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When Political Philosophy Meets Political Science:

Theoretical and Methodological Challenges in the Study of a Philosophical Ideal1

Paper to be presented on the 3rd ECPR General Conference, Budapest, 8-10 September 2005

André Bächtiger & Dominik Hangartner

Institute of Political Science and Institute of Sociology, University of Bern

Lerchenweg 36, CH-3000 Bern 9

E-mail: baechtiger@ipw.unibe.ch, hangartner@soz.unibe.ch

Reconnecting political philosophy with empirical or positive political science has become a

resounding call in the discipline (Rothstein 2004). As Alexander Wendt (2001) bemoans, much

positive political science is driving with the rearview mirror, by explaining what happened in

the past while neglecting the question where we should go from here. But if one is to say

something about the future, both “can” and “should” must be addressed. Yet, when normative

philosophical concepts are to be integrated in positive political science, researchers may

confront both theoretical and methodological challenges. Theoretically, they need to develop

reconstructions of normative theories that can satisfy both philosophers and positive theorists.

In other words, the theoretical bridges must be realistic enough without completely destroying

the utopian content of philosophical constructs. As we shall argue in this article, such

bridge-building activities can imply that metatheoretical debates – e.g. rationalism vs.

constructivism – have to give way to an approach that borrows strength from different (and

potentially opposed) metatheoretical perspectives. Methodologically, one may tap into

unchartered empirical territory requiring that researchers adopt unconventional research

designs while simultaneously devise measures of evaluation that allow putting the

philosophical concept in operational terms (Habermas 2005). Another methodological

challenge is that one cannot expect that standard social science data analysis techniques are

1 We thank Adrienne Héritier, Claudius Wagemann, Emanuel von Erlach, Marco R. Steenbergen, Christian Bolliger, Regula Zürcher, Anina Hitz, the participants of the departmental seminar at the European University Institute (EUI) (October 2005), and the participants of the workshop ”Methods” at the Annual Meeting of the Swiss Association of Political Science (November 2005) for extremely helpful and constructive comments on this project.

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appropriate when empirically investigating concepts of political philosophy. Rather, since these

concepts frequently materialize as “rare events” in the real world, more sophisticated statistical

techniques are in order to correct for potential biases of standard techniques.

This article attempts to identify institutional contexts that make the democratic ideal of

“deliberative agreement” more likely in real world politics. By “deliberative agreement”, we

mean that political actors agree with counterarguments and/or demands of other actors

(whereby in case of demands, mere acceptance is not enough: actors must simultaneously

acknowledge them). We propose that only a broad understanding of institutions and

institutional effects can bring us closer to the Habermasian ideal. On the one hand, we build on

a rationalist approach which can explain the occurrence of “deliberative agreement” either by

the existence of specific incentives or – since it may be impossible to fully incorporate the

“reflective” and “transformative” aspects of deliberation in a rational incentives’ framework

(Müller 1995) - by the absence of a full-fledged strategic and calculus setting which opens up a

space for deliberative action (see Aspingwall/Schneider 2000). On the other hand, we build on a

constructivist or sociological approach constructivist which can explain “deliberative

agreement” as a product of specific guidelines or scripts inscribed in the very structure of

institutions. In concrete, we hypothesize that consociational, veto, and reflective institutions

enhance the chances of “deliberative agreement”. In this regard, consociational institutions

draw both from rationalism and constructivism and involve incentives, spaces, and scripts for

deliberative action; reflective institutions also draw from constructivism and rationalism and

involve scripts and spaces for deliberation and agreement; finally, veto institutions draw only

from rationalism and involve incentives for deliberative action. Our basic argument is that these

three institutional variables and their different mechanisms can work together to improve our

understanding when a philosophical construct such as “deliberative agreement” materializes in

real world politics. We test these hypotheses with 52 Swiss, US and German parliamentary

debates. These debates involve different types of issues and are conducted in different arenas

(public and non-public). To measure “deliberative agreement”, we build on the ”Discourse

Quality Index” (DQI) (Steenbergen et al. 2003) and focus on two of its dimensions: respect

toward counterarguments and respect toward demands. The DQI yields reliable data and allows

empirical researchers to peer into the deliberative dimensions of real world politics. Since we

are entering unexplored empirical territory, we cannot use random-sampling. Instead we will

rely upon a theoretical sampling whereby cases are selected purposefully so that we capture

important and comparable cases. While a theoretical sampling has the drawback of not

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producing generalizable results, it will still permit us to obtain first important hints whether the

proposed institutional contexts indeed make a difference for “deliberative agreement”. To

analyze our data, we use a batch of techniques that match our problematic data structure.

Second, since our dependent variable is binary and heavily skewed - with “deliberative

agreement” representing a rare event - we check for the robustness of standard logistic

regression techniques by utilizing a number of specialized techniques: rare events logit and

gompit. Moreover, since our sample is finite we estimate all models with a non-parametric

bootstrapping procedure allowing us to obtain correct inferences under such conditions.

Making Philosophy Work in the Real World: Designing Institutions that Make Actors

Agree

How can philosophical concepts be integrated in positive political science? The major problem

of such an endeavour is that philosophical constructions and reconstructions occur at a very

high level of abstraction and that most philosophers have formulated philosophical ideals and

principals without considering what is possible in the real world. For many years, this

description also matched the state of art in the research on deliberation. As John Dryzek and

Braithwaite (2000: 242) put it: “the defenders and various critics of deliberation share one

belief: that matters can be resolved at the level of theoretical stipulation, with little recourse to

empirical evidence beyond illustrative anecdotes.” Certainly, one of the leading proponents of

deliberative politics, Jürgen Habermas, has directly confronted the relationship between his

social theory on the one hand and positive social science on the other:

[I]t is unclear how [my] procedural concept, so weighted with idealizations, can link up with

empirical investigations that conceive politics primarily as an arena of power processes…As I

understand it, this question does not imply an opposition between the ideal and the real, for the

normative content…is partially inscribed in the social facticity of observable political processes.

(Habermas, 1996, 287)

Thus, Habermas conceives of discourse theory as an abstraction from and refinement of broadly

empirical raw materials. But, as Michael Neblo (2005) holds, “even if deliberative theorists can

show that there is ultimately no alternative to discourse (because it is constitutive of our notion

of legitimacy)”, we would still require more concrete mechanisms how the theory can be

translated into workable institutions and practices for actually existing democracies.” Neblo’s

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remark serves as a starting point for our attempt to reconstruct an empirical theory of

deliberation. One possible bridge between political philosophy and positive political science is

institutional. Institutions have always contained the hope that they can change actors’ behavior

in normatively attractive ways (see Ostrom 1998)2 . And as Bo Rothstein (1998) notes,

analyzing established institutions makes it possible for us to link the study of political

philosophy with an investigation of how “actually existing” political institutions operate.

However, contemporary “institutionalism” is not one thing but many (Goodin 1996: 2). Two

basic variants of institutionalism can be distinguished: one drawing from a rationalist approach

and one drawing from a constructivist or sociological approach. In order to preserve the

normative edge of deliberation, we propose that only a broad institutional conception including

both rationalist and constructivist components can bring us closer to the Habermasian ideal of

“deliberative agreement”.

