Introduction

With its 169 articles, the 1978 Constitution represents one of the longest in Spanish constitutional history, taking longer to draw up than any previous constitution. It was drafted and approved by both Houses of Parliament (Cortes Generates), the Lower House or Congress of Deputies (Congreso de los Diputados) (4.3.1) and the Upper House or Senate (Senado) (4.3.2). During the sixteen months of its gestation, it passed through an unprecedented number of committees and, in the course of its approval, over one thousand amendments were tabled; no previous constitution had been subjected to such searching scrutiny.

The 1978 Constitution started life in the Committee of Constitutional Affairs and Public Liberties (Comisión de Asuntos Constitucionales y Libertades Públicas) consisting of thirty-six members of the Congress drawn from the major parties represented in Parliament in proportion to their strength in the Lower House. The Committee appointed a seven-man working party with a similar composition, whose task was to draw up the original draft of the Constitution. The draft was passed to the Constitutional Committee of the Congress (Comisión Constitucional del Congreso) before being submitted for approval to the full Congress. Subsequently it was considered by the Constitutional Committee of the Senate (Comisión Constitucional del Senado) prior to being approved by the full Senate. In the final stage of the process, the draft was scrutinised by a joint committee of both Houses of Parliament before being approved in a full joint session of both Houses on 31 October 1978 (table 2.1).

Introduction

Prior to the restoration of the Bourbon monarchy in the last King of Spain was Alfonso XIII, who effectively ruled from 1902 to 1931. Following a period of political unrest, during which the monarchy fell into increasing disrepute and the political tide turned strongly in favour of republicanism, Alfonso fled the country in April 1931 ‘to save the country from civil war’. Until after the Civil War of 1936–the Spanish royal family was to remain in exile in Italy Shortly before his death in Alfonso abdicated in favour of his son Don Juan, Count of Barcelona, who was to live in exile in Portugal up to and beyond the end of the Franco era (figure 3.1).

Monarchical restoration

On 22 November two days after the death of General Franco, Juan Carlos de Borbón y Borbón, son of Don Juan and grandson of Alfonso XIII, was proclaimed King of Spain. In a simple ceremony, the new monarch was sworn in by the president of the Cortes; on this occasion, as in Juan Carlos pledged to uphold Franco's Fundamental Laws, which include the Succession Law (3.2.1.1) and the Organic Law of the State (3.2.1.2).

Since Juan Carlos had been appointed successor to the headship of state by a widely hated dictator and since in November 1975 his father, Don Juan, had not renounced his dynastic rights, it is worth asking what legitimate authority, if any, the new monarch had for ascending the long-vacant throne of Spain.

Since the death of Franco, on 20 November 1975, Spain has undergone substantial transformation. This is reflected in the way in which many of the political and economic institutions which characterised nearly forty years of Francoism have been either swept away or modified along democratic lines.

Largely as a result of these changes, the world in general, and Europe in particular, has focused increasing attention on Spanish affairs. Spain is once more regarded as ‘respectable’. Former barriers to international relations have been gradually removed as the country, for several years now a member of the Council of Europe and NATO, establishes herself as a member of the EEC. While post-Franco Spain saw intrinsic value in democratising her many outdated institutions, the determination to secure integration with Europe injected an extra dimension of urgency into the task of modernising the country's political and economic structures.

Thus, it appears an appropriate time to publish a reference work which describes and examines the political and economic institutions of post-Franco Spain, something which, we believe, has not been attempted before, at least in English. We expect that this publication will be of value and interest to all those who need to be informed about the new institutional framework of contemporary Spain.

The primary justification offered for the package vote and the confidence vote procedure by the drafters of the Fifth Republic Constitution was the need to stabilize the government by firmly entrenching executive authority over policymaking processes. As noted in the Introduction, research since 1958 has concluded that these two procedures have been successful to this end. The package vote and the confidence vote procedure are said to have effectively abolished the parliament's right of amendment, thereby ensuring that the government can implement its policy wishes when faced with a recalcitrant parliament. France's two restrictive procedures are thus viewed as institutional arrangements that influence the vertical relationship between the executive and legislature, giving the executive the upper hand when policy conflict with the National Assembly is severe.

There are two problems with the argument that the package vote and the confidence vote procedure are used by the government against the National Assembly for policy purposes. One problem is empirical. There is no reliable empirical evidence demonstrating that restrictive procedures are indeed used by the government in response to policy conflict with parliament. Instead, claims about policy conflict between the government and the National Assembly seem to be based on impressionistic evidence–on observation of the rhetoric in parliament that inevitably surrounds the utilization of the restrictive procedures.

