interdisciplinary Project
Judicial Advisory Opinions and Legislative Outcomes in Comparative Perspective
High courts in eleven U.S. states (and a number of countries) provide advi? sory opinions on pending legislation when requested by the executive or legislative branch of the government. To examine the implications of the advisory mechanism for institutional behavior and for policy outcomes, we develop and compare results from two incomplete-information models of judicial-legislative interaction. One game models judicial-legislative inter? action …
Wasting Time? The Impact of Ideology and Size on Delay in Coalition Formation
Coalition theory has a distinguished tradition in comparative politics. Beginning with William Riker's The Theory of Political Coalitions,William H. Riker, The Theory of Political Coalitions (New Haven, Conn.: Yale University Press, 1962). comparativists have made considerable theoretical and empirical progress in understanding the complexities of coalition politics, most significantly with respect to government formation and termination
The Politics of Constitutional Review in Germany
Constitutional courts have emerged as central institutions in many advanced democracies. This book investigates the sources and the limits of judicial authority, focusing on the central role of public support for judicial independence. The empirical sections of the book illustrate the theoretical argument in an in-depth study of the German Federal Constitutional Court, including statistical analysis of judicial decisions, case studies, and interv…
Policing the Bargain: Coalition Government and Parliamentary Scrutiny
Policymaking by coalition governments creates a classic principal‐agent problem. Coalitions are comprised of parties with divergent preferences who are forced to delegate important policymaking powers to individual cabinet ministers, thus raising the possibility that ministers will attempt to pursue policies favored by their own party at the expense of their coalition partners. What is going to keep ministers from attempting to move policy in dir…
Coalition Policymaking and Legislative Review
Political scientists know remarkably little about the extent to which legislatures are able to influence policymaking in parliamentary democracies. In this article, we focus on the influence of legislative institutions in periods of coalition government. We show that multiparty governments are plagued by “agency” problems created by delegation to cabinet ministers that increase in severity on issues that divide the coalition. We also argue that t…
Reply to Benoit and Laver
We appreciate the positive reception of our transformation by Benoit and Laver (hereafter, BL), and we are grateful that they have incorporated it into the Wordscores package. Because their comment highlights a fundamental difference between the Martin-Vanberg (MV) and Laver-Benoit-Garry (LBG) approaches that is critical to the choice among transformations, we offer some brief comments that will allow users to make an informed decision regarding …
Coalition Government and Political Communication
One of the central challenges facing multiparty governments in parliamentary democracies is the need for coalition parties to communicate to their constituents that they have not strayed significantly from their electoral commitments when agreeing to policy compromises. We argue that one of the main ways parties attempt to make their case to constituents is through their behavior in legislative debate. Debate provides a unique opportunity—tied di…
A Robust Transformation Procedure for Interpreting Political Text
In a recent article in theAmerican Political Science Review, Laver, Benoit, and Garry (2003, “Extracting policy positions from political texts using words as data,” 97:311—331) propose a new method for conducting content analysis. TheirWordscoresapproach, by automating text-coding procedures, represents an advance in content analysis that will potentially have a large long-term impact on research across the discipline. To allow substantive interp…
The Value of Vagueness: Delegation, Defiance, and Judicial Opinions
An established line of research demonstrates that vague judicial opinions are less likely to be implemented than clear opinions. Vague opinions thus present a puzzle. Why would judges craft opinions that risk noncompliance? We argue that the relationships between judges and other policy makers in separation‐of‐powers systems are central to understanding this puzzle. Opinion vagueness can reflect efforts to resolve core tradeoffs associated with j…
Measuring Policy Content on the U.S. Supreme Court
Political scientists have developed increasingly sophisticated understandings of the influences on Supreme Court decision making. Yet, much less attention has been paid to empirical measures of the Court's ideological output. We develop a theory of the interactions between rational litigants, lower court judges, and Supreme Court justices. We argue that the most common measure of the Supreme Court's ideological output—whether the Court's decision…
Assessing the Allocation of Pork: Evidence From Congressional Earmarks
Distributive politics represents one of the most important and controversial aspects of legislative policymaking. In the U.S. Congress, controversies over distributive politics are most evident in the area of legislative earmarking. In this article, we employ a unique set of data matching earmarks to their legislative sponsors to assess the leading explanations of distributive politics. We find that members of the majority party do considerably b…
Parliaments and Coalitions: The Role of Legislative Institutions in Multiparty Governance
This text reveals that parliaments play a much more important role in policymaking in parliamentary systems than is usually acknowledged. Based on an analysis of roughly 1300 government bills across five democracies, it paints a detailed picture of the treatment of government legislation in contemporary parliaments.
Towards a (re-)integration of the social sciences: The Calculus of Consent at 50
Who Controls the Content of Supreme Court Opinions
Conventional arguments identify either the median justice or the opinion author as the most influential justices in shaping the content of Supreme Court opinions. We develop a model of judicial decision making that suggests that opinions are likely to reflect the views of the median justice in the majority coalition. This result derives from two features of judicial decision making that have received little attention in previous models. The first…
Narrow versus broad judicial decisions
A central debate among judges and legal scholars concerns the appropriate scope of judicial opinions: should decisions be narrow, and stick to the facts at hand, or should they be broad, and provide guidance in related contexts? A central argument for judicial ‘minimalism’ holds that judges should rule narrowly because they lack the knowledge required to make general rules to govern unknown future circumstances. In this paper, we challenge this a…
Multiparty Government, Fiscal Institutions, and Public Spending
A large body of research has claimed that budget making by multiparty governments constitutes a "common pool resource" (CPR) problem that leads them to engage in higher levels of spending than single-party governments and, further, that this upwards fiscal pressure increases with the number of parties in the coalition. We offer a significant modification of the conventional wisdom. Drawing on recent developments in the literature on coalition gov…
A Step in the Wrong Direction: An Appraisal of the Zero-Intelligence Model of Government Formation
In a recent article in the Journal of Politics, Golder, Golder, and Siegel (2012) argue that models of government formation should be rebuilt “from the ground up.” They propose to do so with a “zero-intelligence” model of government formation. They claim that this model makes no theoretical assumptions beyond the requirement that a potential government, to be chosen, must be preferred by all its members and a legislative majority to the incumbent…
Parties and Policymaking in Multiparty Governments: The Legislative Median, Ministerial Autonomy, and the Coalition Compromise
In parliamentary democracies, governments are typically composed of multiple political parties working together in a coalition. Such governments must confront a fundamental challenge in policymaking—the preferences of coalition parties often diverge significantly, but the government can adopt only one common policy on any specific issue. This fact raises a critical question that has far‐reaching implications for the quality of democratic represen…
Political science (37 works) · Law (35 works) · Law (32 works) · Politics (28 works) · Economics (27 works) · Law and economics (18 works) · Judicial and Constitutional Studies (16 works) · Legislature (16 works) · Sociology (15 works) · Political economy (14 works)