Institutional Friction and Policy Responsiveness: The Puzzle of Coalitional Fragmentation and Executive-Legislative Balance

• Published date: 01 December 2024
• DOI: http://doi.org/10.1177/10659129241263481
• Author: Jack Maedgen,Christopher Wlezien
• Date: 01 December 2024

Article

Political Research Quarterly

2024, Vol. 77(4) 1262–1278

© The Author(s) 2024

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DOI: 10.1177/10659129241263481

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Institutional Friction and Policy

Responsiveness: The Puzzle of Coalitional

Fragmentation and Executive-Legislative

Balance

Jack Maedgen

1

and Christopher Wlezien

2

Abstract

Research on policy responsiveness to public opinion highlights differences owing to political institutions—both electoral

and governmental. Electoral institutions that produce coalition governments tend to reduce responsiveness in between

elections. Government institutions that divide powers horizontally, by contrast, appear to increase that responsiveness.

These f‌indings point to the role of institutional “friction”in shaping what governments do, though the two sources appear

to produce different effects—one harmful and the other helpful. This paper explores this apparent contradiction. We

revisit and clarify theoretical assumptions and outline alternative models of the effects of friction. Extending previous

tests, now in 18 countries, we f‌ind clearer evidence supporting that earlier research and moref‌irmly establish friction as

the mechanism, particularly as regards the inf‌luence of electoral systems. The two institutional sources of friction appear

to inf‌luence responsiveness in different ways, which has implications for politics and policy that we consider in the

concluding section.

Keywords

public opinion, spending, majoritarian and proportional representation, multiparty governments, parliamentary and

presidential systems

A growing body of research examines how institutional

arrangements affect policy representation. Early work on

the subject considered the “congruence”between posi-

tions of the public and the government immediately after

elections, beginning with Powell’s (2000) classic study.

1

More recent research examines “responsiveness”of

governments as public preferences change, some of which

concentrates on actual policy decisions (e.g., Ezrow,

Fenzl, and Hellwig 2023;Soroka and Wlezien 2010).

2

The latter may help account for what governments do in

between elections, which matters because preferences can

change; indeed, responsiveness may be necessary for

effective congruence during those periods.

Political institutions may inf‌luence responsiveness in

various ways. To begin with, consider that they can in-

troduce “friction”into the policymaking process, working

to constrain policy change (Jones and Baumgartner 2005;

Jones et al., 2009;Tsebelis 2002). This can inhibit re-

sponsive policymaking even when governments are in

ideological alignment with the public by making it harder

to act. Consider that parties in a coalition government

might have diff‌iculty undertaking policies because the

agreements that brought them together are constraining of

action thereafter. But, it also may be that friction actually

boosts responsiveness, for instance, in systems offering

checks and balances, which some research f‌inds to be

more responsive than those with little to no horizontal

friction (Wlezien and Soroka 2012). The idea is that in-

dependent executive and legislative institutions may

produce greater responsiveness because of the “error

1

University of California, Berkeley, CA, USA

2

University of Texas at Austin, USA

Corresponding Author:

Jack Maedgen, University of California, Barrows Hall, Berkeley, CA

94720, USA.

Email: jackmaedgen@berkeley.edu

correction”that the process allows, for example, in the

United States, the President responds but may over- or

under-shoot, and Congress adjusts policy accordingly.

To understand why at least some forms of friction can

be benef‌icial, it is necessary to recognize that governments

do not mechanically enact policy perfectly in line with

public preferences. Policy is produced by off‌icials within

government acting on imperfect incentives and infor-

mation, and their sense of what the public wants can be

warped partly due to their own preferences and biases, but

also because off‌icials can misperceive public opinion even

when they are trying to represent it. When some poli-

cymakers try to enact policy that is unresponsive to the

public’s wishes, the friction introduced by dividing power

has the potential to increase responsiveness by moderating

policy change. Being able to change policy easily is not

always representationally advantageous; indeed, it may

lead to misrepresentation. Checks and balances thus can

be benef‌icial. This does not mean that more friction al-

ways is better, however, or that all types of friction are

equally benef‌icial.

Investigating these possibilities requires taking a closer

look at the sources of friction arising from electoral

systems and government institutions. We begin by re-

viewing existing work, noting its implications for the

relationship between friction and policy responsiveness.

We show that current scholarship leads to contradictory

expectations, where in some cases friction-enhancing

arrangements are thought to harm responsiveness and

in other cases to help it. We then search for a resolution to

this puzzle by revisiting theoretical expectations and

extending empirical tests.

Using data on aggregate public preferences and

budget outputs across 18 countries at up to f‌ive points in

time, we assess the conditioning effects of institutional

features on the responsiveness of policy to public

opinion. The approach we employ allows us to consider

how variation in institutional friction—across countries

and time for coalitional fragmentation and across

countries for executive dominance—inf‌luences re-

sponsiveness to public preferences. This follows pre-

vious research by Soroka and Wlezien introduced

above, and also that by Coman (2015) and Ferland

(2020) on electoral systems, which differs from other

work (e.g., Rasmussen, Reher, and Toshkov 2019;

Toshkov, M¨

ader, and Rasmussen 2020) that focuses on

variation in adoption across issues at particular points in

time. Although our data do not allow a fully dynamic

analysis—because the public opinion time series are

limited—they make it possible to examine how vari-

ation in institutional settings inf‌luence the impact of

changing preferences on what governments produce.

This is important, we think, as it permits us to take a step

forward empirically and contribute to scholarly

understanding of institutions and policy responsive-

ness, even as it only takes us so far.

The results are largely consistent with existing f‌indings

about whether certain institutional arrangements improve

or worsen responsiveness, but they add to our under-

standing of how these institutions matter. We conf‌irm

previous research showing that proportional (PR) elec-

toral systems are less responsive than majoritarian ones,

but also uncover seemingly strong evidence that the

mechanism of government coalitional friction primarily

explains these differences. We also conf‌irm previous

research showing that systems with dominant executives

tend to be less responsive than those with more balance.

Thus, the different—electoral and governmental—

institutional sources of friction appear to inf‌luence the

policy process differently. These f‌indings have implica-

tions for our understanding of government performance

but also for both public evaluations of institutions and

election outcomes, which we contemplate in the con-

cluding section together with possible directions for future

research.

Friction and the Policymaking Process

One of the most important ways institutions shape the

actions of government is through policymaking friction

(Jones, Sulkin, and Larsen 2003). This perspective is

echoed in research on “veto players,”where institutions

that increase the number of actors with power over policy

are understood to be more friction laden (Tsebelis 2002).

Friction affects the ease with which governments can

change policy and, as a result, leads to less productive

governments (Tsebelis 1999) with more “punctuated”

policy outputs (Jones and Baumgartner 2005;Jones et al.,

2009). Scholars have begun to incorporate friction into

models designed to predict other outcomes of the poli-

cymaking process like the degree of inequality (Enns

et al., 2014;Stepan and Linz 2011). Here, friction

serves to weaken responsiveness to problems, with im-

pacts on real world outcomes.

Given this line of thinking, it would be easy to suspect

that friction-enhancing arrangements necessarily worsen

responsiveness to public opinion. Consider the following

statement from Caughey and Warshaw’s (excellent) book

on policy change in the American states: “Due to the

piecemeal and incremental nature of policy change, it

often takes years or even decades for the force of public

opinion to f‌ilter through the political process”(2022, 4). If

the policymaking process were less piecemeal or less

incremental, responsiveness seemingly would improve.

That said, as we have already suggested, there also is

reason to think that institutional friction might be bene-

f‌icial to policy responsiveness. Perhaps some friction is a

good thing.

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