The second problem with the prevailing view is that there exists no logical argument explaining why policy conflict between the government and the National Assembly should lead to the use of restrictive procedures.

The Cambridge series on the Political Economy of Institutions and Decisions is built around attempts to answer two central questions: How do institutions evolve in response to individual incentives, strategies, and choices, and how do institutions affect the performance of political and economic systems? The scope of the series is comparative and historical rather than international or specifically American, and the focus is positive rather than normative.

John Huber's original, imaginative book develops and tests theories about how institutional arrangements shape political decision making. He provides innovative game-theoretic arguments about how legislative procedures, through their impact on the bargaining strategies of political parties, influence policy outcomes, cabinet stability, and political accountability in France. Bringing together often-separated models of strategic bargaining and legislative behavior, he argues that most policy conflict in parliamentary systems is not between the cabinet and parliament but between different parties or factions within the government majority or between government and opposition parties during minority governments. He examines two institutional arrangements for resolving such conflicts, the ‘package vote’ and the ‘confidence vote procedure,’ both significant elements of politics and policy outcomes in the French National Assembly. He concludes that such procedures are less ‘antidemocratic’ than is often suggested. Neither the package vote nor the confidence vote procedure is used by the government to run roughshod over the National Assembly. Instead, the package vote is used by party leaders in government to preserve essential elements of policy bargains struck outside the legislature.

Institutional arrangements in democratic systems do not magically materialize from an ethereal haze. Instead, they generally emerge from hotly contested debates among individuals who often will play a part in choosing future public policies. But why do political decisionmakers often exhibit such a deep interest in what often seem like trivial details of political rules and procedures? How do individuals who choose decision rules develop beliefs about the impact of specific rules on behavior? Are there systematic elements that underlie explanations of the choice of rules, or must any such ‘explanation’ be idiosyncratic and historically contingent?

This chapter addresses these questions by examining the choice of institutional arrangements through two quite different lenses. The first fixes on formal models of majority rule, and in particular on the contributions these models make toward establishing a general framework for thinking about the adoption of democratic institutions. The second lens fixes on the historical events in France in 1958 that led to the inclusion of the package vote and the confidence vote procedure in the Fifth Republic Constitution.

My goal is to create a dialog in two directions. On one hand, examining the specific events in France aims, not only to provide new historical details about the process that led to the choice of particular procedures in 1958, but also to highlight issues that are relevant to building general theories of endogenous institutions.

There are many different types of institutional arrangements that constitutional engineers can select to influence how political parties resolve conflict. The chief architect of the Fifth Republic, Michel Debré, wanted to select institutional arrangements that would be particularly suited to ending the extraordinary cabinet instability of the Fourth Republic. To this end, he advocated a single-member district, plurality rule electoral law. This institutional arrangement, he believed, would lead to stable governments by creating homogenous, single-party majorities at election time.

French elites ultimately declined this path, however, not because they objected to using the electoral law to manufacture single-party majorities, but because General de Gaulle feared that specifying any electoral law could jeopardize ratification of the Constitution by the French people. The framers therefore chose an alternative institutional solution to the bargaining problems of the Fourth Republic. They placed in the Constitution legislative procedures that would ensure governmental control over policymaking and that would weaken opportunities for destabilizing electoral competition on the floor of parliament.

The package vote and the confidence vote procedure were among the most controversial of the new constitutional procedures. Since each of these institutional innovations permits a member of the government to make the final, take-it-or-leave-it policy proposal, deputies can do little to evade the effects of these provisions. Visceral rhetoric therefore often surrounds discussions of the package vote and the confidence vote procedure, both of which are frequently denounced as antidemocratic because they effectively eliminate amendment prerogatives by deputies.

Two stylized facts are woven through the literature on Fifth Republic France. The first is the primacy of the president in French politics. Institutional arrangements, and in particular the direct election of the president since 1962, are said to give the president vast power. Presidential power is held to be further augmented by the presidentialization of French political parties: since the presidency is an enormous prize, parties are organized to service the needs of their presidential aspirants, and these présidentiables are believed to exercise extraordinary control over party positions on policy.

The second stylized fact is that the National Assembly plays no important role in policymaking. A whole host of constitutional procedures that ‘rationalize’ the role of parliament, together with the emergence of coherent legislative majorities under the Fifth Republic, are said to limit substantially the opportunities for France's elected representatives to participate meaningfully in the legislative process. The National Assembly is therefore often held to be among the weakest legislatures in the advanced industrialized world.

These two stylized facts have had a significant impact on political science research. On one hand, the presidential interpretation of the French system has often led comparative research on parliamentary government to exclude the Fifth Republic. A survey of nineteen studies of coalition formation, for example, reveals only five that include the Fifth Republic, while eight exclude France altogether and six focus only on the Fourth Republic.

