Do Institutional Structures Shape Political Outcomes? Yes, Until Those Structures are Ignored

While we are here in the UK, students are required to write a daily journal entry. I provide a prompt for the students to respond to based upon what we’ve seen and experienced throughout the day. After visiting the Scottish Parliament, I asked them whether the institutional arrangements and structures of the Parliament produce a different politics from Westminster. It is something I hear a lot when I visit the Parliament, and certainly, it was well-expected by the founders of the institution expected a “New Politics” to emerge as a result.

My students were generally not convinced that the Scottish Parliamentary experience was all that different from the way in which politics is practiced the world over. In fact, they were downright cynical at the prospect that institutional structures could shape political behavior or outcomes all that much.

As an institutionalist, I was chagrined to say the least. I’ve built a career, and a research agenda, on the notion that the structures of politics shape behavior. Have I been simply unconvincing in the classroom on this point?

And yet, in some respects, there is a grain of truth in what the students claimed. Some institutional structures matter a lot, while others have little effect. My own research on First Minister’s Questions in the Scottish Parliament suggests that the tone of questions asked in the chamber may be more negative and combative than in Westminster despite all the ballyhoo and hype we hear about how the horseshoe shape of the chamber and the electoral system inspires a consensual rather than combative deliberation. Yet, the electoral system does matter. MSPs almost universally claim that regional members behave differently than those representing constituencies. And the evidence bears this out: they participate differently in the chamber, committee, and in their propensity to hold surgeries. In this case, structural arrangements do shape incentives. Regional MSPs do more party and legislative work, while constituency members pay more attention to the folks back home.

The point made by my students, however, is that politics is conflictual no matter how you slice it. Parties differ as to how to policy priorities and the distribution of power in society. They differ as to the ability to govern and how to do it. Conflict is essential to politics and expected—no matter how voters chose their legislators or the architectural design of the assembly space.

The problem, at the end of the day, is while conflict is necessary to politics, most people—including my students—do not like conflict. Perhaps the question is not whether a particular political system mitigates conflict but whether a political system can, based upon how the system is structured, can harness conflict productively. In the American system, voters are often frustrated by what is perceived to be a conflict that yields few results. Our politics is more partisan and the differences between the parties wider than at any point since at least the Gilded Age. Yet this differences do not manifest in much policy production or change because of political system makes it difficult to produce policy. The people, wrongly in my mind, ascribe to the conflict and the people the blame. The system of checks and balances, if anything, should bear most of the brunt of the blame from the people as the vitriol produced by our hyper-partisan American politics.

Conversely, the conflict in the British system is mostly confined to debate and Question Time both at Westminster and Holyrood. Legislation is still produced and government functions because political change is not in the hands of individual MPs but in government ministers and bureaucrats that help them develop legislative policy. The “talking” legislature serves as a political safety value for society, but the conflictual talk does not generally impede policy progression. Indeed, Brexit is the exception that proves the rule: Because Brexit splits across the parties creates policy deadlock making it difficult for May’s minority government to produce results.

In the American case, policy production is hard with or without conflict. Perhaps most troubling, however, is the recent propensity of frustrated majorities to dispense with institutional safeguards to advance short term policy goals. And that’s truly worrying given that these institutional bumpers were put in place precisely to protect minority interests over the long term. We’ve seen an increasing willingness of executives to resort to executive orders to implement policy when frustrated by Congress. The process of advice and consent has become empty, and Senators are rushing to make the chamber less deliberative by eroding the power of the filibuster. In the pursuit of policy, our checks and balances are falling by the wayside in favor of expediency and the growth of executive power. In that sense, the American system is increasingly aping the British system but without the benefits of a vigorous public scrutiny of the executive outside of congressional hearings. And even those hearing are under threat as members of the executive branch refuse to respond to congressional subpoenas and even the president claims immunity from congressional scrutiny.

To come full circle, do institutional structures matter in politics? The answer is yes, but only in so much as those institutional structures are respected by those who engage in politics. One of my students constantly upholds our codified Constitution as superior to the uncodified British Constitution, saying that the United Kingdom relies far too much on convention and norms. My response to him is that codification matters little if the individuals responsible for implementing words chose to ignore them. And, it is at that precise point where political conflict becomes truly dangerous irrespective if the chamber sits in a horseshoe or on benches across from one another.