Leonard W Martins
Biographic Data
| ID | 704446 |
|---|---|
| NAME | Leonard W Martins |
| GIVEN NAMES | Leonard W |
| FAMILY NAME | Martins |
| SIGNATURE | MARTINS L W |
| AFFILIATIONS | Rice University |
| ORCID | 0000-0003-4051-3495 |
| VERIFIED | Yes |
| TOTAL WORKS | 21 |
| TOTAL CITATIONS | 1406 |
| AUTHOR COUNT | 21 |
| EDITOR COUNT | 0 |
| FIRST PUBLICATION YEAR | 1985 |
| LATEST PUBLICATION YEAR | 2026 |
| H-INDEX | 16 |
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…
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…
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 …
A Copula Approach to the Problem of Selection Bias in Models of Government Survival
Theories of coalition politics in parliamentary democracies have suggested that government formation and survival are jointly determined outcomes. An important empirical implication of these theories is that the sample of observed governments analyzed in studies of government survival may be nonrandomly selected from the population of potential governments. This can lead to serious inferential problems. Unfortunately, current empirical models of …
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…
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…
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.
The Conditional Impact of Incumbency on Government Formation
Previous research on coalition politics has found an "incumbency advantage" in government formation, but it has provided no clear explanation as to why this advantage exists. We classify existing theories as either preference-based or institutions-based explanations for why incumbent coalitions might be likely to form again, and we integrate these explanations into a coherent theoretical argument. We also claim that it is possible, to some extent…
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…
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 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…
Influence without Confidence: Upper Chambers and Government Formation
In most parliamentary democracies, governments must maintain the confidence of a single legislative chamber only. But in bicameral parliaments, upper chambers can affect the fortunes of government policy proposals. Recent work shows that parliamentary governments that lack control over the upper house also tend to collapse sooner than those with upper-house majorities. In this article, we show that coalition builders anticipate the importance of …
The Government Agenda in Parliamentary Democracies
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…
The Government Agenda in Parliamentary Democracies
Lawmaking is a challenge for coalition governments because it inherently demands cooperation and compromise by parties with divergent policy goals. The jurisdictional system of cabinet government exacerbates the problem by providing parties the means to undermine the coalition bargain in the pursuit of their own policy interests. In this article, I explore whether arrangements that allow partners to police one another induce compromise on one of …
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
Government Formation in Parliamentary Democracies
ment of an empirical tradition that allows scholars to evaluate the relative importance of competing theories. We resolve this problem by applying an empirical framework that is appropriate for modeling coalition choice to evaluate several leading explanations of government formation. Our approach allows us to make conclusions about the relative importance of traditional variables relating to size and ideology and to assess the impact of recent n…
Stagflation: A Condition Created by Accelerated Demand Pull Inflation (Comment)
F. B. MacFarland's unorthodox model of oligopolistic-price leadership-pricing as a trigger of inflationary recession and so stagflation is disputed. His claim is challenged that auto companies respond to a leftwardshifting demand curve by raising price as a maximizing application of markup pricing notwithstanding the numerous theorists' writings presumably combined in "a partial explanation of stagflation,"Chrysler left the General Motors' umbrel…
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…
Government Formation in Parliamentary Democracies
ment of an empirical tradition that allows scholars to evaluate the relative importance of competing theories. We resolve this problem by applying an empirical framework that is appropriate for modeling coalition choice to evaluate several leading explanations of government formation. Our approach allows us to make conclusions about the relative importance of traditional variables relating to size and ideology and to assess the impact of recent n…
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…
The Government Agenda in Parliamentary Democracies
Lawmaking is a challenge for coalition governments because it inherently demands cooperation and compromise by parties with divergent policy goals. The jurisdictional system of cabinet government exacerbates the problem by providing parties the means to undermine the coalition bargain in the pursuit of their own policy interests. In this article, I explore whether arrangements that allow partners to police one another induce compromise on one of …
The Conditional Impact of Incumbency on Government Formation
Previous research on coalition politics has found an "incumbency advantage" in government formation, but it has provided no clear explanation as to why this advantage exists. We classify existing theories as either preference-based or institutions-based explanations for why incumbent coalitions might be likely to form again, and we integrate these explanations into a coherent theoretical argument. We also claim that it is possible, to some extent…