Rationalism and Deliberation

Rationalism views institutions as features of a strategic context, imposing incentives (or

constraints) on actors which are treated as rational, goal-oriented and purposeful, maximizing

their utilities on the basis of given, fixed and ordered preferences. From a rationalist perspective,

deliberation could take place when institutional rules provide incentives for it. For instance, in a

situation of interdependent decision-making, deliberation might be necessary in order to

advance an argumentative consensus on the definition of the situation or for acquiring a

collective understanding of the underlying normative framework. Or strategic actors can

become argumentatively “entrapped” and thus be induced to switch to a deliberative mode of

decision-making (Johnson 1991; 1993; Keck 1995; Ulbert/Risse 2005). For instance, if

strategic action has badly failed to serve actors’ preferences – e.g., if bargaining does not result

in any acceptable result and cooperation is indispensable – then actors might be induced to

create an acceptable norm through communicative action that would then provide guidance for

2 Interestingly, recent developments in institutional theory seem to suggest otherwise. Two rational choice practitioners, Daniel Diermeier and Keith Krehbiel, claim that one should hold behavioural postulates fixed, since if one varies behavioural assumptions, comparative institutional analysis will fail to be cumulative and there will be no theories of institutions. Institutional scholars should specify from the outset with what behavioral postulate they operate: a rational choice logic with maximizing actors or a sociological logic with satisficing actors. What counts is that behaviour is kept fixed. Sure, at this stage of our knowledge about institutions there is merit to theoretical protectionism, taking one theory and seeing how far it can be pushed. But such a view on institutions and behaviour is deficient in several regards. On the one hand, it ignores the idea of classical institutionalists and philosophers that behavioral change can occur via institutions. On the other hand, it also neglects the basic insight of social choice theory that focusing on one behavioral assumption such as maximization can produce chaos under

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the issue subject to bargaining. But also in situations of pure majoritarian aggregation –

misleadingly called the “institution-free” conditions - , deliberation might step in as a helper in

need. For instance, deliberation can induce preference structuration, thus facilitating the

disaggregation of a non-single peaked dimension into two or more single-peaked dimensions

and making cycles in decision-making less of a threat (Dryzek/List 2003).

While a rationalist approach is in a pivotal position to examine institutional situations where

actors use deliberation (or elements of it) in a goal-oriented and strategic way, the problem is

that rational choice theory ultimately cripples other forms of behavior than goal-oriented and

strategic behavior and thus cannot exploit the full spectrum of deliberative action with its stress

on reflection and transformation (see Müller 1985). Furthermore, in a rational choice

framework deliberation represents more something of a “helper in need” for coping with

exceptional situations and should hardly inform whole decision processes. As Christian List

(forthcoming) – a leading social choice theorist - holds, agreement at a substantive level is not

only empirically unrealistic, but also logically unnecessary for meaningful collective

decision-making. Thus, if deliberation produces agreement at a meta-level, this may be “good

enough” deliberation from a social choice perspective.

However, there is more to deliberation and agreement from a rational choice perspective.

Applying a domain of application approach to rational and strategic action, we can identify

specific contexts where deliberative action has better chances – and contexts where this is less

the case. Our claim is that when stakes are high and defections from expected standards costly,

actors will follow a course of action that is highly compatible with the predictions of rational

choice theory. But if stakes are lower and defections from expected standards less costly, actors

have more space to behave differently: they may remain strategic but they can also become

truly discursive actors and genuinely search for common understanding (see

Aspingwall/Schneider 2000: 27; March/Olsen 1998: 952-953). This is also backed by

experimental research. Thin models of rational choice have proved to be powerful engines of

predictions for competitive situations in which selective pressures screen out those who do not

maximize external values, such as profits in competitive market. But they have been far less

successful in explaining or predicting behavior in situations where such pressures are not

present (for a concise overview see Ostrom 1998).

specific institutional rules (such as majoritarian aggregation). If this is true, then real-world actors might be well

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Constructivism and Deliberation

Institutions do not only structure incentives, they also have constitutive and cognitive

dimensions (Powell/DiMaggio; see also Finnemore 1996: 326). In the constructivist or

sociological view, social structure is ontologically prior to and generative of agents, and human

action is more context-driven than goal-driven. A sociological approach to institutions builds

on two key concepts: a “logic of appropriateness” (March/Olson 1989; 1998) according to

which actors are guided by collective understandings of what constitutes proper, i.e. socially

accepted behavior in a given rule structure. On the other hand, it builds on ”institutional

isomorphism” suggesting that actors who frequently interact, who are exposed to each other or

are located in a similar environment, develop similarities over time in practices and meaning

structures (DiMaggio and Powell 1991; Scott/Meyer 1994). From the sociological perspective,

deliberation (or strategic behavior) would be inscribed in the very structure of institutions. For

instance, if the institutional goal itself would be deliberation, then actors operating within this

institution would learn and internalize the concept, turning deliberation into appropriate

behavior and making it part of actors’ scripts and identities. Harald Müller (2004) has presented

such an argument and claims that arguing (and bargaining) are fully legitimate and sanctioned

modes of behavior under the right circumstances. For instance, it is normatively acceptable and

even prescribed to bargain in international trade negotiations; in negotiations, it is appropriate

for actors to pursue their self-interest unless it collides with a valid norm that prescribes

different behavior such as arguing. That such deliberative norms or guidelines can make a

difference for deliberation is also backed by experimental research. Shawn Rosenberg (2004)

has tried to model the ideal discourse condition in a field experiment about public education. To

achieve this goal, he had to provide guidelines to participants by reiterating the goals of

deliberation, namely that deliberation means civility, polite discussion, reasoned argument,

considerations of basic justice, and productive conclusions. Rosenberg’s experiments underline

that one cannot simply bring people together and then expect that they would automatically

deliberate in a Habermasian fashion. Rather, the context needs to be structured in a

“constructivist” fashion in that people are provided with guidelines that emphasize reflection

and agreement.

While the constructivist or sociological approach has the advantage to unravel the social

underpinnings of deliberative action, the major problem with the sociological approach is – as

many have stressed - that it frequently underplays the role of agency. If institutions determine

advised to change their action logic under conditions if stable outcomes are to be achieved (see below).

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preferences, then how can one explain why agents acting in the same type of institutions

sometimes hold different preferences? This is aggravated by the distaste of sociological

institutionalists for calculation which most empirical researchers would not lightly dismiss.

While the economic approach may represent an undersocialized view of how agents’ establish

preferences, the cultural view represents an over-socialized one (see Granovetter 1985). In

other words, while rationalism in itself may be too weak to theoretically capture the

philosophical ideal, a sociological and constructivist argument is too strong and ignores that

there may be strong counterincentives that work against a normative script.

However, any theory of institutional design which tries to integrate rationalist and

constructivist approaches confronts a meta-theoretical caveat. As to the integration of

rationalist and constructivist approaches, some argue that the individualist perspective of

rational choice institutionalism and the societal perspective of constructivism can only be

integrated by adopting a comprehensive theory of action that builds on a superior logic since

theories based on contradictory ontologies would be incoherent (Müller 2004). Others argue

that the metatheoretical debate is over and argue for a more pragmatic approach that sees the

two approaches as commensurable while building on a careful theoretical integration of

rationalism and constructivism combined with empirical testing (Jupille et al. 2003). We opt for

the second, pragmatist strategy. As described above, any subsumption approach – be it

sociological or rationalist -, has explanatory shortcomings and empirical blindspots that

preclude its straightforward use as a superior logic of action.

