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19-07-2019

The failure of a Nazi “killer” amendment

Authors: Andreas Kleiner, Benny Moldovanu

Published in: Public Choice | Issue 1-2/2020

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Abstract

We describe a remarkable instance of a motion-proposing and agenda-setting strategy by the Nazi party, NSDAP, during the Weimar Republic. Their purpose was to kill a motion of toleration of the new 1928 government, that would have allowed the government to continue in office without expressing confidence in it. The Nazi party was supported by their fiercest enemies on the far left, the communist party, but the combined killer strategy ultimately failed because of another agenda-setting counter-move undertaken by the Reichstag’s president. In order to understand and analyze that case we also briefly study killer amendments under various informational regimes and postulated voter behavior. In particular, the chances of success of killer amendments are shown to differ across several well-known binary, sequential voting procedures and across legislative agendas.

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Pedersen (2014) contains a rare case from outside the United States. The Danish parliament described there also uses an amendment procedure.

See, for example, Fenno (1978) and Denzau et al. (1985).

Since procedural rules in many European countries lead to similar agendas, our insight provides an additional rationale for the empirical rarity of killer amendments in those countries.

It is worth recalling here that Poole and Rosenthal (1997) actually test for the occurrence of such coalitions as a proxy for political “manipulations” involving insincere voting.

Adolf Trendelenburg, 1802–1872, was a well known philosopher, member of the parliament of Prussia and of the American Academy of Arts and Sciences. His lecture is the oldest essay specifically dealing with agenda formation in the successive voting procedure. It precedes the slightly better known work by Heckscher (1892).

The reverse order is logically equivalent.

Note that with single-peaked preferences, a voter with peak on S ranks A last.

More generally, even if preferences are not single-peaked, Enelow and Koehler (1980) showed that killer amendments can never be successful under sophisticated voting with complete information.

The conclusion also follows more generally form Proposition 1 in Miller (1977): similarly to sophisticated voting, sincere voting in the amendment procedure always selects an element in the Condorcet set (which contains a unique element in our setting with single-peaked preferences).

The article represented a significant generalization with respect to the standard literature on binary sequential voting that almost invariably assumes complete information. Important previous studies assuming incomplete information are Ordeshook and Palfrey (1988) and Gershkov et al. (2017).

Responsiveness is a very mild equilibrium refinement whose main role is to rule out equilibria where other strategies become optimal because they do not actually matter, for example, because all other voters always vote for the first motion.

Some cardinalization is needed here because, under incomplete information, lotteries among alternatives also must be considered in some cases.

Müller already served as Chancellor in the past, explaining the suffix “II”.

It is a peculiarity of the Weimar constitution that non-confidence motions also could be brought against individual ministers.

Spa is a well-known Belgian resort with thermal springs.

The Weimar Republic had 20 cabinets (and 13 chancellors) in less than 14 years. Ten of these governments had no majority support in parliament. See, for example, Winkler (1993).

The Wirtschaftspartei (WP) mainly focused on economic interests of landlords. Its members abstained in all relevant decisions pertaining to the case being considered.

The logic is not completely transparent here. President Löbe argued that both C and T contain the tabling of other motions and thus needed to be voted on before NC.

According to the post-National-Assembly interpretation of Article 54, a cabinet nominated by the republic’s president (after consultations with the parties) has parliament’s confidence until “factually” proven otherwise (see Huber 1981, p. 333); the question was whether defeat of a motion of confidence constituted factual proof or not.

Austen-Smith (1987) looks at a sequential agenda formation game when the agenda is built sequentially while motions are being proposed. Here, motions also were sequentially presented, but a vote to choose among different agendas was undertaken only after all motions had been presented. See also Dutta et al. (2004) and Barbera and Gerber (2017) for other games of endogenous agenda formation.

A few surviving communist members of the Reichstag, such as Walter Ulbricht, became top political figures in the post-WWII German Democratic Republic.

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Title: The failure of a Nazi “killer” amendment
Authors: Andreas Kleiner
Benny Moldovanu
Publication date: 19-07-2019
Publisher: Springer US
Published in: Public Choice / Issue 1-2/2020
Print ISSN: 0048-5829
Electronic ISSN: 1573-7101
DOI: https://doi.org/10.1007/s11127-019-00691-7

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