If politics makes a difference in parliamentary democracies, then the promises political parties make during electoral campaigns should have a systematic impact on their subsequent policy making in office. Existing studies of parliamentary politics have failed to provide an adequate explanation of whether and to what degree this connection exists. This research will extend the scope of narrowly constructed models of coalition bargaining to all stages of policy making activity in the legislature and shift the theoretical focus of traditional analysis of comparative legislative behavior toward promising questions such as why parties behave as they do. The project will advance the empirical state of knowledge in comparative legislatures through the systematic collection of data across the parliamentary democracies of France, Germany, Ireland, and The Netherlands. Data collection will require year-long field research examining legislative proceedings. Econometric methods will be used to model the complex relationships that theory suggests should characterize legislative bargaining.