While many pragmatic integration attempts utilize a sequencing strategy that views rationalism

and constructivism as guiding logics in different phases of the political process (March/Olsen

1998; Börzel/Risse 2000), we adopt a combination strategy that views the different action

logics as additive components. Such a combination model assumes that actors are both sensitive

to costs and benefits and can be simultaneously influenced by guidelines or scripts. Our major

argument is that in order to achieve “deliberative agreement”, actors need the right incentives,

the right scripts, and an action space. However, we are not fully agnostic to any hierarchy of the

various metatheoretical approaches. We always start from a rationalist foundation and add

sociological and constructivist complications only where necessary. In other words, when the

rationalist approach is fully sufficient to explain a certain type of event (in particular, the

non-occurrence of “deliberative agreement”), we shall not consider sociological or

constructivist explanations anymore.

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But what type of concrete institutions enhance the chances of “deliberative agreement”?

Surprisingly, the question of favorable (and unfavorable) institutional contexts for deliberative

action is a topic which has been greatly neglected in the literature, both by institutionalists and

deliberative theorists. There are only few and sporadic hints at favorable institutional settings

(e.g. Scharpf 1997: 165-66; Risse 2001: 20ff.). We propose that three institutional contexts

further “deliberative agreement”: consociational institutions, veto institutions, and reflective

institutions.

Consociational institutions

At the cradle of consociationalism lies deliberation. The pre-modern German philosopher

Johannes Althusius (1563-1638) developed a political theory revolving around the covenant or

“consociatio”. The covenant was an arrangement in which people would live together in mutual

benevolence, striving for consensus by way of open communication. Althusius became

forgotten after the French Revolution, and only in the 1960’s was the idea of “consociatio”

readopted by David Apter and Arend Lijphart and built in a new empirical type of democracy:

consociational democracy, and its later variant, consensus democracy (see Andeweg 2000).

The “deliberative” conception of the Althusian convenant is not alien to the consociational or

consensus model of democracy (see Steiner 1974). As Lijphart (1999: 294) notes, there is an

intimate connection between his consensus democracy and Jane Mansbridge’s “unitary

democracy” (Mansbridge 1980). In unitary democracy, people come together with their friends

to find agreement; this democracy is consensual, based on common interest equal respect, and

persuasion. Mansbridge contrasts this with an adversary ideal which has dominated Western

democratic thinking since the 17th century. In adversary democracy, there is no common good

and the mechanical aggregation of conflicting selfish desires is the very core of an adversary

system. Interestingly, the adversary vision has become so dominant in positive political science

that most scholars tend to equate the consociational or consensus model of democracy with a

mere bargaining model of politics (e.g. Colomer 2001: 193; Lehmbruch 1967). While we do

certainly not deny that there is a lot of bargaining in consociational democracies, we think that

this is a limited understanding of the actual functioning of consociational institutions. As we

shall argue below, consociational institutions also involve a deliberative dimension, whereby

we identify both a rationalist and a sociological path to deliberation and “deliberative

agreement”.

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From a rationalist perspective, one mechanism of consociational institutions may be

particularly important for the production of “deliberative agreement”: the existence of grand

coalitions. Grand coalitions generate, first of all, a logic of joint decision-making where

argumentative rationality might be necessary for the “problem-solving” or “production” part of

policy negotiations in order to successfully cope with different situation definitions, cognitive

problems, factual disagreements, as well as standards of appropriateness, fairness and justice

(Risse, 2000; Holzinger, 2001). Moreover, a coalition arrangement creates collective agency

and shared responsibility with parties being judged at least in part by their government record

(Goodin 1996: 331). Coupled with the motive to maintain the stability of the coalition, this

provides incentives for actors to adopt a cooperative attitude vis-à-vis their coalition partners

which is a precondition for deliberation to develop.

Two other mechanisms enhance further the deliberative potential in consensus systems. First,

grand coalitions obscure policy making clarity and this reduces the possibility that coalition

parties will use political success to compete with other members of the coalition (Powell and

Whitten 1993). Second, when grand coalition arrangements are made permanent and parties

obtain relatively secure power positions (e.g. by obtaining a fixed seat in the government) the

importance of electoral competition among coalition partners is reduced. These factors

facilitate the development of a cooperative interaction orientation (Scharpf 1997) and therefore

contribute to the creation of a “deliberative space”.

The situation in competitive systems with a majority-minority relationship is quite different.

Here, not only can the majority ignore the arguments of the minority, the fact that the stakes are

losing or winning power positions is conducive to competitive interaction orientations among

the parties. Moreover, a minority which is “cooperative” must fear that political successes are

assigned to the majority actors (Fiorina 1981; Lewis-Beck 1988). Therefore, common problem

solving, search for genuine consensus, and “deliberative agreement” may constitute a loss in

the overall competitive game (Scharpf 1997: 166), thus reducing the incentive for deliberation.

In other words, while consociational institutions are stake-reducing and allow for less

calculative and strategic policy-making that makes “deliberative agreement” more likely,

competitive institutions are stake-enhancing and strongly conducive to strategic and adversarial

behaviour that tends to undermine “deliberative agreement”.

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However, the rationalist path to deliberative agreement in consociational institutions is a

relatively minimal one. It basically stipulates a “deliberative space” and some incentives, but

neglects a concrete script for “deliberative agreement”. Therefore, we complement the

rationalist path with a constructivist and sociological path.

The constructivist path draws from classical consociationalism with its stress on the willingness

of actors and on respective scripts. According to Lijphart, consociational actors should also

have the willingness to transcend the borders of their own group, be receptive to the claims of

others, and accommodate the divergent claims and demands of the segments (Lijphart 1969:

216). In our view, this willingness can be encoded in organizational scripts stressing mutual

understanding and conciliation (see Bächtiger/Steiner 2003). If scripted this way, then actors

operating in consociational institutions should be more open to “deliberative agreement”.

It is important to point that these predictions refer to “ideal realizations” of consociational

institutions; they may not always fully hold. In particular, it would be misleading to think that

grand coalitions prevent competitive interaction orientations. Not only must coalition partners

face their constituents on their own account, parties might also have an interest in strengthening

their positions within a coalition arrangement. This can set an important constraint on parties’

cooperative and deliberative capabilities. As such, “deliberative agreement” will remain a “rare

event” even in the context of consociational institutions. Our only claim is that the respective

chances are higher than in competitive settings.

Veto institutions

Veto institutions are defined as “structural incentives providing windows of influence” (Kaiser

1997: 437); one can think of them as places in the decision-making process where the consent

of one or more players is required to leave the status quo. As an explanatory construct, veto

institutions are not independent from the distinction between consociational and competitive

institutions discussed previously. Indeed, one way to conceptualize consociational democracies

is in terms of the presence of numerous veto players. By contrast, competitive systems are

characterized by far fewer veto players. The correlation between veto institutions and

consociational/competitive institutions is not perfect, however. In a grand coalition, not all

parties may be always essential for the passage of legislation or the survival of the coalition,

which severely limits the credibility of any veto threats by those parties (see Strom 2000: 280)

In competitive systems, certain types of legislation may require super-majorities, which may

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give opposition parties a veto position. Therefore, it is necessary to expand the veto argument

and generalize it to all decision-situations.

In the philosophical discussion, veto institutions have served as a potential bridge between

constitutional contractarianism and Habemasian discourse ethics. For the economist James

Buchanan, the right of veto at the constitutional level is crucial since it protects the autonomy of

the individual. If a solution is not in the interest of an individual, she can say no and forego

agreement. The primary agreement form is compromise, but there is an opening toward with

Habermas’s consensus-based discourse notion of agreement. According to Vanberg and

Buchanan (1989), preferences have not only an “interest-component” but also a

“theory-component”. While the former may be unaffected by deliberation, the latter can be

affected when actors seek and share information about the likely effects of policies. Hence, the

outcomes of constitutional debates may not only represent a mere aggregation of interests, but

can also entail communicative or “deliberative” forms of agreement.

Similar to Vanberg and Buchanan, we hypothesize that veto institutions form an “enabling

constraint” for deliberative agreement. As already mentioned in the context of consociational

institutions, veto power generates a logic of interdependent or joint decision making where

“deliberative agreement” might be a result of the “problem-solving” or ”production” part of

policy negotiations. As negotiation theorists stress, actors might have incentives to find

mutually agreeable solutions on such fundamentals in order to make subsequent bargaining

efficient and to secure the overall success of negotiations. When veto institutions are absent,

there is no need for participants to achieve deliberative agreement on fundamentals; the

majority can forego serious arguing and quickly proceed with voting. Thus, veto institutions

involve a rationalist, yet functional path to the philosophical ideal of deliberative agreement.

But when controlling for veto power, will there be any differences in the frequency of

“deliberative agreement” between consociational institutions and competitive institutions?

Following George Tsebelis’s (2002) veto player theory, partisan veto players in consociational

institutions are functionally equivalent to institutional veto players in competitive institutions.

Consequently, the frequency of deliberative agreement should vary according to the presence

or absence of veto players, but not between consociational and competitive institutions.

However, we propose that the two types of veto players differ in terms of deliberative capacity.

While in a consociational setting, actors have incentives in finding a common solution (see

Bolleyer 2004), this is not true in a competitive setting. Here, actors have a prime incentive to

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attack the political opponent and block policies (as the resulting policy successes will provide

the majority party with a greater benefit). Certainly, there may be occasions where the majority

and the minority have strong pressures to find agreement (for instance, when the majority and

minority face a broad public consensus on an issue that effectively precludes competition on

that issue), and consequently, we expect the functional dimensions of veto power to set in for

the production of agreement. But the absence of collective agency does not provide incentives

for problem-solving; rather we expect it to further tough bargaining. This should decrease the

frequency of deliberative agreement, and consequently, controlling for veto power should not

wipe out the differences in deliberative agreement between consociational institutions and

competitive institutions.

The veto argument can be contested, however. First, and very basically, Avio (1997) holds that

there is no way to blend contractarianism and discourse ethics in a manner faithful to the root

theories. In his view, the strategizing bent of actors in contractarianism cannot be reconciled

with “social” and “transformative” bent of discourse ethics. Second, David Austen-Smith and

Timothy Feddersen (2002) challenge the veto argument fundamentally and claim that it is

actually majoritarian voting rules – and not veto institutions - that promote deliberation.

Although unanimity rule creates incentives for supporters of the status quo to reveal

information, it likewise creates incentives for others to conceal information favoring that status

quo. This in turn generates an externality rendering information from all members of the

committee suspect. Consequently, the deliberative process tends to break down under

unanimity rule.

These are important objections that solicit a response. First, whether constitutional

contractarianism and discourse ethics are irreconcilable is a question that needs to be

investigated empirically, given the fact that negotiation theorists have presented a plausible

functional argument in favour of veto power. Second, the problem with Austen-Smith and

Feddersen’s argument is that it involves at least one assumption which is highly problematic.

They assume that actors value private interests as much as the common good. This assumption,

however, is frequently spoiled in real world settings: in many cases, actors have clear

preferences over different demands and the relative weight they put on private or constituent

interests. Under majoritarian decision making, this may create a serious motivational problem

for deliberation, as actors may simply not be willing to listen to minority demands or

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counterarguments. Put differently, only veto institutions guarantee that other actors are

“forced” to listen and deliberate.

Reflective institutions

From the time of the ancient Greeks onward, the idea of a council of elders, who could promote

an element of “second” and longer-term thought, has been advocated by philosophers and

statesmen (Aristotle, Cicero, John Stuart Mill, James Madison). We shall call this type of

institution “reflective institutions”. Reflective institutions put a prime on reflection and

productive conclusions. Drawing from constructivism, we assume that actors operating in such

a “reflective” institutional context learn and internalize the concept of deliberation, turning

“deliberative agreement” into a form of appropriate behaviour that can become part of actors’

cognitive scripts and identities. This is enhanced by specific selection criteria: reflective

institutions are composed of actors who are older, have more political experience and are also

more moderate. Besides these sociological and constructivist components, reflective

institutions also involve a “space” component: longer terms of office and less electoral

pressures, which lowers stakes and creates an additional space for deliberation.

Similar to veto institutions, reflective institutions are nested within consociational and

competitive institutions. In the context of a consociational setting, we expect reflective

institutions to strengthen the deliberative assets of the former: not only do they enlarge the

deliberative space even further, the specific organizational guidelines also reinforce the scripts

of “mutual understanding”. In the context of competitive institutions, however, we expect

reflective institutions to enhance deliberative assets as well, but there will be important

crosspressures. Actors nested in competitive institutions always have strong incentives to

forego deliberative agreement. As with veto institutions, we do not expect reflective institutions

to equalize differences between consociational and competitive institutions.

Methodology

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Dependent Variable: Deliberative Agreement

“Deliberative agreement” is a binary variable that tries to get hold of the Habermasian ideal of

argumentative change and consensus.3 To measure “deliberative agreement” we rely on the

discourse quality index (DQI) developed by Steenbergen et al. (2003). The DQI represents an

attempt to overcome the dearth of measurement instruments in the research on deliberation. It is

based upon broadly shared concepts of the theoretical literature on deliberative democracy and

allows for a quantitative content analysis at the level of speech acts of recorded debates. To

capture “deliberative agreement”, we focus on two indicators of the DQI: respect toward

counterarguments and respect toward demands. Thereby, we concentrate only on their highest

categories: agreeing with counterarguments and agreeing with demands or proposals (or not

doing so). Agreeing with counterarguments measures substantive agreement with arguments

put forward by actors with different opinions and qualifies as a “clean” indicator of the

Habermasian notion of consensus and agreement (see Goodin 2005). However, for assessing

the deliberative dimensions of real-world debates, this may be too strict a test. First, as James

Johnson (1999: 174) holds, a plausible argument for deliberation cannot be utopian in the sense

that it makes heroic assumptions about the deliberative capacities of actors and assumes that the

latter will massively change their opinions in normatively attractive ways. Following Johnson,

it seems sensible to include meta-agreement, productive conclusions as well as compromises

that rely on greater mutual understanding and respect for diverging standpoints

(Knight/Johnson 1994: 285). However, agreeing with demands involves a problematic aspect,

since we may confound the Habermasian conception of agreement with a bargaining

conception of agreement. Thus, mere acceptance of a demand is not counted as “deliberative

agreement”. To obtain this qualification, actors have to make a statement that they came to

value or got persuaded by a demand submitted by other participants. In the empirical analysis,

we shall consider two indicators of “deliberative agreement”: a combined “agreement with

demands/counterarguments” indicator and “agreement with counterarguments” indicator. The

first indicator counts instances where actors either agree with demands and/or with

counterarguments and represents the more lenient test for “deliberative agreement”. At the

same time, it is also provides an indirect test for the rationalist path to “deliberative agreement”.

If institutions only comprise an incentive-based mechanism for deliberative agreement – as is

3 ”Deliberative agreement” closely resembles Thomas Scanlon’s conception of ”reasonable agreement”. However, Scanlon’s conception places intersubjective justification at the center, while our prime interest is not the act of reason-giving but the act of ”agreement”. Put differently, we imply that actors have already deliberated on the merits of arguments and demands when they agree with them. In order not to confuse this kind of agreement with Scanlon’s conception of ”reasonable agreement”, we have coined the term ”deliberative agreement”.

15

the case with veto institutions – then we would expect only this indicator to make a difference.

However, this does not mean that institutions involving scripts and spaces – such as reflective

institutions would have no effect on this indicator. To the contrary, we expect these

mechanisms to affect the frequency of agreement with demands/counterarguments as well. The

second indicator counts instances where actors agree with counterarguments and represents the

stricter test for “deliberative agreement”. It provides an indirect test for the non-rationalist and

constructivist path to “deliberative agreement”. We expect that only institutions that involve

spaces and scripts as well – i.e. consociational and reflective institutions – have an effect on this

indicator, while incentive-based institutions – i.e. veto institutions – should not produce any

effects.4

The DQI has proved to be a reliable measurement instrument of deliberation. In a series of tests,

we could demonstrate that the “inter-coder reliability” of the respect category is very good (see

Steenbergen et al. 2003). Two different coders scored a subset of the debates analysed in this

study. The rate of coder agreement was 0.919 for a combined respect category that comprised

respect toward demands and counterarguments. Because of the possibility of inter-coder

agreement by chance we also computed Cohen’s kappa, which controls for this. Kappa yields

0.881 for the combined respect category. These values indicate a very high inter-coder

reliability.

Independent Variables: Selection of Cases

We will test for the proposed institutional factors with real-world debates in legislatures. But

why choosing legislatures – and not other, more benign organizational contexts? As James

Fishkin and Robert Luskin (2005) hold, “much of the discussion among political elites is

posturing or negotiation rather than deliberation. … Legislators are representatives, after all,

and elected to support or oppose certain things (and because they already do so). They are also

constrained by their parties. So even elite-level politics is not necessarily that deliberative.”

4 A further conceptual note is in order. The common and colloquial understanding of Habermasian notions of agreement is that actors agree with arguments (or demands) directly within discussion. But as Robert Goodin (2003) convincingly argues, argumentative change can also mean ”deliberation within”. ”Deliberation within” consists in the weighing of arguments in private, within the head of each individual. So, we may find ”agreement” that is not directly interactive, as actors come to agree with arguments and demands in private and not during actual discussion. Our conception of ”deliberative agreement” includes both types of agreement, interactive and non-interactive ones.

16

While we agree that deliberation and ”deliberative agreement” are necessarily constrained in

representative institutions, we still think that genuine and consequential deliberation is possible

in legislatures. First, and in line with the new institutionally-oriented research program on

legislatures (see Döring 1995), we propose that the occurrence of deliberative agreement is

largely dependent on favorable institutional contexts. Hence, generalizing from the competitive

United States Congress – as Fishkin and Luskin seem to do – can lead to a biased evaluation of

the deliberative capacity of legislatures. Second, from an institutional point of view,

parliaments offer a unique opportunity to directly compare the impact of different institutional

factors on actors’ behavior while holding the basic organizational setting – legislatures –

constant. And third, from a research-practical point of view, parliamentary debates are

protocoled and accessible, even in the non-public sphere (which, for example, is mostly not true

for interactions within the government).

The foundation of our research design is the idea of typological or theoretical sampling (e.g.

Lamnek 1995; McKeown 1999). But why choosing this relatively unconventional design and

not drawing a random sample of legislatures and debates allowing us to produce generalizable

findings? The reason for refraining from random-sampling is twofold. On the one hand, there are

no lists of parliamentary debates that permit to draw a random sample. Of course, one could

select debates from listings of bills, but that sampling frame is insufficiently detailed because a

bill can trigger multiple debates. On the other hand, the goal was to select debates that matter. A

random sample, however, might have yielded a selection of debates on relatively minute issues.

That might have been correct from a statistical viewpoint, but it would have been of little

theoretical interest. Despite the fact that a theoretical sampling does not yield generalizable

findings, we think that it can serve an important purpose. The goal of a theoretical sampling is to

generate a set of “critical cases” (Eckstein 1975), i.e. cases for which we would expect the theory

to hold true, if it is going to hold true at all. If we were to find that the theory does not hold true

for those cases, this would cast serious doubt on the this qualification, actors have to make a

statement that they came to value or got persuaded theory, regardless of the fact that the cases do

not constitute a random sample.

For a legislature with consociational institutions, Switzerland represents one of the best

empirical approximations (see Lijphart 1999). It has an institutionalized grand coalition which

structures party relationships in a less competitive fashion. Of course, this does not exclude

competitive relationships among parties, but it allows for other types of interaction orientations

and sometimes even for truly cooperative ones. Moreover, the constructivist path to

17

deliberation is also clearly present, with some actors stressing “mutual understanding” among

coalition partners. Switzerland also allows testing for decision situations with and without veto

power of the coalition partners. The distinction between a veto and a non-veto situation is made

according to the presence or absence of a referendum threat of one of the coalition partners.

For legislatures with competitive institutions, we choose the United States and Germany. The

reason for choosing two legislatures is that in the context of competitive legislatures,

presidentialism and lower party discipline can positively affect the quality of discourse (see

Bächtiger/Steenbergen 2004).5 Under presidentialism and lower party discipline, legislators

have more leeway to transcend party boundaries and can more open to argumentative change.

This creates an additional deliberative space for which we need to control. Both the United

States and Germany also allow comparing for the effects of minority veto. In the United States,

it is quite difficult to clearly distinguish between veto and non-veto situations, as low party

discipline frequently leads to negotiations among different factions of MPs as well as between

the two chambers. Hence, we focus on decision situations where there were direct and credible

veto threats (such as a presidential veto or a filibuster threat) as well as on decision situations

where it was ”clear” to the actors that a bill would pass with a simple majority. In Germany, a

veto situation arises when the opposition possesses a majority in the second chamber, the

Bundesrat, and the consent of the latter is required to pass a bill. Other bills can be generally

decided with the simple majority of the governing parties. Finally, we also use data from the

German Conference Committee (Vermittlungsausschuss), a body that is charged with

reconciling conflicts between the two parliamentary chambers. The reason for including the

German Conference Committee is the following: in the United States Congress, committee

debates are generally held in public and also have very few deliberative elements - neither

hearings nor legislative mark-ups involve sustained arguing among legislators; this confines

analysis to floor debates only. In order to explore the important constellation of a competitive

setting with weak party discipline behind closed doors - in fact, representing a standard

negotiation setting – the German Conference Committee is an extremely helpful addition: it

represents a non-public body located in a competitive system with its members partially

relieved from hierarchical directives with the expectation to develop innovative approaches and

overcome blockades to overcome legislative stalemates (Spörndli 2004).

5 We do not have consider a parliamentary consensus system. The reason is that the management of disagreements—the essence of Habermasian discourse ethics—is usually handled outside of the legislature, in the executive, in special committees, or in intra-coalition summits (Tsebelis 2002: 93, 109ff.).

18

Our three basic contexts also allow testing for the effects of reflective institutions. In the realm

of legislatures, second chambers can be considered relevant proxies. Not only does the

literature conceive of them as institutions that promote an element of “second” and longer-term

thought, also senators tend to view them as such. In the US Senate debate on partial birth

abortion (1995) Clairborne Pell (D-Rhodes Island) made the following remark: “The Senate has

a long and established tradition of careful deliberation ... for legislating such difficult issues

with thorough and adequate review.”6 Similar statements are also uttered by Swiss and German

senators.