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
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…
Influence without Confidence: Upper Chambers and Government Formation
In most parliamentary democracies, governments must maintain the confidence of a single legislative chamber only. But in bicameral parliaments, upper chambers can affect the fortunes of government policy proposals. Recent work shows that parliamentary governments that lack control over the upper house also tend to collapse sooner than those with upper-house majorities. In this article, we show that coalition builders anticipate the importance of …
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…
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…
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…
A Copula Approach to the Problem of Selection Bias in Models of Government Survival
Theories of coalition politics in parliamentary democracies have suggested that government formation and survival are jointly determined outcomes. An important empirical implication of these theories is that the sample of observed governments analyzed in studies of government survival may be nonrandomly selected from the population of potential governments. This can lead to serious inferential problems. Unfortunately, current empirical models of …
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.
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…
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 …
Stagflation: A Condition Created by Accelerated Demand Pull Inflation (Comment)
F. B. MacFarland's unorthodox model of oligopolistic-price leadership-pricing as a trigger of inflationary recession and so stagflation is disputed. His claim is challenged that auto companies respond to a leftwardshifting demand curve by raising price as a maximizing application of markup pricing notwithstanding the numerous theorists' writings presumably combined in "a partial explanation of stagflation,"Chrysler left the General Motors' umbrel…
Government Formation in Parliamentary Democracies
ment of an empirical tradition that allows scholars to evaluate the relative importance of competing theories. We resolve this problem by applying an empirical framework that is appropriate for modeling coalition choice to evaluate several leading explanations of government formation. Our approach allows us to make conclusions about the relative importance of traditional variables relating to size and ideology and to assess the impact of recent n…
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 Government Agenda in Parliamentary Democracies
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…
The Government Agenda in Parliamentary Democracies
Lawmaking is a challenge for coalition governments because it inherently demands cooperation and compromise by parties with divergent policy goals. The jurisdictional system of cabinet government exacerbates the problem by providing parties the means to undermine the coalition bargain in the pursuit of their own policy interests. In this article, I explore whether arrangements that allow partners to police one another induce compromise on one of …
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…
Influence without Confidence: Upper Chambers and Government Formation
In most parliamentary democracies, governments must maintain the confidence of a single legislative chamber only. But in bicameral parliaments, upper chambers can affect the fortunes of government policy proposals. Recent work shows that parliamentary governments that lack control over the upper house also tend to collapse sooner than those with upper-house majorities. In this article, we show that coalition builders anticipate the importance of …
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 Conditional Impact of Incumbency on Government Formation
Previous research on coalition politics has found an "incumbency advantage" in government formation, but it has provided no clear explanation as to why this advantage exists. We classify existing theories as either preference-based or institutions-based explanations for why incumbent coalitions might be likely to form again, and we integrate these explanations into a coherent theoretical argument. We also claim that it is possible, to some extent…
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.
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…
A Copula Approach to the Problem of Selection Bias in Models of Government Survival
Theories of coalition politics in parliamentary democracies have suggested that government formation and survival are jointly determined outcomes. An important empirical implication of these theories is that the sample of observed governments analyzed in studies of government survival may be nonrandomly selected from the population of potential governments. This can lead to serious inferential problems. Unfortunately, current empirical models of …
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 …
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…
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…
Political science (18 works) · Politics (18 works) · Economics (16 works) · Government (linguistics (16 works) · Law (15 works) · Law (15 works) · Electoral Systems and Political Participation (14 works) · Legislature (12 works) · Political economy (11 works) · Public Administration (11 works)