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Voting against the separation of powers between legislature and administration

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The culminating point of administration is to know well how much power, great or small, we ought to use in all circumstances.

(Charles de Montesquieu 1689–1755).

Abstract

The separation of powers is endogenous to the politico-economic process, and thus to politicians’ self-interest. Only little is known about what really drives politicians’ behavior when shaping institutional rules with respect to the separation of powers. We econometrically compare votes of parliamentary representatives and their constituents on a popular initiative that directly aimed at weakening the separation of powers in 1922 in Switzerland. We analyze whether the strength of individual ties to the public service affect representatives’ behavior, holding constituents’ preferences constant. Our results indicate that while politicians tend to represent their constituents’ preferences, representatives with ties to the public service have a higher probability of supporting the eligibility of public servants for the legislature. Thus, they favor reducing the separation of powers between legislature and administration.

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Notes

  1. A potential reason for this aspect of the separation of powers to differ between countries might be that in small countries (such as Switzerland) and in countries with a large capital (such as France with Paris), it is technically possible for a relevant number of representatives to work at the same time as national public servants, to be a resident of an election district and to act as a national representative in the capital.

  2. Referenda as a measurement for preferences of constituents for other issues are also used by Brunner et al. (2013), Garrett (1999) or Hersch and McDougall (1988) in the United States.

  3. The referendum was rejected and even today federal public servants in Switzerland cannot become parliamentary representatives to the National Council.

  4. Local and cantonal public servants were allowed to serve as representatives to national parliament but federal public servants were not eligible.

  5. Carey and Hix (2013) and Eichenberger et al. (2012) draw on the same dataset but focus district magnitude and public debts respectively.

  6. The election procedures for the Council of States is subject to the sovereignty of the cantons.

  7. In 1922 the Canton of Jura did not exist but the respective area was part of the Canton of Berne.

  8. There were no women in parliament in 1922, and we thus use the masculine form when denoting a single representative.

  9. While voters rely on parliament as a whole for advice in complex and attention demanding situations (Stadelmann and Torgler 2013), individual representatives cannot reasonably be assumed to shift the majority’s of the whole constituency.

  10. We also extend the definition of ties to the public service in refinements by analyzing the profession of the representatives’ parents and their general life history. Our results remain stable when excluding “trade union representative” from this definition.

  11. As the concept of national accounts was only established long after 1922, firm density may also be regarded as a proxy for GDP.

  12. Note that we also separate the sample into French/Italian and German speaking constituencies, which does not change our main results.

  13. In a number of alternative specifications, we also estimate logistic versions of Eq. (1).

  14. Without clustering standard errors would be lower.

  15. If we did not control for constituents’ preferences in the estimation, the effect found would be even larger, by approximately 5 % points.

  16. We expect that the insignificant result for the variable Constituent yes share reflects the fact that more left-wing constituents tend to elect more left-wing candidates and at the same time these constituents also support a reduction in the separation of powers in favor of federal public servants.

  17. Federal subsidies for education were fairly low in the 1920 s. Consequently, we also checked whether total subsidies, which included also military support payments, had an influence. The results for total subsidies is also insignificant.

  18. Again, the insignificant results for all constituency specific controls when including the variable for left-wing politicians is probably due to the fact that constituency characteristics and preferences also determine who gets elected as a representative in the first place.

  19. Note that we do not include Left wing politician as a control in these estimates (similar to specifications 7 and 8) as the number of seats influences the probability of observing fewer politicians from the center.

  20. Unfortunately, it is not possible to analyze a separate sample of left-wing representatives for its sample size is too small to gain statistically significant results and most of these representatives have ties to the public services.

  21. Forming inverse subsamples, i.e. with older politicians, politicians who have not studied and politicians who have been to parliament for strictly more than 3 years, does not change the positive effect of ties to the public service but in some cases with few observations significance at a 10 %-level is not achieved.

  22. Amtliches Bulletin der Bundesversammlung 1922, Wählbarkeit der Bundesbeamten in den Nationalrat. Begutachtung des Volksbegehrens.

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Acknowledgments

We are grateful to Peter Bernholz, Charles B. Blankart, Geoffrey Brennan, Roger Congleton, Lars Feld, Bruno S. Frey, Christoph Schaltegger and all the participants of the conference of the European Center for the Study of Public Choice 2013 in Freiburg (Germany) for illuminating and inspiring discussions. Ann Bauer, Catharina Peters and Lena Kraus offered valuable research assistance.

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Authors and Affiliations

  1. University of Bayreuth, Universitätsstraße 30, 95440, Bayreuth, Germany

    David Stadelmann

  2. University of Fribourg, Bd. de Pérolles 90, 1700, Fribourg, Switzerland

    Reiner Eichenberger & Marco Portmann

  3. Center for Research in Economics, Management and the Arts (CREMA), Basel, Switzerland

    David Stadelmann & Reiner Eichenberger

Authors
  1. David Stadelmann
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  2. Reiner Eichenberger
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  3. Marco Portmann
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Correspondence to David Stadelmann.

Appendix

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Table 5 Data description and sources
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Stadelmann, D., Eichenberger, R. & Portmann, M. Voting against the separation of powers between legislature and administration. Const Polit Econ 25, 207–229 (2014). https://doi.org/10.1007/s10602-014-9162-2

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