The three proposed factors are not the only variables that raise the chances of deliberative

agreement in the realm of legislatures. While we have already mentioned party discipline as a

control variable, we use four additional controls: (1) arena, (2) issues, (3) roles, and (4) gender.

Non-public Arena. Non-public legislative bodies such as parliamentary committees

allow legislators to deliberate without external interference, lower the pressures of following

constituent demands, and make it easier for politicians to reflect, to show respect for the claims

of others, or even to change their opinions (see Checkel 1999). Conversely, in full sessions of

parliament, one can expect that most actors will primarily engage in ritualistic rhetoric and

strategic arguing. However, as Elster (1998) noted in his study on constituent assemblies, while

actors talked much more seriously behind closed doors, the non-public character

simultaneously enhanced bargaining. This could also reduce the frequency of “deliberative

agreement”.

Issue Polarization. Hereby, we distinguish between polarized and less polarized issues.

Less polarized issues mean that actors are ideologically closer, i.e. they share more values and

goals, while in polarized issues, ideological distances are larger. If an issue is not very polarized,

then we should expect more cooperative interaction orientations among the political actors.

This should promote more consensual decision making and, as such, should lead to a higher

frequency of “deliberative agreement”.

Roles. We also control for the presence of specific parliamentary roles. First, we expect

members of government – especially in consensus settings – to play a mediating role in

legislative interactions. This in, turn, should enhance the frequency of “deliberative agreement”.

In addition, we control for chairmen and experts. We expect these two type of roles to decrease

6 Partial Birth Abortion Debate, November 8, 1995, S16790

19

the frequency of “deliberative agreement” (but increase the frequency of neutral speeches).

While the major role of chairmen is to ensure that debates are conducted smoothly, the role of

experts consists of presenting legislators with information and facts. These role expectations

prime on implicit respect, but not on argumentative change and agreement.

Gender. Following feminist conceptions of democracy, we expect female legislators to

be more open to deliberative agreement. As Jane Mansbridge (1996: 123) has emphasized,

feminist politics involve “connectedness” and “mutual persuasion” instead of self-interest and

power politics.

As to the debates, we selected 52 debates, mostly from the late 1980s and 1990s,7 from the three

legislatures described before. The test is based on a total of 52 debates in these three legislatures,

involving polarized and less polarized issues in public parliamentary sessions and in non-public

parliamentary committees.

As our dependent variable, all the predictors in our analysis are measured as a dichotomy: either

a debate possesses the characteristic or it does not. While one could think of more precise

measures, using dichotomies has the advantage of casting the influence of characteristics in the

starkest possible manner. More precisely, Swiss debates score one on consociational

institutions, while debates in Germany and the United States score zero on this predictor. High

veto power is a predictor that takes on the value of one if there were strong veto players in a

debate and zero otherwise. In Switzerland, the distinction is made according to the presence or

absence of a referendum threat by one of the members of the grand coalition. In the United

States, we focus on situations where there was a direct and credible veto threat such as a

presidential veto or a filibuster. In Germany, a veto situation arises when the opposition has a

majority in the Bundesrat and its consent is required to pass legislation. As to reflective

institutions, debates in the Swiss Ständerat, the American Senate, the German Bundesrat, and

the German Conference Committee receive a score of one, whereas debates in the Swiss

Nationalrat, U.S. House of Representatives, and the German Bundestag receive a zero on this

predictor. Regarding our control variables, we first consider low party discipline. Initial coding

of this predictor was done at the systemic level, with debates in non-parliamentary/presidential

settings (i.e. Switzerland and the U.S.) receiving a score of one on this predictor and debates in

a parliamentary setting (i.e. Germany) receiving a score of zero. We then modified this coding

7 The exceptions to this time frame are the debates in the German Conference Committee which are drawn from the 1970s.

20

by going into the debates and considering their specifics. We found that party discipline had

been relaxed in some of the German debates, namely those on the abortion issue and all of the

debates in the Conference Committee. Those debates were therefore coded as a one.8 Our

second control variable is arena. In this regard, German and Swiss committee debates, as well

as debates in the German Conference Committee, are coded one on nonpublic arena, whereas

plenary debates are coded zero.9 Our measure of issue polarization draws heavily from Kriesi’s

(2001) analysis of German policy issues. In this analysis, socioeconomic issues and abortion

are considered highly polarized, whereas issues such as rights of the disabled, animal welfare,

and crime prevention are less polarized.10 We group the latter set of issues under the rubric of

low issue polarization. Finally, our actor-centered control variables are coded as follows:

female legislators are coded one, whereas male legislators receive a zero government members,

committee chairs and experts were coded as one, while ordinary legislators are coded as zero.

Statistical Methods

As mentioned before, deliberative agreement is a dichotomous dependent variable. The most

common approach of estimating equations with such dependent variables is to use logistic

regression (logit or probit). We shall use a logit as our baseline estimation. However,

philosophical concepts such as deliberative agreement tend to materialize as “rare events” in

the real world. When looking at the frequency distributions of our two dependent variables –

agreement with demands/counterarguments and agreement with counterarguments, the former

occurs in 7.8 percent of all observations, while the latter occurs only in 5.3 percent of all

observations. In such situations, standard logit and probit techniques can produce biased

coefficients that can lead researchers to under- or overestimate their size and significance (see

King/Zeng 2001). To overcome this problem, Gary King and Langche Zeng have developed a

procedure called “rare events logit”. As a further robustness check, we will use a gompit model.

Gompit (also called complementary log-log) is the inverse of the Gompertz distribution

function and frequently used when the probability of an event is very small. Another estimation

8 While members of the Conference Committee are partially relieved of partisan directives and have a lot of leeway, some might argue that it is too generous to declare party discipline low in this committee. We reran our analyses considering party discipline to be high and the results are consistent with those reported here. 9 We exclude the United States from the non-public versus public analysis because committee meetings are usually public and there are few other forums in which legislators deliberate behind closed doors. 10 We double-checked Kriesi’s (2001) classification using Party Manifesto data (Budge et al. 2001). In practically all cases, political parties took significantly different positions in their manifestos on the issues that Kriesi considered polarized, whereas positional differences were much smaller when issue polarization was low. One exception was crime, which Kriesi identified as polarized but we consider at a low level of polarization, based in

21

technique for skewed distributions of the dependent variable would be the skewed logit, or

scobit, model (Nagler 1994). Scobit relaxes the assumption inherent in probit and logit that the

maximum effect of the covariates is fixed at a probability of .5. Furthermore, rather than

assuming that positive responses are rare events, as the gompit model does, scobit allows the

direction and skewness in the sigmoid function to be estimated from the data. This is a flexible

function, but applied researchers may not find it practical for two reasons (see

Buckley/Westerland 2004). First, the scobit model can be difficult to estimate computationally.