This chapter develops an Electoral Politics Model of the confidence vote procedure. Unlike agents in the models discussed previously, the agents in the Electoral Politics Model are not motivated exclusively by short-term policy preferences. Instead, they are also motivated by ‘office’ considerations (related to control of the government) and electoral considerations (related to communication with voters). The analysis explores how these various motivations influence strategic behavior in policymaking after government formation is complete. The result is a theory that directs attention away from policy considerations in procedural choice and toward the role that the confidence vote procedure plays in shaping opportunities for political parties to communicate to voters information about political accountability and policy positions.

The chapter has three sections. The first section describes and defends the assumptions of the Electoral Politics Model. I then sketch the results, and the logic underlying these results, in the second section. The third section concludes with a discussion of the empirical implications from the model.

THE MODEL: PARTY MOTIVATIONS AND CONFIDENCE VOTES

The basic structure of the Electoral Politics Model is quite similar to that of the Policy Conflict Model described in Chapter 3. But the Electoral Politics Model contains assumptions about the identity of the agents, their motivations (or utility functions), and their possible strategies (or actions) that are quite different than those found in the Policy Conflict Model. I review these differences in this section.

Democratic government is impossible without formal institutional arrangements, or rules, that fix the limits of legitimate political behavior. Rules define how elected representatives are chosen, how policies are formulated and adopted, how policies are enforced, and even how the rules for choosing policy are themselves established. Although there is an enormous variety of institutional arrangements for democratic government, almost all share one common feature: they are not neutral. Most rules create opportunities for particular individuals or groups, impose constraints on others, and thus affect who wins and who loses the competition to influence policy outcomes. Rules also create trade-offs. Some may increase the efficiency of decision making, but only at the cost of excluding certain individuals or groups from power and influence. Other rules may enhance political stability, but only by denying meaningful choices to citizens at election time. And yet other rules may ensure the inclusion of a large number of groups in decision making, but at the cost of clear accountability for policy choices. Not surprisingly, then, political elites expend enormous energies battling over the rules for political decision making.

The transition from the Fourth to the Fifth Republic in France provides what may be the most dramatic historical example of how changing the rules of a democracy can change the performance of that democracy. The Fourth Republic is often criticized for two related reasons. The first is executive impotence.

This chapter uses qualitative case studies to analyze the argument from the Electoral Politics Model. The case studies focus on the budget debates that occurred in 1988 and 1989, the first two years of Michel Rocard's Socialist minority government. As described in the Introduction, during the 1988 budget debate, Prime Minister Rocard's government made significant policy concessions to the opposition parties, and the budget was adopted without recourse to Article 49.3. Observers and politicians alike proclaimed the renaissance of parliament. One year later, however, Rocard's government made virtually no policy concessions to deputies in the National Assembly, and, following a rancorous parliamentary debate, the budget was adopted under the confidence vote procedure. The central focus of this chapter is to analyze the cause of these changes across the two years, and the usefulness of the Electoral Politics Model in explaining them.

The chapter has six sections. The first contains an argument about methodology and focuses on the role that qualitative case studies can play in the attempt to understand how the confidence vote procedure shapes political behavior in France. The second section describes in detail the legislative behavior and policy choices during the 1988 and 1989 budget debates. The third section draws on interviews with key participants in the budget debates to evaluate the circumstances leading to the adoption of Rocard's budget in 1988 without use of the confidence vote procedure.

This chapter steps back from the idea that France's restrictive procedures are used to structure bargaining processes between the legislature and executive. Instead, it examines how the two procedures can facilitate bargaining processes among the members of the governmental majority. The theoretical underpinning for the analysis is two themes that emerge from models developed by scholars who study the use of closed amendment rules in the U.S. Congress. The first theme is that institutional arrangements in general, and restrictive legislative procedures in particular, play a central role in preserving gains from trade between parties and party factions when policies are chosen on more than one policy dimension at a time. The second theme is that restrictive procedures are important tools for hastening the legislative process when the government faces important time constraints and policies are chosen on more than one dimension.

The chapter has three parts. The first part discusses how one can apply insights from the ‘gains from trade’ models to the French context. It then tests these insights empirically. The second part discusses how one can apply the ‘time constraints’ models to the French context. It then tests these insights empirically. The third part undertakes multivariate tests of the hypotheses developed in this chapter and Chapter 3.

DIMENSIONAL COMPLEXITY AND RESTRICTIVE PROCEDURES

When applied to the case of France, three hypotheses emerge from the ‘American’ models that link the use of closed rules in the House to the problems inherent to choosing policies by majority rules in multidimensional policy spaces: