2023/08/22 by Gary W. Cox · 1 voice
Business, Management and Accounting · Social Sciences · #Electoral Systems and Political Participation #Political Influence and Corporate Strategies #Political and Economic history of UK and US
paper · doi:10.1086/726919
openalex publication_date 2023/08/22 · openalex created_date 2025/10/10 · openalex updated_date 2026/07/31
Responsible parties are conventionally defined as those capable of announcing their legislative goals and then passing them on the strength of their own members’ votes. In this article, I consider why UK majority parties have closely approximated these conditions for responsibility since the 1880s, while US majority parties have never approximated them closely. I provide the first systematic evidence on when the British opposition began to offer across-the-board opposition to the government’s agenda and when the government became able to pass bills using only its own members’ votes. I also explore the role that leaders’ control of the legislative agenda and their followers’ nominations played in these developments. I attribute US parties’ inability to mimic their British counterparts to different costs of defending bill passage coalitions against “weakest-link” attacks.