In our case, the ancillary parameter produced heavy convergence problems. Second, since

“deliberative agreement” classifies as a classical rare event, the gompit function provides

sufficient flexibility for our purposes. Besides skewness, there is a further problem to tackle. In

the context of our finite sample, the variance of the coefficient is unknown. Instead of drawing

inferences on the basis of a theoretical (and asymptotic) assumption, we rely upon the empirical

distribution. Bootstrapping allow us to do that. Second, bootstrapping also enables us to get rid

of an autocorrelation problem in our data. Not only are actors nested within specific debates, the

same actors can also speak up repeatedly. This violates the independency requirement in

statistical analysis, which again can lead to erroneously estimated standard errors. Replication

via bootstrapping allows us to address these problems.11 Hence, we will apply a non-parametric

bootstrapping procedure with 1,000 replications to all models – logit, rare events logit, and

gompit.12

A final comment is in order. Some might argue that the lack of a probability sample prohibits

any form of statistical analysis. We disagree since our goal is not to generalize from the

statistical results, which would be problematic based on a typological sample, but rather to

discover if the effects of predictors are reliable. Our predictors divide the legislatures and

debates into different groups; our goal is to determine if the variance across those groups is

sufficiently large compared to the within-group variance to consider the effects of the

predictors meaningful.

part on the Manifesto data. Inclusion or exclusion of this issue in the low polarization category does not affect the results. 11 We have rerun all models by using cluster-corrected standard errors at the level of debates and speakers (results available upon request). These analyses produce very similar results to those reported here. 12 In addition to these multivariate analyses, we also conducted a series of tests of each predictor by itself (results available upon request). Those tests have the drawback of providing less statistical control. On the other hand, they allowed us greater control in selecting debates that were truly comparable. The results from these analyses sketch a picture that is very similar to that presented here.

22

Results

Is there evidence that our three institutional variables enhance the frequency of “deliberative

agreements”? First, let us look at a batch of bivariate tests (tables 1-6). The bivariate

relationships indicate that our three institutional contexts further “deliberative agreement”.

Consociational and reflective institutions produce statistically significant differences both for

the lenient version of “deliberative agreement”, agreement with demands/counterarguments,

and for the strict version thereof, agreement with counterarguments. Veto institutions, in turn,

only produce significant differences in the context of the lenient indicator, but no statistically

reliable differences can be found in the context of the strict version. This corroborates our

theoretical expectation that institutions involving purely incentive-based mechanisms – such as

veto institutions - are not sufficient to produce the philosophical ideal in its “pure form”. Let us

now check whether these findings also hold in the multivariate model.

Table 1:Agreement with Demands/ Counterarguments in Consociational

and Competitive Institutions

Table 2:Agreement with Demands/

Counterarguments in Veto and

Non-Veto Situations

Table 3:Agreement with Demands/

Counterarguments in Reflective

And Non-Reflective Institutions

Comp.

Inst.

Consoc.

Inst.

Non-

Veto

Veto

Non-

Refl.

Refl.

Inst

Not

Agree

2427

96.2%

1597

86.6%

4024

92.2%

Not

Agree

454

95.6%

3570

91.8%

4024

92.2%

Not

Agree

2620

93.9%

1404

89.0%

4024

92.2%

Agree 96

3.8%

246

13.4%

342

7.8%

Agree 21

4.4%

321

8.2%

342

7.8%

Agree 169

6.1%

173

11.0%

342

7.8%

Total 2523

100%

1843

100%

4366

100%

Total 475

100%

3891

100%

4366

100%

2789

100%

1577

100%

4366

100%

Chi2 = 134.337, Pr. = .000 Chi2 = 8.596, Pr. = .003 Chi2 = 33.648, Pr. = .000

Table 4:Agreement with Counterarguments in Consociational

and Competitive Institutions

Table 5:Agreement with

Counterarguments in Veto and

Non-Veto Situations

Table 6:Agreement with

Counterarguments in Veto and

Non-Veto Situations

23

Comp.

Inst.

Consoc.

Inst.

Non-

Veto

Veto

Non-

Refl.

Refl.

Inst.

Not

Agree

2444

96.9%

1690

91.7%

4024

94.7%

Not

Agree

458

96.4%

3676

94.5%

4024

94.7%

Not

Agree

2664

95.%

1470

93.2%

4024

94.7%

Agree 79

3.1%

153

8.3%

232

5.3%

Agree 17

3.6%

215

5.5%

232

5.3%

Agree 125

4.9%

107

6.8%

232

5.3%

Total 2523

100%

1843

100%

4366

100%

Total 475

100%

3891

100%

4366

2789

100%

1577

100%

4366

100%

Chi2 = 56.590, Pr. = .000 Chi2 = 3.188, Pr. = .074 Chi2 = 10.621, Pr. = .001

When we look at our combined agreement with demands/counterarguments indicator in Table 7,

we see that consociational and reflective institutions enhance the chances of ”deliberative

agreement”, while there is no effect for veto institutions. Our bootstrapped logit model (with

1,000 replications) yields an average logit coefficient of 1.428 for consociational institutions

and an average logit coefficient for reflective institutions of .455. Both are significant in the

95% bootstrapped confidence interval (in the sense that the 95% confidence interval excludes

0). Consociational institutions increase the probability of “deliberative agreement” by .357

percentage points (maximum effect), while reflective institutions increase the respective

probability by .114 percentage points (maximum effect). For the control variables, there is – as

predicted – a significant and positive association of low issue polarization with deliberative

agreement, and a negative association of chairmen with deliberative agreement. No statistically

reliable differences can be established for low party discipline, non-publicity, gender,

government members, and experts. The specialized techniques – rare events logit and gompit –

produce virtually identical results and corroborate the findings of our baseline logit model (see

Table 9 in the Appendix). This gives us confidence that the differences we found are

meaningful.

Table 7: Predictions of “Agreement with Demands/Counterarguments”

24

Independent Variables Average Effect 95% Bootstrapped Confidence Interval

Consociational Institutions 1.428* (1.079, 1.777)

Veto Institutions .099 (-.382, .581)

Reflective Institutions .455* (.196, .715)

Low Party Discipline/Presidentialism

-.265 (-.774, .244)

Non-Public Arena .125 (-.173, .424)

Low Issue Polarization .767* (.520, 1.015)

Female Legislators -.097 (-.400, .206)

Members of Government .417 (-.082, .916)

Chairmen -.821* (-1.394, -.248)

Experts -.214 (-.828, .399)

Constant -3.650* (-4.305, -2.996)

Coefficients are based on bootstrapped Logit with 1000 replications. N=4364. * Indicates confidence

interval excludes 0.

Second, when we look at agreement with counterarguments, we only find one statistically

significant institutional effect, namely for consociational institutions; reflective and veto

institutions, on the contrary, do not yield significant differences anymore. Consociational

institutions increase the probability of “deliberative agreement” by .277 percentage points

(maximum effect). For the control variables, the pattern looks relatively similar to the first

model, with statistically significant differences in deliberative agreement for low issue

polarization, government members and chairmen, and no statistical differences for lower party

discipline, non-publicity, gender, and experts. Again, the specialized techniques corroborate

the findings of our baseline logit model (see Table 10 in the Appendix)

25

Table 8: Predictions of “Agreement with Counterarguments”

Independent Variables Average Effect 95% Bootstrapped Confidence Interval

Consociational Institutions 1.107* (.684, 1.530)

Veto Institutions .051 (-.490, .592)

Reflective Institutions .274 (-.032, .579)

Low Party Discipline/Presidentialism

-.235 (-.804, .333)

Non-Public Arena .100 (-.268, .467)

Low Issue Polarization .648* (.352, 944)

Female Legislators -.264 (-.628, .099)

Members of Government .611* (.052, 1.171)

Chairmen -.674 (-1.361, .013)

Experts -.194 (-.902, .514)

Constant -3.684* (-4.421, -2.947)

Coefficients are based on bootstrapped Logit with 1000 replications. N=4364. * Indicates confidence

interval excludes 0.

For both models, we also probed whether there are interactive effects among the three

institutional variables. In particular, we checked whether the effects of veto and reflective

institutions play out differently in the context of consociational and competitive institutions.

But we found no such interactive effects. All interaction terms were non-significant (the

confidence intervals were large and always included 0), so we dropped the interaction terms out

of the models.

The results of the multivariate analysis differ from the bivariate findings. They show that is

primarily consociational institutions – involving incentives, spaces and scripts for deliberative

action - that bring about “deliberative agreement”. Competitive institutions, to the contrary,

26

involve powerful incentives that tend to undermine deliberative agreement. The effects of the

other institutional factors – veto institutions and reflective institutions – tend to be absorbed by

consociational and competitive institutions. This is particularly true for veto institutions.

Looking at the raw data, the overall rate of agreement with demands/counterarguments – the

critical indicator for an incentive-based institutional factor - is at 3.80 percent in the context of

competitive institutions, with a rate of agreement of 3.86 percent in veto situations and 3.54

percent in non-veto situations. In the context of consociational institutions, differences between

veto and non-veto institutions seem to be more marked: the overall rate of agreement with

demands/counterarguments is at 13.35 percent in the context of competitive institutions, with a

rate of agreement of 13.55 percent in veto situations and 6.86 percent in non-veto situations.13

For agreement with counterarguments, there are extremely tiny differences between veto and

non-veto situations: 0.74 percent in the context of consociatonal institutions, and 0.42 percent

in the context of competitive institutions. These results suggest that institutions thriving on

purely incentive-based mechanisms - such as veto institutions - do not perform well when it

comes to explain a philosophical ideal. As critics have suggested, there seems to be indeed no

straightforward reconciliation of contractarianism with Habermasian discourse ethics.

Reflective institutions, in turn – involving scripts and spaces for deliberative action – perform

better and produce an effect on “deliberative agreement” more broadly conceptualized

(including meta-agreement, productive conclusions and respectful compromises). But they fail

to produce statistically reliable differences for the stricter indicator, agreement with

counterarguments. This is a clear refusal of our theoretical expectations. The scripts and spaces

promoting deliberative action in reflective institutions are either absorbed by concurrent scripts

and spaces in consociational institutions or, in the context of competitive institutions, are

undermined by strong incentives to forego agreement with counterarguments. The raw data

corroborate such a conclusion. In the context of consociational institutions, the overall rate of

agreement with counterarguments is at 8.3 percent, with a rate of agreement of 9.79 percent in

second chamber debates and 7.04 percent in first chamber debates. In the context of competitive

institutions, the overall rate of agreement with counterarguments is at 3.13 percent, with a rate

of agreement of 3.29 percent in second chamber debates and 3.07 percent in first chamber

debates.

13 However, the number of observations in the non-veto situation is low (N=79) and the number of agreements under these conditions dwindles to 7; this precludes a strong interpretation of this finding.

27

In conclusion, we would like to stress two points. First, the powerful and robust effect of

consociational institutions on “deliberative agreement” underlines that consociational

institutions indeed involve a deliberative dimension and cannot be simply equated with

bargaining, as many scholars have claimed. Otherwise, we should not have found substantive

and significant differences for both types of deliberative agreement. Second, while the

insignificant effects of veto institutions in all models are a clear blow for our hypothesis, it does

not provide support for the critics’ argument either. Austen-Smith and Feddersen assume that

veto power is strongly counterproductive of deliberative action, which should produce a

negative association of this predictor with deliberative action. This, however, is not the case.

Conclusion In this article, we proposed and empirically probed three institutional design factors –

consociational institutions, veto institutions, and reflective institutions - in the production of the

Habermasian ideal of “deliberative agreement” in the context of legislative debates in

Switzerland, the United States, and Germany. The three institutional factors premise on

different mechanisms – incentives, spaces, and scripts - which can be assigned to different

metatheoretical traditions, namely rationalism and constructivism. Our main theoretical

expectation was that neither rationalism nor constructivism alone is capable of producing the

philosophical ideal. While rationalism in itself is too weak to theoretically capture the

philosophical ideal in its pure form, a constructivist argument is too strong and ignores that

there are may be strong rationalist incentives that run counter to its realization. Our findings

lend some support to these theoretical expectations. Our analysis suggests that we need

institutions – such as consociational institutions - comprising the full metatheoretical menu

with the right incentives, the right scripts and action spaces - to produce the philosophical ideal

in its pure form. Institutions having the wrong incentives – such as competitive institutions –

are strongly counterproductive of the philosophical ideal. Under such conditions, favorable

mechanisms – be it incentives, spaces, and scripts - are not much of a help, especially when it

comes to capture the philosophical ideal in its pure form.

Methodologically, one major challenge was to estimate causal effects from a problematic data

base, involving both “rare events” and a finite sample. We used a bootstrapped logit as our

baseline estimation method but checked for robustness with specialized techniques (rare events

28

logit, and gompit). In our case, the bootstrapped logit models performed well and did not

produce biased estimates and standard errors. But this may not always hold true: the more

extreme analysis becomes (in terms of skewness and number of observations) the more

necessary it becomes to perform thorough robustness checks with sophisticated techniques.

In sum, our analysis shows that certain types of political institutions indeed provide a meeting

point for positive political science and philosophy. But in the realm of real world politics, it is

fair to say that this meeting point is not at the main concourse of New York’s Grand Central

Station, but rather at a remote and exclusive “gentlemen’s club”. The Habermasian ideal of

“deliberative agreement” is a rare event even under propitious conditions.

29

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Appendix

Table 9: Predictions of “Agreement with Demands/Counterarguments”

Independent Variables Rare Events Logit Gompit

Consociational

Institutions

1.420* (1.074, 1.763) .488* (.373, .602)

Veto Institutions .081 (-.390,.552) .017 (-.137, .172)

Reflective Institutions .453* (.194, .712) .172* (.074, .270)

Low Party Discipline/

Presidentialism

-.269 (-.772, .235) -.069 (-.227, .090)

Non-Public Arena .122 (-.174, .419) .063 (-.045, .172)

Low Issue Polarization .765* (.519, 1.012) .259* (.164, .353)

Female Legislators -.093 (-.393, .208) -.038 (-.148, .072)

Government Members .430 (-.060, .920) .194 (-.023, .410)

Chairmen -.793* (-1.346, -.238) -.326* (-.525, -.127)

Experts -.189 (-.781, 403) -.075 (-.284, .134)

Constant -3.610*(-4.253, -2.968) -1.326*(-1.527, -1.125)

N=4364. Table entries are average effects (estimates 95% bootstrapped confidence

interval in parentheses). * Indicates confidence interval excludes 0.

36

Table 10: Predictions of “Agreement with Counterarguments”

Independent Variables Rare Events Logit Gompit

Consociational

Institutions

1.010* (.680, 1.520) .333* (.212, .455)

Veto Institutions .028 (-.498,.554) .013 (-.146, .172)

Reflective Institutions .273 (-.031, .576) .087 (-.015, .189)

Low Party Discipline/

Presidentialism

-.239 (-.801, .323) -.042 (-.204, .119)

Non-Public Arena .096 (-.269, .461) .061 (-.053, .175)

Low Issue Polarization .646* (.352, 940) .199* (.098, .300)

Female Legislators -.255 (-.614 .104) -.081 (-.197, .035)

Government Members .630* (.086, 1.175) .231* (.011, .451)

Chairmen -.630 (-1.277, .017) -.246* (-.454, -.037)

Experts -.158 (-.830, 514) -.055 (-.274, .163)

Constant -3.635*(-4.355, -2.915) -1.344*(-1.553, -1.135)

N=4364. Table entries are average effects (estimates of 95% bootstrapped

confidence interval in parentheses). * Indicates confidence interval excludes 0.